John Borneman - Böcker

There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered to be outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessments, in much of the West an increasing focus on rehabilitation through therapy provides hope that psychological transformation is possible. Examining the experiences of child sex offenders undergoing therapy in Germany - where such treatments are both a legal right and duty - John Borneman, in Cruel Attachments, offers a fine - grained account of rehabilitation for this reviled criminal type. Carefully exploring different cases of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders, Borneman details a secular ritual process aimed not only at preventing future acts of molestation but also at fundamentally transforming the offender, who is ultimately charged with creating an almost entirely new self.Acknowledging the powerful repulsion felt by a public that is often extremely skeptical about the success of rehabilitation, he challenges readers to confront the contemporary contexts and conundrums that lie at the heart of regulating intimacy between children and adults.

Loss is a fundamental human condition that often leads both individuals and groups to seek redress in the form of violence. But are there possible modes of redress to reckon with loss that might lead to a departure from the violence of collective and individual revenge? This book focuses on the redress of political crime in Germany and Lebanon, extending its analysis to questions of accountability and democratization in the United States and elsewhere. To understand the proposed modes of redress, John Borneman links the way the actors define their injuries to the cultural forms of redress these injuries assume and to the social contexts in which they are open to refiguring. Borneman theorizes modes of accountability, the meaning of "regime change" and the American occupation of Iraq, and the mechanisms of democratic authority in Europe and North America.

Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. In "Being There", John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, they have gathered essays by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.

Belonging in the two Berlins is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Taking the practices of everyday life in the divided Berlin as his point of departure, Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror-imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis, he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlins residents with the official version of the lifecourse prescribed by the two German states. He examines the relation of the dual political structure to everyday life, the way in which the two states legally regulated the lifecourse in order to define the particular categories of self which signify Germanness, and how citizens experientially appropriated the frameworks provided by these states. Living in the two Berlins constantly compelled residents to define themselves in opposition to their other half. Borneman argues that this resulted in a de facto divided Germany with two distinct nations and peoples. The formation of German subjectivity since World War II is unique in that the distinctive features for belonging - for being at home - to one side exclude the other. Indeed, these divisions inscribed by the Cold War account for many of the problems in forging a new cultural unity.

Uses ethnographic tools to analyze political disorder and its representation at the end of the Cold War.In this series of essays, the author shifts the focus of anthropology from a study of discrete cultures to one of alternative and sub-versions of large-scale global orders. Borneman employs new descriptive tools to analyze political disorder and its representation, issues which have become central with the end of the Cold War. Despite living in an era when group legitimacy depends on the ability to approximate national form, we have instead been witnessing the dissolution of coherent identities and nations. Ethnographically, Borneman focuses on these transformations in Germany during the disintegration and collapse of the socialist project, concentrating on relations between the first and the second Worlds.

Uses ethnographic tools to analyze political disorder and its representation at the end of the Cold War.In this series of essays, the author shifts the focus of anthropology from a study of discrete cultures to one of alternative and sub-versions of large-scale global orders. Borneman employs new descriptive tools to analyze political disorder and its representation, issues which have become central with the end of the Cold War. Despite living in an era when group legitimacy depends on the ability to approximate national form, we have instead been witnessing the dissolution of coherent identities and nations. Ethnographically, Borneman focuses on these transformations in Germany during the disintegration and collapse of the socialist project, concentrating on relations between the first and the second Worlds.

"A firsthand confrontation with the inner fears and the outer realities of [German Jews] as they themselves reflect post-Shoah history and experience. This is not merely lived 'history,' it is 'history' with a living face."—Sander L. Gilman This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance, who proclaims, "I am a German Jew. I want to live here." Others describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: "I don't have anything in common with the whole German people." Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: "If someone asks me, 'Who are you?' then I can only say, 'I am a fish out of water.'" Uncertain, angry, resolute, anguished—the diverse testimonies of these people provide startling evidence that "the history of German Jews is not over."

The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory? This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures. John Borneman, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, specializes in political and legal anthropology.He has written widely on national identification and symbolic form in Germany and on the relation of culture to international order. His most recent work is on accountability and the use of retributive justice in preventing cycles of violence.

The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory?This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures.

A personal odyssey and a portrait of a distinguished anthropologist in practice—a life shaped by accident, transformation, and the enduring power of connection.How does the youngest of eight children, raised on a family farm in northern Wisconsin by parents with only half a grammar school education, become an Ivy League professor and a witness to some of the most transformative events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? In this remarkable memoir, John Borneman tells the story of his life as an “accidental anthropologist” with searing honesty, humor, and emotional depth.Tracing a path from his upbringing as a queer farm boy to a career in anthropology, Borneman’s memoir reflects on social mobility, the decline of the American family farm, and shifting understandings of queerness and masculinity. Meanwhile, as a fourth-generation German American, his journey carried him to divided Berlin, where he captures the moods of East and West, and back again during the arrival of Syrian refugees—culminating in a long-standing friendship and a poignant reunion with a refugee he had first met years earlier.Through these encounters, Borneman shows how empathy and attention can reveal the hidden textures of history, identity, and belonging. Rich in insight and humanity, this is a story of personal discovery, intercultural encounter, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world—one that speaks to scholars and general readers alike.

Migration across Europe's external and internal borders has introduced unprecedented sociocultural diversity, and with it, new questions about belonging, identity, and the incorporation of others into extant and emergent groups and communities.