obituary JEREMY BOISSEVAIN 1928-2015 Jeremy Boissevain was born in London in 1928, of a Dutch father and American mother, and died in Amsterdam on 26 June 2015. He was professor emeritus of social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research. Following his graduation from Haverford College, Philadelphia in 1953 he spent several years – in the Philippines, Japan, India, and Malta – working for Care International, one of the oldest and largest humanitarian aid organizations devoted to fighting poverty internationally. This was a background that led him almost seamlessly to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the late 1950s where he studied for his PhD under Lucy Mair who was not only a founding mother of British postwar social anthropology and an advocate of anthropology as a jargon-free humanitarian discipline, but also the step-daughter of William Beveridge, author of the British welfare state and former LSE director. Throughout his own scholarly life, Jeremy kept the flame alive of the fundamentally socialist and humanitarian ideas and values of the LSE in those years. Quite recently, at an anthropology of tourism seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), he reflected that he had entered the profession in order to contribute something towards making the world a better place. His doctoral field research was carried out in two villages in Malta. Kirkop was and is minute, while Naxxar is much bigger; both have two or more competing band clubs. It was in this context that he developed an abiding interest in the annual festivals – the Maltese festas. In these festas the band clubs play a central role together with fireworks, generous amounts of street food and drink, ritualistically riotous expressions of triumphant celebration, and, at the end of the festivities, slightly more solemn processions through villages and/or city quarters as the patron saints are borne back into their churches in a process through which religious hierarchy is gradually superimposed upon the celebratory and ludic parts of the festa. In his resulting monograph, Saints and fireworks (1965) inspired both by his fieldwork in the Maltese villages and also theoretically by Wylie’s (1957) Village in the Vaucluse, Jeremy, the structuralist, was clearly at work. Church, band club, and festa day itself, were all elements of a socio-spatial and temporal articulation of proceedings that expressed and reconciled, through a fundamentally dualistic factional idiom, important socioeconomic divisions in the village. At the same time, Jeremy’s fundamentally empirical bent meant that he avoided overly neat theoretically driven explanations of his findings, and the persistent duality of social action that he exposed remains an anthropological puzzle. Decades later, Jeremy was quick to note that Maltese festas had expanded in size and in quantity, belying any straightforward link between modernization and secularization. His next book, Friends of friends (1974), dramatically broke the structuralist mould. Since his early days at the LSE he had been preoccupied with the limitations of structural functionalism as an approach to society and politics, not only in and of the Mediterranean region, but also in more general terms. Structural functionalism, he suggested, is simply incapable of dealing with the actions by networks of friends and the ebb and flow of factions – the staple fare of Mediterranean social life. He suggested that the relationship between structure and agency is a fundamental one in the social sciences and only by getting down to quotidian detail – by asking, for example, questions about who forms what networks, and when, why, and under what contexts they do this – can central aspects of the political dynamics of social life be properly appreciated. This pioneering concern with how individual agency is expressed through networking was not only of seminal importance in anthropology, but also prefigured the future global importance of social media such as Facebook. Jeremy’s substantial later work on tourism and environmental movements in Malta followed a trajectory that, far from intellectually leaving the village and its social and cultural solidarities behind, kept it and its people strongly in mind as the island state converted itself partly into a gentrified version of itself and partly into a shambolic resort of ‘abusive’ (his term) unplanned blocks of concrete. As a student of the Maltese environment, Jeremy was one of the first observers to note that from the 1960s onwards, Malta witnessed an inversion in patterns of residential settlement, with the once feared and despised countryside and seaside becoming desirable locations to live in. In the 1990s, he was quick to note how the gentrification of rural neighbourhoods was leading to the development of a new form of vernacular architectural style, revolving around restored farmhouses, the decorative use of rubble wall fragments and tastefully hung agricultural implements. Naturally, Jeremy lived in a restored farmhouse himself at this stage and by now he had no inhibitions about making a public stand in Maltese society in an attempt to defend what was left of rural Malta from the encroachments of the developers. Indeed, he dedicated his valedictory speech after 50 years of fieldwork to a passionate plea to the Maltese to develop a culture of long-term planning which would, amongst other things, mean removing all advertising billboards from outside built-up areas. As he pointed out, in words that showed how concerned he was with Malta’s image, they: ‘give Malta the image of a nation of hucksters selling off its family silver’. ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 32 NO 1, FEBRUARY 2016 Fig. 1. Jeremy Boissevain at home in Naxxar. As a Mediterraneanist, Jeremy worked quite self-consciously to promote a vision of the region that emphasized continuity at a deep cultural level behind what appear to be intractable differences and divisions. Of course, there were always political implications to this project and one of his biggest disappointments was that his dream of a Mediterranean institute pioneering the study of anthropology throughout the region was never fully realized. (But he did coin the name EUROMED to christen the research group in Amsterdam that he founded in the early 1970s – well before the European Commission borrowed the term to give to its own series of programmes of research on the Mediterranean that Jeremy himself periodically took part in.) Additionally, anthropology itself changed, witnessing a growing divide between a newly developed anthropology of Europe and the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa. In Malta itself he felt let down by local politicians with whom he believed that had shared this vision. Yet the Mediterranean is again becoming a focus for anthropological study, if for no other reason than that migration throughout the region is once more connecting and dividing its people from one another. They say the death of great men mirrors their lives. In this context it is fitting that this jovial, happy, curious, wise, scientifically sceptical social observer, whose name will be forever linked to the study of Maltese festas, died the day after attending a function at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences at which he spent several enjoyable hours talking to many of his former colleagues and PhD students. Jeremy is survived by his wife, Inga, four daughters, and seven grandchildren. l Tom Selwyn SOAS ts14@soas.ac.uk David Zammit University of Malta david.zammit@um.edu.mt Boissevain, J. 1965. Saints and fireworks: Religion and politics in rural Malta. London: Athlone Press. — 1969. Hal-Farrug: A village in Malta. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. — 1974. Friends of friends: Networks, manipulators and coalitions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — 2013. Factions, friends and feasts. New York: Berghahn. Wylie, L. 1957. Village in the Vaucluse. Harvard: Harvard UP. 25