Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2017 –2019
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
4 VNet STATE IC M R A T K Max Planck Institute C I N E G L for Social Anthropology E GREATER MEKONG SUBREGION Report 2017 – 2019 Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ Max Planck Fellow Group ‘Connectivity in Motion’ Imprint Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2017 –2019 Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ Max Planck Fellow Group (Burkhard Schnepel) ‘Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean’ edited by Chris Hann Published by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle /Saale P. O. Box 11 03 51 D - 06017 Halle /Saale Germany Phone: +49 (0) 345 2927- 0 http://www.eth.mpg.de Printed 2020 by IMPRESS Druckerei, Halle /Saale Responsibility for the content of the contributions lies with the individual authors. © 2020 Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology ISSN 1618-8683 Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2017 – 2019 Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ Max Planck Fellow Group (Burkhard Schnepel) ‘Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean’ edited by Chris Hann Halle/Saale 2020 Table of Contents iii Table of Contents Preface v Structure and Organization ix I Introduction Populism and Democracy in Eurasia (in the spirit of Karl Polanyi) Chris Hann 1 II Economic Anthropology Financialization Chris Hann 17 III Urban Anthropology Buddhist Temple Economies in Urban Asia Christoph Brumann 25 IV Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network Introduction to the V4 Network Chris Hann 37 V Max Planck - Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change Introduction to Max-Cam Chris Hann 53 VI The Political and Economic Anthropology of Southeast Asia Electric Statemaking in the Greater Mekong Subregion Kirsten W. Endres 65 VII Realising Eurasia: Civilization and Moral Economy in the 21st Century 5+ Years of REALEURASIA Chris Hann and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann 73 VIII International Max Planck Research School for the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia 7+ Years of ANARCHIE Chris Hann and Sascha Roth, with François Bertemes and Andreas Pečar 93 iv Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology IX Goody Lectures 107 X Publications 111 Max Planck Fellow Group Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean Burkhard Schnepel 137 Index 153 ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ v Preface Chris Hann In the years 2017–2019 the Department of Resilience and Transformation has dem- onstrated more resilience than transformation. That is to say, the research outlined in this report demonstrates a lot of continuity with the themes documented in the last such report, compiled three years ago. The major change is that we no longer have a sub-group in the field of historical anthropology.1 The sections devoted to the Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network and to our collaboration with Cambridge (Max-Cam) present new initiatives that were announced in the last report. They constitute extensions of a research profile developed cumulatively over many years, rather than transformations. Continuity is also apparent in research leadership and hence in the authorship of the sections that follow. Christoph Brumann, Kirsten Endres and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann have shared responsibilities with me over the last decade. Sascha Roth has continued in post as the dedicated coordinator of our graduate school, ANARCHIE. The most notable change this year is the inclusion in our report of Max Planck Fellow Burkhard Schnepel’s account of the accomplishments of his group, Con- nectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean. Max Planck Fellows are not affiliated to departments and Burkhard has always gone out of his way to open up his programme to the entire institute. However, it makes good sense intellectually to include his project alongside our own, since his vision of maritime connectivity in the Indian Ocean world complements our interest in terrestrial links across Europe and Asia over the centuries. In recent years Iain Walker, a senior researcher work- ing with Burkhard for many years, has participated regularly in the seminars of our department. Moreover Burkhard himself has been active in teaching and supervision for our graduate school ANARCHIE. In sum, he has been a valued colleague and friend of the department for almost two decades: his commitment to the discipline and service to our faculty at the Martin Luther University are second to none. This report is devoted to our research. It does not elaborate on the many ways in which department members contribute to the intellectual community at our institute, cooperate with our university colleagues and other local institutions, or engage in outreach to our Kuratorium and a wider public (we were, for example, very active in the programme offered by the institute to mark the first Max Planck Day in Sep- tember 2018). Nor can we elaborate here on our international scholarly networking. Our annual Goody Lecture plays an important role in this respect: details of the 1 After a very productive career in the Max Planck Society that began at the Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Mikołaj Szołtysek returned in 2017 to his native Poland as a POLONEZ Fellow at the Institute of History at the University of Warsaw. Dittmar Schorkowitz is still based at this Institute; he is now affiliated to the Department of Law and Anthropology. vi Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology lectures given by Nur Yalman (Harvard University), Sylvia Yanagisako (Stanford University) and Carola Lentz (Mainz University) can be found in Part IX. Stephen Levinson (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) was scheduled to deliver the 10th Goody Lecture on 28 May 2020. Alas, as we finalise this report in April, due to the Covid-19 pandemic we have been obliged to postpone this event. The Goody Lecture for 2021 will be delivered on 24 June by our colleague Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo). Thomas has been a close associate of the department from its earliest days. His appointment in 2017 as an External Scientific Member of this institute is the absolute highlight of the present reporting period. Other milestones of the last three years include the following: • The postdoctoral research group “Financialization,” headed jointly by Chris Hann and Don Kalb, completed its work in 2018–9. An edited volume Financialization: Relational Approaches will be published in Summer 2020 in the Berghahn Books series “Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy.” • The European Research Council project “Realising Eurasia” was extended until June 2020. Its major conferences took place in 2017 and 2019 as planned, in Wittenberg and Halle respectively. Project Coordinator Lale Yalçın-Heckmann is preparing an edited volume Moral Economy at Work: Ethnographic Investiga- tions in Eurasia. • The Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network was launched in October 2017. Besides supporting numerous doctoral and postdoctoral research projects, workshops and conferences have been organized by network members in Halle and Pilsen (2018) and Poznań and Prague (2019). • The Max Planck – Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change (“Max-Cam”) was founded in July 2017 and formally inaugurated by the Vice- Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and the President of the Max Planck Society in Cambridge on 6 March 2018. • In connection with Max-Cam, in 2017 Chris Hann was re-elected to a Fellow- ship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (where he was previously a Fellow between 1980 and 1992). In 2018, as a consequence of Brexit, he applied for and was granted German citizenship. Also in 2018, he was elected a Fellow of Academia Europaea. In 2019, he was awarded the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. • In 2019, ten years after joining our Max Planck Institute, Kirsten Endres was appointed to a professorship [Außerplanmäßige Professur] at the Martin Luther University. Her monograph Market Frictions. Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border was published in 2019 by Berghahn Books in the series “Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy.” ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ vii • Marek Mikuš, until 2018 a member of the “Financialization” group, submitted a successful grant application to the German Research Council and took up a new position in 2019 as Head of the Emmy Noether Research Group, “Peripheral Debt: Money, Risk and Politics in Eastern Europe.” • Minh Nguyen (Research Fellow between 2011 and 2016, now Professor at the University of Bielefeld) was awarded the 2019 Book Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Work for her monograph Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Acknowledgements As always, without the outstanding efficiency of the office team, Berit Eckert, Anke Meyer and Michaela Rittmeyer, this report would never have been completed on time. Kristin Magnucki in Research Coordination took charge of the final formatting; she also designed our cover and all the posters reproduced in the pages that follow. Using this Report This report is produced primarily for the purposes of the Scientific Advisory Board of the MPI, which is scheduled to hold its next meeting in Halle in the Autumn of 2020. According to convention, it opens with a full list of departmental researchers in this review period (2017–2019). It concludes with a comprehensive listing of our publications in this period. This list is structured according to the categories used in previous reports. Books and edited