Social anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain coined the term ‘friends of friends’ in 1974, it is relevant thirty years later.
Jeremy Boissevain steps up to the podium where a crowd of some 50 early risers, who have come to a morning breakfast seminar to hear what the Dutch anthropologist has to say about Malta’s coming of age since he first pioneered the anthropological study of the small island back in the fifties. Upon his opening lines, it is evident that little has changed since he first came to the island to discover its highly charged political climate and network of patron-client relations, back in 1956.