C Hann
Biographic Data
| ID | 26735 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Hann |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Hann |
| SIGNATURE | HANN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1836-6284 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
In Memoriam Keith Hart, 1943–2025
Don’t Kill Your Ancestors! Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner and the Vortex of Decolonisation
With debates about decolonising curricula and research practices in socio-cultural anthropology continuing vigorously, this paper argues for caution. The decolonisation movement is the culmination of appeals for rupture that devalue the contributions of those who worked within earlier paradigms. In Britain, the loose paradigm known as structural functionalism, which claimed the mantle of science on the basis of comparative methods, has long been …
The uniqueness of Ernest Gellner
This article presents a personal appraisal of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) on the centenary of his birth, examining his trajectory from childhood in inter-war Prague through British academia to his final years establishing nationalism studies at the Central European University. The analysis portrays Gellner as an inveterate contrarian. It traces his intellectual biography from philosophy at Oxford to sociology at LSE and social anthropology at Camb…
Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962-2024)
Anthropology TodayVolume 41, Issue 1 p. 25-26 Obituary Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962-2024) Chris Hann, Corresponding Author Chris Hann [email protected] Max Planck Institute for Social AnthropologySearch for more papers by this author Chris Hann, Corresponding Author Chris Hann [email protected] Max Planck Institute for Social AnthropologySearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 January 2025 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12941…
The proxy war in Ukraine
Overwhelming empathy with all the civilians and conscripts who have suffered from the ongoing violence in Ukraine, which began years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, must be complemented by analysis and explanation. What can anthropologists contribute? I have been disappointed by one-sided accounts endorsing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the cause of the Ukrainian nation that have dominated in the Western mass me…
The proxy war in Ukraine
Overwhelming empathy with all the civilians and conscripts who have suffered from the ongoing violence in Ukraine, which began years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, must be complemented by analysis and explanation. What can anthropologists contribute? I have been disappointed by one-sided accounts endorsing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the cause of the Ukrainian nation that have dominated in the Western mass me…
New Humanism
Time out of joint
This guest editorial critically examines the current landscape of European politics and reassesses anthropology's role in deciphering contemporary social and political dynamics. It analyzes the surge of populism, epitomized by leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, and challenges prevailing narratives on migration, the Ukraine conflict and European integration. The editorial argues that anthropologists must engage more intimately with grassroots pe…
The substance of society
The economic anthropologist as romantic bricoleur
More than 50 years after the writing of the papers assembled as Stone Age Economics , the author’s voice has been silenced. That immense contribution has been the subject of numerous reassessments. The volume contains all his important work in economic anthropology. Each chapter is teeming with ideas, and even seasoned teachers in this field will usually discover something new each time they revisit it. Looking at it again this year, I was astoni…
A Life in Central Europe
The life and work of János Horváth (an ethnic German whose original surname was Mayer) are emblematic of the transformations Hungary went through in the second half of the 20th century. His contributions to education, politics, administration, sport, music, local history, and "civil society" over seven decades will be sorely missed in the village of Tázlár
Economy and ethics in the cosmic process⋆
When T.H. Huxley lectured on evolution and ethics in 1893, his critique of the amoral laws of the 'cosmic process' left his audience puzzled. While Huxley paid little attention to political and economic institutions, this article draws attention to the historical materialism of that era and its twentieth-century legacies. Empirically, it analyses the rise and fall of a Hungarian state farm with reference to the comparative literature on twentieth…
Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád Countermovements
The four Visegrad countries (V4) are widely perceived to be undermining liberal democracy and the stability of the European Union they joined in 2004. The essays in this special issue approach this
The Dialectics of Disembedding and Civil Society in Provincial Hungary
This essay applies Karl Polanyi's concepts of embedding and countermovement to provincial Hungary during and after socialism. Comprehensive state socialist repression in the 1950s was a politics-led disembedding. An economy-led countermovement began in the 1960s, later augmented by elite discourses of civil society. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of socialist embeddedness. Neoliberal configurations after 1990 dislocated both economic and associ…
In search of civil society
The need to rebuild civil society was a prominent theme in dissident writings in East-Central Europe in late socialism, but the revival of this concept deserves close scrutiny and local contextualization. This article identifies two currents in Hungarian debates, one focused on addressing problems of backwardness by opening up paths of material embourgeoisement and the other on abstract liberal notions of associational freedom. It then outlines s…
Anthropology and populism
