Paper long abstract:

The history of world anthropologies should also tackle the problem of scholars who came from marginal places and took part in the activities of centres. I would like to present three Poles: Bronislaw Malinowski, Maria Czaplicka and Jan Czekanowski. One of them, Malinowski became one of the discipline's founding fathers, the second, Czaplicka - a victim of the model of professionalization of anthropology then, the third, Czekanowski came back to Poland and became a renown physical anthropologist.

I would like to depict their ambivalent position in the colonial structure and the positive effect of that ambivalence for their fieldworks. Another problems concerns their political profile as members of a nation without state. It was especially important as they carried out their researches just before of during the IWW, when the chances for the independent Poland appeared.

I will also sketch their backgrounds: cultural as well as intellectual, the Polish "baggage" they took with them to the profession, their ethos of intelligentsia and their reluctant attitude towards Polish anthropology (of volkskundist type).

I will analyze the diaries of Bronislaw Malinowski (a Polish full edition), the field diaries of Jan Czekanowski from Africa, together with Czaplicka's travel book she published after her Siberian expedition.

The theoretical frame of reference will be based on the world anthropologies discussion.