The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, _x000D_ his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.
Interpretation
Understanding a different culture involves seeing the world through its people's eyes and appreciating their perspective.
This quote by Bronislaw Malinowski emphasizes the importance of empathy and cultural relativism in anthropology. It suggests that to truly understand another culture, one must adopt their viewpoint, comprehend their relationship with life, and recognize how they interpret their world, which can lead to greater insight and respect for diversity.
In practice
In a discussion about cultural anthropology, this quote highlights the need for cultural understanding.
Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.
Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.
The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.
There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.
The older I get, the more I believe in what I can't explain or understand, even more than the things that are explainable and understandable.
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.
I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
Every rebellion against suffering is fed by the subversive power of remembered suffering.
Often times we call a man [or woman] cold when he [or she] is only sad.
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
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