Chris Hann

Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
I was born and brought up in Wales, but my university education is from Oxford (BA 1974 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and Cambridge (PhD, Social Anthropology, 1979). I stayed on in Cambridge as a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, and was appointed to a lectureship (with tenure) at the Department of Social Anthropology. Between 1992 and joining the Max Planck Society in 1999 I was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Later I became Honorary Professor at Kent, and also at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig.

My main research interests date back to my undergraduate days and my first fieldwork projects in rural Hungary and Poland. I followed up with a comparative investigation of smallholders in a capitalist context on the Black Sea coast of Turkey (a later, more comprehensive project in the same region was a joint enterprise with Ildikó Bellér-Hann). My work on religion derives primarily from my encounter with the Greek Catholic minority in Poland, an interest that later expanded to eastern Christians in general. After 2006 I resumed fieldwork in Xinjiang in the form of a contribution to the departmental Focus Group investigating social support and kinship in China and Vietnam (again jointly with Ildikó Bellér-Hann). I maintain strong interests in comparative economic organization, in part through collaborative projects with Catherine Alexander, Stephen Gudeman, Keith Hart, Deborah James, Don Kalb and Jonathan Parry. My intention over many decades has been to contribute to social anthropology, in particular economic anthropology, whilst simultaneously questioning and breaking down disciplinary boundaries across the social sciences and history. The department’s programmes were underpinned by a conception of the unity in diversity of the Eurasian landmass, and of the contributions made by Eurasian civilizations to world history.

I am a Former Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, an Ordentliches Mitglied of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and a member of Academia Europaea (committee member, Social Thought and Social Change). In 2015 I was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 2019 I was presented with the Huxley Medal by the same Institute. In 2020 I became a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chris Hann is an active Emeritus who continues to do fieldwork in provincial Hungary and to publish on a wide range of subjects (including topical concerns such as populism in Hungary, repression in Xinjiang and warfare in Ukraine). Since retirement in August 2021, he is no longer resident in Halle. He regrets that he is now unable to take on students or to offer advice to prospective applicants.