Given the association we have become accustomed to make between anthropology and tolerance, it is more than a bit upsetting to discover that the diary which Bronislaw Malinowski kept in the course of his early field work in Melanesia is spotted with references to "niggers." True, its editor was able to dismiss this as "the colloquial term commonly used by Europeans [at that time] . . . to denote native peoples," and it has also been suggested that the word is an artifact of translation from the Polish original. However, there is still perhaps good reason to take the matter more seriously. Field work is the central experience of modern anthropology, and it is usually thought to require not only tolerance, sympathy, and empathy, but even identification with the people studied. If, in the words of Clifford Geertz,2 the archetypical fieldworker was in fact a "crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist," and perhaps a racist to boot, then the discovery is certainly disturbing, if not "shattering" for "anthropology's image of itself.'' Geertz suggests that we must reject the "unsophisticated conception of rapport" which would "enfold the anthropologist and informant into a single moral, emotional, and intellectual universe." He goes on to explain Malinowski's undeniable virtuosity as a fieldworker as a triumph of sheer industry over inadequate empathy. According to Geertz, the pattern of Malinowski's field work moved from sexual fantasy to overwhelming guilt to expiation in ethnographic drudgery to euphoric exultation in the tropic landscape -and back again to start the cycle over. There is no doubt that the pattern is there, but before accepting a characterization of Malinowski as a kind of nasty anthropological Edison, it might be we11 to look a little more closely at the data.
Of course, not all of this inheres in the word "nigger," but it may still be helpful to note that the first appearance of the term is on page 154i.e., that it, or its Polish equivalent, was apparently not part of Malinowski's diary vocabulary during his trip to Mailu in 1914 and 1915. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Malinowski also used a number of somewhat less charged terms ("natives," "blacks," "boys," '(primitives," "savages," and "Negroes"), that he found "white superiority" "disgusting," that he was upon occasion capable of joyful identification with "naturmenschen," and that he often spoke of individual Melanesians in very positive empathetic terms. One is inclined, therefore, to look for the factors which may