should read ethnographic works.The total lack of "moral personality" is disastrous. For instance, my behavior at George's, my pawing of Jab., dancing with her, etc. is caused mainly by a desire to impress other fellows...I must have a system of specific formal prohibitions: I must not smoke. I must not touch a woman with suberotic intentions. I must not betray E.R.M. [his fiancee] mentally, i.e., recall my previous relations with women, or think about future ones...Preserve the essential inner personality through all difficulties and vicissitudes: I must never sacrifice moral principles or essential work to "posing," to convivial Stimmung, etc. My main task now must be: work. Ergo: work!On almost every page one finds something like this. He has erotic fantasies of one sort or another, remembers his mother or his fiancee, is overwhelmed with guilt, and resolves, in spite of severe lassitude, to get down to business, which he does with a vengeance. He then feels, especially if the work goes well, exhausted but euphoric, and discourses, often with real eloquence, on the beauties of the landscape "toward which I have a voluptuous feeling."THE ETHNOGRAPHY this expiatory approach to work produced was, as one might expect, detailed, concrete, comprehensive to the point of indiscriminateness, andthe word is inadequatevoluminous. "Working at my present pace," he remarks in one of his more optimistic moods, "I should come back laden with materials as a camel." He did, and each of his major works is an enormous encyclopedia of data on every topic related to its general theme, and even on some topics that are not related at all. Coral Gardens and Their Magic, first published in 1935 and just now reissued (and the work Malinowski personally regarded as his best) is a prime example. In its 800 pages, divided into two not very closely integrated volumes, one gets everything from diagrams of house types, layouts of garden plots, and lists of yam exchanges to extensive discussions of Trobriand clan organization, agricultural rituals, gift exchanges, and gardening practices, plus (inserted between a chapter on "The Cultivation of Taro, Palms and Bananas" and one on "Land Tenure") a disquisition on field methods, and (in the second volume) ninety-eight magical texts in the Trobriand language complete with literal and free translations and commentaries. There are sections called "An Ethnographic Theory of the Magical Word," "What Industrial Specialization Looks Like in Melanesia," "A Walk Through the Gardens," "KayakuThe chief and Magician in Council," "Hunger, Love and Vanity as Driving Forces in the Trobriand Harvest Gift," and "Fruits of the Wood and of the Wild," after which there is a lengthy appendix lamenting the amount of facts he failed to gather (for example, how often the natives calculate the number of seed yams per garden plot).Malinowski's ex-students were right: it is this great corpus of material, in Coral Gardens, in The Argonauts, in Crime and Custom, in Sex and Repression in Savage Society, in The Sexual Life of Savages, that remains as his monument. The restthe biologistic theory of functionalism, the contextual theory of language, the confidence theory of