Chris Hann

Last updated


Chris Hann (born 4 August 1953) is a British social anthropologist who has done field research in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe (especially in Hungary and Poland) and the Turkic-speaking world (Black Sea coast and Xinjiang, N-W China). His main theoretical interests lie in economic anthropology, religion (especially Eastern Christianity), and long-term history (the Eurasian landmass). After holding university posts in Cambridge and Canterbury, UK, Hann has worked since 1999 in Germany as one of the founding Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. Hann has made significant contributions to the subfield of economic anthropology. [1]

Contents

Early life

Hann was born in Cardiff, the first child of parents (of mixed Irish, English and Welsh ancestry) themselves born and brought up in the Welsh capital. In the same year the family moved to the new town of Cwmbrân, in Monmouthshire. Hann was brought up in a monolingual English-speaking environment immediately south of the “Border Country” of Raymond Williams. [2] [3]

Career and field research

Hann won a Welsh Foundation Scholarship to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Jesus College, Oxford University, graduating with a first class degree in 1974. He specialised in Eastern Europe, which he first visited with an Inter-rail ticket in 1972. After Oxford, Hann was a graduate student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1974-5 he took the Certificate course in social anthropology, choosing Melanesia as his ethnographic option. For his doctorate, Jack Goody advised him to continue with the regional specialisation he already had in Eastern Europe. He spent the years 1975-77 learning Hungarian and doing field research on the Danube-Tisza interfluve, defending his thesis in 1979. He still visits the village of Tázlár regularly, arguing that the micro-level developments he tracks there reflect the efflorescence and demise of a distinctive “market socialism”. [4] [5]

Hann opened a new field site in Southern Poland in 1978–9 with the aim of comparing “peasant” adaptations in a non-collectivised socialist society with his Hungarian observations. Fieldwork in the Carpathians coincided with food shortages, the rise of Solidarity, and national political crisis. Apart from the insights gained into the dysfunctionality of Polish socialism, working in a region inhabited by an east Slav minority allowed Hann to develop new interests in ethnicity and national identity. He followed this up in the 1990s with research into Polish-Ukrainian relations and the predicament of the Greek Catholic Church in the border city of Przemyśl. [6] [7]

Hann is married to Ildikó Bellér-Hann, who teaches the societies and cultures of Central Asia and Western China at the Institute of Regional and Cross-Cultural Studies of the University of Copenhagen. They have carried out field research together in Anatolia (east Black Sea coast) and in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, N-W China. Hann's main contribution to the Turkey project focused on smallholders who gave up subsistence farming in order to grow tea as a cash crop in the Rize region. In rural Xinjiang he investigated economic transformations, while also engaging with religion and ethnic relations. [8]

Research in all four field sites (Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Xinjiang) began while Hann was based in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology. He left Cambridge in 1992 to become Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent (Canterbury). After two years as a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, in 1999 Hann moved to Halle as a Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Main interests

Hann's theoretical interests are closely related to his ethnographic research. He was a pioneer anthropological investigator of what he calls “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism”. Since 1990 he has traced the distinctive pathways of “postsocialism” within a global political economy. Hann has been critical of terms like “market economy” and “civil society”, predicting at an early stage that the slogans and strategies on which foreign advisers and local elites agreed would not deliver the goods that the mass of citizens hoped for. [9] The main theme of his team research in the first years of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (1999-2005) was the privatization of collective property. [10] This was followed by collective research into religious transformation after socialism (2003-2010). In his personal contributions to this work Hann frequently draws on his knowledge of the Greek Catholics of Central Europe to critique a Western, essentially Protestant, bias in the Anglophone “anthropology of Christianity”. [11]

Another persistent strand in Hann's work concerns the connections between anthropology and history. He edited When History Accelerates in honour of Paul Stirling – a collection that focused on recent and contemporary history. After joining the Max Planck Society, Hann began to address longer-term patterns, acknowledging debts to Ernest Gellner, his head of department in Cambridge in the 1980s, and Jack Goody, the supervisor of his doctoral thesis. Hann has sought to locate recent socialism and postsocialism in the context of the “Eurasian miracle” that accompanied the rise of cities in the late Bronze Age. [12] Adapting the work of Goody, he argues that the last three millennia of Eurasian history may be thought of as a dialectic between market exchange (culminating in capitalism) and redistribution (culminating in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism, and expressed more attractively in democratic variants of these doctrines). [13] The key concepts here are borrowed from Karl Polanyi. [14] In a large project funded by the European Research Council he has compared civilisations across the Eurasian landmass with reference to the moral economy of small businesses. [15]

Collaboration

Hann has cooperated systematically with scholars whose regional and theoretical interests differ from his own. In economic anthropology he has maintained a friendship with Keith Hart that dates back to the 1980s, when they were colleagues in Cambridge. [16] He has also worked closely with other leading figures in the (sub)discipline, including Stephen Gudeman, with whom he led the “Economy and Ritual” postdoctoral research group in Halle in 2009–2012). [17] More recently he has co-led similar groups with Catherine Alexander [ permanent dead link ] and Jonathan Parry (on “Industry and Inequality in Eurasia”, 2012–2015) and with Don Kalb (on “Financialization”, 2015–2018).

