IN MEMORIAM DOUWE JONGMANS (1922-2011)

by Wim van Binsbergen (website: http://shikanda.net; e-mail: wimvanbinsbergen@gmail.com

 

 

After Steinmetz and after the latter’s successor Fahrenfort, Douwe Jongmans belonged (with Trouwborst, Hofstra, Holleman, and Köbben, among others) to the first academic generation of Dutch scholars specifically to be trained as anthropologists, in the middle of the 20th century. By that time, anthropology in the Netherlands was institutionally subsumed under social geography, but rapidly on the way to establish its disciplinary independence. Under that constellation, having gained one’s PhD on the basis of prolonged fieldwork in a foreign continent, came to be the hallmark of professionalisation and professoralisation in Dutch anthropology. Here Jongmans had the handicap that his PhD thesis under Fahrenfort (1955, Politiek in Polynesië: Het despotisme op Tahiti in de 18e en 19e eeuw, on despotism in Tahiti during the 18th-19th c.) was based on library research and not on fieldwork. Thus it had to be my other distinguished teacher André Köbben (on the basis of his fieldwork on Zwarte planters, ‘Black commercial farmers’, in Ivory Coast, PhD 1955), and not Douwe Jongmans, who succeeded Fahrenfort in his Amsterdam chair upon the latter’s retirement in 1955. Nonetheless Jongmans had, already at the time, developed into an experienced and widely respected fieldworker, notably in regard of the social organisation of North African societies. After publications on sedentarisation of nomads in Morocco (Van bron tot bron, with Jager Gerlings, 1953) and Lybia (Lybia: Land van de dorst, 1964), and a famous, extensively annotated bibliography on fieldwork (Anthroplogists in the field, with Gutkind, 1967), Jongmans attention was to converge more and more on Khumiriyya / ‘La Kroumirie’, the highlands of North Western Tunisia that were to be the scene of an extensive and long-standing fieldwork training project under his direction. Successful fieldwork in the deserts and mountainous regions of North Africa in the 1950s required extensive communicative and methodological skills, as well as constituting complex logistic and physical challenges. Hence Jongmans was the obvious choice when the Anthropological Sociological Centre of Amsterdam University needed a specialist to set up and manage an annual three-monthly fieldwork training project for anthropology students halfway the (then) seven years (!) of their pre-PhD studies. Jongmans was in charge of this project from the early 1960 to the early 1970s, combining his supervisory and management tasks with very detailed local fieldwork of his own. In this research he experimented with the theories of George Homans, and ventured into the application of matrix theory, network theory and other mathematical approaches for the analysis of the dynamics of wealth, power and prestige in small-scale communities. This highly formalised yet excellently documented work earned Jongmans access to and recognition from prominent British anthropologists during the heyday of the Manchester School. At the same time he was already venturing into the field of reproductive behaviour (notably fertility-related communication processes), and this research so impressed medical workers in this field that it was to earn Jongmans a personal professorial chair towards the end of his career (1982-1986). Scores of anthropology students, not only from Amsterdam University but also from the Free University Amsterdam and from other Dutch universities, were to be processed through the Jongmans project. They usually started out as clumsy clowns in their interaction with the culturally different guest community and their interpreter, but under Jongmans’ inspiring and generous supervision (with extensive in-situ supervision sessions every second week) most of them ended up as perceptive intercultural observers, analysts and at times even manipulators of (but also as downright admirers of and enthusiasts for) the society under study. Towards the end of their fieldwork training, most proved already capable of collecting such a complete and consistent body of data that these could be turned into scientific texts (usually MA theses) of, often, high quality, – texts also, occasionally, in which their informants were given a face and a voice. Prominent Dutch anthropologists of the next academic generation, such as Bovenkerk, Brunt, Geschiere, Verrips, and (if you will allow me) myself, learned the craft of ethnographic fieldwork from Douwe Jongmans, step by step. In most of them this produced a life-time gratitude. Of course, in this intensive and comprehensive process Jongmans was assisted by a line of excellent, more of less junior colleagues such as Klaas van der Veen, Marielou Creyghton, Pieter