Chris Hann: Difference between revisions

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 (novel)|Border Country]]” of [[Raymond Williams]].<ref>{{cite web | url=https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1119986 | title=Video & Audio: Chris Hann - Metadata }}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=Border Country|last=Williams|first=Raymond|publisher=Carmarthen|year=2006 [1960]|isbnorig-year=1960|location=Parthian Library of Wales|pages=|via=}}</ref>

Hann won a Welsh Foundation Scholarship to study [[politics]], [[philosophy]], and [[economics]] at [[Jesus College, Oxford|Jesus College]], [[University of Oxford|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|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 language|Hungarian]] and doing field research on the [[Danube–Tisza Interfluve|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]]”.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Tázlár: A village in Hungary|last=Hann|first=Chris|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1980|isbn=|location=Cambridge|pages=|via=}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hann|first=Chris|title=Backwardness revisited: time, space and civilization in rural Eastern Europe|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/backwardness-revisited-time-space-and-civilization-in-rural-eastern-europe/6699CEAFDF1639E9C2FA60BE4F460C28|journal=Comparative Studies in Society and History|year=2015 |volume=57 (|issue=4)|pages=881–911 |doi=10.1017/S0010417515000389 |s2cid=147917935 }}</ref>

Hann opened a new field site in [[Southern Poland]] in 1978-91978–9 with the aim of comparing “peasant” adaptations in a non-collectivised socialist society with his Hungarian observations. Fieldwork in the [[Carpathian Mountains|Carpathians]] coincided with food shortages, the rise of [[Solidarity (Polish trade union)|Solidarity]], and national political crisis. Apart from the insights gained into the dysfunctionality of Polish socialism, working in a region inhabited by an [[East Slavs|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]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=A Village Without Solidarity: Polish peasants in years of crisis|last=Hann|first=Chris|publisher=Yale University Press|year=1985|isbn=|location=New Haven|pages=|via=}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hann|first=Chris|title=Postsocialist nationalism: rediscovering the past in South East Poland|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501049?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents2501049|journal=Slavic Review|year=1998|volume=57( |issue=4)|pages=840–863|doi=10.2307/2501049|s2cid=143830747 }}</ref>

Hann is married to [http://ccrs.ku.dk/staff/?pure=en/persons/381452 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]], [[Northwest China|N-W China]]. Hann’sHann's main contribution to the [[Turkey]] project focused on smallholders who gave up [[Subsistence agriculture|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.<ref>''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.</ref>

Hann’sHann's theoretical interests are closely related to his [[Ethnography|ethnographic research]]. He was a pioneer anthropological investigator of what he calls “[[Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism]]” socialism”. Since 1990 he has traced the distinctive pathways of “[[postsocialism]]” within a [[Global Political Economy|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.<ref>(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.</ref> 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]].<ref>“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</ref> 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 [[Eastern Catholic Churches|Greek Catholics]] of [[Central Europe]] to critique a Western, essentially [[Protestantism|Protestant]], bias in the Anglophone “[[Christian anthropology|anthropology of Christianity]]”.<ref>(ed.) 2010 ''Religion, identities, postsocialism. The Halle Focus Group, 2003-2010:''

Another persistent strand in Hann’sHann's work concerns the connections between [[anthropology]] and [[history]]. He edited [http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/when-history-accelerates-9781474287227/ When History Accelerates] in honour of [https://web.archive.org/web/20160712160128/http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/tvillageTVillage/ 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]].<ref>“A concept of Eurasia”, ''Current Anthropology'' 2016, 57 (1): 1-27; Cf. Jack Goody, ''The Eurasian Miracle'', Cambridge: 2010.</ref> Adapting the work of [[Jack Goody|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 of income and wealth|redistribution]] (culminating in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism, and expressed more attractively in democratic variants of these doctrines).<ref>“Goody, Polanyi and Eurasia: an unfinished project in comparative historical economic anthropology”, ''History and Anthropology'' 2015, 26 (3): 308-20.</ref> The key concepts here are borrowed from Karl Polanyi.<ref>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.</ref> 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.<ref>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</ref>

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 (anthropologist)|Keith Hart]] that dates back to the 1980s, when they were colleagues in Cambridge.<ref>''Market and Society: the Great Transformation revisited'' (ed. with Keith Hart) Cambridge: 2009; ''Economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique'' (with Keith Hart) Cambridge: 2011.</ref> He has also worked closely with other leading figures in the (sub)discipline, including [https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/gudeman Stephen Gudeman], with whom he led the “Economy and Ritual” postdoctoral research group in Halle in 2009-20122009–2012).<ref>''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.</ref> More recently he has co-led similar groups with [https://www.dur.ac.uk/health.inequalities/staff/profile/?mode=staff&id=10654 Catherine Alexander]{{Dead link|date=November 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} and [http://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/people/parry.aspx Jonathan Parry] (on “Industry and Inequality in Eurasia”, 2012-20152012–2015) and with [[Don Kalb]] (on “Financialization”, 2015-20182015–2018).

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.[http://www.eth.mpg.de/anarchie] With Hermann Goltz of the Faculty of Theology, he organized an international conference on Eastern Christians, the papers of which were published in 2010.<ref>''Eastern Christians in anthropological perspective'' (ed. with Hermann Goltz) Berkeley: 2010.</ref> He was a part-time collaborator in [[Thomas Hylland Eriksen]]’s “[http://ccrs.ku.dk/staff/?pure=en/persons/381452 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 ([http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-james-laidlaw James Laidlaw] and [http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-joel-robbins Joel Robbins]). The Centre became operational in January 2017.

Chris Hann was elected a member of the [[Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities|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 of Great Britain and Ireland|Royal Anthropological Institute]] (London). In 2019 he was awarded the [[Huxley Memorial Medal]] of the Royal Anthropological Institute.<ref>[https://www.therai.org.uk/awards/honours-prior-recipients/huxley-memorial-medal-and-lecture-prior-recipients Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture Prior Recipients]</ref> In April 2020 Chris Hann was appointed Fellow of the [[Learned Society of Wales]].<ref>[https://www.learnedsociety.wales/forty-five-new-fellows-for-the-learned-society-of-wales/ Learned Society of Wales Welcomes 45 New Fellows, April 2020] download of a list</ref>