Videos about our researchers, their projects and their books

Colonial Encounters. From Caliban and Owain Glyndŵr to Ilham Tohti and Petra
Köpping more

In this video Jovan Maud talks with the editors of the book Monks, Money and Morality: Christoph Brumann, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko and Beata Świtek. more

On 7 July 2021 three internationally renowned scholars from the disciplines of history, archaeology, and socio-cultural anthropology delivered plenary lectures to open the conference ‘Society and Morality in Eurasia: From Prehistory to the Present Day’. more

In the first episode of our new video series Read On, Christoph Brumann introduces his new book, “The best we share: nation, culture and world-making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena”, in which he explores the World Heritage Convention adopted by Unesco member states in 1972. more

On 13 November 2019 the historian Wolfgang Reinhard gave the opening talk entitled “The Representation of Power and the Power of Representation” at the Autumn School of the “International Max Planck Research School for the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia” (IMPRS ANARCHIE). more

On 21 and 22 November 2019, the Max Planck Research Group “How ‘Terrorists’ Learn” organised the workshop “Is Terrorist Learning Different?”. The keynote speech by the institute’s founding director, Günther Schlee, on “Studying Evil” invited participants to reflect on the opportunities and limitations as well as on the ethics of researching the subject of terrorist learning. more

From 11 to 13 December 2019 a conference entitled “Work, Ethics and Freedom” took place at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. It was opened with a keynote by Wolfgang Streeck, Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, on different configurations in the relationship between universalism and particularism, in theory and the real world. more

“Social Relations of the Capitalocene: Work, Value(s) and Personhood Below the Commanding Heights,” was the last major Workshop of Chris Hann’s ERC project “Realising Eurasia: Civilization and Moral Economy in the 21st Century”. Organised by Hann and project coordinator Lale Yalçın-Heckmann  and taking place on 23-25 January 2019, the goal on this occasion was to draw out some of the larger implications of the empirical and theoretical research carried out in the team since 2014.
The first keynote speaker Gareth Dale emphasized the novelty of capitalist temporality in world history. Polanyi’s mantle was adopted more explicitly by the other keynote speakers, Ayşe Buğra (Boğaziçi, Istanbul) and Mark Harvey (Essex). The former applied the Polanyian notion of reciprocity to shed light on contemporary state-business relations in Turkey. Harvey questioned how any economy could possibly be described as disembedded. more

For many years people fleeing from war zones and crisis areas have looked to Europe in search of refuge. But because an application for asylum can only be filed in person within the territory of an EU member state, thousands of individuals embark on dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean or the Balkans. One possibility that could enable a less risky passage to Europe would be to issue humanitarian visas. What would the humanitarian visa mean in practice and does it offer a meaningful alternative to current EU asylum and migration policy? This question was the topic of a conference entitled “Humanitarian visas and the external dimension of the EU migration and asylum policy,” which took place on 17 and 18 May 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. more

Author: Carolin Görzig
Length: 12 minutes more

Speaker: Victor Shnirelman
Length: 63 minutes more

Author: Dominik Müller
Length: 13 minutes

Author: Christoph Brumann
Length: 14 minutes

Author: Marie-Claire Foblets
Length: 15 minutes

Autor: Chris Hann
Spieldauer: 12 Minuten

Author: Günther Schlee
Length: 17 minutes

Author: Chris Hann
Length: 13 minutes