Papers by Antonius C . G . M . Robben
Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 2022
Journal of Material Culture, 2021
The German and Allied bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War caused thousands of dead and h... more The German and Allied bombing of Rotterdam in the Second World War caused thousands of dead and hundreds of missing, and severely damaged the Dutch port city. The joint destruction of people and their built environment made the ruins and rubble stand metonymically for the dead when they could not be mentioned in the censored press. The contiguity of ruins, rubble, corpses and human remains was not only semantic but also material because of the intermingling and even amalgamation of organic and inorganic remains into anthropomineral debris. The hybrid matter was dumped in rivers and canals to create broad avenues and a modern city centre. This article argues that Rotterdam's semantic and material metonyms of destruction were generated by the contiguity, entanglement, and post-mortem and post-ruination agencies of the dead and the destroyed city centre. This analysis provides insight into the interaction and co-constitution of human and material remains in war.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2020
Ethnographic fieldwork is an emotional research practice because of its intersubjective nature an... more Ethnographic fieldwork is an emotional research practice because of its intersubjective nature and empathic embrace of the actor's perspective. This intersubjectivity also involves the fieldworker's unconscious, which influences ethnographic encounters and anthropological interpretations. Two years of psychoanalysis in Argentina revealed the influence of the unconscious on my fieldwork about political violence and trauma through dream analyses and the analyst's interventions. This understanding improved the rapport with research participants and opened an alternative road to reflexivity. [Argentina, dreams, fieldwork, psychoanalysis, unconscious]
Human Remains and Violence, 2019
Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and All... more Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and Allied bombardments. Civil defence measures had been taken before the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and these e orts were intensi ed during the country's occupation as Allied bombers attacked Rotterdam's port, factories, dry docks and oil terminals. Residential neighbourhoods were also hit through imprecise targeting and by mis red ak grenades. Inadequate air raid shelters and people's reluctance to enter them caused many casualties. The condition of the corpses and their post-mortem treatment was thus co-constituted by the relationship between the victims and their material circumstances. This article concludes that an understanding of the treatment of the dead a er war, genocide and mass violence must pay systematic attention to the materiality of death because the condition, collection and handling of human remains is a ected by the material means that impacted on the victims.
Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War, 2010
Anthropology Today, 2009
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Journal of Contemporary History, 2006
This article focuses on combat motivation in two Argentinian wars: one domestic against a guerril... more This article focuses on combat motivation in two Argentinian wars: one domestic against a guerrilla insurgency and the other international against foreign troops. The willingness to fight one's fellow citizens in face-to-face combat with small fire arms is quite different from battling foreign professional forces on unfamiliar terrain with high-tech armament. 1 Despite these differences, the two wars were historically, politically and culturally related. Both wars were waged by largely the same field officers and started by a military regime with intense convictions about the integrity of Argentinian culture, territory and nation, a strong sense of martial honour, and an exaggerated belief in its historical mission.
Anthropological Quarterly, 1984
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
American Anthropologist, 1989
Man, 1994
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Ethos, 1996
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Cultural Critique, 2005
We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other ... more We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying: "It was like that for you, too? Then that conWrms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn't imagining things." -Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor.
Social Anthropology, 2008
Social Anthropology, 2010
This article examines how the military dimension of the global clash between the cellular system ... more This article examines how the military dimension of the global clash between the cellular system of nonstate networks and the vertebrate system of nation-states, as formulated by Arjun Appadurai, was played out in counterinsurgency operations between U.S. troops and Iraqi insurgents during the Iraq War between 2004 and 2006. It demonstrates how American forces embraced the insurgency’s networked tactics when massive assault operations failed. Informed by social mimesis and Manichaeism, counterinsurgency units enhanced the chaos of local battle spaces, dehumanised combatants hiding among the people, and thereby increased civilian deaths at checkpoints, during raids, and in detention centres.
