John Borneman

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.