Bronislaw Malinowski, born and educated in Poland, helped to establish British social anthropology. His classic monographs on the Trobriand Islanders were published between 1922 and 1935, when he was professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. This collection of Malinowski's early writings establishes the intellectual background to his achievement, and shows how his considerable impact on twentieth-century thought is rooted in the late nineteenth-century philosophy of central Europe, especially the work of Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the ethnological theories of James Frazer.