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Abstract
Els Baerends – among those who knew her and her work a highly respected anthropologist of law – died unexpectedly on 8 December 2014.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the comments and other assistance of a number of colleagues and others: Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Marie-Claire Foblets, Fré le Poole, Fons Strijbosch, Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, Maarten van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and Heleen Weyers. The photograph of Els was taken by Maarten van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal in 2011 in her wild and lovely garden, which boasted a number of fruit trees, including the apple tree bearing the three apples discernable here.
Notes
† A shorter but on some matters of largely local interest somewhat fuller version of this In Memoriam will appear roughly simultaneously in Dutch in Recht der Werkelijkheid (the Dutch law and society journal).
1. G.P. Baerends was one of a small group of pioneers in ethology (behavioral biology), together with Niko Tinbergen, K. Lorenz and K von Frisch, who, from the 1930s, focused on the behavior of animals in their natural surroundings, with the objective of producing new fundamental theory capable of explaining what was observed. (See the website of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW): http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/DL/levensberichten/PE00000423.pdf.)
From her parents, Els inherited a life-long interest in the explanation of human social behavior within the context of ethology generally. In the late 1990s, she taught the course in Human Ethology – which earlier had been taught by her father – in the Biology Department of the University of Groningen, together with the biologist A.G.G. Groothuis. This background in human ethology seems to account for her later commitment to an ethological approach to anthropology. And it was her biological background that kept her from subscribing to what she considered the non-biological excesses of sociobiology, such as the idea of group selection.
2. The work and the importance of this group of Dutch scholars, who devoted themselves primarily to the study of legal pluralism in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), is discussed in Griffiths (Citation1986).
3. For examples of Holleman’s work, see Holleman Citation1952 (a treatise on Shona customary law), Holleman Citation1973 (a classic article on ‘trouble cases’ and ‘troubleless cases’) and Holleman Citation1981 (on van Vollenhoven, the great man of the ‘adat-law school’).
4. The products of her research in northern Togo include a large number of articles and six ethnographic films (see the bibliographic appendix at the end of this In Memoriam). Her then husband’s dissertation – which emphasizes the importance of Els’ contribution – compared the disposition of matrimonial cases by the local juge de paix and the paramount chief of the Anufom (Rouveroy van Nieuwaal Citation1976; see Griffiths Citation1977 for a review).
5. P.E. de Josselin de Jong was a major international figure in post-war structural anthropology (see de Ridder and Karremans Citation1987).
6. See 1994e.
7. Intra-lineage indebtedness exists, for example, between a woman, whose marriage to a man in another lineage has enabled her brother to marry a woman from that other lineage: she can expect help from the brother if she needs it.
8. In the period 1997–2008, she was also part-time lecturer in the Department of Anthropology of the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), where she was responsible for teaching the anthropology of kinship systems. And in 2002–2008, part of her appointment at the University of Groningen was as a lecturer on anthropological aspects of disaster relief in the context of a special master's degree program on international humanitarian action (NOHA).
9. An interesting feature of this seminar, which illustrates both her fundamentally comparative/theoretical stance and her engaging relationship with her students, was the field trips she led to the annual horse market in Zuidlaren, where the buying and selling of horses is carried out pursuant to extra-legal norms. This illustrated her position that one can do legal anthropology just as well in Europe as in Africa, Asia or the America.
10. The Volksrechtskring brought together researchers who had done field research in Africa (besides Els: F. von Benda-Beckmann, J.F. Holleman and Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal); Indonesia (F. von Benda-Beckmann, K. von Benda-Beckmann, M. Koesnoe, K. Maddock, D. Schaareman, H. Slaats, K. Slaats, S. Soendari and F. Strijbosch) and Korea (D. Eikemeier). It included a representative of the older Dutch ‘adat-law’ tradition (J.F. Holleman), and a few others with a general interest in anthropology of law such as myself and the legal historian G.C.J.J. van den Bergh (author of a classic study of the notorious popular tribunals in a Dutch village, Staphorst en zijn Gerichten (Staphorst and its Popular Tribunals, G.C.J.J. van den Bergh c.s. 1980); see Griffiths Citation1984 for a review.
