magic, the non-economic interpretation of primitive trade, the extension of family ties approach to social organization now seem at best feeble first steps toward an adequate conceptualization of culture, at worst dogmatic oversimplifications that have done more harm than good. His achievement was to compile a faithful, lifelike, and indeed moving record of a primitive way of life, against psychological odds that would have crushed almost anyone else. For if the Trobrianders are "bloody niggers" in his private diary, in his ethnographic works they are, through a mysterious transformation wrought by science, among the most intelligent, dignified, and conscientious natives in the whole of anthropological literature: men, Malinowski is forever insisting, even as you and I.Or as he. The insight into Trobriand life Malinowski apparently was unable to gain by human contact he gained by industry. Closed off, by the peculiarities of his own personality, from reaching directly what, in The Argonauts, he called the final goal of ethnography, "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world," he reached it indirectly. Isolated, even estranged, from his subjects emotionally, he struggled to understand them by patiently observing them, talking to them, reflecting about them. Such an approach can carry one only so far. But it carried Malinowski farther than most because, in spite of his personal torments or because of them, he carried on the struggle so relentlessly. "Truly," he says in the concluding sentence of the diary, "I lack real character." Perhaps; but it rather depends on what is meant by character.Notes(*) Raymond Firth (ed.), Man and Culture, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.----Letter # 1November 9, 1967: Hortense Powdermaker,AN AGREEABLE MANBy Hortense PowdermakerIn response to Under the mosquito netTo the Editors:I am puzzled that the distinguished anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, misses or misinterprets a number of significant points of Malinowski's A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word in his review [NYR, Sept. 14].I agree with the reviewer that the diary is tedious in the extreme, but not that it "destroyed one final idol, and one he [Malinowski] did much to create: that of the field worker with extraordinary empathy for the natives." I find nothing in Malinowski's writings on method (and remember none in his teachings) about this so-called "extraordinary empathy." The image of the field worker created by Malinowski in the Introduction of his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), the first long account of his work in the Trobriand Islands, emphasized the need to live in the native village, for constant observation, learning the native language, exact recording, separating inference from data, and so on about other techniques for collecting and handling data. It happens, although the reviewer does not mention it, that Malinowski was the first to make anthropology an observational science, to pitch his camp in a native village, and to be a partioipant-observer. Perhaps it was the very novelty of these procedures that led to the development by others of the myth of Malinowski's "extraordinary empathy." We might study the creation of myths in the anthropological