Chris Hann (born 4 August 1953) is a British social anthropologist who has done field research in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe (especially in Hungary and Poland) and the Turkic-speaking world (Black Sea coast and Xinjiang, N-W China).
After holding university posts in Cambridge and Canterbury, UK, Hann has worked since 1999 in Germany as one of the founding Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale.
[2][3] Hann won a Welsh Foundation Scholarship to study politics, philosophy, and economics at Jesus College, Oxford University, graduating with a first class degree in 1974.
Apart from the insights gained into the dysfunctionality of Polish socialism, working in a region inhabited by an east Slav minority allowed Hann to develop new interests in ethnicity and national identity.
[6][7] Hann is married to 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.
Hann's main contribution to the Turkey project focused on smallholders who gave up subsistence farming in order to grow tea as a cash crop in the Rize region.
[8] Research in all four field sites (Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Xinjiang) began while Hann was based in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology.
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.
In his personal contributions to this work Hann frequently draws on his knowledge of the Greek Catholics of Central Europe to critique a Western, essentially Protestant, bias in the Anglophone “anthropology of Christianity”.
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.