Social Anthropology, Max Planck Institute, Halle, Germany
Octobre 2013 à Juin 2014
Chris Hann was born in Wales in 1953. He studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford and Social Anthropology as a graduate student in Cambridge. His first major publication was based on his PhD (1980). Later he carried out fieldwork in Poland, and, together with Ildikó Bellér-Hann, in Turkey and China (Xinjiang).
After holding teaching positions in the UK at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent (Canterbury), Hann moved in 1999 to Halle, Germany, to take up his present position as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He heads the department “Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia”. Hann has worked in many branches of anthropology, which he views primarily as comparative sociology. The current focus groups of his department are “Kinship and Social Support in China and Vietnam”, “Minorities and the State” (historical anthropology), and “Industry and Inequality” (economic anthropology).
Repatriating Polanyi
Although he achieved international fame only through his English language publications after the Second World War, Karl Polanyi was educated in Habsburg, Hungary. His ideas, which have attracted renewed attention in recent years as a result of the on-going crisis of the world economy, were decisively shaped by his formative years in Central Europe. This project will apply his economic anthropology to rural Hungary, and in particular to the Great Plain village of Tázlár, where Hann has been conducting field research since 1976. A poor settlement in the pre-socialist era, Tázlár prospered in the latter decades of socialism, before experiencing economic and demographic decline after 1990. This fluctuating history will be interpreted in terms of Polanyian concepts such as ‘embeddedness’, the ‘economistic fallacy’ and the ‘double movement’. The excessive expansion of the principle of the market results not only in ‘disembeddedness’ and ensuing societal self-defence mechanisms of a benign character, but also in malignant populist nationalism. Polanyi’s double movement must thus be refined as a treble.
HANN, Chris. Repatriating Polanyi, Market Society in the Visegrád States, Central European University Press, 2019.
HANN, Chris. Tázlár: A Village in Hungary [online]. Cambridge, New York : Cambridge University Press, 1980, 206 p. Available on link (visited the 28.05.2013)
HANN, Chris. A Village Without Solidarity; Polish peasants in years of crisis. New Haven, London : Yale University Press, 1985, 215 p.
HANN, Chris, Bellér-Hann I. Turkish Region; state, market and social identities on the East Black Sea coast. Oxford : James Currey, Santa Fe : SAR Press, 2000, 240 p.
HANN, Chris. “Not the Horse We Wanted!” : Postsocialism, Neoliberalism, Eurasia. Berlin : LIT Verlag, 2006, 304 p.
HANN, Chris, Hart K. Economic Anthropology : History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge : Polity, 2011, 208 p.