Queer Desire and the Anthropological Imagination: Randolph Stow and Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands.

While in the end Malinowski's account of the field and of the decidedly heterosexual anthropological subject had no space for Stow's queer subjectivity, it was nonetheless through an ongoing creative engagement both with his experiences in the Trobriand Islands and Malinowski's writings that Stow was able to write about sexual outsiders. Australian writer Randolph Stow arrived in New Guinea's Trobriand Islands in 1959 with Bronislaw Malinowski's Trobriand ethnographies under his arm: I Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Coral Gardens and their Magic i and I The Sexual Life of Savages i . Stow's lifelong interest in anthropology and the personal trauma of the time he spent in the Trobriand Islands have become more possible to grasp since the National Library of Australia acquired the Stow collection in 2010, which contains substantial writings and ephemera from Stow's time in the Trobriand Islands. 16 Clifford Geertz, "I-Witnessing: Malinowski's Children", in I Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author i (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 73-101, 76. 17 Randolph Stow, I Visitants i (London: Minerva, 1979), 43. 18 Randolph Stow, "Notes and Texts", Papers of Randolph Stow, Box 6. [Extracted from the article]