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Jeremy Boissevain: Factions, Friends and Feasts: Anthropological perspectives on the Mediterranean, New York & Oxford. Berghahn, 2013, x+310pp.

Anthropologists might be accused of habitually overstaying their welcome. That’s because the way they do research has nothing to do with surveys or interviews. Rather, they tend to immerse themselves for long periods of time (typically a year or two) in the societies they study.

Simply put, anthropologists do research by living with their people. Even by these standards, the case of Jeremy Boissevain is exceptional.

He first came to Malta over 50 years ago and has been part of the furniture since.

That’s partly the reason why it was smiles all round when our university awarded him an honoris causa doctorate last year. The rest has to do with the richness and solidity of his ongoing work on Malta.

This book, which brings together some of his best writings on Malta and the Mediterranean, gives us an idea of the breadth of that contribution. If it were an art exhibition, this would be a retrospective.

As expected, the title includes the words ‘factions’ and ‘friends’ (more on feasts later). In an interview with Alan Macfarlane in Cambridge in 1983, Boissevain said that it was two things he wished to be remembered for. First, for his insistence (significant at the time) that contemporary European societies were as worthy of anthropological study as supposedly-exotic, distant ones.

Second, for his systematic analysis of some of the enterprising ways in which people formed shifting alliances in order to gain access to resources, power and prestige.

The seminal work was Friends of Friends, first published in 1974 and subsequently translated into a number of languages. In a nutshell, his network model made room for factions and for the colourful ways in which patrons and brokers operated.

Some of Boissevain’s more memorable explorations of the ways in which friends of friends matter are included in the third part of the book under review.

Which brings us back to Malta, which in 50 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 works 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 Ħal Farru A Village in Malta (1969).

It is thanks to these books that 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 Ħal Farruġ.

Hardly a single public debate on festa takes place in which Boissevain’s name is not dropped, usually from the height of cluelessness.

Clare Azzopardi’s recent collection of fine 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.

Manages to be technically acute without having to resort to academic jargo

That said, pop has its risks. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people say that Boissevain ‘got it wrong’.

The reference is to a prediction he once made that festi, 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, festi have grown enormously in recent years.

There are now more saints, more band clubs, more graven images, more fireworks, generally more bunting than there were 40 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.

That he did in the 1980s, which explains my earlier reference to cluelessness – it is clear that most of the people who bandy about the story of the failed prediction have 40 years of Boissevain to catch up on.

Or they might read this book as a short cut, given that at least two chapters tell us why, as early as the 1980s, “Malta was celebrating as never before”.

The fourth part of the book gives us a glimpse of some of Boissevain’s later work.

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 “revitalisation 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 ritualising boundaries.

Political and bureaucratic 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.

Typically for a work by Jeremy Boissevain, Factions, Friends and Feasts manages to be technically acute without having to resort to academic jargon.

Which is just as well, given that the whole point is to make sense of a summer cocktail of corruption scandals, protests over Żonqor and some very loud petards.

Jeremy Bossevain died on June 26, a few weeks after the review was written.