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.

John Borneman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is author of After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin; Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation; Unsettling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe; and coauthor, with Jeffrey M. Peck, of Sojourners: The Return of German-Jews and the Question of Identity.