As part of Papua New Guinea, the Trobriant Islands are located in a bordering sea of the Pacific Ocean. At the beginning of the 20th century the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was one of the first to explore the archipelago in the South Sea and ist inhabitants. In the context of his work he discovered that Freund's psychoanalytic universality thesis regarding the Oedipus complex is not true for the islanders. In this first volume out of three, Malinowsky deals with the tribal economics and social organizations as well as the trobriandan gardening techniques and the magic within this kind of work.