Sjoerd Hofstra - Photographs.

Sjoerd Hofstra (1898–1983) was a Dutch sociologist, anthropologist and field photographer born in Idsegahuizum, Friesland, on 21 January 1898. After initially working in journalism, he studied psychology and sociology in Paris and subsequently social geography at the University of Amsterdam, completing his doctorate in 1933 under Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz. He also studied in Hamburg, Berlin and London, where he became associated with Bronisław Malinowski and the developing methods of social anthropology based upon extended fieldwork. As a Rockefeller research fellow of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Hofstra travelled to the British colony of Sierra Leone in January 1934 to undertake research among the Mende. He based himself principally in Panguma in what is now Kenema District and remained in Sierra Leone until March 1935. A second period of fieldwork followed between May and September 1936. During these visits Hofstra lived for approximately twenty one months among Mende communities, conducting interviews and recording information about social organisation, customary law, agriculture, hunting, healing, burial practices, language and religious and ceremonial life. His research was curtailed on both visits by blackwater fever, a severe complication of malaria, and the planned comprehensive study of the Mende was never completed.

Photography formed an important part of Hofstra's fieldwork. He made hundreds of photographs and glass plate images in and around Panguma between 1934 and 1936, recording houses and village architecture, families, children, agricultural labour, rice cultivation, palm oil production, markets, crafts, clothing, ceremonies, funerals and community gatherings. His photographs also document masks and performances associated with Mende social and ceremonial organisations, including the Sande society. Unlike photographs made during a brief colonial expedition, many resulted from Hofstra's extended residence in the same community and can be considered alongside his field notes, interviews and detailed letters, allowing individual photographs to be connected with specific people, locations and practices. At the same time, the collection remains a product of European anthropology conducted within colonial Sierra Leone and needs to be understood within the research methods and unequal colonial structures of the 1930s. Approximately four hundred surviving photographs have been digitised by the African Studies Centre Leiden, while the wider Hofstra archive contains field notes, demographic material, interviews and linguistic research. Together these materials provide an unusually detailed photographic and written record of Mende life immediately before the Second World War.

After returning to the Netherlands, Hofstra developed a substantial academic career rather than continuing as a professional photographer. He became director of Rotterdam's Museum of Geography and Ethnography and in 1947 was appointed Professor of African Anthropology at Leiden University. From 1949 he also held a chair in sociology at the University of Amsterdam and later became one of the founding figures of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, established in 1952. Although he published several academic articles based on his Mende research, including Personality and Differentiation in the Political Life of the Mendi in 1937, he never produced the major book originally planned from his Sierra Leone fieldwork. Hofstra died in Thun, Switzerland, on 14 April 1983. His surviving photographs and research papers are preserved by the African Studies Centre Leiden, and in 2014 his daughter, historian Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, edited his extensive correspondence from Sierra Leone as Among the Mende in Sierra Leone: The Letters from Sjoerd Hofstra (1934–36). The combination of these letters, field notes and photographs makes it possible to examine not only what Hofstra photographed, but also the circumstances in which many of the images were produced and the anthropological research of which they originally formed a part.

Sjoerd Hofstra

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Photographs by Sjoerd Hofstra (1898–1983).
Sjoerd Hofstra Collection, Sierra Leone, 1934–1936.
Source: African Studies Centre Leiden, Leiden University.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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