Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea

IN this volume Dr. Malinowski has given the first-fruits of his extended stay in the Trobriands, a group of islands off the south-east of New Guinea. A good deal of more or less desultory information, published in Government reports and elsewhere, has indicated that these islanders differ in some respects from their neighbours; Dr. Malinowski now shows how intimately they are all associated with one another, not merely by ordinary trade, but by a hitherto unrecorded and very remarkable system of ceremonial exchange, known as Kula, with which this book is almost solely concerned. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. By Dr. Bronislaw Malinowski. Pp. xxxii + 527. (London: G. Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1922.) 21s. net.