Chris Hann

Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam, Nation-State and (Post)Socialism

Abstract This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.

Introduction: learning from Polanyi 1

Market and society Markets are networks constituted by acts of buying and selling, usually through the medium of money. For most of history they were kept marginal to the mainstream institutions on which societies were built. But not long ago, and at first only in some parts of the world, markets came to be accepted as central to society, leading to a vigorous political debate, which is ongoing, about the appropriate relationship between the two. It is widely acknowledged that the publication of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations in 1776 provided a charter for “the market” (now often singular) to assume its place as the dominant institution of modern societies. The idea of economy, which started out as a principle of rural household management, now became closely identified with markets, as did the profession of economics which grew up to study them. One man, however, made the modern history of the relationship between market and society his special concern: Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), whose The Great Transformation , published during the Second World War, remains the most powerful indictment of what he considered to be the utopian and ultimately destructive attempt to build society on the basis of self-regulating markets. Our authors therefore consider the relevance of this Central European polymath for their work.

The economistic fallacy and forms of integration under and after socialism

Abstract The concept of ‘the economistic fallacy’, theorized most elaborately in a posthumous work, is central to the entire oeuvre of Karl Polanyi – and to its endemic ambiguities. While previous discussion has focused on capitalist and pre-capitalist societies, this paper explores the alleged fallacy in a socialist framework. Drawing on field-work in a village on the Great Plain, it is argued that the Hungarian variety of ‘market socialism’ brought about a successful balance between the Polanyian ‘forms of integration’, in a conjuncture which stimulated household accumulation and promoted the interests of the rural population as a whole. Since the demise of socialism, this balance has been lost. A renewed economistic fallacy can be detected in the era of neo-liberal capitalism, but in Hungary the scope for household accumulation has greatly diminished, and the high price paid by the countryside is reflected in reactionary political movements. Polanyi sometimes fell into the trap of an anti-market, ‘collectivistic fallacy’. However, if the economistic fallacy was dominant in the ‘nineteenth-century consciousness’ which he lambasted, the twentieth century demonstrated the inadequacy of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist alternatives in their purist forms. The Hungarian case exemplifies the more general challenge: how to institutionalize substantivist mixed economies which allow individuals and households appropriate space for ‘economistic’ behaviour in markets to meet some of their needs, without indulging the fantasy that reduces human motivations to utility maximization and socio-cultural complexity to a generalized market rationality.

Rural transformation on the East Black Sea coast of Turkey: a note on Keyder

This article questions the interpretation of modern Turkish agrarian history advanced in this journal in 1983 by Caglar Key der. The preeminence of petty commodity production does not entail class homogeneity, any more than Lenins analysis of class differentiation in pre‐revolutionary Russia was invalidated by Chayanovs theory of the family‐labour farm. Sharecropping illustrates the structural inequalities which characterise the social relations of Turkish agriculture. These are often founded upon uneven regional development. The argument is supported by fieldwork experience in the tea‐producing region of the Black Sea coast.

A Concept of Eurasia

To imagine Europe and Asia as constituting equivalent “continents” has long been recognized as the ethnocentric cornerstone of a Western, or Euro-American, world view. The amalgam Eurasia corrects this bias by highlighting the intensifying interconnectedness of the entire landmass in recent millennia. This article builds on the work of Jack Goody and others to analyze the unity-in-civilizational-diversity of the Old World. It draws on the substantivist economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi to postulate continuities between ancient ideals of economic embeddedness in the agrarian empires and various forms of socialism in the twentieth century. Today, when the human economy everywhere is again exposed to the domination of the market, the Eurasian dialectic has universal relevance. However, recognition and realization of pan-Eurasian affinities continues to be impeded by geopolitics, and sociocultural anthropology has a long way to go to overcome its Atlantic bias.

Second economy and civil society

If the expansion of the ‘second economy’ in contemporary Hungary is considered in the context of the wider labour market, the second economy can be seen to have brought only limited panaceas to economic problems, whilst accentuating inequalities and moral tensions. But some new forms of work may have very appealing aspects, and the suggestion that an all‐embracing market model is the only alternative to the reform path followed hitherto is untenable. Such calls perpetuate the tradition of East European intellectuals in thrall to the West, and to some rather unhelpful Western ideas at that, including the concept of ‘civil society’. With the best theorists apparently committed to solving the problems of a small East European country in the late twentieth century with preindustrial Western remedies, it is not surprising that there has been little sign to date in Hungary of any rapprochement between intellectuals and the bulk of the working population. It is an error to abstract the second economy from the fi...

Backwardness Revisited: Time, Space, and Civilization in Rural Eastern Europe

Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue duree exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

The fragility of Europe's Willkommenskultur

In this guest editorial Chris Hann considers the refugee route via the Balkans to Germany that opened up in a big way in the summer of 2015. The influx of ‘economic migrants’, as most newcomers are widely perceived, is polarizing opinion throughout the member states of the European Union. Hann also detects a renewal of the old east-west moral geographies, due in part to legacies of the socialist era in eastern Europe and the semi-peripheral condition of the region today for European capitalism. Whereas most anthropologists tend to favor unconstrained mobility and hence call for the abolition of frontiers, Hann suggests that the solution cannot be so simple. Focusing on the interplay of economic and ethical factors, he urges empathy not only with all categories of refugees/migrants but also with the dispossessed in the societies that offer them a ‘welcome’.

Civil Society at the Grass-roots: A Reactionary View

The perspective of a social anthropologist on the large issues addressed in this volume is very different from that of the other contributors. In this chapter I am concerned with the adequacy of concepts such as democratisation and civil society for an understanding of contemporary social transformations in Eastern Europe. Focusing upon a Hungarian community which I have known over the last 15 years, I shall argue that more attention should be paid to the needs and anxieties of citizens as they themselves express them in the context of their experiences under socialism. It seems to me that the discourse of civil society, particularly when linked to an extreme model of market economy, is an ideological product alien to most citizens. Many villagers regret the passing of an age when dogma and ideology were less obtrusive in their community and posed less of a threat to their welfare.

The heart of the matter: Christianity, materiality, and modernity

At the microlevel, this paper focuses on the Roman Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart, noting its spread among Catholic populations in Central Europe whose liturgical tradition is that of Byzantium rather than Rome. At the mesolevel, it places this instance of religious acculturation in the context of long-term economic and political inequalities between East and West. At the macrolevel, implications are outlined for debates concerning civilizational differences and modernity. It is commonly supposed that the latter was initiated when Protestants began a shift toward interior belief based on text, eventually dragging Roman Catholics in their wake, while Eastern Christians have remained largely excluded from both material and ontological progress. The anthropology of Christianity has concentrated on Western-influenced “moderns,” in their many guises, outside the religion’s heartlands. But the take-up of Sacred Heart religiosity among the Greek Catholics of Central Europe suggests that there are no deep ontological barriers within Christianity. Similarly, there are no grounds for dismissing Eastern Christian institutional patterns as premodern; they should be drawn into the comparative framework as a distinctive crystallization of Christian civilization.