Coral Gardens and Their Magic
book by Bronisław Malinowski
Coral Gardens and Their Magic, properly Coral Gardens and Their Magic Volume I: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands and Coral Gardens and Their Magic Volume II: The Language of Magic and Gardening, is the final two-volume book in anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski's ethnographic trilogy on the lives of the Trobriand Islanders. It concentrates on the cultivation practices the Trobriand Islanders used to grow yams, taro, bananas and palms which Malinowski's more famous ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific briefly mentioned in passing. It describes the gardens in which the Trobrianders grew food as more than merely utilitarian spaces, even as works of art. In 1988 Alfred Gell called the book "still the best account of any primitive technological-cum-magical system, and unlikely ever to be superseded in this respect". The book has been described as Malinowski's magnum opus.
Overview
The book consists of seven parts divided over two volumes. Volume I, The Description of Gardening, contains the introduction and parts one to three, and volume II, The Language of Magic and Gardening, parts four to seven.
Part One: "Introduction: Tribal economics and social organisation of the Trobrianders"This part introduces the climate, industry, and gardening arrangements of the Trobriands and supplies initial anthropological data on the Trobriand Islanders, including by sketching out their social organization and economic institutions.
Part Two: "Gardens and their magic on a coral atoll"This part describes the role of magic in Trobriand gardening, the rites it involves, Trobriand theories of land tenure, and the technology and spaces associated with gardening practices. It also considers the methodological limitations of various approaches to ethnographic fieldwork, especially in relation to terminology.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coral Gardens and Their Magic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.