"Crime and Custom in Savage Society" By Bronislaw Malinowski (1926)

 Any takers for this classic text? Available free online HERE for those who don't already have it on their shelves. Shame on you.  I'm working from the 1966 8th edition which has been withdrawn from UCS Sociology Dept at some point in the distant past and retailed to me through abebooks.co.uk, of which you are no doubt already aware.  Seventeen chapters in two parts beginning with "The Automatic Submission to Custom and the Real Problem", and ending with "The Factors of Social Cohesion in a Primitive Tribe." Remembering that this was first published in 1922 and take into account that one of the reasons for starting with the older books before the more recent descendants, so to speak, it gives us a chance to look at the ideas in their embryonic but fully contextualised form rather than the gloss or digest of what Malinowski is said to have said passed down as footnotes of footnotes.  Part of the point in starting here is to get an idea of the original text, and from it to form a set of potential trajectories. Where could these ideas have led to when they were written in 1922? Not only where did they they lead, but what could they have led to.  Reading references to older texts in more recent books, particularly in some recent scholarship, it is possible for the reader, and likewise the reader of history texts, to get the idea that the development of thought from then to now was a linear and predictable process.  Clearly this view should at the very least be questioned. So I would propose that it is preferable to read and react to the original text, bearing in mind when and for whom it was written, what it was trying to convey to which audience. We should choose rather to re-read the original in preference to a quick Google search for Wiki-commentaries in order that we might begin to build a substantial base of knowledge on which those later refinements and commentaries can more fairly sit. Presuming, that is that we are reading for pleasure and expanded self-knowledge, rather than hoping to pass exams in the immediate future or knock out a quick cut'n'paste essay.