How long does it take to read Argonauts of the Western Pacific?
an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea
Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski takes about 10 hours 17 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 17 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1922. 561 pages, about 154,275 words.
21 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 17 hours 9 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 17 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 26 minutes |
The page count is the median across 61 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Bronislaw Malinowski's pathbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific is at once a detailed account of exchange in the Melanesian islands and a manifesto of a modernist anthropology. Malinowski argued that the goal of which the ethnographer should never lose sight is 'to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.' Through vivid evocations of Kula life, including the building and launching of canoes, fishing expeditions and the role of myth and magic amongst the Kula people, Malinowski brilliantly describes an inter-island system of exchange - from gifts from father to son to swapping fish for yams - around which an entire community revolves. A classic of anthropology that did much to establish the primacy of painstaking fieldwork over the earlier anecdotal reports of travel writers, journalists and missionaries, it is a compelling insight into a world now largely lost from view. With a new foreword by Adam Kuper"--
Subjects: Ethnology, Folklore, Barter, Magic, Anthropology, Folklore, papua new guinea