This guest editorial probes the inflationary use of 'populism' and the contribution that anthropologists can make to this field. Although a highly variable phenomenon historically, contemporary populists in locations as diverse as rural Hungary and urban Wales have much in common in their disaffection with the politics of liberal democracy. While the deeper causes must be sought in political economy, emotion and identity are just as important as …
Eurasian Dynamics
Der einleitende Beitrag umreißt einen Rahmen, der die Dynamik der eurasischen Landmasse (flexibel definiert) in den Mittelpunkt der Weltgeschichte der letzten drei Jahrtausende stellt. Konzepte von Kulturraum, Zivilisation und Weltsystem werden kritisch überprüft. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt den Theorien der Achsenzeit, die sowohl religiöse als auch säkulare Varianten der Transzendenz umfassen, sowie deren Rolle bei der Legitimation politischer Ins…
Reflections on an Anglophone academic sect
While saluting the ethnographic originality of the contents of this special issue and the ambition of its editors to extend recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity to large Catholic populations in Asia, the author argues that the contributors remain in thrall to Protestant tenets of rupture and individualism. He urges more balanced coverage of the diversity of Christian communities and more attention to a long history of anthropologica…
Making Sense of Eurasia
The concept of Eurasia is a muddle. In this article it is argued, following the British social anthropologist Jack Goody, that the landmass exhibits important commanalities, which date back to the agrarian empires and urban cultures of the Bronze Age. Europe is better understood as the macro-region "Western Eurasia" than as a continent, equivalent to the whole of Asia. This recognition is occluded by scholarship shot through with Eurocentric and …
The Anthropocene and anthropology
Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author's long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, et…
The fragility of Europe's Willkommenskultur
In this guest editorial Chris Hann considers the refugee route via the Balkans to Germany that opened up in a big way in the summer of 2015. The influx of ‘economic migrants’, as most newcomers are widely perceived, is polarizing opinion throughout the member states of the European Union. Hann also detects a renewal of the old east‐west moral geographies, due in part to legacies of the socialist era in eastern Europe and the semi‐peripheral condi…
After ideocracy and civil society
Behind only that of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influence of the Central European polymaths Ernest Gellner and Karl Polanyi on socio-cultural anthropology in the 20th century was profound. Gellner and Polanyi also influenced much wider swathes of scholarship. They belong to different generations and were raised in quite different settings in Prague and Budapest respectively. What these thinkers have in common is a philosophy of history which posits…
Imperative Eurasia (Respond to this article at http
The end of the Cold War marked the apogee of Western global domination, but this has since come under increasing threat, notably through the rise of China. To preserve the values of European social democracy, it makes more sense to negotiate new rules of political economy with multiple centres of power across Eurasia than to plunge deeper into a free trade zone with North America. Current European institutions are unable to respond to this new ch…
Faltering dialogue
Both inside and outside Europe, many societies have drawn on their own textual traditions to generate bodies of knowledge possessing some affinity to comparative socio-cultural anthropology. The premise of this article is that even where the focus is restricted to one country or one nationality, such "national ethnography" should be considered as a legitimate branch of a broadly conceived anthropological field, rather than belittled or denigrated…
Civilizational analysis for beginners
The concept of civilization has not prospered in socio-cultural anthropology. Its origins lie in Enlightenment France, where it was used in both singular and plural forms, the universalist singular eventually prevailing in the decades leading up to the Revolution. Our discipline came to prefer pluralizing counter-currents of this universalism such as that associated with Johann Gottfried Herder. The key term in German was Kultur, though it was no…
A new double movement? Anthropological perspectives on property in the age of neoliberalism
This review article shows that, both empirically and theoretically, socio-cultural anthropologists have much to contribute to interdisciplinary debates concerning property. The longest section presents results from recent investigations of decollectivization in the rural sectors of former socialist states. The generally disappointing outcomes of privatization can always be explained away in terms of ‘institutional’ shortcomings, but the real chal…
After Communism
Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia
This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different…
Ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe
The article draws on anthropological fieldwork in southeast Poland to illuminate both the historical development of national identities and the contemporary revival of ethnic tensions. For many centuries Eastern Galicia, and within it the town and district of Przemys̀l, exemplified what Ernest Gellner refers to as the diversity of the ‘Agrarian Age’. A drive towards homogenisation (associated by Gellner with modern industrial society) began here …
Anthropology and populism
This guest editorial probes the inflationary use of 'populism' and the contribution that anthropologists can make to this field. Although a highly variable phenomenon historically, contemporary populists in locations as diverse as rural Hungary and urban Wales have much in common in their disaffection with the politics of liberal democracy. While the deeper causes must be sought in political economy, emotion and identity are just as important as …
