The British social anthropologist Kaspar Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) founded the functional school of anthropology. He stressed the pragmatic functioning of human institutions within a culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski was born on April 7, 1884, in Cracow, then in a part of Poland belonging to Austria. His father was a professor of Slavic languages. Bronislaw attended Cracow's King John Sobieski public school and the Jagellonian University, earning in 1908 the doctoral degree in physics and mathematics. While ill he read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which turned his interest to anthropology. Brief study at the University of Leipzig under Karl Bücher and Wilhelm Wundt was followed in 1910 by further study in anthropology at the London School of Economics under C. G. Seligman and Edward Westermarck. He first lectured at the University of London's School of Economics in 1913. There he earned the doctor of science degree in 1916, was appointed reader in...