Andre Thiemann
Andre Thiemann
QUALIFICATIONS
2016 Ph.D., Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
2009 M.A., Social Anthropology, Free University Berlin
PRINCIPAL RESEARCH INTERESTS
Political Anthropology; Political Ecology; Global Value Chains; Infrastructures of Value; Care, Kinship and the State; Post-Socialist Transformations, Eastern Europe
RESEARCH PROFILE
My current research follows three axes. First, I study how in contemporary Serbia domestic and wild pigs navigate frictions between veterinarization, environmentalism, recreational hunting, African-Swine-Fever, a globalising meat sector, and the resultant, often toxic ecologies on different scales. This research is embedded in an appreciation of the longue-durée of how pigs have shaped politics: since the Serbian nation state emerged in the early 19th century, they have been a major commodity that provided considerable tax revenue.
Second, my ongoing work on global value chains traces how Serbia became a major global producer and exporter of raspberries (and other fruits). I am particularly interested in the underlying infrastructures of value and how these technological, indeed industrial arrangements lead to declarations of affection and kinship between farmers and plants, undermining the Western Nature/Culture divide.
Third, for almost two decades, I have researched state-and non-state politics on several scales and co-developed a relational approach to the state, inspired by my fieldwork and readings of contemporary social scientific research, which I bring into conversation with classic approaches such as the political ethnographies by the Manchester School of Social Anthropology and Strategic-Relational work. I recently published a monograph on this subject.
Books
- The Politics of Relations: How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Edited Special Issues
2024 Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 89(2). (co-editor Christof Lammer)
Journal Articles
2024 Introduction: Infrastructuring Value. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 89(2): 195–218. (co-author Christof Lammer)
2024 Infrastructuring ‘Red Gold’: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 89(2): 289–311.
2024 Fledgling Farms and Failing Health: How the Polypore State Transforms the Multispecies Relations in Serbia’s Raspberry Fields. Journal of Labor & Society, 27(3): 344–369.
2022 Becoming In‐visible: Family Farms in Rural Latvia in the Framework of the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, 44(1): 41–52. (co-author Kristīne Rolle)
2020 The Red Gold of Serbia: A Historical Ethnography of Serbian Raspberry Production for the Global Market. Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography (VWPE) 10.
2019 Moral Appreciation: Caring for Post-Socialist Cows in Contemporary Serbia. Etnofoor, 31(2): 13–31.
2017 Kapitalizam koji se smanjuje, “mlečni putevi”, i moralno uvažavanje “živog sela” u Srbiji [Shrinking capitalism, ‘milky ways’, and the moral appreciation of the ‘living village’ in Serbia]. Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU, 65(2): 387–402.
2014 State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs. Social Analysis, 58(3): 107–123. (co-authors Tatjana Thelen and Duška Roth)
2014 “It was the least painful to go into Greenhouse Production”: The Moral Appreciation of Social Security in Post-Socialist Serbia. Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 1(2): 24–41.
Book Chapters
2020 Commodity Chains. A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 3rd, revised edition, edited by James Carrier. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 368–378.
2018 Underimplementing the Law: Social Work, Bureaucratic Error, and the Politics of Distribution in Postsocialist Serbia. From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe, eds. Heike Karge, Friederike Kind-Kovács & Sara Bernasconi, Budapest, CEU University Press, 293–313.
Past Projects and Grants
2024 Visiting Researcher at the Laboratório de Experimentações Etnográficas, Dept. of Social Sciences, Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, FAPESP Research Grant 24/00730-3 “Materialities of Value: Comparing grassroots economics in the Global South and East”. (with PI Catarina Morawska Vianna)
2022 Plants as/and Humans: Southern Epistemologies and ‘Floral Turn’, Small workshop grant by the Czech Academy of Sciences and the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES). (co-organisers Barbora Kyereko & Luděk Brož)
2022 Baltic Summer School of Anthropology 2022: “Global-to-Local Food chains: Food Sovereignty and Climate Change”, Baltic-German University Liaison Office Project Funding & Cēsis Municipality Summer School support grant. (principal organiser)
2019–22 Comparing Vital Capitals: An anthropological analysis of the global value chains of sea buckthorn and raspberries, Project No.1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271, Agreement No. 9.-14.5/87 funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the State Education Development Agency Republic of Latvia (Principal Investigator)
2017 Navigating the Boundaries of Kinship and Politics, funding for conferences by Fritz Thyssen Foundation (co-organisers Astrid Baerwolf, Nathalie Büsser, Eric Hounshell & Jeannett Martin)
Editorial Work
Ongoing Etnografia Polska, Editorial Board
External Reviewing
Book Proposal and Manuscript Evaluation: Palgrave Macmillan
Journal Articles Manuscript Review: Social Anthropology, Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Comparative Migration Studies (COMS), East European Politics and Society (EEPS), Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Allegra Lab
Invited Talks (last four years)
2024 15. October. Public Lecture: “Infrastructures of Value: The Relational Materiality of Capitalism and its Alternatives in Serbia’s Raspberry Value Chain” at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianopolis, Brazil, Department of Anthropology, Post-graduate Program Social Anthropology
2024 18. September. Public Lecture: “The Anthropology of the State” at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil, CCHLA–Graduate Program in Social Anthropology,
2024 28. August. Public Lecture “Infrastructures of Value in Agriculture: An Anthropological Perspective on the Relational Materiality of Capitalism and its Alternatives” at the Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar), Post-graduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS), Quartas Indomáveis
2022 23. March. Public Lecture “Infrastructuring Raspberries: Agronomists, Cold Chains and the Socialist Base of the ‘Red Gold of Serbia’” in the Riga Stradins University Doctoral Seminar
Conference and Workshop Organisation
2022 21.–22. November. Plants as/and Humans: Southern Epistemologies and ‘Floral Turn’, Prague, workshop by the Czech Academy of Sciences, with the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES). (co-organisers Barbora Kyereko & Luděk Brož)
2022 25.–28. August. Baltic Summer School of Anthropology 2022: “Global-to-Local Food chains: Food Sovereignty and Climate Change” in Cēsis, Latvia, organised with M.A. and PhD students of Riga Stradins and Latvian State University. (principal organiser)
2019 9.–10. May. Workshop Consuming the Unique: Food, Art and the Globalizing Infrastructures of Value at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU Budapest. (co-organiser Daniel Monterescu)
2017 8.–10. May. Navigating the Boundaries of Kinship and Politics, Workshop by the ZiF Research Group “Kinship and Politics”, Center for Interdisciplinary Research Bielefeld. (co-organisers Nathalie Büsser, Eric Hounshell & Jeannett Martin)
Public Outreach & Online Essays
2024 Keebet as Supervisor, or on the Surprises of Ethnographic Theorizing. Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis 56 (3): 670–71.
2024 How Pigs Make Politics in Serbia: An Essay in Historical Ethnography. rootling.place.
2023 Wildschweinen auf der Spur: Deutscher Anthropologe forscht an Tschechischer Akademie der Wissenschaften. Radio Prague International.
2023 Infrastructuring Gens: Materiality, Marx and More-Than-Capitalist Value. boas-blog #Researching Capitalism.
2023 Video Abstract – Introduction: Infrastructuring Value, vimeo.com.
