The volume included the following works by one of the founders of the functional school in English anthropology: “Dynamics of Cultural Change”, “Crime and Custom in the Society of Savages”, “Myth in Primitive Psychology”, etc. Malinovsky opposed evolutionist and diffusionist theories of culture, spoke against considering individual aspects of culture in isolation from the cultural context. He understood culture as a holistic, integrated, coordinated system, all elements of which are closely related to each other. A comparative analysis of cultures conducted by B. Malinovsky allows us to discover universal cultural patterns.