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Room No

OLD.6.13

Office Hours

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Languages

English, German, Mandarin, Spanish

Key Expertise

China

About me

Hans Steinmüller has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. In Hubei, he investigated the major changes that occurred in family lives, in the world of work, in ritual and rural development. The contradictions in all of these fields between local practice and official discourse is the main topic of his first monograph, . Related research interests have to do with the meanings of , , and in Chinese politics.

His second empirical project deals with the history of militarism in the highlands of Myanmar. The main interest here is to understand sovereignty in the Wa State, a de-facto state governed by an insurgent army. On the basis of long-term fieldwork in the Wa State, he writes about the relations between village and army, military economies, and para-nationalism.

Beyond his ethnographic work, Hans is interested in general theoretical questions in Social Anthropology, including attention, care, legibility, and opacity. He has explored some of these themes in recent collaborations, including one special issue on and another one entitled .

Hans is the convenor of the MSc programme and editor of .

Expertise Details

China; political and economic anthropology; moralities and ethics; irony; ritual; gambling

Books

2017 with Stephan Feuchtwang. . London: World Scientific.

2013. . New York: Berghahn.

Edited Works

2023. Special Section , China Quarterly 254, 301-365.

2023 ed. with Natalia Buitron. Special Issue . Ethnos 88:4, 677-836.

2020 ed. with Natalia Buitron. Special Issue . L’Homme 236, 5-158.

2017 ed. with Susanne Brandtstädter. . London: Routledge.

2016 ed. with Susanne Brandtstädter. . London: Routledge.

Articles

2025. , in Di Wu, Ed Pulford and Andrea Pia (eds.) China as Context, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Submitted April 2024

2025. with Liliana Arias and Hans Caycedo. , in Lucia Michelutti et al. (eds.) Stories of Extortion, London: UCL Press.

2024. , in Chris Hann and Deborah James (eds.) One Hundred Years of Argonauts: Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology, New York: Berghahn, 298-324.

2023. with Stephan Feuchtwang. , in Mathijs Pelkmans and Harry Walker (eds.) How People Compare. Abingdon: Routledge, 172-189.

2023 with Natalia Buitron. . Ethnos 88:4, 677-701.

2023. . Ethnos 88:4, 774-96.

2023 with Jiazhi Fengjiang. . Ethnos 88:1, 109-129.

2022. . Comparative Studies in Society and History 64:4, 910-33.

2022. . Journal of Historical Sociology 35:1, 69-82.

2022. positions: asia critique 4:30, 895-921.

2022. . Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 40:1, 104-120.

2021 with Natalia Buitron. . Religion and Society 12, 39-55.

2021. . Nations and Nationalism 27:3, 880-94.

2021. . Social Anthropology 29:3, 686-700.

2021 with Andrew Ong. . Critique of Anthropology 41:1, 65-87.

2020 with Natalia Buitron. . L’Homme 236, i-xxxvi.

2020. . Social Anthropology 28:1, 121-35.

2019. . Anthropology of This Century 25.

2019. . Comparative Studies in Society and History 61:3, 508-34.

2016. . Anthropos 111:2, 619-28.

2015. . Social Analysis 59:4, 83-100.

2015 with Tan Tongxue. . Anthropology Today 31:2, 15-18.

2014. . Anthropology of This Century 11.

2013. . Terrain 61, 40-53.

2011. . Critique of Anthropology 31:1, 21-42.

2011. . Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17:2, 263-80.

2011. . The Australian Journal of Anthropology 22:2, 220-35.

2011 with Wu Fei. Anthropology Today 27:1, 10-13.

2010. . American Ethnologist 37:3, 539-49.

2010. . Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 58: 81–96.

My research

Book

Author(s) Hans Steinmüller

ISSN/ISBN 978-0-85745-890-2

See more research

91探花

Dr Hans Steinm眉ller

Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology