IN MEMORIAM DOUWE JONGMANS (1922-2011)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