The article proposes a re-reading (confessed to be interested and ironic) of the well-known explanations rendered by Malinowski in the opening chapter of the Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In this text, Malinowski explains the reasons for the type of approach adopted to study a Melanesian population in the 1910s, which has ever since become the consecrated approach in Anthropology known by the idea of "fieldwork". The author intends to show that the same reasons used by Malinowski, placed within the propitiated framework by different objects, are able to base a different methodological approach. In this sense, to continue "faithful" to Malinowski means to re-read (or even to subvert it) in ordet to explore certain vital aspects of the text, based on real research situations that anthropologists have come across at present time. This should allow the adequation of methodologies in the field that do not need to be strictly defined as "fieldwork". These reflections were defined after a personal trajectory characterized by researches using archive materials and textual sources.
Anthropology; etnography; fieldwork; Malinowski