van Dijk, Jos van de Klei, but this did not in the least diminish Jongmans’ own merits, as initiator, communicator, sparring partner, challenger, father confessor, and passionate analyst – a convincing role model for communication and strategy in the field. Jongmans greatly enjoyed his pedagogic role and his superior knowledge of and access to the local society. He often resorted to edifying parables in order to put his pedagogic points across while sparing the students’ sensitivities, and was usually remarkably mild, in his awareness of the great psychological challenges that first fieldwork tends to pose. He would not hesitate to patiently take his charges through a real-life interview with local informants if – as was usually the case – the students’ interview technique turned out to be so defective that by itself it did not allow them to penetrate beyond idealised formulations of local custom, and into matters of conceptualisation, worldview, and values. The hypothetical case, although generally distrusted among ethnographers (‘suppose you dream that the local saint comes to you from his nearby tomb; what are you to do?’) in his hands became an unfailing tool of qualitative analysis. Douwe Jongmans was a great artist in the field of intercultural communication and knowledge formation, as far as the relationship between European anthropologists and North African peasants was concerned. However, in the institutional communication and power formation within the Dutch scientific field he was rather less dextrous (but what else can one expect from a true antropologist?), and here he remained in the fringe, or rather, was increasingly pushed to the fringe – from where he would loyally continue to inspire, educate and facilitate, but was largely unable to act as an academic patron. Those who had closely and publicly identified with him and his approach during their studies were made to feel the brunt of this state of affairs in the early, even not so early, phases of own career. This happened for instance to myself, when my extensive North African work was at first co-opted and found to qualify for a PhD from Amsterdam University, whereas later I had to accept that with the machinations around the person of Jongmans this was no longer an option; I found myself forced to shelve my North African work for over 40 years and to turn to sub-Saharan Africa, with totally different new work and with a string of different prospective supervisors, finally to be accommodated by Matthew Schoffeleers, not at Amsterdam University but at the Free University in that city. But even if this kind of developments left some of Jongmans’ students to end up as peripheral or as merely ‘Mediterraneanists-manqués’, yet they knew themselves to be incomparably privileged by the unique, tailored-to-measure field education Jongmans had given hem. On the otherhand, it was not only that Jongmans could not extend effective academic patronage, in an academic institutional setting where such patronage was, and is, an absolute condition for a beginning career to take off. Another factor was that for decades, Jongmans himself would monopolise ‘his’ Khumir­iyya, in a way somewhat perpendicular to the ideal of the free circulation of scientific knowledge and exchange. As an unfortunate result Khumiriyya, with all its excellent fieldwork projects, in the end has yet remained underrepresented as far as high-ranking finished scholarly products are concerned. Be this as it may, yet a large number of Dutch anthropologists will continue to honour Douwe Jongmans as, after all, their principal and most effective teacher of the essence of anthropology.

 

Jongmans, D.G. & K.W. van der Veen, 1968, ‘Het leeronderzoek in Tunesië’, Sociologische Gids, 15: 175-83.

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, ‘Dutch anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1970’s’, in: Kloos, P., & H.J.M. Claessen, 1981, eds., Current Issues in Anthropology: The Netherlands, Rotterdam: Netherlands Sociological and Anthropological Association, pp. 41-81, also at: http://shikanda.net/publications/ASC-1239806-081.pdf

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1987a, ‘Eerste veldwerk: Tunesie 1968’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & M.R. Doornbos, eds, Afrika in spiegelbeeld, Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, pp. 21-55, also at: http://shikanda.net/publications/ASC-1239806-240.pdf ; English version: ‘First fieldwork (Tunisia 1968)’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin / Boston / Muenster: LIT, ch. 2, also at: http://shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/First%20fieldwork%20from%20Intercultural%20encounters%20pp.%2051-74%202003.pdf

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