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Halle / Saale 2007ISSN 1615-4568Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, PO Box 110351,06017 Halle / Saale, Phone: +49 (0)345 2927- 0, Fax: +49 (0)345 2927- 402,http://www.eth.mpg.de, e-mail: workingpaper@eth.mpg.de
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 a
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 and
 
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entral
 
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Anthropology’s Multiple Temporalities and its Future in Central andEastern Europe
Chris Hann
1
 (with comments from Milena Benovska, Aleksandar Boškovi
ć
 , Micha
ł 
Buchowski, Don Kalb, Juraj Podoba, David Z. Scheffel, Petr Skalník, Michael Stewart, Zden
ě 
k Uherek, Katherine Verdery and a reply from Chris Hann)
Abstract
Hann’s essay takes a parochial academic anniversary in Britain as an occasion to reflect on ensuingchanges of paradigm in social anthropology, notably the rejection of evolutionism and the neglectof history that accompanied the ‘fieldwork revolution’ led by Bronis
ł
aw Malinowski. In the light of this discussion it is argued that the ‘anthropology of postsocialism’ of recent years should notcontent itself with ethnographic studies of transformation but would benefit from engaging moreseriously with multiple layers of history as well as with adjacent social sciences. It is further arguedthat social and cultural anthropologists should form a common scholarly community with the‘national ethnographers‘, since these two styles of enquiry complement each other; but suchintegrated communities remain rare, in Britain no less than in Central and Eastern Europe. These propositions are discussed from a variety of standpoints by ten colleagues. Finally, Hann respondsto their comments and criticisms and restates his position on the central intellectual andinstitutional issues.
2
 
1
Chris Hann is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, PO Box 110351, 06017 Halle/ Saale,Germany, e-mail: hann@eth.mpg.de.
2
The lead essay by Chris Hann was commissioned by the Editors of 
Sociologický
č 
asopis/Czech Sociological Review
tointroduce a special issue of studies of postsocialism. After receiving his text the Editors decided to send it out tonumerous colleagues for comment, and Hann was given an opportunity to respond to these responses. The special issuewas published in Czech in February 2007 as Vol. 43, No. 1 of the journal. This Working Paper provides a full translationof the exchanges in that issue. Thanks to all the commentators for agreeing to this speedy dissemination of an Englishversion, to Marek Skovajsa and his co-Editors for their authorization, and to Robin Cassling, who translated thecomments of Juraj Podoba and Zden
ě
k Uherek and the statement by Ivo Budil (see Appendix). These translations and theorganization and editing of the whole debate in
Sociologický
č 
asopis
were sponsored by the Institute of Sociology,Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (www.soc.cas.cz), and the International Visegrad Fund, Bratislava(www.visegradfund.org).
 
 2
I
A century has passed since James Frazer received an offer in 1907 from the University of Liverpool to take up the world’s first university chair in social anthropology (Ackerman 1987: 207-8). Frazer was the archetypal ‘armchair anthropologist’: an erudite classical scholar whoseknowledge of obscure ethnographic details was encyclopedic. It stemmed almost entirely from books and the reports of travellers and missionaries. His anthropology, like that of the greatmajority of his contemporaries, was self-consciously evolutionist. Frazer’s distinctive contribution,most famously in
The Golden Bough
(1890), lay in the field of belief and knowledge: he outlined asteady path of progression from magic to religion and then eventually to science. He would surely be astonished at the topics addressed by today’s social anthropologists. As a scholar who took it for granted that the discipline was concerned with ‘savages’ and with the broad sweep of humanhistory, he might be especially surprised that many anthropologists have become specialists in theanalysis of social change as it unfolds before our eyes in the contemporary world.Studies of the postsocialist transformation of Eastern Europe of the kind presented in this specialissue (of the
Czech Sociological Review
) provide a good illustration of how far anthropologistshave come: their work is increasingly read by other social scientists in search of answers to puzzlesleft unresolved by the standard models of ‘transition’ in large disciplines such as economics, political science and sociology. It is not my task to discuss the papers in this special issue: theyspeak for themselves, and in any case some of the key themes are highlighted by the Editors intheir introduction. Rather, I would like to use the open-ended invitation that has been extended tome to offer some general reflections on social anthropology’s varying engagement with questionsof history and evolution. I hope that these reflections will help to place the contributions collectedhere in a wider intellectual context. I shall argue that there will always be a need for fine-grainedethnographic observation; the need is especially great in times of major social change, when theinsights of ethnographers may be especially valuable in complementing, re-shaping andoccasionally correcting the paradigms used in other disciplines. So let me make it absolutely plainat the start: ethnographic studies of the recent transformations in the former socialist countries areindispensable. This is the major priority of my department at the Max Planck Institute for SocialAnthropology in Halle.But I also want to argue that good ethnography forms only one part of social anthropology. Asthe second decade of ‘transition’ draws to a close it is time that the anthropologists working in thisregion begin to take up temporalities other than the postsocialist present. At the very least thisshould mean paying careful attention to how socialist-era history has impacted on the most recentdevelopments. It could also mean something more ambitious, e.g. assessing the significance of socialism in the long-term history of Eurasia. However history is brought in, this expansion of thetemporal framework will raise crucial theoretical issues that have not yet been adequately faced bythe ethnographers of transformation.These thoughts lead me in the concluding section to pontificate about the relationship betweensocial anthropology and certain neighbouring disciplines. The relationship to sociology is evidentlystrong in the Czech case (or else this special issue would never have come about). But I am moreconcerned with the relationship to the field of 
etnologia
,
národopis
,
 folklor 
etc. Of course it is notmy job to advise colleagues in other places how to design their institutes, appoint their staff andorganize their seminars. Nonetheless I shall try to explain why, despite the anguish this stancecauses to some of my closest friends in the region, I think that it is generally a mistake to attempt to
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