At least the timing was right. One week ago, a ‘mysterious large box from the University of Malta’ was delivered to Jeremy Boissevain’s house in Amsterdam. In it was the gown he wore at his Honoris Causa graduation last November. It is something of a tradition at our University that graduates of that highest distinction get to keep their robes.

Boissevain lost no time to write to the Rector to thank him, and to say how much he looked forward to his next visit to Malta. That last part was not to be. He died suddenly last Friday, aged 87.

Jeremy and Inga Boissevain first came to Malta in 1956. At the time he worked for Care, a US relief organization that had operations in various places around the world. He ended up doing research here as a doctoral student in anthropology. Malta turned out to be a rich seam, and by the 1970s Boissevain was marching with the discipline’s elite corps.

This is not an obituary. Instead I shall entertain myself with some musings on what might have caught Boissevain’s eye had he settled down to fieldwork in Malta in 2015.

There are two caveats. First, any ‘what if?’ exercise of this kind is likely to be highly speculative. Second, it’s not as if Boissevain’s research in Malta was a one-off.

True to inherited form Boissevain’s best work on Malta is based on field observations

He made Malta his permanent research location, so to say, and was intellectually active (and often vociferous) until the very end. Which means we do have some clues.

Raymond Firth, who was one of the stars at the London School of Economics during Boissevain’s time there, taught his students that the best way to understand society was by looking at what people actually did. According to Firth, the wise anthropologist was one who did not pay too much attention to what people said.

True to inherited form Boissevain’s best work on Malta is based on field observations. His notes tell of how he did the daily rounds in the village of Kirkop. On special occasions and festa time in particular, these rounds would become a total immersion into the lives of the villagers.

Fifty years on, Boissevain would have a hard time trying to filter out what people said. That’s because we say so much all the time. Take last week’s protest. I wouldn’t call 3,000 people on the streets of Valletta a good example of lip service. Still, the momentum of the whole thing is immeasurably greater elsewhere.

I doubt Boissevain would dismiss, à la Umberto Eco, the tens of thousands of Facebook posts and comments as so much hot air. Nor would he follow Firth’s advice and make light of the huge mass of television, radio, and newspaper coverage and commentary.

Certainly the politicians he was so interested in don’t. In this first respect, then, Malta is a profoundly different place to what it was in the early 1960s. Call it an information society if you will, the point is that words perhaps matter more than they ever did back then. Anthropologists today are condemned to spend a good chunk of their time in the field sitting down at their desks.

One of Jeremy Boissevain’s key encounters in Malta was with a volatile political field in which individual entrepreneurs mattered a great deal. Indeed it was that encounter which whetted his appetite for the networks that would make him famous.

I suspect that Malta today would take him back to structures. Perhaps paradoxically given the supposedly-democratic spaces that punctuate the information society, the two parties have become control freaks. Party headquarters produce and control slogans, images, public events, and the rest. For all her solidity and guts, someone like Marlene Farrugia is hardly an entrepreneur; rather, she’s now electoral toast.

As for the saints that made him a household name locally, and whose delightful company he is now stuck with for eternity, Boissevain would have a perennial field day.

First, the secular type. One of Boissevain’s more memorable moments was his analysis of the Maltese proverb ‘Bla qaddisin ma titlax il-ġenna’ (‘You can’t go to heaven without the help of saints’). That proverb was a wide network of patrons, clients, and brokers, in a nutshell.

Except a nutshell would scarcely suffice to contain the current state of the art. Access to the heaven of the national coffers is controlled more than ever by an incestuous cabal of fixers, avuncular figures with a penchant for 18 year-olds, hunting buddies, tiger trainers, billboard A-listers, and such. A 2015 edition of Friends of Friends would run into several thousand pages.

Second, the heavenly type. As Boissevain himself observed as early as the 1970s, festa has grown enormously. At the risk of being repetitive, a 2015 edition of Saints and Fireworks would run into several hundred pages.

Boissevain did research in a physical landscape that was fairly stable, if far from timeless. ‘L-ambjent’ makes an appearance in his early works as little more than a setting. One of the photographs in Ħal Farruġ is an aerial shot of Kirkop. It shows a Maltese village as a tacky souvenir might picture it: a small collection of village houses huddled around a church and surrounded by seemingly-unassailable stretches of agricultural land.

Back in the early 1960s we hadn’t yet got to work on making our island beautiful. The political corollaries of that noble project were barely a twinkle in the eye at that time and Boissevain duly had nothing to say about them. It was a theme that would cause him much heartache (because a good anthropologist also learns to feel with their people) later on in his scholarly and personal life. Something tells me it would have been one of his key topics of contemporary research.

The funny thing is that, for all the extra footprint, I doubt fieldwork in Malta would have been at all possible for a 2015 Jeremy Boissevain and his young family.

Renting a place would have sapped all his funds – unless, that is, he decided to moonlight as a gaming facilitator or whatever they’re called.

Adieu, dear Professor Boissevain. You were born at just the right time. There simply would have been too much of it to haul in using artisanal netting techniques.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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