Chris Hann
Biographic Data
| ID | 3581013 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Hann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Hann |
| SIGNATURE | HANN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 387 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 12 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
One Hundred Years of Argonauts: Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology
The Gypsy condition in Kiskunhalas: Work, consumption, and indebtedness after socialism
The article outlines the recent history of the Gypsy minority in the town of Kiskunhalas, Bács-Kiskun county, with an emphasis on its changing economic situation. Gypsy households benefited from secure employment until the late 1980s. Some of them were able to profit from the embourgeoisement opportunities available to all citizens in the socialist mixed economy. Under postsocialist conditions, however, most Gypsies face uncertainty and hardship …
Taxation and the Polanyian forms of integration in socialist and postsocialist Hungary
Reciprocity, redistribution, and (market) exchange were the "forms of integration" put forward by Karl Polanyi as a "special tool box" to investigate relations between economy and society where the principle of price-forming markets is not (yet) dominant. Though intended as the basis for a comparative alternative to the universalist assumptions of mainstream (neoclassical) economics, Polanyi did not make significant use of these concepts to analy…
Economy, emulation, and equality: Sociogenesis in the postsocialist capitalocene
Economy and emulation are freighted concepts. They draw attention to universal phenomena, the forms of which vary according to social organization, and in particular the dynamics of (in)equality. Socialist modernization, which is explored here in the context of successive transformations of rural economy in southern Hungary, was characterized by distinctive forms of enchantment and ritualized collective action. These have been lost in the course …
On peoples, history, and sovereignty
The article opens with materials from the author's research among east Slavs in Poland: a close-up portrayal of villagers classified as Ukrainians in the Polish People's Republic, some of whom had no developed national consciousness; and an equally brief account of a postsocialist project in a nearby city, in which the boundaries between rival peoples were clearly drawn.Explanations for inconsistencies between individuals and enduring tensions be…
Introduction Self-Sufficiency as Reality and as Myth
Anthropology of Transformation: From Europe to Asia and Back
This collection of essays is the result of the joint efforts of colleagues and students of the leading social anthropology and post-socialism theorist, Professor Chris Hann. With the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 2019 as their catalyst, the authors reflect upon Chris Hann’s lifelong fieldwork in the discipline, spanning regions as diverse as East Central Europe, Turkey, and the Chinese north-west. The collapse of the…
Civilizational Analysis
Civilizational analysis is an approach within historical sociology that aims to include all human populations in time and space (i.e., not only those literate societies for which the concept “civilization” is often reserved) in comparative analysis on a supra‐societal level. It takes inspiration from anthropologists (notably Mauss) as well as founding fathers of sociology (Durkheim and Weber). Major contributions, theoretical as well as empirical…
The Great Dispossession. Uyghurs between Civilizations: Uyghurs Between Civilizations
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China, where the authors of this book have worked since 1986, has become increasingly unstable in recent decades. The Uyghurs are the easternmost people of the Turkic-Islamic civilizational belt that stretches across Central Eurasia. The incorporation of this population into the Chinese nation state has been fraught with difficulty. Central policies under socialism have fluctuated between generou…
Marketization and development on a European periphery: From peasant oikos to socialism and neoliberal capitalism on the Danube-Tisza interfluve
The modern term economy is associated above all with market exchange. But it derives from the Greek oikos, which for Aristotle referred to the well-managed estate, able to withstand the forces of supply and demand by virtue of a high degree of self-sufficiency. The paper explores the long-term discontinuous expansion of the principle of price-forming markets (in the sense of Karl Polanyi) at the expense of self-sufficiency in a zone of the Great …
Threats to Regional Identity: From Atheist Communists to the Virgin Mary
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The seductions of Europe and the solidarities of Eurasia
Almost 40 years ago, when I was doing fieldwork in Poland, the word Solidarity was on everyone’s lips. One of the popular rallying cries, here and elsewhere in the region, was that of “rejoining Europe”. Similar ebullience was found in many Western countries at the time, justified by the increasingly progressive politics of the European Economic Community (as it was known at the time) and by the intellectual vogue for “civil society” as a key com…
Galicia: A Multicultured Land
Civil Society
“Civil society” is a complex term in the European history of ideas. It entered popular parlance and was taken up by anthropologists only at the end of the twentieth century, when it was initially used to indicate a liberal society based on freedom of association, in opposition to the totalitarian socialist state. Anthropologists later applied the term in studies of democratization and development in other regions, but some remain suspicious of th…
G ellner, E rnest (1925–95)
A controversial figure in the British school, Ernest Gellner forged a unique combination of the social anthropology of the school's founder, Bronisław Malinowski, with Western Enlightenment traditions in philosophy. This approach was out of kilter with intellectual fashions throughout his lifetime. Nonetheless, Gellner produced a classic ethnography of the Atlas Mountains; elegant structural models of Muslim society, the nation‐state, and civil s…
Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject
Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commons…
Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject
G oody, J ack (1919–2015)
Jack Goody was a social anthropologist who preferred to think of his discipline as comparative sociology. He began his career as an Africanist, specializing in kinship, property transmission, and the impact of literacy. From the 1960s onward he focused on contrasts between Eurasia and sub‐Saharan Africa in the technologies and institutions of production, consumption and the domestic domain. Following the archaeologist Gordon Childe, he attributed…
Multiscalar Narrative Identities: Individual and Nation, Europe and Eurasia
The paper explores narratives of identity on multiple scales between the individual and the Eurasian landmass, taking the various identities of Cracow‐born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski as a leitmotiv to illustrate the main arguments. Apart from being a cultural Pole and an Austrian (later British) subject, Malinowski was a typical European intellectual of his age. At the end of his life in the United States, he appealed to the values of Eu…
Moral(ity and) Economy: Work, Workfare, and Fairness in Provincial Hungary
The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson's "moral economy" has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the…
Economic Anthropology
For almost a century, economic anthropology has formed a fairly coherent field at the interface between sociocultural anthropology and economics. Many anthropologists are suspicious of economists' concepts and some question the very notion of “the economy.” Material livelihoods are always embedded in wider contexts of immaterial values and practices that cannot be reduced to a utilitarian calculus. However, some anthropologists maintain that the …
Embeddedness and Effervescence: Political Economy and Community Sociality through a Century of Transformations in Rural Hungary
Based on long-term fieldwork in a village on the Great Hungarian Plain, this article analyzes the links between political economy and forms of sociability commonly encompassed by the term ritual. Three cycles of integration and disintegration are described. Each phase of disruption has led to new forms of "self-protection" (Karl Polanyi) and the construction of new community relations. The exemplary forms of sociability today are significantly di…
Whose moods? Anthropologists in a bubble
Comment on Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. "The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany's refugee crisis." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105-135
A Concept of Eurasia
To imagine Europe and Asia as constituting equivalent "continents" has long been recognized as the ethnocentric cornerstone of a Western, or Euro-American, world view. The amalgam Eurasia corrects this bias by highlighting the intensifying interconnectedness of the entire landmass in recent millennia. This article builds on the work of Jack Goody and others to analyze the unity-in-civilizational-diversity of the Old World. It draws on the substan…
Jack Goody (1919-2015)
The Anthropology of Christianity per se
Several anthropologists have recently linked diagnoses of the diffuse impact of the Christian religion on the history of their discipline to programmatic calls for a consolidation of the "anthropology of Christianity". This review article suggests that complaints of long-term neglect of Christianity in the anthropological literature are exaggerated. The contributions of recent decades have reflected general epistemological trends and continued th…
Moral(ity and) Economy: Work, Workfare, and Fairness in Provincial Hungary
The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson's "moral economy" has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the…
A Concept of Eurasia
To imagine Europe and Asia as constituting equivalent "continents" has long been recognized as the ethnocentric cornerstone of a Western, or Euro-American, world view. The amalgam Eurasia corrects this bias by highlighting the intensifying interconnectedness of the entire landmass in recent millennia. This article builds on the work of Jack Goody and others to analyze the unity-in-civilizational-diversity of the Old World. It draws on the substan…
Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland
Since the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 few subjects in eastern Europe have attracted as much attention as nationalism. Detailed academic studies have been carried out from many disciplinary perspectives, by scholars native to the region as well as many from outside it. This is also a field in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations have undertaken numerous policy-oriented initiatives. Eastern European developments have figur…
From Production to Property: Decollectivization and the Family-Land Relationship in Contemporary Hungary
The concept of property has long occupied a central place in Western political and economic theory, but it has had a chequered history in social anthropology, and has not figured strongly in recent work in the discipline. This article draws on fieldwork carried out in rural Hungary since 1976 and concentrates on a specific type of property right, the ownership of agricultural land. Recent moves to decollectivize farmland pose dilemmas for many vi…
The Heart of the Matter: Christianity, Materiality, and Modernity
At the microlevel, this paper focuses on the Roman Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart, noting its spread among Catholic populations in Central Europe whose liturgical tradition is that of Byzantium rather than Rome. At the mesolevel, it places this instance of religious acculturation in the context of long-term economic and political inequalities between East and West. At the macrolevel, implications are outlined for debates concerning civilizatio…
The Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism
