During Jeremy Boissevain’s first fieldwork in Malta, some 55 years ago, it was put about in the village that he was a spy for the United Nations. (An American, with a Swedish wife, from a British university, asking questions in Kirkop – what else could he be?) Boissevain dealt with it by treating the main conspiracy theorist to “a heavy drinking session”, which sobered up the man about the actual work of an anthropologist.

Alas, between then and his death last week, Boissevain found it much more difficult, despite his best efforts, to give the Maltese middle and upper classes a similarly sober view of what his research actually consisted of.

His name is well-known, his writing style is plain and accessible and the Maltese publication of Saints and fireworks ran into three editions. But you have to wonder how many people understood him.

Saints and fireworks entered Maltese discourse. Some of Boissevain’s authority rubbed off onto the usage of ‘friends of friends’ when it became the title of another of his books.

Generally, however, such phrases remain used in the same way in which people insist that all that glitters is not gold without ever having read, attended or watched The Merchant of Venice.

Many middle-class Maltese use a sly, knowing tone to refer to Boissevain’s work. They assume that he proves, in exquisite social detail, what they’ve known all along about ‘the other Malta’. In fact, however, Boissevain’s work upends many of their key assumptions.

Maltese portraits of ‘the other Malta’ have frequently recurring features: that it is deeply peasant at heart, in a cultural deep freeze, fatalistic, suffocated by group identity and not really part of ‘Europe’ (not the real Western one, anyway).

Boissevain’s Malta, on the other hand, is one where identity is dynamic and competitive individualism is the most striking characteristic. Far from not being part of Europe, Malta serves as a lens through which to understand Europe better.

His studies of Maltese feasts don’t just show that the intensity, form and audiences changed over a few decades. Boissevain shows that people’s motivations changed as well.

The very identity being celebrated changes in the space of a relatively short period of time.

That the forms and intensity changed we know thanks to his scrupulous documentation of details concerning expenses, the number of band clubs, etc. Famously, he had expected the numbers to go down. Instead, they went up even as the public influence of the Maltese Church waned.

While he got it wrong in one sense, he had been right all along on a more important level. He had always insisted that you could not understand parish-pump politics by focusing on the parish or the village alone. National processes were working their way through village life.

Some of his scenic pen-portraits might make the world he studied look quaint, such as how, on feast days, house doors were kept open to display new home appliances as décor. But such exhibitions were driven by the cultural energy of a class of upwardly mobile people.

The arguments over who should have what role in the feast was an argument made by people who wanted to make the world their own.

Boissevain later understood that this dynamic was open-ended. It acquired new shapes as it unfolded. As people migrated – to other towns and lands – they came to value the feast in a new way.

Any cynic can see Malta as a grain of sand; Jeremy Boissevain saw the world in it

Not all Maltese feasts take the exact form of those that Boissevain studied in detail. Nonetheless, his work remains illuminating whether you’re trying to understand towns with a different form of rivalry or the increasing participation of women in the organisation and the revelry, or the more ironic, carnival-like atmosphere in some places.

Talk about atavistic peasants is an intellectually feeble explanation for all of that. Indeed, Boissevain found it difficult to explain even in the terms of the dominant social theory in the UK when he was a doctoral student.

The idea that society functions as a kind of super-ego, making its choices and imposing them on individual members (except for the elite and eccentrics), just didn’t seem to work.

Someday, someone will need to sort out how 1960s Malta sowed the seeds of two kinds of intellectual reaction.

In one, Maltese poets and novelists (the latter especially in the 1970s) wrote of social life as a stifling cage, where to assert oneself and exercise choice was to anoint yourself an existential hero (and martyr).

In the other, people like Boissevain (and, in his own way, the late Fr Peter Serracino Inglott) were struck by the individualism of an expanding universe, eclectic and provisional, in which the exercise of personal choice, manoeuvring and manipulating was routine and humdrum.

It’s this world that Boissevain tried to explain and understand by speaking of ‘friends of friends’.

He did not use it to suggest a closed incestuous world. On the contrary, he was referring to a world whose reach extended far beyond that which the anthropologist – or, indeed, the individuals being studied – could directly know.

He suggested that society in general should be studied as a network of networks. He subclassified networks by using terms such as coalitions, cliques, factions and gangs.

Since such terms are used within Maltese society itself, it is tempting to think that Boissevain was using them in the same sense. Actually, he was not.

He was borrowing the terms and using them neutrally.

Rather than using those terms to suggest what was peculiar and sinister to Malta (or ‘the Mediterranean’), he was saying that the case of Malta threw light on certain universal features of human society.

He was not coming up with a new grand theory of society. He said he was offering a method to explore interpersonal links and interdependence, a set of questions that should always be asked. These questions did not exhaust the whole of what one needed to know about any society, including Malta.

Just as he used the case of Malta to expand the notion of what any society meant, in his later work he used Maltese feasts as a stepping stone to understanding the nature and character of Europe, beyond its self-images.

Maltese feasts and rituals could be seen, he argued, in the wider context of a rise in certain kinds of public rituals in secular Europe. Malta was not bucking the trend but moving in step with it.

He also built on the Maltese case to challenge certain academic commonplaces about the impact of tourism.

In his writings, Boissevain urged his readers not to focus exclusively on institutions but, as a senior academic, he helped build them.

In Holland and Europe, he was an important figure in the development of an anthropology of Europe and the Mediterranean (which he thought of as complementary not opposites).

In Malta, he nurtured tourism studies as well as anthropology.

In all of this, Malta featured as a muse to help him understand the wider world – how the part relates to the whole.

He participated in small Maltese feasts to understand human feasting.

He built friendships and saw how chains of friends change what we know and how we act.

Any cynic can see Malta as a grain of sand; Boissevain saw the world in it.

ranierfsadni@europe.com