[1] Published posthumously by his widow Valetta Swann in 1967,[1] the diaries, which repeatedly touch upon intensely personal matters such as sexual desires, as well as his private prejudices against his interlocutors, have remained extremely controversial.
When the diaries were published in 1967, Clifford Geertz called them "gross" and "tiresome", and wrote that they portrayed Malinowski as "a crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme.
[3]: 75 Michael W. Young noted that the diaries, "scandalously frank" with regards to topic such as the author's sexual desires and encounters, "debunked the romantic myth that he enjoyed relaxed and friendly rapport with his subjects and it fueled a moral crisis of the discipline in the 1970s.
[5][6] In 1985, Malinowski's daughter, Helena Wayne, noted that the diaries were "very personal [and] not meant for other eyes", and that she would have preferred if they remained out of print, instead available only as raw materials for a biographer.
[7]: 97 In 2018, William W. Kelly wrote that "debate continues on whether the Diary directly reflects (and discredits) his fieldwork or whether it was an anguished outpouring of psychological anxieties that had more to do with his family, potential fiancées, and career than with anything going on outside his tent on the Trobriands".