Success always leaves behind a residue of yearning for what used to be and an aversion to the forces that did away with it. -Kazimierz Wyka, 1945 In 1945, after the devastation of World War Two and German occupation of Poland, prominent literary critic Kazimierz Wyka foretold and warned of the results of society repressed by impersonal government and excluded from economic decisions. His essay, Excluded Economy, Clarifies the story of endless int…
Reproduction and Inheritance: Goody Revisited
According to Jack Goody, in a body of work that dates back to the 1950s, differences in the mode of inheritance between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa have multiple connections to domestic groups, kin terminology, politics and stratification, and above all, productive systems. Goody's theory is built on evolutionist assumptions and draws in part on statistical analysis of the Ethnographic Atlas. Theoretically and methodologically unfashionable am…
The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland
The economistic fallacy and forms of integration under and after socialism
The concept of 'the economistic fallacy', theorized most elaborately in a posthumous work, is central to the entire oeuvre of Karl Polanyi - and to its endemic ambiguities. While previous discussion has focused on capitalist and pre-capitalist societies, this paper explores the alleged fallacy in a socialist framework. Drawing on field-work in a village on the Great Plain, it is argued that the Hungarian variety of 'market socialism' brought abou…
Samovars and Sex on Turkey's Russian Markets
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2011
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Overheated Underdogs: Civilizational Analysis and Migration on the Danube-Tisza Interfluve
Drawing on four decades of field research on the Danube-Tisza interfluve, the Western zone of the Great Hungarian Plain, this paper places the "overheating" of the post-Cold War era in a longue durée perspective. The first section traces a millennium of history in terms of multi-directional migrations and civilizational encounters of various kinds: between sedentary agriculturalists and pastoral nomads, between Christian and Muslim agrarian order…
Goody, Polanyi and Eurasia: An Unfinished Project in Comparative Historical Economic Anthropology
Goody's essay overlaps with his recent work on the “search for metals” and, more generally, with his many books expounding the commonalities of Eurasian history. His critique of Eurocentrism remains invaluable. This review article argues that his emphasis on diffusion can be usefully supplemented with a concept of civilization, to facilitate comparative structural analysis. Goody's perspective might also be enhanced by an engagement with the lite…
Backwardness Revisited: Time, Space, and Civilization in Rural Eastern Europe
Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful…
The Theft of Anthropology
Social anthropology flourished in the 20th century but ethnographic methods and intensifying 'creative destruction' in the elaboration of theory have combined to deflect attention away from earlier concerns with long-term historical change. The 'theft of history' that took place within anthropology refers to this loss, which is not to be confused with healthy interdisciplinary borrowing. With the demise of the evolutionist paradigm and intensifyi…
Gellner's Structural-Functional-Culturalism
Enlightenment traditions celebrating the individual and knowledge that is universally valid are only one stream in the social philosophy of Ernest Gellner.As a philosopher, he vehemently rejected Wittgensteinian relativism.As a social anthropologist, he prioritised the study of 'structure' and 'function', rather than cultural 'costume'.Yet his theory of nationalism relies on a concept of culture, which I suggest derives ultimately from the Herder…
A Village without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis
Anthropology's Multiple Temporalities and its Future in East-Central Europe
The article takes a parochial academic anniversary in Britain as an occasion to refl ect on ensuing changes of paradigm in social anthropology, notably the rejection of evolutionism and the neglect of history that accompanied the ‚fi eldwork revolution' led by Bronislaw Malinowski.In the light of this discussion it is argued that the ‚anthropology of postsocialism' of recent years should not content itself with ethnographic studies of transformat…
Creeds, Cultures And The 'Witchery Of Music
Frazer's brief excursus on the 'witchery of music' is the starting-point for a discussion of the role of music in the eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) and western Roman Catholic (Latin) Christian traditions, with reference to a region of central Europe where these traditions have co-existed for more than a thousand years. The Greek Catholic Church provides a case of syncretism within one and the same religion. This 'hybrid' Church has complicated the…
Ciągle niewygodna klasa. Środkowo-europejscy post-chłopi w kraju i za granicą w dobie neoliberalizmu
The paper builds on the author’s intimate knowledge of Eastern European village life over four decades. Before, during, and after socialism, villagers (“peasants” ) have always been incorporated into wider structures, while at the same time challenging standard social science theories. Their greater ability to reproduce themselves “outside the market” is the basis of their distinctiveness; this corresponds to a persisting distinction between town…
Economic Anthropology
Economic anthropology emerged in the twentieth century at the interface between sociocultural anthropology (commonly known as ethnology in earlier times, hereafter anthropology) and economics (in earlier nomenclature commonly political economy). The latter is nowadays predominantly a universalizing discipline, theorizing deductively on the basis of maximizing individuals and firms. By contrast, anthropologists tend to work inductively from their …
The Skeleton at the Feast: Contributions to East European Anthropology
