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Abstract
While anthropologists have been cautious to avoid essentialism, the notion "informant" in anthropology's promotion of scholar-informant solidarity has been surprisingly undifferentiated. Based on my experience of interlocutors' heterogeneity during my fieldwork on Assam tea plantations, I illustrate the ambiguity, porosity and mutability of the category of the "informant." I argue that the general imperative to support informants occludes that there are multiple interlocutors with different, at times conflicting, claims. Therefore, a (conscious or unconscious) decision about whom among the multiple interlocutors to support in the field of study seems inevitable. Inspired by the epistemological concept of recursivity, drawn from the recent framework of a recursive anthropology, I suggest ethical recursivity as one possible answer to the question on what ethical grounds anthropologists could base their decision about whom among the multiple (marginalized) interlocutors they show solidarity to, in order to reconcile ethical premises and actions within a publicly engaged anthropology.

Konstitutionelle Ansprüche und reale Umsetzung der Konvention über die Rechte von Menschen mit Behinderungen klaffen in Indien weit auseinander. Hiervon sind Menschen mit Lernschwierigkeiten besonders betroffen. Welche Hürden stehen der praktischen Umsetzung der Rechte auf lokaler Ebene im Weg? Die Ethnologin Anna-Lena Wolf forschte im Frühjahr 2011 zur Situation von Menschen mit Lernschwierigkeiten im nordindischen Varanasi. Sie fand, dass die fortwährende Stigmatisierung von Menschen mit Lernschwierigkeiten die Verwirklichung ihrer Menschenrechte verhindert. Gründe dafür sieht sie darin, dass abwertende Einstellungen gegenüber Menschen mit Lernschwierigkeiten häufig als berechtigt und normal empfunden werden.

In May 2017, Veena Das joined the second edition of «Anthro-pology Talks» at the University of Bern. Every two years, the Institute of Social Anthropology invites leading social and cultural anthropologists to discuss their recent work. After a series of lectures and workshops, the event concludes with an interview about the visiting scholar's work and their thoughts on the future of our discipline.