Born Bronisław Kasper Malinowski to a family in the Polish nobility (the szlachta), Malinowski made contributions to anthropology through his text Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and to linguistic anthropology in Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935). Travelling to the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski documented the life, customs and traditions of Melanesian people using systematic observation in ethnographic field notes and photography. This rich description of the Trobrianders set the standard for scientific ethnographic practice in his book A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944).