ORATION
by Professor Mark Anthony Falzon PhD (Cantab)
Head of the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta
Throughout its history, anthropology has come under sporadic fire for its alleged feudalistic
ambitions. The charge is that, in spite of all the lip-service about ‘getting off the verandah’, ‘the
native’s point of view’, and such, the discipline is essentially a top-down appropriative enterprise - at
best, a lop-sided kind of gift-exchange. The point is arguable and it is also one I don’t necessarily buy,
certainly not wholesale. Partly the reason I don’t is that anthropologists have found, probably
increasingly, that they themselves can be and often have been appropriated and circulated.
Jeremy Boissevain serves up an outstanding example of that transaction. On the one hand he
has established himself as the doyen of anthropology in Malta and used his field capital to build an
empire that includes several books and scores of articles. On the other, he has been adopted by his
(there, feudalism again) people as, first, the foreign expert who habilitated festa as an object worthy of
the international scholarship and, second, the foreign expert who got it all wrong.
I’ll get back to that one shortly. But first I wish to emphasise that it was neither saints nor
fireworks that made Jeremy Boissevain’s international reputation. Rather, it was friends. In Friends of
Friends, first published by Blackwell in 1974 and subsequently translated into a number of languages,
he cast the metaphor of the network to explore some of the enterprising ways in which people formed
shifting alliances in order to gain access to resources, power, and prestige. At the time, this was all
rather refreshing. Boissevain got his PhD in 1962 and had been trained in a structural-functionalist
tradition that saw society as a set of enduring groups supported by values and sanctions - in other
words, a system that was largely in equilibrium and that left little room for individual entrepreneurship
and manoeuvre.
Based in part on the pioneering work of Edmund Leach and later Fredrik Barth, Boissevain
broke with that tradition in no cautious way. His book was an assault on plus ça change, on the
scholarly tendency to explain the system in terms of itself, and on what he rather mischievously called
‘immaculate social conception’. (The last would later come back to indulge anthropology as a concern
with agency.) Feet back on the ground, his network model made room for factions, and for the
colourful ways in which patrons and brokers operated. All of these were very evident in Malta and in
Sicily, two places where Boissevain had done fieldwork. Which reminds us that another reason why
Friends of Friends was ground-breaking was that it turned the anthropological gaze away from the
supposedly exotic to our own contemporary European societies. In an interview he gave to Alan
Macfarlane in Cambridge in 1983, Jeremy Boissevain said that it was these contributions he wished to
be remembered for. Well, here we are thirty years later talking about them. The only risk I see is that of
a partial eclipse, in the sense that the years 1983 to date have been rather productive for him.
That brings us back to Malta, which in fifty years of trying seems to have failed to provide a
dull moment for Boissevain. His first article on Maltese village politics was published in 1962 but the
ethnographies that really established him as our own anthropologist-in-residence were Saints and
Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta (first published in 1965) and Hal Farrug: A Village in
Malta (1969). It’s the kind of work that one keeps going back to, thanks in large part to its
ethnographic richness. If you will allow me an example of my own, some time ago I co-authored a
piece on fireworks which looked at festa as a multi-sensory experience. This was very much in the
contemporary vein which pays attention to what some people call the ‘atmosphere’ (sound, smell,
touch, and so on) of social life. Still, we found ourselves taking as our point of departure Boissevain’s
descriptions of the loud bangs that occasionally shattered window panes, and of the coming together of
the smells of incense and burning gunpowder that signified the convergence of sacred and profane,
festa ta’ ġewwa and festa ta’ barra. I remember thinking as a rash student that Boissevain’s work was
not theoretical enough, that it was largely descriptive ethnography. I now realise I was wrong. First, it
wasn’t his fault that I had not yet read his theoretical work. Second, it is probably anthropology’s
concern with fine-grained detail that ultimately stands the test of time. In that respect among others,
Boissevain’s work on Malta is peerless.
