Chris Hann is one of the most distinguished social anthropologists of our time. He has done fieldwork in the socialist and post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Poland. He has also worked in the Turkic-speaking world, on the Black Sea coast and in Xinjiang in north-western China. On 8–9 October 2026 he visited the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences as part of the international project Cosmopolitanism and Tianxia: Toward the Shared Grounds of Mutually Beneficial and Respectful Understanding in Global Political Thought.
Chris Hann studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and his work has long focused on where anthropology and economics meet. He is the founding director, now emeritus, of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Over two days at the Institute of Philosophy SAS, he led seminars that critically examined the concepts of cosmopolitanism and tianxia.
On Thursday 8 October 2026, Chris Hann looked at the Chinese concept of tianxia (“all under heaven”) from an anthropologist’s perspective. His fieldwork with his wife, Ildikó Bellér-Hann, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region led to the book The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs between Civilizations (2020). The Chinese state’s stance towards the Uyghur population, which is mostly agrarian and Muslim, has raised many questions. They concern identity, national and religious belonging and, above all, cultural heritage. Should tradition give way to modernisation and progress? Must a “backward” way of life be abandoned for a modern one even when the people themselves do not see it that way? And what is the role of national minorities and small nations in general? Insisting on “Uyghurness” or “Slovakness” means using a language spoken by only a few million people. Does that reduce the community’s chances of a successful life? Or does it enrich cultural life, as modern movements for national emancipation believed? Based on his research, Hann concluded that it is always right to stand on the side of real, concrete people.
On Friday 9 October 2026, Chris Hann presented his reading of Steven Lukes’s The Diversity of Morals (2025). As an anthropologist, he raised concerns about how abstract and universal cosmopolitanism is, since “whoever belongs everywhere belongs nowhere”. Brice Cantrell (University of Szeged) and Laura Kladeková (Institute of Philosophy SAS) responded to Hann with contributions grounded in social and cultural reality. They aimed to connect the worlds of literature and philosophy with today’s pressing issues: value pluralism, mass migration, minorities and the many forms of polarisation. They placed these issues in the context of cultural memory and forgetting, perspectivism, and building bridges of empathy.