The Anthropocene and anthropology
Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author's long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, et…
Problems with the (de)privatization of religion
Faltering dialogue
Both inside and outside Europe, many societies have drawn on their own textual traditions to generate bodies of knowledge possessing some affinity to comparative socio-cultural anthropology. The premise of this article is that even where the focus is restricted to one country or one nationality, such "national ethnography" should be considered as a legitimate branch of a broadly conceived anthropological field, rather than belittled or denigrated…
In search of civil society
The need to rebuild civil society was a prominent theme in dissident writings in East-Central Europe in late socialism, but the revival of this concept deserves close scrutiny and local contextualization. This article identifies two currents in Hungarian debates, one focused on addressing problems of backwardness by opening up paths of material embourgeoisement and the other on abstract liberal notions of associational freedom. It then outlines s…
The fragility of Europe's Willkommenskultur
In this guest editorial Chris Hann considers the refugee route via the Balkans to Germany that opened up in a big way in the summer of 2015. The influx of ‘economic migrants’, as most newcomers are widely perceived, is polarizing opinion throughout the member states of the European Union. Hann also detects a renewal of the old east‐west moral geographies, due in part to legacies of the socialist era in eastern Europe and the semi‐peripheral condi…
Reconciling anthropologies
Peasants in an Era of Freedom
While external commentators, and the Chinese state authorities, refer to the period which began around 1980 as the 'reform period' and apply concepts such as 'socialist commodity economy', Uyghur peasants in the vicinity of Qäzqär in the extreme west of China refer to the era in which they live as an age of 'freedom'. This paper focuses on the bundle of rights over land and other changing property rights. Karl Polanyi's concept of a 'Great Transf…
Economy and ethics in the cosmic process⋆
When T.H. Huxley lectured on evolution and ethics in 1893, his critique of the amoral laws of the 'cosmic process' left his audience puzzled. While Huxley paid little attention to political and economic institutions, this article draws attention to the historical materialism of that era and its twentieth-century legacies. Empirically, it analyses the rise and fall of a Hungarian state farm with reference to the comparative literature on twentieth…
Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád Countermovements
The four Visegrad countries (V4) are widely perceived to be undermining liberal democracy and the stability of the European Union they joined in 2004. The essays in this special issue approach this
The Dialectics of Disembedding and Civil Society in Provincial Hungary
This essay applies Karl Polanyi's concepts of embedding and countermovement to provincial Hungary during and after socialism. Comprehensive state socialist repression in the 1950s was a politics-led disembedding. An economy-led countermovement began in the 1960s, later augmented by elite discourses of civil society. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of socialist embeddedness. Neoliberal configurations after 1990 dislocated both economic and associ…
Making Sense of Eurasia
The concept of Eurasia is a muddle. In this article it is argued, following the British social anthropologist Jack Goody, that the landmass exhibits important commanalities, which date back to the agrarian empires and urban cultures of the Bronze Age. Europe is better understood as the macro-region "Western Eurasia" than as a continent, equivalent to the whole of Asia. This recognition is occluded by scholarship shot through with Eurocentric and …
Back to civilization (Respond to this article at http
This editorial reinforces recent calls for anthropologists to participate more actively in multidisciplinary reappraisals of the concept of civilization. Beyond the dominant relativist model of discrete cultures and historical accounts of complex trading networks across the Eurasian landmass, it is important to recognize the civilizational coagulations that sustained such networks. The challenge is how to explain the dogged persistence of civiliz…
Beyond the Plan
Ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe
The article draws on anthropological fieldwork in southeast Poland to illuminate both the historical development of national identities and the contemporary revival of ethnic tensions. For many centuries Eastern Galicia, and within it the town and district of Przemys̀l, exemplified what Ernest Gellner refers to as the diversity of the ‘Agrarian Age’. A drive towards homogenisation (associated by Gellner with modern industrial society) began here …
What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next
Nationalism
Settling Accounts
Peasants in an Era of Freedom
While external commentators, and the Chinese state authorities, refer to the period which began around 1980 as the 'reform period' and apply concepts such as 'socialist commodity economy', Uyghur peasants in the vicinity of Qäzqär in the extreme west of China refer to the era in which they live as an age of 'freedom'. This paper focuses on the bundle of rights over land and other changing property rights. Karl Polanyi's concept of a 'Great Transf…
Problems with the (de)privatization of religion
A new double movement? Anthropological perspectives on property in the age of neoliberalism
This review article shows that, both empirically and theoretically, socio-cultural anthropologists have much to contribute to interdisciplinary debates concerning property. The longest section presents results from recent investigations of decollectivization in the rural sectors of former socialist states. The generally disappointing outcomes of privatization can always be explained away in terms of ‘institutional’ shortcomings, but the real chal…
