The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia
Bronislaw Malinowski's 1929 ethnography of the Trobriand Islanders, based on the fieldwork that established participant observation as the method of social anthropology. It documents courtship, marriage, kinship and belief, and is best known for the claim that Trobrianders did not recognise physiological paternity, which Malinowski used against Freud's universal Oedipus complex. The title is of its period, and the book is read now as much for its method as its content.