Andre Thiemann
Andre Thiemann
Research profile
André Thiemann received his PhD in social anthropology in 2016 from the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. After postdoctoral research positions and a visiting professorship at ZiF Bielefeld and at CEU Budapest, he was 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’. A trained social anthropologist with a background in African and Eastern European studies, André explores the political-economic transformations of former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe through ethnography and historical anthropology. In his publications on the state, farming infrastructures, global value chains, multispecies relations with plants (raspberries and sea buckthorn) and animals (cows and pigs), he combines new and historical materialist perspectives to understand the contemporary moment and its possible futures. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC BOAR Project: "Veterinarization of Europe? Hunting for Wild Boar Futures in the Time of African Swine Fever."
Research Outputs
Books and Special Issues
2024 The Politics of Relations: How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia, EASA Series, New York, Oxford: Berghahn (in press).
2023 Thiemann, A., Lammer, Ch., "Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture” in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (published online 12/03/2023).
Peer reviewed journals
2023 Fledgling Farms and Failing Health: How the Polypore State Transforms the Multispecies Relations in Serbia’s Raspberry Fields, In Lin, J., Arnold, D., Nguyen, M. (eds.) Welfare in Crisis: Labor and Social Protection in the Global South, special issue of Journal of Labor and Society, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10129.
2023 Lammer, Ch., Thiemann, A. Introduction: Infrastructuring Value. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 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: Journal of Anthropology, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2163271.
2022 Thiemann, A., Rolle, K. 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.
2019 Moral Appreciation: Caring for Post-Socialist Cows in Contemporary Serbia. Etnofoor 31 (2): 13–31 (revised and expanded version of 2017).
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 State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs. Social Analysis (special issue – Stategraphy) 58 (3): 107-123. with 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
2022 Commodity Chains. In Carrier, J. (ed.) Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 3rd, revised edition; Cheltenham and Northampton (MA): Edward Elgar.
2018 Underimplementing the Law: Social Work, Bureaucratic Error, and the Politics of Distribution in Postsocialist Serbia. In Karge, H., Kind-Kovács, F., Bernasconi, S. (eds.) From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe. eds. Budapest: CEU University Press, 293-313.
Conference presentations (last five years)
2023 Fledgling Farms and Failing Health: Polypore transformations of multispecies labor and the state in Serbia’s raspberry fields, biennial conference of the German Anthropological Association: Contested Knowledge, Anthropological Perspectives, Munich, Germany.
2023 Fledgling farms and failing health: Transformations of multispecies labour and care in the Serbian raspberry fields, conference In the Frictions: Fragments of Care, Health, and Wellbeing in the Balkans, Zadar, Croatia.
2022 Introductory Remarks: Plants as/and Humans. Workshop Plants as/and Humans: Southern Epistemologies and ‘Floral Turn’ (workshop organizer), Prague, Czech Republic.
2022 Introduction: Infrastructures of Value and Infrastructuring Raspberries: Agronomists, Cold Chains, and the Involution of Serbia’s ‘Raspberry Country, panel Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities of Food and Farming at AAA conference “Unsettling Landscapes”, Seattle.
2022 Welcome and Introductory remarks, 6th Baltic Summer School of Anthropology. Global-to-Local Food Chains: Food Sovereignty and Climate Change, in Cēsis, Latvia.
2022 Infrastructures of value: Post-socialist infrastructural involution and the production of Serbian raspberries for global markets, conference Ecologies of Decay: Modern ruination in the global (post)socialist peripheries, SSEES, University College London.
2022 Raspberries across system boundaries: translations of knowledges and technologies during and after socialism, Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft conference: Unsettling the hegemonic gaze: translation and transfer of knowledge in Southeast Europe, Regensburg.
2021 Farmers’ failing health and FDI: A Serbian case study in public health and welfare transformations, conference Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in Emerging Economies of the Global South, ZiF Bielefeld.
2021 Infrastructuring Raspberries: Agronomists, Cold Chains and the Socialist Base of the ‘Red Gold of Serbia’, conference: Thirty years of capitalist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe: Inequalities and Resistance, Cluj, Romania.
2021 Becoming in-visible: small family farms in rural Latvia in the framework of the National and EU Agriculture Policy, PLACES conference panel: Flying Ideas, Flying Circuses and Flying Cars: Anthropological Approaches to Techniques and Technologies in the Current World, Riga, Latvia.
2020 The ‘red gold of Serbia’ under ‘environmental’ duress: Towards an economic anthropology of the global value chain of raspberries, Workshop of the “Economic Anthropology” Group of the German Anthropological Association: Economic Anthropology and the Sense of Environmental Crisis, Cologne, Germany.
