John Borneman

Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation

R econcile: to render no longer opposed. What conditions might make possible reconciliation after violent conflict? This essay addresses reconciliation in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansings and ethnicizations of the twentieth century. It neither elaborates a specific case nor makes detailed historical-cultural comparisons. Its potential contribution is theoretical and temporal: identifying contemporary psychosocial logics and processes integral to reconciliation after violent conflicts. In particular, it focuses on the role of the “third party” and argues for cultivating “practices of listening” after a violent conflict.1 The arguments presented can apply to reconciliation after conflicts other than those specifically referred to, but I restrict myself largely to a temporal diagnostic of the extreme case of what is today called ethnic cleansing: the attempt, through

After the wall : East meets West in the new Berlin

The many and the one - Berlin the Autumn Revolution of 1989 one night in Jericho - The Wall comes down becoming socialist walled in without a home - exile of the spirit in the GDR state fantasy and desire - images of the West beyond the Wall fear, guilt and revenge becoming capitalist transitions - crossing the Wall the election and the end of the revolution.

Public Apologies as Performative Redress

The newfound inclination of states to issue apologies to both individuals and other states attests to the growing power of victim groups, evinces a novel willingness of states or state representatives to admit wrong, and reveals an emergent global public that is eager to hear such admissions. Such symbolic actions can play an important role in diffusing conflict and preparing the groundwork for a new political order.

Why Reconciliation? A Response to Critics

In my essay “Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing” (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 281–304), I seek to identify processes that might enable departures from violent conflicts. How is it possible to reconcile—to render no longer opposed— in the aftermath of extreme violence, such as an ethnic cleansing? I elaborate two conditions, both centering around redress of loss, that must be confronted to break most cycles of contemporary ethnic and racial violence: (1) reproduction and relations of affinity and (2) retribution. All four commentators address the latter issue while avoiding the first. Why this silence about global ideologies of reproduction? This omission is all the more striking given how pervasive such tactics are in the very examples cited by the respondents themselves. In nearly all of the empirical cases mentioned—in particular, South Africa, Israel, Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland—violence operates through the use of marital and reproductive strategies that have long been subjects of anthropological investigation. Studies critical of these strategies tend to talk technically of “demographic imbalances” or “population control,” without naming or addressing the ideologies of reproduction and marital form that are responses to the human face of loss. Marriage and reproduction are indeed human projects, but, as forms of human affiliation, neither can be deemed more necessary or natural than male domination, the oppression of women, or child exploitation—all, at one time or another, assumed to be universal. The relation of reproduction to both the specific character of human violence and contemporary majoritarian politics deserves more attention. Whereas other

Race, Ethnicity, Species, Breed: Totemism and Horse-Breed Classification in America

Totem: the iconic representation of a specific ordering of plant and animal species. Clan: the representation of a group identity. Totemism: the relationship between totem and clan. From Emile Durkheim and his nineteenthcentury antecedents to Claude Levi-Strauss, the discussion of totemism has addressed the way in which people classify themselves with reference to the animal and plant world. This discussion began with the observation among different exotic peoples of the widespread practice of arranging certain animal and plant species into a pattern that, while differing from culture to culture in content, seemed to indicate a consistent formal relationship between totem and clan. The iconic representation of so-called nature—the totem—seemed invariably the model for the representation of intra- or intergroup identity—for the clan.

Containment in interlocution-based fieldwork encounters: Thought, theory, and transformative thinking

This article theorizes a single dimension of interlocution-based fieldwork: that of serving as a ‘container’ for the emotions of our interlocutors. I focus on the dynamic of ‘containment’ of messages in fieldwork interactions that arrest the ethnographer in the task of thinking. This arrest draws attention to the need to connect emotion to thought in order to learn from experience. That connection contributes essentially to the goal of ‘transformative thinking’: to awaken new qualities of relatedness and aliveness. I argue that not all interactions produce encounters that result in experience in which we are prodded to think. Many interactions are immediately cognized and understood because they seem to leave us emotionally untouched. Scholars who avoid or dismiss such moments of arrest tend to unwittingly replace the verification of perceptions with the authorization of results as the primary legitimation of knowledge acquisition. Verification requires thinking through the lived experience of the ethnographic encounter, whereas authorization makes knowledge production contingent on the application of key thoughts, words, concepts, and positions derived from inherited sources, methods, and paradigms.

Incest, the Child, and the Despotic Father

Based on ethnographic research in Berlin, this paper examines two paradigmatic cases in which real incest is brought into the penumbra of law and subsumed into an imaginary complex superimposed on sexual abuse. It uses them to theorize at a higher level of abstraction about the deployment of myth by the unconscious, the relation between taboo and law, male and female attachments to the child, gender conflict, and changes in the position of the father in the symbolic order of the West. One case focuses on how a child victim translates what had happened into the therapeutic and legal languages of sexual abuse, the other on the father’s evolving apprehension of his deed in the course of therapy. I argue that (1) the incest taboo increasingly regulates lineal rather than lateral relations between kin; (2) the imaginary complex construes male sexuality as a security threat to children, resulting in a negative identification with and of male difference, with serious consequences for the family, the heterosexual couple, and the mother-child bond; and (3) the erosion of the incest taboo, and of the authority of the father who was its guarantor, opens up alternative modalities to regulate relations between generations and genders.

The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis

This article deals with the German concept of Stimmung, which does not allow a translation into the English notion of “affective mood,” but rather is simultaneously an internal and external state, subjective (involving the “I”) and objective (involving attunement [einstimmen] to others), enveloping both content and form. To understand the essential imbrication of individual and collective moods summoned by the term, we examine three empirical cases of Stimmungswechsel, or “mood shifts”—from indifference to ambivalence, to xenophilia and xenophobia—as they shaped the September 2016 German regional electoral campaigns. Following Sally Falk Moore, we focus on the “diagnostic events” which triggered these shifts, observed in fieldwork encounters with Germans concerning migrants and refugees who entered Germany in 2015. How did the perception and experience of “the refugee” become internal to the “mood shifts”? How is Stimmung linked to relations to refugees as psychic attachments that either echo an originary collective experience of losing home or promise submission to an experience of self-transformation?

State: Anthropological Aspects

Modern statehood is a mode of political organization of ‘society’ in which the state is the primary agent charged with building its representation. The nation has become the preferred form for this representation, law, the principal means used to anticipate the conduct of its subjects (citizens) and develop normative frameworks (policies) to direct change, and democracy, the dominant form of self-representation. The scope of the state now goes beyond traditional activities such as war and the production of laws that regulate the exercise of power over territoriality and commerce to extend to the generation of forms of subjectivity in people.

Do Germans smell like a rose? Phagia, philia, phobia

Response to comments on Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. “The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135.