John Borneman
Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1989
interests
authority and identification, political and legal anthropology, anthropology of memory, narrative theory and ethnographic method, urban studies, kinship, sexuality, Europe and Middle East
short bio
John Borneman has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Central Europe, and is currently engaged in research in Lebanon and Syria. He has completed projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, forms of justice and accountability, and on regime change. Currently he is working on an anthropology of secularism. From 1991 to 2001 he taught at Cornell University, and has been guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Stockholm University (Sweden); Bergen University (Norway); guest professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France); Fulbright Professor at Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin (Germany) and the University of Aleppo (Syria). He has written widely on kinship, sexuality, nationality, and political form, with an ethnographic focus on Germany--and currently Lebanon. His most recent publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist States (1997); Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture (1998); Death of the Father: Toward an Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2003), and The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction (2004). Professor Borneman teaches courses on culture and international order, the anthropology of memory, and money, sex, and cultural diversity.
| Books | |
| 2009 (forthcoming) Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and The Making of Truth (co-editor Abdellah Hammoudi) (Berkeley: University of California Press) |
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| 2007 Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (Princeton: Princeton University Press) |
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| 2004 Death of the Father: An Anthropology of The End in Political Authority, ed. (New York: Berghahn Press) |
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| 1992 Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) |
| Articles |
| 2005 “Public Apologies as Performative Redress,” Johns Hopkins SAIS Review of International Affairs 25 (2): 53-66, special issue “Pride and Guilt in International Relations” |
| 2005 “The Weather Where We Are (Sri Lanka),” Granta 91 (Fall): 227-233. |
| 2003 “Is The United States Europe’s Other? American Ethnologist 30 (4): 487-507, with commentaries by Ostendorf, Rabinow, Schiller, Bowman, Ickstadt, and my rejoinder “Someone won the war!” |
| 2001 "Caring and To Be Cared For: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality," 29-46, in The Ethics of Kinship, ed. James Faubion. (New Jersey: Rowland and Littlefield) |
| 2000 “Politics without a Head: Is the Love Parade a New Form of Political Identification?” (co-author Stefan Senders), Cultural Anthropology 15 (2):294-317* |
| 1997 "Europeanization," Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 487-514 (co-author Nick Fowler) |
| 1992 “State, Territory, and Identity Formation in the Postwar Berlins,” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 44-61 |
| 1988 "Race, Ethnicity, Species, Breed: Totemism and Horse Breed Classification in America," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1): 25-51 |