Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea is a 1922 ethnography by Bronisław Malinowski, which has had enormous impact on the ethnographic genre.

It is part of Malinowski's trilogy on the Trobrianders, including The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929) and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935).

Unlike the armchair anthropology of previous researchers, this method was characterized by participant observation: informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, results from activities undertaken off or online, and life-histories.

[3][4][5]: 7 [6]: 72  It has been described as an "instant classic"; already James George Frazer in his preface to the first edition compared Malinowski's impact on ethnography to that of Shakespeare on literature.

[11]Today, Argonauts of the Western Pacific is the archetypal account of anthropologists' "following the people" method of collecting information for a multi-sited ethnography.