Recognizing Eurasia. Empire and Connectivity during Three Millennia

Abstract
Presenting both macro- and micro-level approaches, exploring maritime as well as terrestrial networks of communication, and investigating diverse forms of political society from the agrarian empires of the ancient world to the People’s Republic of China in our era, the essays in this special issue are brought together in a frame that counters the continuing weight of Eurocentrism by drawing attention to long-term connectivities and commonalities across Eurasia. The authors (representing multiple nationalities and theoretical traditions) work in social anthropology, area studies, history, and (historical and political) sociology.

Biographical Note
Prof. Dr. Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany)
Born and brought up in Wales, Chris Hann studied in Oxford (BA 1974 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics) and Cambridge (PhD, Social Anthropology, 1979). He stayed on in Cambridge as a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, and later he became a lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology. Between 1992 and joining the Max Planck Society in 1999, he was professor of social anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He retains the title honorary professor at Kent, and also at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and Leipzig University.
His main research interests date back to his undergraduate days and his first fieldwork projects in rural Hungary and Poland. He followed up with a comparative investigation of smallholders in a capitalist context on the Black Sea coast of Turkey (with Dr. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, nowadays based at the University of Copenhagen). His work on religion derives primarily from his encounter with the Greek Catholic minority in Poland, an interest that later expanded to eastern Christians in general. After 2006, he resumed fieldwork in Xinjiang in the form of a contribution to the departmental Focus Group investigating social support and kinship in China and Vietnam (again jointly with Dr. Ildikó Bellér-Hann). He maintains strong interests in comparative economic organization, in part through collaborative projects with Catherine Alexander, Stephen Gudeman, Keith Hart, Don Kalb, and Jonathan Parry. All of this work is designed to break down disciplinary boundaries and contribute to a better understanding of Eurasia in world history. The concept of Eurasia is the principal frame for all research in his department.