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