11. Van den Steenhoven was from 1972 to 1981 professor of folk law and legal development in non-western societies, Catholic University of Nijmegen. The field research that ultimately lead to his dissertation Leadership and Law among the Eskimo's of the Keewatin District, Northwest Territories (1962) took place in the 1950s, and until 1969, his writing remained exclusively focused on Eskimo law. In the 1970s, he changed his focus to the adat law of Indonesia and published an article (Citation1973) on the adat law of the Karo's of North Sumatra. In the early 1970s, he supervised a team of Dutch and Indonesian researchers in a study of the adat law of Bali and Lombok.
12. 1981b and 1986a.
13. See Allott and Woodman 1987.
14. Rouland Citation1988, 109.
15. The paper was later published in a special double issue of the Journal of Legal Pluralism on ‘The socio-legal position of women in changing society’, which Els edited together with LaPrairie (1991b,c).
16. 1991a. She also contributed to the Commission's Newsletter (1994d).
17. It was in the context of the Commission that she first met Marie-Clair Foblets, later professor and head of the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology at the Catholic University of Louvain and now Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. The two became close friends, especially when Els took up a part-time teaching position in Louvain (see note 8 above).
18. 1988c, 1994f, 1995, 1998b, 2006a and 2009.
19. For the origins of this expression among anti-dogmatic Dutch legal scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, see ‘Redactioneel’ [From the editors] in the first issue of the journal (1986, 1–2: 2–7).
20. 1975 and 1991b,c.
21. Formally, the integration of Journal of Legal Pluralism with the Commission took place in 2013, but long before that the personal traits d'union were strong and the two worked from the Commission’s beginnings in 1978 closely together.
22. See 1988b for her published contributions to the AGRISK program.
23. See 1994b and 1994c. Cf. 1994a and 1998a on the same subject.
24. Quoted in Köbben Citation1964: 24 [transl. JG].
25. 1999b, 417. See also thesis 6 accompanying her dissertation [transl. JG]:
In anthropological research, participation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for good observation. Social-scientific discussions of participant observation … often pay more attention to problems of participation than to those of observation … which often take the form of the children's game ‘I see I see what you don't see’.
26. See note 1 above.
27. See e.g. 1994c.
28. See e.g. 1988a, 2013.
29. See e.g. 1996a.
30. 1994d, 1994f, 1995, 1998b, 1999a, 2000b, 2006, 2007 and 2009.
31. 1999b and 2000a.
32. 1995, 98 [transl. JG]; see also 1994d, 47 for a somewhat fuller formulation in English.
33. The classic characterization used by the Legal Realists to express their disdain for formal legal reasoning.
34. A simple example of this is the requirement, common in non-state legal systems such as Indonesian adat law, that important transactions, to be valid, must be formally witnessed by particular members of the community. If a dispute later arises over the boundary of a particular plot of land, for example, these witnesses are available to verify what was agreed upon. Knowledge of this fact tends to discourage violations of the agreement.
35. She notes the absence as late as the 1970s of large-scale resistance by women (outside the main city): ‘In most cases the social security afforded by the … system is preferred to the uncertain situation that is often the result of … [choosing a marriage partner oneself] and against the wishes of the parents’. (1994: 408, transl. JG)
36. In addition to the films listed here, Els cooperated in an advisory role in several other ethnographic films: Enige Impressies van de Veemarkt in Groningen [Some Impressions of the Cattle Market in Groningen] (E.A.B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, 1963); Als een Vreemdeling in Egypte [Like a Stranger in Egypt] (E.A.B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, 1977); Huisslachting van Twee Varkens in Genne, Glinthuisweg 15, Hasselt [Home Slaughter of Two Pigs in Genne, Glinthuisweg 15, Hasselt] (Stichting Film en Wetenschap,1978); and Ondertrouw en Huwelijk [Engagement and Marriage] (Historische Vereniging Staphorst, 1983). She was apparently also involved in producing De Zelfkazer [The Home Cheese-maker], 1973.