Bronisław Malinowski

Quotes From

Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)

• No society can work in an efficient manner unless laws are obeyed ‘willingly’ and ‘spontaneously’. The threat of coercion and the fear of punishment do not touch the average man, whether ‘savage’ or ‘civilized’, while, on the other hand, they are indispensable with regard to certain turbulent or criminal elements in either society.#
• If the rules of custom are obeyed by the savage through sheer inability to break them, then no definition can be given of law, no distinction can be drawn between the rules of law, morals, manners, and other usages. For the only way in which we can classify rules of conduct is by reference to the motives and sanctions by which they are enforced.#
• The true problem [in anthropology] is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life.#

“Man’s Culture and Man’s Behavior” (1941)

• For all this there is a price to be paid in terms of obedience to tradition. Man must submit to a number of rules and determinants that do not come from his organism but from submission to his own artifact and machinery, to cooperation, and to the tyranny of words and other symbols.#Quoted in Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)