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In response to papers by Langlitz on the position of the devil’s advocate and Van Dinther on morality and advocacy, I try to parse ethics, morality, and moralizing in light of my two recent studies: of the rehabilitation of child sex molesters, and of the incorporation of Syrian refugees in Germany. I argue against any automatic politicizing or moralizing of our research objects, though this is not a categorical opposition. There are times when the anthropologist is thrust into a political advocacy role, and where avoidance in assuming this role would be unethical. That has indeed been the case for my work with and on refugees. However, ethical research with child sex molesters was possible only by depoliticizing and de-moralizing their location in contemporary culture. To study a subject widely assumed incorrigible and defined as evil, ethnographic research was possible only through empathetic understanding and the ability to situate the subject in a developmental frame to understand how he or she has arrived at the act of child molestation and what the possibilities for change of the self are.

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 Theory7 (3): 105–135.

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 internaland externalstate, subjective(involving the “I”) and objective(involving attunement [einstimmen] to others), enveloping both contentand 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 Stimmunglinked 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?

In the media and in corporate boardrooms, people are debating what action should be taken regarding underwater stock options. Everyone feels the imperative to act, but for many companies the best course of action may be to stick with their existing stock option programs and step back to reevaluate their entire long term incentive plan. The authors challenge the current mindset of 'fixing' underwater options and offer solutions to get the company's longterm incentives back to being just that--a program to retain and reward top talent for superior performance.

In jeder Kultur werden Intimbeziehungen zwischen Erwachsenen und Kindern reguliert, meist bilden sie ein Tabu. Im Westen sind diese Tabus im letzten halben Jahrhundert Gegenstand ausdrücklicher Gesetzgebung geworden. Der strafrechtliche Schwerpunkt zielt auf zwei männliche Figuren, die Kinder missbrauchen: den Inzest-Täter und den Pädophilen. Im Rechtsjargon erscheint der Täter als nicht korrigierbarer Rezidivist, im psychiatrischen Jargon als unter einer ,Paraphilie’ leidend und daher als psychisch krank zu behandeln. In weiten Teilen der westlichen Welt hat sich eine Verschiebung ergeben: von Strafe und Heilung zur Rehabilitation‘ durch Therapie. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit der Therapiepraxis in Deutschland für des Kindesmissbrauchs schuldige Täter. Rehabilitation erscheint ah ritueller Prozess mit Anzeige und Arrest, Therapie, Bestrafung und Reintegration in die Gesellschaft. Durch eine Darlegung dieses modernen säkularen Rehabilitationsrituals wird die komplexe Beziehung verdeutlicht, die zwischen einem Rechtssystem besteht, das eine Änderung des Selbst verlang, eine Transformation der inneren Person, und einer Öffentlichkeit, die extrem skeptisch ist gegenüber dem Erfolg des Rehabilitationsrituals.

AbstractFor anthropologists who engage in encounter-based fieldwork, contact zones have a peculiar phenomenal quality that is often neglected by scholars from other disciplines who have taken up the fieldwork paradigm initially developed by ethnographers. In this paper, I want to elaborate how, in my most recent fieldwork in Syria, I experienced such zones, and I want to reflect on this experience and its relation to concepts and writing as it becomes knowledge. I define fieldwork as “the registering of sensory impressions in a (temporal) process of mutual subject-discovery and critique,” and anthropology as a “mode of engagement in generating knowledge and social and political action that enables ongoing relationships” (Borneman/Hammoudi 2009: 19). This picture of fieldwork and ethnography, in its stress on the author being in “a zone of contact with the world he is depicting” (Bakhtin 1981: 30), is at odds with understandings that focus on anthropology as a “cultural critique” of the West (Marcus/Fischer 1986), “creative and usable mappings” (Gupta/Ferguson 1997: 56), “comparison of embedded concepts” between societies (Asad 2003: 17), or interpretation of another culture (Geertz 1973).

The article discusses the use of statistics to help improve the library or promote its effectiveness. Statistics can be used to make comparison between libraries or to evaluate the performance within a library. Distributions of related data points may be described by calculating the average, standard deviation and the bell curve in a normal distribution. Investigators can effectively compare libraries by using the median and interquartile range.

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.