Return to Topicalities April-May 2011
WHY JONGMANS AND SCHOFFELEERS? THE OEDIPAL DYNAMICS OF AN ACADEMIC CAREER
While it is true to say that the contradictions of van Binsbergen's career are brought out by the two recent (2011) deaths of Douwe Jongmans and Matthew Schoffeleers, the implied significance of these two figures in Wim van Binsbergen's career is not immediately obvious, and not of a kind usually discussed in public by the very owner of the career in question. Fortunately we now have at our disposal an anonymous but apparently insightful text, posted on the Galactic Transnet on the occasion of the centennial of van Binsbergen's birth -- even though, predictably, that occasion turns out to have only been commemorated at the small and struggling Laboratoire d'Etudes Binsbergeniennes in the Taoist Republic of West Africa (formerly Kamerun Provins):
'...Wim van Binsbergen's association with Douwe Jongmans and Matthew Schoffeleers has had a significance even beyond invaluable theoretical and methodological inspiration -- it also meant that in his early career he came to be tied to senior academicians who, regardless of their invaluable individual intellectual qualities, for a variety of reasons were unable to act as powerful institutional patrons. No doubt this choice reflects deep-seated personality tendencies in Wim van Binsbergen (1947- ) in early adult life, when the extreme challenge of being his parents' son created both the search for substitute fathers, and the oedipal urge to keep these at bay and denying them paternal prerogatives and obligations -- vis-ŕ-vis an idealised, deceptive, yet passionately coveted maternal figure whose characteristics were symbolically transferred onto the world of academic knowledge production. Throughout his life he was prone to turn the facts of his biography into a personal and highly one-sided myth. A case in point is his account of his sangoma training and practice, in his book Intercultural Encounters, 2003; in the same book's Introduction he stresses psychoanalytical transference as a disqualifying condition inevitably attending anthropological fieldwork, while in a somewhat later theoretical article on myth (2009) he advocates the analysist's 'fusion' with myth as a methodological principle. Against this background it is significant that his self-image throughout his youth was shaped after the biblical narrative (Luke 2:39-52) of Jesus teaching in the Temple as a twelve-year old boy and in doing so denying his parents' authority over him. Very early in his career, van Binsbergen (who in 1969 had passionately defended Jongmans before his colleagues at the Amsterdam Anthropological Sociological Centre, in a long text on the Jongmans' fieldwork training project, 1987 / 2003) tacitly accepted as inevitable and irrevocable the inconstancy in the patronage of his MA supervisor (and, at the latter's initiative, proposed PhD supervisor) Jeremy Boissevain. Perhaps because of the same oedipal frame of mind, van Binsbergen drifted away from an obvious, loyal and effective academic patron such as his principal teacher of theoretical anthropology André Köbben; this despite the fact that the latter was instrumental in getting him a teaching job at the University of Zambia (the self-funded beginning of van Binsbergen's life-long research into the Nkoya people and their ecstatic cults of affliction), as well as a write-up year at Amsterdam University in order to process his Zambian field data when the PhD project under Boissevain turned out to have shipwrecked. Terence Ranger (UCLA / Manchester / Oxford), with all his stimulating international stature and unconditional loyalty, was geographically too remote and appeared too late in van Binsbergen's career than that he could play the role of academic patron on a grand scale -- he was on van Binsbergen's PhD committee, though, and throughout the 1980s he was, with the stimulating political scientist Martin Doornbos (ISS, The Hague), official External Advisor when van Binsbergen as Head of Political and Historical Studies was one of the two academic directors at the African Studies Centre. The inspiring role of other principal role models such as Wim Wertheim, Jaap van Velsen, Jack Simons and Ray Alexander, and, more remotely, Max Gluckman (partly through the intermediary of the latter's affine Dick Werbner) -- most of them of left-wing, Marxist signature; most of them Jews -- is signalled throughout van Binsbergen's work and need not be treated here; they, too, remained too remote for effective patronage, although the Manchester link brought van Binsbergen his first full chair (Simon Professor of Social Anthropology, Manchester, 1979-1980), after acting in the Leiden chair of African sociology and anthropology (1975-1977), probably also through Köbben's intercession. As a result, the role of most effective and loyal, and cherished, academic patron, in van Binsbergen's case could be said to have been reserved for his first lecturer in anthropology (1964-1965), Bonno Thoden van Velzen (1934- ), who was eligible as a patron in that he was not old enough to inspire paternal / oedipal feelings, yet who was to be of crucial influence on van Binsbergen's career: instrumental in getting van Binsbergen a full-time position at the African Studies Centre, Leiden (1977) and a decisively inspiring year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (1994-1995), whilst also acting as external examiner of his PhD (1979).
This overall constellation has informed Wim van Binsbergen's career to a considerable extent, and explains much of its obvious and painful contradictions. Constitutionally unable or unwilling to pose as someone's client or student but obsessively trying to bend, prematurely, these standard and honourable academic relationships towards a model of relationships between equals and peers, van Binsbergen. over the years, has often squandered his relational and institutional capital with the same speed and thoroughness with which he produced his intellectual capital. It has therefore been his great good fortune that, from the late 1970s to this very day, the African Studies Centre Leiden, an interuniversity research institution aloof from mainstream Dutch university organisation with its politics and prizes, could yet constitute the constant factor, the mainstay, in this career, with significant and prestigious, but short-term or part-time, and institutionally little endowed and powerless, professorial appointments with such universities as Leiden (1975-1977), Manchester, Berlin (1986), Amsterdam (Free University, 1990-1998), Durban-Westville (1992), and Rotterdam (1998- ). With the same versatility and restlessness, and in further expression of a homelessness he detected and appreciated so much in others e.g. Valentin Mudimbe, van Binsbergen's initial training in social and religious anthropology, ethnohistory and Islamic studies was transcended in his sustained efforts to situate his African material more and more within a global context; in the pursuit of this goal he serially worked his way through such disciplines as political science, ethnic studies, history of ideas, Mediterranean archaeology, intercultural philosophy, and comparative mythology, with a fair chunk of linguistics and genetics...'