Together with Faculty colleagues in history and archaeology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (where he is Honorary Professor), in 2012 Hann launched an International Max Planck Research School for the “Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia” (ANARCHIE) in 2012. With Hermann Goltz of the Faculty of Theology, he organized an international conference on Eastern Christians, the papers of which were published in 2010. [18] He was a part-time collaborator in Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s “Overheating” project at the University of Oslo, a multi-dimensional investigation of contemporary globalization. In 2016 Hann initiated “MAX-CAM: Centre for the Study of Ethics, Human Economy and Social Change”, a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen, Peter van der Veer), and the Division of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (James Laidlaw and Joel Robbins). The Centre became operational in January 2017.

Honours and awards

Chris Hann was elected a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2008. In 1991 he was awarded the Curl Essay Prize and in 2015 the Rivers Memorial Medal – both by the Royal Anthropological Institute (London). In 2019 he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. [19] In April 2020 Chris Hann was appointed Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. [20]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Society</span> Association of German research institutes

The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Polanyi</span> Economist, philosopher and historian (1886–1964)

Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

<i>The Great Transformation</i> (book) 1944 book by Karl Polanyi

The Great Transformation is a book by Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian political economist. First published in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, it deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as a single human invention, which he calls the "Market Society".

Basil Kovpak is a Ukrainian Traditionalist Catholic priest and the founder and current head of the Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat. Formerly a priest of the Archeparchy of Lviv of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), Kovpak was excommunicated by the UGCC in 2007.

The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is a scientific research institute founded in 1999 in Halle, Germany. It is one of the institutes of the Max Planck Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Goody</span> English social anthropologist (1919–2015)

Sir John Rankine Goody was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.

Marie-Claire, Baroness Foblets is a Belgian lawyer and anthropologist, who is currently Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests are interculturalism, migration and minorities.

David Charles Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the sociology department and currently directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He was formerly an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute. He is well-cited in the fields of economic sociology, social networks, science and technology studies, and social change and development.

Keith Hart is a British anthropologist and writer living in Paris. His main research has focused on economic anthropology, Africa and the African diaspora, and money. He has taught at universities including East Anglia, Manchester, Yale and the Chicago, as well as at Cambridge University where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World and Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes. His written work focuses on the national limits of politics in a globalised economy.

The International MA in Russian and Eurasian Studies is an advanced graduate programme at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia, for students who already hold a BA degree or its equivalent. The programme is taught in English and offers training and research opportunities as well as a first hand experience of getting a close feel for Russia and many other countries in a wider region. In 1997 this programme began as MA in Russian Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Kalb</span> Dutch anthropologist

Don Kalb is a Dutch anthropologist, full professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, and an assistant professor of social sciences and cultural anthropology at Universiteit Utrecht. For many years, Kalb was a professor of sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristen Ghodsee</span> American ethnographer and professor

Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. She was critical of the role of Western feminist nongovernmental organizations doing work among East European women in the 1990s. She has also examined the shifting gender relations of Muslim minorities after Communist rule, the intersections of Islamic beliefs and practices with the ideological remains of Marxism–Leninism, communist nostalgia, the legacies of Marxist feminism, and the intellectual history of utopianism.

In economics and economic sociology, embeddedness refers to the degree to which economic activity is constrained by non-economic institutions. The term was created by economic historian Karl Polanyi as part of his substantivist approach. Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. In market societies, in contrast, economic activities have been rationalized, and economic action is "disembedded" from society and able to follow its own distinctive logic, captured in economic modeling. Polanyi's ideas were widely adopted and discussed in anthropology in what has been called the formalist–substantivist debate. Subsequently, the term "embeddedness" was further developed by economic sociologist Mark Granovetter, who argued that even in market societies, economic activity is not as disembedded from society as economic models would suggest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karamba Diaby</span> German politician

Karamba Diaby is a Senegalese-born German chemist and politician of the Social Democratic Party who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag since the 2013 elections.

Alison Stenning is a Professor of Social & Economic Geography at the Newcastle University, formerly lecturer in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology there; as well as, at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, in the University of Birmingham (1996–2003), where she also served as an Associate Member at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies. Stenning is a social geographer with particular interests in the regional community and the economy of the Eastern Bloc countries once controlled by the Soviet Union. Stenning wrote extensively about the post-communist political economy of Poland's industrial hubs such as Nowa Huta.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jens Beckert</span> German sociologist