After Communism
Reconciling anthropologies
Imperial formations – Edited by Anne Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan & Peter C. Perdue
Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia
This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different…
Of conferences and conflicts
The 16th Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in July 2009 was an opportunity for China to showcase socialist policies toward ethnic minorities. However just three weeks before the Congress 200 people were killed in ethnic rioting in Xinjiang. Hann's Narrative contrasts the dominant rhetoric of the Congress with the realities on the ground in rural eastern Xinjiang
Back to civilization (Respond to this article at http
This editorial reinforces recent calls for anthropologists to participate more actively in multidisciplinary reappraisals of the concept of civilization. Beyond the dominant relativist model of discrete cultures and historical accounts of complex trading networks across the Eurasian landmass, it is important to recognize the civilizational coagulations that sustained such networks. The challenge is how to explain the dogged persistence of civiliz…
Culture and commodification (Respond to this article at http
Smith in Beijing, Stalin in Urumchi
The extraordinary growth rates of China's "reform socialist" economy have helped to finance not only the United States' debt but also large-scale transfers to the country's underdeveloped regions. Yet violence in Tibet in 2008 was followed in July 2009 by major rioting in Xinjiang. This article approaches the latter events through the analysis of contemporary labor markets, socialist policies toward ethnic minorities, and the history of Xinjiang'…
Faltering dialogue
Both inside and outside Europe, many societies have drawn on their own textual traditions to generate bodies of knowledge possessing some affinity to comparative socio-cultural anthropology. The premise of this article is that even where the focus is restricted to one country or one nationality, such "national ethnography" should be considered as a legitimate branch of a broadly conceived anthropological field, rather than belittled or denigrated…
Civilizational analysis for beginners
The concept of civilization has not prospered in socio-cultural anthropology. Its origins lie in Enlightenment France, where it was used in both singular and plural forms, the universalist singular eventually prevailing in the decades leading up to the Revolution. Our discipline came to prefer pluralizing counter-currents of this universalism such as that associated with Johann Gottfried Herder. The key term in German was Kultur, though it was no…
Imperative Eurasia (Respond to this article at http
The end of the Cold War marked the apogee of Western global domination, but this has since come under increasing threat, notably through the rise of China. To preserve the values of European social democracy, it makes more sense to negotiate new rules of political economy with multiple centres of power across Eurasia than to plunge deeper into a free trade zone with North America. Current European institutions are unable to respond to this new ch…
The fragility of Europe's Willkommenskultur
In this guest editorial Chris Hann considers the refugee route via the Balkans to Germany that opened up in a big way in the summer of 2015. The influx of ‘economic migrants’, as most newcomers are widely perceived, is polarizing opinion throughout the member states of the European Union. Hann also detects a renewal of the old east‐west moral geographies, due in part to legacies of the socialist era in eastern Europe and the semi‐peripheral condi…
After ideocracy and civil society
Behind only that of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influence of the Central European polymaths Ernest Gellner and Karl Polanyi on socio-cultural anthropology in the 20th century was profound. Gellner and Polanyi also influenced much wider swathes of scholarship. They belong to different generations and were raised in quite different settings in Prague and Budapest respectively. What these thinkers have in common is a philosophy of history which posits…
Reflections on an Anglophone academic sect
While saluting the ethnographic originality of the contents of this special issue and the ambition of its editors to extend recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity to large Catholic populations in Asia, the author argues that the contributors remain in thrall to Protestant tenets of rupture and individualism. He urges more balanced coverage of the diversity of Christian communities and more attention to a long history of anthropologica…
Making Sense of Eurasia
The concept of Eurasia is a muddle. In this article it is argued, following the British social anthropologist Jack Goody, that the landmass exhibits important commanalities, which date back to the agrarian empires and urban cultures of the Bronze Age. Europe is better understood as the macro-region "Western Eurasia" than as a continent, equivalent to the whole of Asia. This recognition is occluded by scholarship shot through with Eurocentric and …
The Anthropocene and anthropology
Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author's long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, et…
Eurasian Dynamics
Der einleitende Beitrag umreißt einen Rahmen, der die Dynamik der eurasischen Landmasse (flexibel definiert) in den Mittelpunkt der Weltgeschichte der letzten drei Jahrtausende stellt. Konzepte von Kulturraum, Zivilisation und Weltsystem werden kritisch überprüft. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt den Theorien der Achsenzeit, die sowohl religiöse als auch säkulare Varianten der Transzendenz umfassen, sowie deren Rolle bei der Legitimation politischer Ins…
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (20 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Political economy (16 works) · History (14 works) · Law (14 works) · History (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)