André Thiemann
- thiemann (@zav) eu.cas.cz
- eu.avcr.cz/en/about-us/staff/andre-thiemann/
André is a social anthropologist exploring the political-economic transformations of former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe in the Capitalocene, through ethnographic research on the ecological relations between vibrant matter, plants, animals and people.
https://rsu-lv.academia.edu/AndreThiemann?from_navbar=true
https://www.univie.ac.at/cast/members/andre-thiemann/
André works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences in the BOAR project. A trained social anthropologist, he previously held fellowships at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research ZIF Bielefeld and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, was Visiting Professor of Social Anthropology at the Central European University Budapest and worked as Visiting Lead Researcher at Riga Stradiņš University, where he led the project ‘Comparing vital capitals: An anthropological analysis of the global value chains of sea buckthorn and raspberries’.
After finishing his studies at Free University Berlin with a thesis on Nigerian markets, André did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle with a thesis on everyday state relations in Serbia. His research interests include political economy, kinship, relatedness and care, ecological processes, multispecies relationships, global value chains, infrastructures and the state. Inspired by feminist science, technology and society scholars, André explores these issues by combining new and historical materialist perspectives, working towards a deeper, critical-materialist understanding of the contemporary moment and its possible futures.
At BOAR, André studies how wayward domestic and wild pigs in Serbia create frictions between veterinarization, environmentalism, recreational hunting, African-Swine-Fever-culling, and a meat sector moving unevenly from extensive pannage and garden pig rearing practices towards industrial-scale pig farming (which produces toxic ecologies on an entirely new scale). One focus will be on the metabolic triangle between plants, pigs and humans, such as the competition between human and pig mammals over Serbia’s raspberries – a major post-socialist cash crop.
Education
2016 | Dr. phil. in Social Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
2009 | Magister in Social Anthropology, Free University Berlin, Germany
Selected publications
Peer-reviewed journal articles
2023 | with Lammer, Christof. Introduction: Infrastructuring Value. Ethnos: 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2023.2180063.
2023 | Infrastructuring “Red Gold”: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s Raspberry Country. Ethnos: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2163271.
2022 | with Kristīne Rolle. 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. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12286.
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. Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU 65 (2): 387-402. (Shrinking Capitalism, ‘Milky Ways’ and the Moral Appreciation of the ‘Living Village’)
2014 | with Tatjana Thelen and Duška Roth. State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs. Social Analysis (SI Stategraphy: Towards a Relational Anthropology of the State) 58 (3): 107–123
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
Books
Caring States: How Politics, Infrastructures, and Welfare Relations Transform the State in Serbia (monograph under contract with Berghahn Press).
2007 | with Polyphonic Editing Team. 6th Days of Polyphonic Anthropology: Symbols and Rituals of Statehood and Resistance. A Documentation of Collective Field Research Done by Young Anthropologists from Berlin and Warsaw. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Printing House
Peer-reviewed chapters in edited volumes
2022 | Commodity Chains. In Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 3rd, revised edition. Ed. J. Carrier; Cheltenham and Northampton (MA): Edward Elgar, 368–78
2018 | Underimplementing the Law: Social Work, Bureaucratic Error, and the Politics of Distribution in Postsocialist Serbia. In: From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe. Eds. H. Karge, Heike, F. Kind-Kovács, Friederike & S. Bernasconi. Budapest: CEU University Press, 293–313
Working papers / Reviews / other
2020 | The Red Gold of Serbia: A Historical Ethnography of Serbian Raspberry Production for the Global Market. Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography 10
2019 – vlogs, blogs and research activities (https://www.rsu.lv/en/project/comparing-vital-capitals-anthropological-analysis-global-value-chains-sea-buckthorn-and)
2020 | Review of Thelen, Tatjana and Erdmute Alber (ed.). 2018. Reconnecting Kinship and State, Antropos 115: 281–82
2019 | Review of David W. Montgomery (ed.) 2018. Everyday Life in the Balkans, Südosteuropa 67 (2): 294–96
2019 | Review of Č. Brković (2017), Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Oxford: Berghahn), Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 27 (2): 130–33 https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ajec/27/2/ajec.27.issue-2.xml.
2018 | Of Refugees and States: How Vernacular Humanitarianism Draws Together Disparate Scales of Statecraft, Public Anthropologist Journal Blog (8.10.2018) http://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2018/10/08/of-refugees-and-states-how-vernacular-humanitarianism-draws-together-disparate-scales-of-statecraft/.
2017 | Towards a relational anthropology of the state, Allegra Lab (9.12.2017) http://allegralaboratory.net/towards-a-relational-anthropology-of-the-state/
2014 | Florian Bieber (University of Graz) interviews Andre Thiemann (MPI Halle) about his research article “It was the least painful to go into Greenhouse Production” 11 min., (13.11.2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjLlcTq4r40
2014 | with Dr Tabea Häberlein. Conference Report: Doing Politics – Making Kinship: Back Towards a Future Anthropology of Social Organisation and Belonging. 13.02.2014 –15.02.2014, Berlin, in: H-Soz-Kult (21.05.2014). http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5375.
2007 | Introduction, in: Polyphonic Editing Team. 6th Days of Polyphonic Anthropology: Symbols and Rituals of Statehood and Resistance. A Documentation of Collective Field Research Done by Young Anthropologists from Berlin and Warsaw. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Printing House: 11–22
2007 | Framing Polyphony 6: Beyond a ‘Quick and Dirty’ Approach, in Polyphonic Editing Team. 6th Days of Polyphonic Anthropology: Symbols and Rituals of Statehood and Resistance. A Documentation of Collective Field Research Done by Young Anthropologists from Berlin and Warsaw. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Printing House: 32–44