This volume investigates ideas, beliefs and sentiments in relation to social organization.

This vintage book comprises three famous Malinowski essays on the subject of religion. Malinowski is one of the most important and influential anthropologists of all time. He is particularly renowned for his ability to combine the reality of human experience, with the cold calculations of science. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, "Magic, Science and Religion" provides its reader with a series of concepts concerning religion, magic, science, rite and myth. This is undertaken in an attempt to form a definite impression and understanding of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. The chapters of this book include: "Magic, Science and Religion", "Primitive Man and his Religion", "Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings", "Faith and Cult", "The Creative Acts of Religion", "Providence in Primitive Life", "Man's Selective Interest in Nature", etcetera. This book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

The material in this book is an expansion of a lecture given at the Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., on May 15, 1933. I have thought it best to leave it in the somewhat informal discourse of the lecture platform. References to the literature, and other annotations, are numbered consecutively and placed together at the end of the book. It should be pointed out here at the start, as it is in the text, that the author is not a medical man, but merely a biologist greatly interested in human biology; aware of his deficiencies in knowledge and experience consequent upon not having an equally lively sense of his inalienable right as a biologist to study man, the most interesting of all animals.

This volume provides an ethnographic account of courtship, marriage and family life among the people of the Trobriand Islands.