It was with enormous sadness that I learned last night that Monique Nuijten, a friend and colleague whom I have admired since the start of her career, had reached the end of her courageous battle with a brain tumour. Her illness had cut short a career that was still going from strength to strength, and her passing is a real loss for colleagues who worked with her in the Netherlands, Brazil and Mexico, and for anthropology in general. Our only comfort is that she died surrounded by the love of a truly caring partner in life and academic interests, Finn Stepputat, and her two daughters and young grandchildren.
I originally got to know Monique at the Colegio de Michoacán in Zamora, Mexico, when she was carrying out the extensive fieldwork that provided the basis for the doctoral thesis that she wrote under Norman Long’s supervision, In the Name of the Land: Organization, Transnationalism and the Culture of the State in a Mexican Ejido. I was delighted to be invited to participate in the examination at Wageningen of what was one of the most insightful theses that I have ever read in both ethnographic and theoretical terms. Monique’s greatest strength was her ability to use her ethnography to develop new concepts and advance theory. Although the thesis covered other issues that are central to the lives of peasant families in Western Mexico, including international migration, its most innovative chapters provided the basis for a widely cited book that was a major contribution not only to the political anthropology of rural Mexico but also to wider efforts to develop new critical anthropological approaches to understanding state power.
Like many of the best anthropological analyses, Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organisation in Mexico (Pluto, 2003) starts by observing an apparent paradox. Why did peasants in the land reform sector who were also in conflict with private landowners over disputed “lost lands” continue to pursue their claims through engagement with the state’s labyrinthine bureaucratic processes, despite their first hand experience of corruption and a high degree of experience-bred cynicism about bureaucrats and politicians? Monique’s ethnographic study revealed that cynicism did not prevent the effective implantation of “the culture of the state”. Her resolution of the paradox was based on exploring that process “from below” in terms of the way “the state” was imagined by her research subjects and how engagement with state actors and practices related to the materiality of their everyday social life. In seeking the aid of intermediaries (priests, lawyers, activist politicians) who might “connect” them to a “centre” of power that they had to construct in their imaginations, Monique showed how the peasants that she studied were in practice collaborating with official propagandists, the school system and the media in constructing what she termed a “machine” through which hope could be repeatedly regenerated despite repeated setbacks. The role of the intermediaries was not really that of forging effective connections to the imagined centre, but that of making it more likely that peasants would invest in the idea of using the law and bureaucracy as a means of solving their problems. Power, Community and the State fused several theoretical paradigms to build a powerful and original analysis of a field of practices through which “the state” became “real” and meaningful for people.
Developing another of the significant issues raised by her earlier research, in 2007 Monique co-edited a collection of essays with Gerhard Anders, Corruption and the Secret of Law. Drawing on authors working in and on Europe, the USA and the Asia-Pacific region, that book offered a powerful critical perspective on both conventional social science and international policy approaches to corruption by looking at the intrinsic connections between corruption and the law rather than conceptualising them as dichotomous opposites. The alternative anthropological perspective that the book offered not only promoted more nuanced understandings of the meanings and practices of corruption, but started from the premise that the study of corruption “cannot be an end in itself but should rather be a field of enquiry to understand power relations in society at large”, and in structural terms. That was a goal of every project that Monique embarked upon.
Because of our shared interests in Mexico, I kept in regular contact with Monique through the 1990s into the new millennium, and our paths converged again after we both, coincidentally, began new field research on the urban peripheries of cities in Northeast Brazil, Monique in Recife, and I in Salvador. My friendship, academic collaboration and exchanging of ideas with Monique was thereafter shared by my wife, Maria Gabriela Hita, a sociology professor at the Federal University of Bahia who also has a preference for ethnographic methods in research. We both have fond memories of the visit that Monique and Finn paid to us in Salvador ten years ago and Monique’s subsequent invaluable inputs into some of our own publication projects. Monique’s work in Recife continued her use of ethnography to document popular perspectives from below to shed light on relations between poorer citizens living in irregular settlements and the different instances of state power, local, regional and federal, that intervened in their lives. She joined forces with Cambridge’s Sian Lazar to co-edit a special issue of Critique of Anthropology on “Citizenship, the Self and Political Agency” in 2013 (DOI: 10.1177/0308275X12466684) that put together studies from different Latin American countries and India and considered a variety of different forms of collective political action. Monique’s own contribution to this collection contrasted local languages of political belonging and the official language of citizenship of the Brazilian state. It was a real privilege as co-managing editor of CoA to be able to publish this collection, just as it was for my wife and myself to be able to publish a Portuguese translation of some of her work on favela urbanisation projects in Recife in a special issue that we put together for the UFBA journal Caderno CRH on the contentious spaces of neoliberal urbanism. The work of Monique and her colleagues (http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0103-49792018000100004) showed how residents stubbornly reappropriated the urban space and new housing complexes assigned to them by these projects, resisting the different forms of imposition produced by the intersection of neoliberal models of “self-responsible” citizenship, modernist visions of “civilised patterns” in the use of the urbanised environment, and the participatory politics of the Workers Party, whose failures in this context offered valuable lessons that remain relevant to the future of the Left in Brazil today.
Monique was deeply supportive of her students and they held her in deep affection. She was equally admired and respected by her colleagues. Her capacity to produce fresh and exciting concepts, exemplified by the “hope-generating machine”, inspired students and colleagues alike. So did her grounding of theoretical innovation in the most perceptive kind of ethnographic observation. She was a wonderfully warm and collegial person who will be missed by all of us who had the privilege of knowing her. Wageningen has recently published a collection of articles and memoirs that celebrate Monique’s life and work, intellectual achievements, engagement with social movements and political issues, and caring and compassionate nature. It includes interviews with Monique herself and is a wonderful and worthy tribute to a wonderful person. Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten is available as an open access PDF at https://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/epdf/10.3920/978-90-8686-909-1.
John Gledhill, anthropologist 