Juxtaposition and the creative reader Malinowski in the field

A re-assessment of Bronislaw Malinowski's two principal texts conceived during his fieldwork experience in the Trobriand Islands, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific and A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, will be attempted in light of James Clifford's contention that they are two halves of the same work, separated only by essentialist binary opposition codes (i.e., self/other, dominant/submissive, objective/subjective, public/private) that have dominated much of western modern philosophical discourse. This re-assessment will take the form of a postmodern critique of some of the fundamental epistemological tenets and assumptions underlying traditional western thought on which scientific Anthropology and its principal methodology, ethnography is based. Central to this re-assessment is the question of authority of ethnographic texts such as those of Malinowski: how can textual authority be re-imagined/re-read in light of these postmodern contentions? Hence, our attempt to utilize the method of collage to flatten authority.