When History Accelerates: Essays on Rapid Social Change, Complexity and Creativity
Fast forward - the great transformation globalized, C.M. Hann the evolution of society - a Darwinian appoach, Krishan Kumar rates of change - weasel words and the indispensible in anthropological analysis, Roy Ellen modelling complexity and change - social knowledge and social process, Michael D. Fischer social creativity, J. Davis rustic chivalry - variations in honour ideologies in Italy and the limits of historical explanation, Nevill Colcloug…
FromVolksgeistto radical humanism: Culture and value in economic anthropology
Stocking, George W., ed. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. (History of Anthropology, Vol. 8). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. viii + 349 pp. including index. $27.50 cloth. Wilk, Richard R. Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. xviii + 189 pp. including appendix, bibliography and index. $49.00 cloth, $15.95 pap…
Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeastern Europe
A Village without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis
Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany
New Hungarian Peasants: An East Central European Experience with Collectivization
A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis
A Village without Solidarity: Polish Peasantry in Years of Crisis
A Village Without Solidarity: Polish Peasants in Years of Crisis
Th Icaes, Zagreb
Christianity's Internal Frontier: The Case of Uniates in South-East Poland
Situation religieuse et politique des uniates c'est-a-dire des orthodoxes ayant accepte a la fin du XVI s. l'union avec Rome, tout en conservant le rite orthodoxe. L'A. traite surtout leur histoire au XX s.| Pologne, Ukraine, Transylvanie| manipulation de ces populations dans des desseins politiques ou religieux
Socialism and King Stephen's right hand
Second Thoughts on Smallholders: Tea Production, The State, and Social Differentiation in the Rize Region
Many specialists in comparative farming systems and agrarian social structures have recognized in recent decades the resilience and vitality of non-capitalistic family farming (Harriss, 1982; Shanin, 1987). For Turkey, both the general characteristics and many regional variations were well established by Aresvik (1975). Recent work by Çağlar Keyder (1983) has traced the genesis of modern Turkish rural society back to the Ottoman period and outlin…
A Chinese Beggar's Den: Poverty and Mobility in an Underclass Community
Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures
The Albanians of Rrogam
Samovars and Sex on Turkey's Russian Markets
The Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism
Success always leaves behind a residue of yearning for what used to be and an aversion to the forces that did away with it. -Kazimierz Wyka, 1945 In 1945, after the devastation of World War Two and German occupation of Poland, prominent literary critic Kazimierz Wyka foretold and warned of the results of society repressed by impersonal government and excluded from economic decisions. His essay, Excluded Economy, Clarifies the story of endless int…
From Production to Property: Decollectivization and the Family-Land Relationship in Contemporary Hungary
The concept of property has long occupied a central place in Western political and economic theory, but it has had a chequered history in social anthropology, and has not figured strongly in recent work in the discipline. This article draws on fieldwork carried out in rural Hungary since 1976 and concentrates on a specific type of property right, the ownership of agricultural land. Recent moves to decollectivize farmland pose dilemmas for many vi…
The Anthropology of Ethnicity
Notions of nationalism
In recent years, following the end of the cold war and the relative simplicities of the bipolar confrontation, nationalism has re-emerged as a dominant force and ideology in our world. Everywhere, peoples who had been confined within the borders of countries with which they did not identify, and whose regimes they intensely disliked, have been seeking self-determination and democracy. Notions of Nationalism, as the title implies, is an open-minde…
The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland
Gellner on Malinowski: Words and Things in Central Europe
Civil Society: Challenging Western Models
Introduction Political society and civil anthropology Chris Hann 1. Money, morality and modes of civil society among American Mormons Elizabeth Dunn 2. How Ernest Gellner got mugged on the streets of London, Or civil society, the media and the quality of life Peter Loizos 3. Anti-semitism and fear of the public sphere in a post-totalitarian society: East Germany Susanne Spuelbeck 4. The shifting meanings of civil and civic society in Poland Micha…
When History Accelerates: Essays on Rapid Social Change, Complexity and Creativity
Fast forward - the great transformation globalized, C.M. Hann the evolution of society - a Darwinian appoach, Krishan Kumar rates of change - weasel words and the indispensible in anthropological analysis, Roy Ellen modelling complexity and change - social knowledge and social process, Michael D. Fischer social creativity, J. Davis rustic chivalry - variations in honour ideologies in Italy and the limits of historical explanation, Nevill Colcloug…
Church Unions in Central and Eastern Europe
Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in Southeast Poland
Since the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 few subjects in eastern Europe have attracted as much attention as nationalism. Detailed academic studies have been carried out from many disciplinary perspectives, by scholars native to the region as well as many from outside it. This is also a field in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations have undertaken numerous policy-oriented initiatives. Eastern European developments have figur…
Political science (54 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Law (43 works) · History (37 works) · Politics (36 works) · Economics (26 works) · Law (25 works) · History (23 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Anthropology (21 works)