Memory Studies, 2012
Three decades of political, legal and discursive contestation about the violence, military repres... more Three decades of political, legal and discursive contestation about the violence, military repression, and disappearances that troubled Argentina during the 1970s have repeatedly changed the multidirectional memories of adversarial groups and undercut attempts at national reconciliation. The representation of past violence as dirty war, state terrorism or genocide singled out different perpetrators, evoked other remembrances, and called for distinct ways to reconcile Argentine society. These interpretive frameworks succeeded one another in public debates about the past, and generated conflicting collective memories among political opponents. The recent comparison of disappearances with the Holocaust convinced the human rights movement, and certain judicial and academic circles that genocide occurred in Argentina. Individual culpability became transformed into collective responsibility, and further complicated national reconciliation. This article demonstrates that the memorialization and continuous narration of past massive violence in Argentina did not advance the coexistence of adversarial groups but intensified their enmity and revived certain repressive practices.
Death Studies, 2014
This article uses the Dual Process Model (DPM) in an analysis of the national mourning of tens of... more This article uses the Dual Process Model (DPM) in an analysis of the national mourning of tens of thousands of disappeared in Chile and Argentina by adapting the model from the individual to the collective level where society as a whole is bereaved. Perpetrators are also involved in the national mourning process as members of a bereaved society. This article aims (1) to demonstrate the DPMs significance for the analysis of national mourning in post-conflict societies; and (2) to explain oscillations between loss orientation and restoration orientation in coping with massive losses that seem contradictory from a grief work perspective.
American Anthropologist, 2015
At two recent international conferences (The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnologi... more At two recent international conferences (The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences [IUAES] 2013 and 2014), two themes caught my attention. One was that of "crisis." Partly animating this crisis were budget cuts to the institutions that fund research, which, as various colleagues argued, appeared to be the same all over the world. Young anthropologists, I heard, were having difficulties entering institutions permanently. Trained researchers were all the time counting on more obligations and lower budgets. The positions that remained vacant were not filled. But the Argentinean case, without a doubt, demonstrates a different reality, which I will discuss here.
Conflict and Society, 2015
In conducting fieldwork among perpetrators of state violence, it is a major methodological proble... more In conducting fieldwork among perpetrators of state violence, it is a major methodological problem to gain access to competing factions within the research population. Ethnographers often succeed in finding access to at least one faction but this successful rapport might then immediately close off other factions that mistrust the ethnographer’s politics, intentions or alleged sympathies. The ethnographic challenge is to find intermediaries or switchboard operators, as they are called in this article, who have established informal channels of communication between hostile factions. Switchboard operators have the following characteristics: discretion, neutrality, lack of formal power, disinterestedness, trustworthiness, and they act as a conduit of communication. This article describes how switchboard operators were located in Argentina, and how they played a crucial role in my fieldwork among a broad spectrum of military perpetrators who had terrorized the Argentine people between 1976 and 1983 with enforced disappearances and state repression.
Conflct and Society, 2016
Technological developments in the security fi eld are calling for a new anthropological approach ... more Technological developments in the security fi eld are calling for a new anthropological approach to the study of violence. Th e anthropology of violence shift ed during the late 1980s from an emphasis on the structural and symbolic dynamics of violence to a focus on historical and social practices. Th e concern for violence exercised through political relations was replaced by attention to the everyday experience of violence, while central concepts such as state, power, ritual, mobilization, and resistance made way for terror, trauma, suff ering, subjectivity, and resilience. Th e time has arrived for a new take on violence that can help us understand the revolutionary impact of technological innovations adopted by police, military, secret services, and private companies. Th e push for seamless surveillance systems, the tapping of e-mail traffi c, phone and wireless communications, permanent camera supervision, body scans, biosensors, and activity analyses of cars and people circulating in public places are aff ecting people's daily lives, bodily integrity, and freedom of personal expression and selfh ood. Military operations have become equally invasive with the spread of spy satellites, airborne and submarine drones, and warbots with multiple reconnaissance and combat capabilities. What all these technological developments have in common is a mediation of embodied senses and human decision making. Police and military rely less on their natural senses and professional assessments, and progressively more on mediating devices to control populations and detect suspects and enemies. Th e ethnographic study of violent social practices should not be abandoned, but new technologies require additional attention to processes of mediation.
Uploads
Papers by Antonius C . G . M . Robben