Hans Steinmuller

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, Communities of Complicity. Related research interests have to do with the meanings of cynicism, irony, and justice 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 The Ends of Egalitarianism and another one entitled Governing Opacity.

Hans is the convenor of the MSc programme China in Comparative Perspective and editor of Social Analysis.