A flâneur and ethnographer in their home city: the Krakow of Bronisław Malinowski and Feliks Gross : remarks of a historian of anthropology

The paper discusses the beginnings of anthropologists' interest in the city on the examples of Bronisław Malinowski, and his student and colaborator, Feliks Gross, who both came from Krakow. Malinowski's entries in his diaries suggest a modernist figure of a flâneur, an urban spectator, as depicted by Walter Benjamin. The figure has very much in common with ethnographer, and they are both two versions of male adventurous explorer. Gross can be seen a pioneer of urban anthropology because of his fieldwork in the Jewish district of Krakow, which he sstarted in the late 1930s, but could not complete because of the outbreak of the II WW. He later used the experiences and knowledge he got from it in his theoretical writings. Malinowski's and Gross' home city, walked through a flâneurian way, had thus been a testing ground for their future ethnographies and theories.