Why Belgium?

Extract

‘Why belgium?’ is the question that American and Belgian colleagues and friends have asked me recurrently since I began doing research in that society in 1959. Ever since then, Belgium has been one of the consistent sites of my sociological inquiry, reflection and analysis. (Zäire, Belgium's former colony in Central Africa, became another such site, beginning in 1962). With a mixture of real interest, conventional politeness, perplexity and, on the part of Belgians, a tinge of traditional irony, those who have followed my fieldwork have often wondered out loud what I was discovering and learning in that small society that could possibly preoccupy me for so many years. Through some of my publications on the sociology of Belgian medical science and research or, more accurately, on ‘Belgium through the windows of its medical laboratories’, I have implicitly responded to this question (1). And I have periodically speculated on it more privately in my fieldnotes, and in letters to friends. But I have never dealt with it in an explicit, public way. This article constitutes my first formal attempt to do so.