Jan Blommaert (1961–2021)

Abstract

Jan Blommaert’s passing was a niched translocal social media phenomenon. Young scholars and established academics around the world mourned and praised his academic impact. Many of them also wrote testimonies about his personality and the impact he had on their lives and academic careers (see Diggit Magazine for a collection). Reading those messages, one could not help but wonder how he could have met, inspired and collaborated with all those people in all those places in the same timeframe. When he in March 2020 broke the news that he was ill, he was immediately overwhelmed by the many messages he received on his Facebook, Academia page, Twitter, and email. In Belgium, the country where he was born, lived and was deeply committed in society, hundreds of exstudents, civil society workers, activists, journalists, politicians, and unionists would thank him for his many contributions to society in Facebook posts on his wall. He was not only personally overwhelmed by it all or thankful, he saw it as proof that ‘his publication strategy worked’. A strategy he coined ‘knowledge activism’ and focused on open publishing and giving back knowledge to other academics and society in general. The academic and academic knowledge was something that he considered as intrinsically connected to society. Blommaert was, just like most of his maîtres à penser – Dell Hymes, Johannes Fabian, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman to name just a few – an academic driven not only by an academic but also by a social and political mission. His work was ‘ethnographic throughout, but ethnography in a particular sense: not that “ethnography” found in most textbook descriptions of it (a “method”, in other words), but a general programmatic perspective on social reality and how real subjects, in real conditions of everyday life, possessed by real interests, make sense of it’ (Blommaert, 2018a: ix). Just like Dell Hymes, he subscribed to a humanist politics that grounded his ethnographic approach. Ethnography was not just a scientific occupation but also a politicaldemocratic project in the Enlightenment and Marxist tradition.