No abstract

How does one deal with diversity in an organization known to be hostile to it? Drawing on a Weberian perspective I present in this article one case occurring in actual historical practice: that of Inspector Bobkowski, a teacher, chief of the political education unit at the Berlin police academy and training center, and a hobby historian. With an eye to the case at hand as well as other efforts to deal with difference under the Weimar Republic encountered during my fieldwork, I attempt to uncover the motives underlying the action of officers who contributed to the promotion of diversity within the police force in Germany. Inquiring into their motives enables me to construct an ideal type of a "carrier of diversity," which, I argue, shares affinities with a liberal agenda of civic equality.

Cultural diversity has been one the most pressing challenges to present-day Germany. Issues of diversity and, its corollary from the perspectiveof the recipient society, the practice of toleration—as opposedto the personal attitude of tolerance—are being paradigmaticallydebated around the fate of Muslims. Although not new, Muslimspresence and public claims, such as the claim for legal recognition ofIslam and religious instruction in public schools, have undoubtedlyraised the issue of diversity anew. Some recent events, such as the“Ludin case,” a German teacher of Afghan descent who fought thefederal state of Baden-Wurttemberg to wear a hijab in class, is a tellingexample (see Beverly Weber’s article examining the case in this issueof German Politics and Society). Similarly to the debate raging overheadscarves in France, this case seems to point to the “Muslim” as animportant figure of the stranger, understood as symbol of groupmediation, of the group’s inner and outer boundaries.1 But, unlike theheadscarf affair in France, where pupils are at the center stage of thedebate, the case of teachers in Germany bears witness to a differenttype of stranger as outlined by Simmel in terms of spatial and symbolicposition within the group. Indeed, he/she is a stranger “fromwithin.”2 As such, Muslim growing and enduring presence in Germanyshowcases practical problems encountered with the “managementof diversity” within some state institutions. Looking at the assessment of these dilemmas not only points to conflicting normativemodels of social organization, but also puts in the hot seat thosewho, to paraphrase Dubet, carry out le travail sur autrui (“work on theother”), professionals activities, which aim at explicitly transformingthe “stranger.”

Katherine Verdery’s latest book, an ethnography of the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police and the permission to copy and study a Securitate file, that of Iuliana, represents, for the author, the opportunity to write an unusual book review. Superposing the book and the file allows her to reflect on the work of secret police officers and that of ethnographers as well as questioning the practice of the sociological observer. As it turns out, the file adds a new dimension and an interpretation key to the book: beyond the importance of networks or social relationships as material secret police officers and ethnographers share, it discloses gossip as an empirical source and a recruitment technique. Centering on gossip helps the author in reformulating one of the book’s central arguments and delineating the contours of the “bourgeois,” a figure at the core of a new research project. The extreme character of the two cases at hand—material constituted toward a political end—sheds light on the relations ethnographers entertain to their informants as well as to dilemmas of research, which might otherwise remain unseen

While I was doing fieldwork in a Montreal women’s jail an unexpected detail emerged that intrigued me as a sociologist: the striking presence of the rosary. This detail is at the core of the present article. Conspicuous and discreet, exotic and trivial, the white plastic rosary given by volunteers to incarcerated women was everywhere. Without assuming an inherently religious character, and resisting the temptation to make of it something profound or curious, I ask in this article two simple questions: What is the rosary as an artefact? And how much about chaplaincy at the women’s jail and Catholicism in contemporary Quebec is condensed in this detail? The answers to these questions instruct us on the context of the jail, the study of religion today, and the importance of artefacts.