Anthropologist, born in Kraków, Poland. He studied at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and at Leipzig, went to London in 1910, and taught at the London School of Economics, where he became a professor (1927). In 1938 he went to the USA, where he accepted a post at Yale. He was the pioneer of "participant observation" as a method of fieldwork (notably in the Trobriand Is), and a major proponent of functionalism in anthroplogy.