Baloma; The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands

Baloma; The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands' is a book by Bronislaw Malinowski, first published in 1916. It is an ethnographic study that records and analyses the Trobriand islanders' beliefs about the baloma — the spirits of deceased kin — and how those beliefs shape mortuary practice, magic, ideas of reincarnation, and local explanations of conception. Malinowski draws on fieldwork in the Trobriands to present a careful, detailed account rather than a theoretical treatise, situating ritual and everyday life in a single cultural logic. The work is best read as a close, observational piece of classical ethnography: it maps particular ceremonies and stories, explains the social functions of belief, and shows how ideas about the dead are woven into kinship, lineage and social reproduction. While not a narrative with protagonists, its central subjects are the Trobriand people themselves and the baloma spirits that, in local thought, play a decisive role in birth, ancestry and the continuity of the matriline. The essay has been influential in anthropology for its empirically rich account of how a society constructs cosmology, personhood and social order.