Antonius Robben

Robben's next monograph, Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018), analyzed how primary bonds of trust motivated the relentless search for the disappeared by their relatives and how the military dictatorship was betraying the Argentine people through state repression. 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.

The study of the complex relations among violence, trauma, and memory constitutes Robben's second area of research. The book Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005) demonstrated that the spiral of violence—generally understood as a self-perpetuating process—can become mediated by sociocultural trauma to result in a violence-trauma-violence process. Different manifestations of violence and trauma percolated through Argentine society and was fueled by the repeated mutual sociocultural traumatization of political enemies. This historical process culminated in the state terrorism of the country's last dictatorship (1976–83) against an armed insurgency and a radicalized political left. Protests against the massive enforced disappearances, together with labor unrest and the defeat in the Falkland/Malvinas War (1982), brought down the military regime.

Robben's study of cultural economics examines the relation of practice and discourse in the economy. 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. Power differences and frequent disagreements about economic matters shaped their actions, decisions, and long-term strategies. This focus on discursive conflict and practice also guided the field research in Argentina on political violence and sociocultural trauma.

Robben received an M.A. in Sociology in 1976 and graduated cum laude with an M.Phil. in Anthropology in 1979 from the University of Amsterdam. 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. He received a Ph.D. in 1986 for his fieldwork from 1982 to 1983 on fishermen in Bahia, Brazil at the University of California, Berkeley. He was supervised by Burton Benedict and theoretically influenced by Gerald Berreman, Paul Rabinow, and Hubert Dreyfus. Robben later became a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. He was also an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1986 to 1989. Later, he took two years to do fieldwork from 1989 to 1991 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to study the sociocultural trauma of enforced disappearances by the 1976-1983 military regime. Robben returned to the Netherlands in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University in 1993. He received research grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lowie Foundation, National Science Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research. He spent 2004 at Harvard University with a research fellowship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. In 2006, the American Anthropological Association awarded Robben the Robert B. Textor Prize for “his contributions to anticipatory anthropology, structural change and violence, and a widening understanding of the traumatic impact of growing violence globally.” Deeply affected by the Iraq War, he started the Iraq Research Project (2006–10) to add an anthropological understanding to a public debate dominated by historians, political scientists, and foreign affairs specialists. Currently, Robben is studying the wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction of the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

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