CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Cordially invites you to:
Time's arrow in Tázlár (and in anthropology)
a public lecture by
Chris Hann
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Tázlár is a community on the Great Plain, half way between Danube and Tisza. I began
fieldwork there 36 years ago. Agricultural production expanded rapidly in the last decades of
socialism but declined thereafter, calling familiar models of progress into question. Similarly,
the recent return of village schools to Church control contradicts the usual Western pattern.
How to theorise these trajectories? Eastern European elites have long been vigorously
complicit in promoting notions of backwardness, socio-cultural as well as economic. It is
tempting to revive such theories in the conditions of postsocialism. Yet anthropologists have
known for decades that they must not deny coevalness (J. Fabian). What does Fabian's
"radical contemporaneity" imply in studying rural Hungary today?
Chris Hann grew up in Wales and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford
University before switching to Social Anthropology as a graduate student in Cambridge. His
first major publication was based on his PhD: Tázlár: a Village in Hungary, Cambridge
University Press, 1980. Later he carried out fieldwork in Poland (A Village Without
Solidarity; Polish peasants in years of crisis, Yale University Press, 1985) and in Turkey
(Turkish Region; state, market and social identities on the East Black Sea coast, James
Currey 2000, with Ildikó Bellér-Hann). His currrent ethnographic project, also with Ildikó
Bellér-Hann, is a study of rural Uyghur communities in eastern Xinjiang.
Monday, December 03, 5: 30 pm
Popper room