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1935-2024
Dutch anthropologist Anton Blok died on June 24th, at the age of 89. He was one of the most prominent anthropologists in the Netherlands during the second half of the twentieth century. Anton Blok published several pioneering studies and numerous thought-provoking articles, many of which were focused on themes related to violence and its control.
Anton Blok received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He initially chose to study geography, but soon switched to anthropology, impressed by the introductory lectures in that field of study given by the renowned Africanist André Köbben. He settled on research on the mafia in the Mediterranean. Anthropology professor Jeremy Boissevain became his supervisor.
Blok was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan (1972–1973), where he became acquainted with historically oriented researchers, including anthropologist Eric Wolf and sociologist Charles Tilly, whose theoretical approaches had lasting influence on his work. From 1973 to 1985, Blok was professor of cultural anthropology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. From 1986 to 2000, he held this chair at the University of Amsterdam. In 1987–1988, he was visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Already in the 1960s, he had explicitly distanced himself from the Dutch anthropological tradition, a style that from its inception had a mainly descriptive, atheoretical character, and shifted to a more problem-oriented approach. Anton Blok’s first book, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960 (Harper & Row, 1974) relates the “phenomenon” of mafia—in large part inspired by the sociologist Norbert Elias’s ideas on state formation and the civilizing process—to the meager influence that central authority in Italy had in the region of Sicily since the founding of the state in 1861. The void between the central authority and local landowners as well as between landowners and peasants together created the possibility for violent rural entrepreneurs (mafiosi) to seize power and pit the different parties against one another.
In his 1991 book De Bokkerijders. Roversbenden en geheime genootschappen in de landen van Overmaas (1730-1774) (The Bokkerijders: Robber Bands and Secret Societies in the Lands East of the River Meuse [1730-1774]), Blok investigates the organized brigands mobilized in a relatively small area along the river Meuse (currently belonging mostly to the Netherlands) that in the eighteenth century consisted of smaller political entities that fell within the sphere of influence of adjacent and colliding major powers. Whereas the activities of the mafia took place in a peripheral area of the Italian state, the violence of these mostly Dutch criminal bands occurred in an internationally fragmented border region. The book tried to answer long-standing questions about the background and characteristics of the robber band members, such as the motives, organization, methods, and purposes of the bands. Blok’s careful anthropological insights about class identities, occupation, gender, status and the social patterns that prevailed among these groups led to the success of the book.
In 2001, Blok published a partially revised selection of previously published articles under the title Honour and Violence. The articles within all deal with unique topics on which very little had been written in anthropology before, such as senseless violence, animal symbolism, the ambiguous position of chimneysweeps, and the narcissism of minor differences.
In his last book, Radical Innovators: The Blessings of Adversity in Science and Art, 1500–2000, Blok picked up a theme he had been mesmerized by for years: the roots of pioneering creativity in adversity. In a collective biography of nearly a hundred innovators in the arts and sciences, he examines factors that may have contributed to groundbreaking achievements, including physical defects, neglect, early parental loss, illness, minority status, and disease.
Blok was a gifted researcher and teacher and an enthusiastic supervisor. He was an erudite, careful, and broad-minded person, with an enormous zest for work and life. He often pointed to facts that others overlooked, seeking to examine social life from different angles, finding delight in surprising insights. Entirely in line with C. Wright Mills’s famous essay on intellectual craftsmanship, Blok playfully brought his imagination and his life experience to his research interests, always seeking to get a better grip on the topic at hand.
Huub de Jonge (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Donna Goldstein (University of Colorado Boulder)