His first-phase contributions on factions, village politics, and patronage eventually developed
into related interests in tourism and public rituals. Boissevain looked at some of the ways in which the
tangible and desirable contents of a growing tourist industry often by-produced a discontent over
threats to heritage and the coastal landscape. This in turn left its mark on political processes such as the
rise of environmental non-governmental organisations. What Boissevain called the ‘revitalization of
European rituals’ was also linked to tourism and broader processes of mobility. As the significance of
the traditional neighbourhood waned and the figure of the stranger became commonplace, local
populations sought to mark off their communities by defining and ritualizing boundaries. Political and
bureacratic pressures by a unifying Europe did nothing to allay the closing of ranks; on the contrary,
they probably served as a catalyst as locals felt the need to assert and defend their identities by
celebrating them. Boissevain’s reading of the interminable rounds of re-enactments and local food
festivals is no jeremiad. As he put it, they might just make Europe a more cheerful place to live in.
Outside these main fields of sustained inquiry, Boissevain has also contributed a number of
what one might call divertissements on various aspects of Maltese and European society and culture.
These include several papers on Dom Mintoff, a Braudelian look at the Mediterranean seasonal
rhythms of summer activity and winter standstill, a short piece that asks why the Maltese ask so few
questions, a study of marriage ceremonies, and so on.
All of these happen to be themes that occupy the centre ground of the local agora. It is hardly
surprising then that Jeremy Boissevain’s name has seeped through to popular culture. Tellingly, it was
local publishers who gave us later editions of both Saints and Fireworks and Hal Farrug. Hardly a
single public debate on festa and political factions takes place in which Boissevain’s name is not
mentioned. Clare Azzopardi’s recent collection of short stories features the house in Naxxar where a
certain Jerry lived. For a while, ‘ħbieb tal-ħbieb’ (‘friends of friends’) was the political slogan chosen
by the Labour Party to salvo away at what it saw as an endemic cronyism within the Nationalist
government of the time. And so on. If there were a Maltese The Simpsons, the producers would at
some point have a hard time finding a voice actor to play Jeremy Boissevain. The old Navajo joke
about the typical family – mama, papa, four children, and the anthropologist – comes to mind.
Like all journeys, this one has had its risks. I said earlier that Boissevain is best known in local
popular circles as the prophet who got the future wrong. The reference is to a prediction he once made
that festa, and the importance of saints of the secular type for that matter, would decline. The saints, he
had argued, were about to go marching out. Only they did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, festa
has grown enormously in recent years. There are now more saints, more band clubs, more graven
images, more fireworks, generally more bunting than there were thirty or so years ago.
I suppose the reason why the failed prediction so struck a chord is that it seems to be a kind of
vindication, a testimony to the resilience of the Maltese spirit and a slap in the face of all foreigners
who dare question it. It also makes a good cautionary tale, an antidote to a godly army of meddlesome
reformers and restorers. For his part, Boissevain typically and productively saw the scholarly side of
having got it wrong.
There is however another facet to his local incarnation as a prophet. In recent years Boissevain
has enjoyed a following among middle-class Maltese, especially those of an environmentalist bent. He
has spoken in public and in no uncertain terms about the patronage circles, amoral familism, and
partisan ties that effectively thwart our loyalty to the state. Above all, he has sung a poignant elegy to
the countryside where, as a young fieldworker, he spent so many happy afternoons with his family.
That countryside has now been largely sacrificed at the altar of that odd word ‘development’. These
themes were summed up by Boissevain at a seminar held in 2006. It was something of a Jacob Marley
moment as he summoned the ghosts of Malta past, present, and future. His concluding words were, “I
truly hope that I won’t be obliged to come back and haunt you after yet another thirty years with the
same message.” I’m sure that many in the audience felt that he would be most welcome to do so.
I have outlined but a small part of Jeremy Boissevain’s intellectual contribution. I would be
doing him an injustice if I didn’t also mention the generosity with which he has shared his wisdom. I
once somewhat hesitantly approached him for some guidance as a fresh graduate in 1997. He promptly
invited me to his house in Naxxar where we spent a convivial evening going through some of my ideas
for doctoral research. The details escape me but I have a clear memory of how his passion for
anthropology and forthcomingness inspired me long afterwards. I happen to know through my friends,
and friends of friends, that my experience was certainly no exception. Professor Boissevain, on behalf
of a complex network of people, Thank You.