Jens Beckert is a German sociologist with a strong interest in economic sociology. The author of books on inherited wealth and the social foundations of economic efficiency and imagined futures in the economy, he focuses on the role of the economy in society – especially based on studies of markets – as well as organizational sociology, the sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Postsocialism is the academic study of states after the fall or decline of socialism, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. The "socialism" in postsocialism is not based on a Marxist conception of socialism but rather, especially in the Eastern European context, on the idea of "actually existing socialism". Scholars of postsocialist states maintain that, even if the political and economic systems in place did not adhere to orthodox Marxist ideas of "socialism", these systems were real and had real effects on cultures, society, and individuals' subjectivities. Scholars of postsocialism often draw from other theoretical frameworks like postcolonialism and focus especially on the evolution of labor relations, gender roles, and ethnic and religious political affiliations. The idea of postsocialism has also been criticized, however, for placing so much emphasis on the impact of socialism while the term socialism remains difficult to define, especially if extended beyond Eastern Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Wengrow</span> British archaeologist

David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He co-authored the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in 2022. Wengrow has contributed essays on topics such as social inequality and climate change to The Guardian and The New York Times. In 2021 he was ranked No. 10 in ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential people in art.

Nina Bandelj is an economic sociologist, author and academic. She is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Vice Provost for faculty development, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She is also a visiting professor at the IEDC-Bled School of Management and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

References

  1. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/intros/KaneffExplorations_intro.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  2. "Video & Audio: Chris Hann - Metadata".
  3. Williams, Raymond (2006) [1960]. Border Country. Parthian Library of Wales: Carmarthen.
  4. Hann, Chris (1980). Tázlár: A village in Hungary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Hann, Chris (2015). "Backwardness revisited: time, space and civilization in rural Eastern Europe". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 57 (4): 881–911. doi:10.1017/S0010417515000389. S2CID   147917935.
  6. Hann, Chris (1985). A Village Without Solidarity: Polish peasants in years of crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  7. Hann, Chris (1998). "Postsocialist nationalism: rediscovering the past in South East Poland". Slavic Review. 57 (4): 840–863. doi:10.2307/2501049. JSTOR   2501049. S2CID   143830747.
  8. Tea and the domestication of the Turkish State Huntingdon: 1990; Turkish region: state, market and social identities on the east Black Sea coast (with Ildikó Bellér-Hann), Oxford: 2000. “Embedded socialism? Land, labour, and money in Eastern Xinjiang” in Chris Hann and Keith Hart (eds.), Market and Society: The Great Transformation revisited Cambridge: 2009, pp. 256-71; “Smith in Beijing, Stalin in Urumchi: ethnicity, political economy and violence in Xinjiang, 1759-2009” Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60: 108-23 (2011); “The universal and the particular in rural Xinjiang: ritual commensality and the mosque community” in Magnus Marsden and Konstantinos Retsikas (eds.), Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds. Dordrecht: 2013, pp. 171-91.
  9. (Ed.) Market Economy and Civil Society in Hungary Brighton: 1990; Civil society: challenging western models (ed. With Elizabeth Dunn) London: 1996. The skeleton at the feast Canterbury. 1996.
  10. “From production to property”, Man 1993 28 (3): 299-320; Property relations: renewing the anthropological tradition (ed.) Cambridge:1998; The postsocialist agrarian question (with the Property Relations Group) Münster: 2003; (ed.) Property Relations Halle: 2005 http://www.eth.mpg.de/3026998/2000---2005---dep---hann
  11. (ed.) 2010 Religion, identities, postsocialism. The Halle Focus Group, 2003-2010: “http://www.eth.mpg.de/3341163/2003---2010---dep---hann “Creeds, cultures and the witchery of music”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2003, 9 (2): 223-39; “The heart of the matter: materialities, modernities and Christian civilization”, Current Anthropology 2014. 55 (Supp. 10): 182-92.
  12. “A concept of Eurasia”, Current Anthropology 2016, 57 (1): 1-27; Cf. Jack Goody, The Eurasian Miracle, Cambridge: 2010.
  13. “Goody, Polanyi and Eurasia: an unfinished project in comparative historical economic anthropology”, History and Anthropology 2015, 26 (3): 308-20.
  14. Hann is able to read and evaluate Polanyi’s early Hungarian texts as well as the better known writings in German and English. See “Radical functionalism: the life and work of Karl Polanyi”, Dialectical Anthropology 1992, 17: 141-66. See also “The economistic fallacy and forms of integration during and after socialism”, Economy and Society 2014, 43 (4): 626-49.
  15. Realising Eurasia: Civilisation and Moral Economy in the 21st Century (European Research Council Project Number: 340854, 2014-2019).http://www.eth.mpg.de/erc_realeurasia
  16. Market and Society: the Great Transformation revisited (ed. with Keith Hart) Cambridge: 2009; Economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique (with Keith Hart) Cambridge: 2011.
  17. Economy and ritual: studies of postsocialist transformations and Oikos and market: explorations in self-sufficiency after socialism (both volumes ed. with Stephen Gudeman) New York: 2015.
  18. Eastern Christians in anthropological perspective (ed. with Hermann Goltz) Berkeley: 2010.
  19. Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture Prior Recipients
  20. Learned Society of Wales Welcomes 45 New Fellows, April 2020 download of a list