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Antonius Robben

Antonius Robben

Antonius (‘Tony’) Cornelis Gerardus Maria Robben (born December 17, 1953) is a Dutch cultural anthropologist. He is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Career and fieldwork

Antonius Robben received an M.A. in Sociology (1976), and graduated cum laude with an M.Phil. in Anthropology (1979) from the University of Amsterdam. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork (1977-78) among raft fishermen in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, under the supervision of Jeremy Boissevain and Bob Scholte. More fieldwork (1982-83) on fishermen was carried out in the state of Bahia, Brazil, for a Ph.D. (1986) at the University of California, Berkeley. He was supervised by Burton Benedict, and theoretically influenced by Gerald Berreman, Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus. Robben then became a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1986-89), followed by more than two years of fieldwork (1989-91) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to study the traumatic consequences of forced disappearances by the military regime. Antonius Robben returned to the Netherlands in 1991, and was appointed as Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University in 1993. He has been the recipient of research funds from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lowie Foundation, National Science Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research. He spent 2004 at Harvard University with a research fellowship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. In 2006, the American Anthropological Association awarded Antonius Robben with the Robert B. Textor Prize for “his contributions to anticipatory anthropology, structural change and violence, and a widening understanding of the traumatic impact of growing violence globally.”Deeply affected by the Iraq War, the Iraq Research Project (2006-10) was started to add an anthropological understanding to a public debate dominated by  historians, political scientists, and foreign affairs specialists. At present, Robben is studying the wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction of the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Research interests

Robben’s research has developed along five lines of interest: 1. Cultural economics; 2. Violence, trauma, and memory; 3. Death and mourning; 4. Space, place, and material culture; and 5. The methodology of anthropological research.

The first research line examines the dialectic relation of practice and discourse in the economy. Inspired by Bourdieu, Foucault, Heidegger and Ricoeur, the ethnography Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic Practice and Discursive Conflict in Brazil (1989) argues that the economy is not a bounded social system that can be reduced to objective principles, laws, structures or models. Instead, research among Brazilian fishermen demonstrated how their conflicting interpretations about what constituted the economy was intertwined with their different economic practices. Power differences and frequent disagreements about economic matters shaped their actions, decisions, and long-term strategies. This focus on discursive conflict and practice guided also the field research in Argentina on political violence and sociocultural trauma.

The study of the complex relations among violence, trauma, and memory are Robben’s second research line. The book Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005) demonstrated that the spiral of violence - generally understood as a self-perpetuating process - can become mediated by sociocultural trauma to result in a violence-trauma-violence process. Different manifestations of violence and trauma percolated through Argentine society, fueled by the repeated sociocultural traumatization of political enemies. This historical process culminated in the state terrorism of the country’s last dictatorship (1976-83) against an armed insurgency and a radicalized political left. Protests against the massive disappearances, together with labor unrest and the defeat in the Falkland/Malvinas War (1982), brought down the military regime. Robben’s next monograph, Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018), analyzed how primary bonds of trust motivated the relentless search for the disappeared by their relatives, and how the military dictatorship was betraying the Argentine people through state repression. The dynamics of trust and betrayal did not end in 1983 but continued in ongoing contestations and mutual mistrust among the state, and military and human rights groups.

The third research line consists of the interdisciplinary study of violent death and complicated mourning. The edited book Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (co-edited with Marcelo Suárez-Orozco) developed a multilevel approach that demonstrates how political violence targets simultaneously the body, the psyche and the sociocultural order. This approach was elaborated in the monograph Argentina Betrayed by explaining how competing social groups and state institutions cope with massive deaths through the oscillation of processes of mourning and recovery. This ongoing oscillation influenced the complicated mourning of the violent deaths and disappearances, which were denounced by the human rights movement as an Argentine genocide. Robben concludes that the accusation of a nationwide complicity with genocide is a way of mourning the immensity of the crime of enforced disappearances and the betrayal of the trust of the searching relatives and the traumatized Argentine society.

The fourth research line involves the study of spatial structures, social practices, and material culture. Sons of the Sea Goddess demonstrated how house design organizes domestic life through a process of structuration between cultural practices, spatial classifications, and social hierarchies. Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina and Argentina Betrayed revealed that the intrusion of the home by military assault teams violated spatial, social, gender and ego boundaries that undermined people’s trust in each other and the state. In a current project about wartime Rotterdam, Robben is examining the co-constitution of violent death and material culture.

Robben’s final research line concerns the investigation of anthropological research methods. He originated the concept ethnographic seduction to analyze the conscious and unconscious processes by which interviewees in conflict areas and postwar societies lead ethnographers astray from their research objectives. They seduce fieldworkers into accepting their discourse as the only correct interpretation of reality. Other problems of ethnographic fieldwork in conflict situations were addressed in the edited book Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (co-edited with Carolyn Nordstrom). Robben made an additional methodological step with the edited volume Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War, which designed a comparative methodology for the anthropological study of war-torn regions inaccessible to ethnographic fieldworkers.

Selected publications

Books

2018    Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2005    Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1989    Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic Practice and Discursive Conflict in Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press.

Edited books

2018    A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell.

2017    Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. 2^nd edition. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell.

2015    Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (co-edited with Francisco Ferrándiz). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2012    Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader. 2^nd edition (co-edited with Jeffrey Sluka). Malden: Wiley Blackwell.

2010    Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2000    Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. (co-edited with Marcelo Suárez-Orozco). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1995    Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. (co-edited with Carolyn Nordstrom). Berkeley: University of California Press.