Short answers, pulled from the story.
Bronisław Malinowski was born on the 7th of April 1884 in Kraków, which was then part of the Austrian partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, within the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. His father, Lucjan Malinowski, was a professor of Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University.
The Kula ring is a ceremonial exchange system practiced by the indigenous peoples of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. Shell ornaments circulate in one direction and necklaces in the other, with the exchange serving social and ceremonial rather than straightforwardly practical ends. Malinowski's account of it in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) became foundational for theories of reciprocity and exchange in anthropology.
Participant observation is an ethnographic method in which the researcher lives alongside the people being studied rather than observing from a distance. Malinowski developed it after his first field trip to Mailu Island, where he was lodged with a missionary and found himself unable to adequately observe daily customs. He responded by pitching a tent in the middle of Trobriand Island villages and living there for weeks or months at a time, learning the language and experiencing everyday life directly.
Psychological functionalism is Malinowski's theory that culture functions to meet the needs of individuals rather than the needs of society as a whole. He traced basic human needs to biology, including metabolism, reproduction, safety, and health, and argued that cultural institutions such as kinship, shelter, and hygiene arose as cooperative group responses to those drives. This stood in contrast to Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, which emphasized the function of institutions in relation to society as a whole.
Bronisław Malinowski coined the term phatic communion in his 1923 essay "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages," published as a supplementary contribution to The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. Phatic communion refers to the use of language not to convey meaning but to bind speaker and listener through social sentiment.
Malinowski's personal diary, discovered in his Yale University office after his death and published by his widow Valetta Swann in 1967 as A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, was ethnocentric and egocentric in nature. This sat in tension with his public advocacy for immersive, respectful fieldwork. Michael W. Young described the publication as triggering a "moral crisis of the discipline," and James Clifford called the diary "a crucial document for the history of anthropology" in 1987.