Comparing Socialisms: From tractors in Central Europe to rice-burning in Ghana (via the Mediterranean)
Event: Comparing Socialisms: From tractors in Central Europe to rice-burning in Ghana (via the Mediterranean)
Date: On Thursday 23 April 2026
Time: 16:30 - 17:30
Venue: Valletta Campus Library
This lecture will outline a comparative anthropological approach to the study of socialism.
The first part will draw on the speaker's early (doctoral and postdoctoral) field research in Hungary and Poland, focusing on property relations in the transformation of backward rural societies under nominally Marxist-Leninist regimes.
The last part will widen coverage to consider the "socialist impulse" in a context not conventionally considered socialist at all, namely West Africa, where Jack Goody drew analogies with sorcery accusations. In between, variants of what Goody termed "electoral socialism" can be found in the Mediterranean.
This lecture is not intended as an antiquarian exercise: the socialist impulse remains indispensable for addressing contemporary threats to the planet.
About the Speaker
Chris Hann (born 1953, Cardiff) was Welsh Foundation Scholar at Jesus College, Oxford, 1971-1974. His PhD (Cambridge 1979) was a study of socio-economic change in rural Hungary. Later field research took him to Poland, Turkey (East Black Sea coast) and China (Xinjiang). His interests include economic anthropology and the historical anthropology of Eurasia. Between 1999 and 2021, he was a Founding Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale).
This is the 5th Lecture given in commemoration of Prof. Sir Jack Goody who donated his extensive library to the University which is housed in Valletta.
