Antonius Robben

Antonius "Tony" Cornelis Gerardus Maria Robben (born December 17, 1953) is a Dutch cultural anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands.

He conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 1977 and 1978 among raft (jangada) fishermen in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, under the supervision of Jeremy Boissevain and Bob Scholte.

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 on Brazilian boat and canoe fishermen demonstrated how their conflicting interpretations about what constituted the economy was intertwined with the social consequences of their different economic practices.

The dynamics of trust and betrayal did not end in 1983 when the regime fell from power, but continued in ongoing contestations and mutual mistrust among the state, and military and human rights groups during democratic times.

[9] This approach was elaborated in the monograph Argentina Betrayed by explaining how competing social groups and state institutions cope with massive deaths and disappearances through the oscillating processes of mourning and recovery.

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 searching relatives and a traumatized Argentine society.

Sons of the Sea Goddess demonstrated how house design organizes domestic life through a process of structuration among cultural practices, spatial classifications, and social hierarchies.

He originated the concept of '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.