2020 Infrastructuring the state: Cold chains beyond the Cold War and the ‘red gold of Serbia’ (raspberries), EASA conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
2019 The sweat of the raspberry plantation, pecha kucha presentation at the founding meeting of the EASA network Environmental Anthropology, Cologne, Germany.
2019 Caring States, Ambivalent Families: How the Gift of State-paid Senior Home Care Reconfigures the Internal State-Society Boundary in Serbia, joint conference of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA): “Changing Climates”, Vancouver, Canada.
2019 Transversal rebellion: Re-aligning the scales of statecraft through football, Swiss Anthropological Society Conference The Global as Method – Ethnographic Scales in the 21st century, Geneva.
2019 Infrastructuring Stategraphy: Pipes and the Relational Anthropology of the State, founding meeting of EASA network Anthropologies of the State “Genealogies and Positionalities of Thinking the State”, Leiden, Netherlands.
2019 Football and transversal politics: A central Serbian perspective on the Anthropology of the Local State, conference of the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) “The End of Negotiations“, Constance, Germany.
2019 Humanitarian afterlife: Bridging the scales of the Local State in Serbia, 26th International Conference of Europeanists at Juan Carlos III. University: “Sovereignties in Contention – Nations, Regions, and Citizens in Europe”, Madrid, Spain.
2019 Infrastructuring Raspberries: The Politics and Poetics of Creating Serbia’s Vital Capital, Workshop “Consuming the unique: food, art and the globalizing infrastructures of value” at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Budapest, Hungary.
Organising committee (last five years)
2022 Plants as/and Humans: Southern Epistemologies and ‘Floral Turn’, 2-day workshop in Prague, Czech Republic (2022/11/21-22).
2022 Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities of Food and Farming, panel at AAA conference “Unsettling Landscapes”, Seattle (2022/11/11).
2022 Global-to-Local Food Chains: Food Sovereignty and Climate Change, 6th Baltic Summer School of Anthropology, 4-day summer school in Cēsis, Latvia (lead organiser) (2022/08/25-28).
2021 Flying Ideas, Flying Circuses and Flying Cars: Anthropological Approaches to Techniques and Technologies in the Current World, panel at PLACES conference, Riga, Latvia (2021/03/25).
2019 Consuming the unique: food, art and the globalizing infrastructures of value, 2-day workshop at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology CEU Budapest, Hungary (lead organiser) (2019/05/09-10).
2022 925/2022/2.2-14/2022/9 Project funding by the Baltic-German University Liaison Office.
2020 Elinor Ostrom Fellow at ZiF, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld (12/2020-03/2022).
2019 1.1.1.2/VIAA/2/18/271, Agreement No. 9.-14.5/87 “Vital Capitals”, Post-doctoral Research Aid by the European Regional Development Fund and the State Education and Development Agency of the Republic of Latvia (08/2019-07/2022).
2019 CEU Conferences and Academic Events Fund, Central European University, Budapest.
2017 Junior Core Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, Central European University, Budapest (10/2017-06/2018).
2017 conference grant Thyssen Foundation, Research Field “State, Economy, Society”.
2009 Ph.D. Stipend Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (04/2009-03/2013).
Video
2023 Lammer, Ch., Thiemann, A. (14/03/2023) “Introduction: Infrastructures of Value”, 2min 32sec video abstract on Vimeo: Video Abstract - Introduction: Infrastructuring Value on Vimeo.
Online Essays and Working Papers
2023 Lammer, Ch., Thiemann, A. (20/06/2023) Infrastructuring Gens: Materiality, Marx and More-Than-Capitalist Value, boas-blog “Researching Capitalism” https://boasblogs.org/researchingcapitalism/infrastructuring-gens/.
2020 The Red Gold of Serbia: A Historical Ethnography of Serbian Raspberry Production for the Global Market. Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography 10.
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/.
Book Reviews
2020 Review of Thelen, Tatjana and Erdmute Alber (ed.). 2018. Reconnecting Kinship and State, Antropos 115, 281–282.
2019 Review of David W. Montgomery (ed.) 2018. Everyday Life in the Balkans, Südosteuropa 67 (2), 294–296.
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): 130–133. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ajec/27/2/ajec.27.issue-2.xml.
Miscellaneous
2014 Häberlein, T., Thiemann, A. (21/05/2014)Conference Report: Doing Politics – Making Kinship: Back Towards a Future Anthropology of Social Organisation and Belonging. 13.02.2014 –15.02.2014, Berlin, H-Soz-Kult. http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5375.
- with Polyphonic Editing Team (eds.) 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.
- Introduction, in: 6th Days of Polyphonic Anthropology, 11–22.
- Framing Polyphony 6: Beyond a ‘Quick and Dirty’ Approach, in 6th Days of Polyphonic Anthropology, 32–44.
