Tatjana Thelen

Tatjana Thelen is currently a full professor in the department for Social and Cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna. Previously, she has held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Zurich. Her research has centred around negotiations of rights and responsibilities to care in boundary work between state and kinship.

Title: Care, Kinship, State: (Re)producing belonging and difference

Keywords: Kinship, Law and the State, Economy, Property and Social Change, Care, Difference and Social Security, (Post-)Socialist Societies, Relational Theory

Selected publications

• 2018   Reconnecting State and Kinship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (together with Erdmute Alber). http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15744.html, https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/reconnecting-state-and-kinship
• 2018   Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. (revised reprint, together with Larissa Vetters and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann). http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/ThelenStategraphy
• 2013   The Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Shared Parentage, Experience and Exchange. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (together with Erdmute Alber and Cati Coe).
• 2012   Rural realities in the post-socialist space. Journal of Rural Studies 28 (2). (together with Rebecca Kay and Sergei Shubin).
• 2010   Parenting after the Century of the Child: Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses. Aldershot: Ashgate (together with Haldis Haukanes).
• 2009   Social Security in Religious Networks. Anthropological Perspectives on New Risks and Ambivalences. New York, Oxford: Berghahn (together with Carolin Leutloff-Grandits and Anja Peleikis).
• 2007   Social Security and Care After Socialism, Focaal 50 (2). (together with Rosie Read).

Journal articles (peer reviwied)

• 2019   Political belonging through elder care: Temporalities, representations and mutuality. Anthropological Theory 19 (2): 279-299. (together with Cati Coe).* First Published 2017: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1463499617742833
• 2019 Culture/s or Ontology/ies as Critique? A Reply to Caroline Arni (in German). In: Historische Anthropologie 28 (2): 274-280.
• 2015   Care as Social Organisation: Creating, Maintaining and dissolving significant relations. Anthropological Theory 15 (4): 497-515.*
• 2014   Introduction to Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Approach to Anthropology of the State. Social Analysis 58 (3): 1-19. (together with Larissa Vetters and Keebet von Benda- Beckmann).*
• 2014   State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs. Social Analysis 58 (3): 107-123. (together with Andre Thiemann and Duska Vranjes).*
• 2012   Rural realities in post-socialist space: Introduction. Journal of Rural Studies 28 (2): 55-62. (together with Rebecca Kay and Sergei Shubin).*
• 2012   Comparative Anthropology: Achievements, Failures and Future. Ethnologie Francaise 42 (2): 385-391. (together with Andre Gingrich).
• 2012   “The natural order of things” and State Policies: Parenting in eastern Germany after 1989. Ethnologie francaise 42 (1): 45-54.*
• 2012   Economic concepts, common grounds and ‘new’ diversity in the Anthropology of postsocialism. Reply to Katherine Verdery and Elizabeth Cullen Dunn Critique of Anthropology 32 (1): 87–90.
• 2011   Shortage, fuzzy property and other dead ends in anthropological analysis of (post) socialism. Critique of Anthropology 31 (1): 43-61.* Reply by Katherine Verdery and Elizabeth Cullen Dunn Critique of Anthropology 31 (2): 251-255.
• 2011   ‘The sleep has been rubbed from their eyes’: social citizenship and the reproduction of local hierarchies in rural Hungary and Romania. Citizenship Studies 15 (3-4): 513-527. (together with Stefan Dorondel, Alexandra Szöke and Larissa Vetters).*
• 2010   Self Sacrifice or natural donation? A life course perspective on grandmothering in New Zagreb (Croatia) and East Berlin (Germany). Horizontes Antropologicos 16 (34): 427-452. (together with Carolin Leutloff-Grandits).*
• 2007   Introduction. Social security and care after socialism: Reconfigurations of public and private. Focaal 50: 3-18. (together with Rosie Read).*
• 2007   “Veteran Care” Shifting provision, needs, and meanings of enterprise-centred pensioner care in eastern Germany. In: Social security and care after socialism: Reconfigurations of public and private. Focaal 50: 35-50.*
• 2006   Law and mutual assistance in families: A comparison of socialist legacies in Hungary and eastern Germany. Journal of Legal Pluralism 53-54: 177-207.*
• 2006   Lunch in an East German Enterprise – Differences in Eating Habits as Symbols of Collective Identities. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 131: 51-70.*
• 2005   Violence and social (dis)continuity: comparing collectivization in two East European villages. Social History 30 (1): 25-44.*

Handbooks and encyclopaedia articles

• 2019   Ethnographic Methods. In: Raj Kollmorgen, Wolfgang Merkel and Hans-Jürgen Wagener (eds.): Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201-211.
• 2018   Socialism: Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. In: Hilary Callan (ed.): International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1836
• 2018   Property. In: Hilary Callan (ed.): International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2349

Book chapters (peer reviewed)

• 2018   Reconnecting State and Kinship: Temporalities, Scales, Classifications In: Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber (eds.): Reconnecting State and Kinship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (together with Erdmute Alber), 1-35.*
• 2018   Stategraphy: Relational Modalities, Boundary Work, and Embeddedness. In: Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. (revised reprint, together with Larissa Vetters and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann), 1-19.*
• 2015   Care of the Elderly, Migration, Community: Explorations from Rural Romania. In: Erdmute Alber and Heike Drotbohm (eds.): Anthropological Perspectives on Care: Work, Kinship, and the Life-Course. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 137-155.*
• 2013   The Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Explorations in Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange. In: Erdmute Alber, Cati Coe and Tatjana Thelen (eds.): The Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-28. (together with Cati Coe and Erdmute Alber).*
• 2010   Two German localities: Introduction In: Patrick Heady and Peter Schweitzer (eds.): Family, Kinship and State in Contemporary Europe: The View from Below: Nineteen Localities. Vol. 2. Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 225-231.
• 2010   Navigating Kinship relations in eastern Germany: love, care and limits. In: Patrick Heady and Peter Schweitzer (eds.): Family, Kinship and State in Contemporary Europe: The View from Below: Nineteen Localities. Vol. 2. Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 232-267. (together with Astrid Baerwolf).
• 2010   Parenting After the Century of the Child: Introduction. In: Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes (eds.): Parenting After the Century of the Child: Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1-10. (together with Haldis Haukanes).*
• 2010   Parenthood and Childhood: Debates within the Social Sciences. In: Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes (eds.): Parenting After the century of the Child: Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses. Aldershot: Ashgate, 11-33. (together with Haldis Haukanes).*
• 2010   Privatizing Parenthood – Modernizing Childhood? Paradoxes of School Reform in Eastern Germany. In: Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes (eds.): Parenting After the Century of the Child. Travelling Ideals. Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses. Aldershot: Ashgate, 141-161.*
• 2009   Social Security in Religious Networks: An Introduction. In: Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, Anja Peleikis and Tatjana Thelen (eds.): Social Security in Religious Networks. Anthropological Perspectives on New Risks and Ambivalences. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 1-30. (together with Carolin Leutloff-Grandits and Anja Peleikis).*
• 2009   Social Security, Life Courses and Religious Norms: Ambivalent Layers of Support in an Eastern German Protestant Network. In: Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, Anja Peleikis and Tatjana Thelen (eds.): Social Security in Religious Networks. Anthropological Perspectives on New Risks and Ambivalences. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 94-122.
• 2007   Partition and Partings: The Paradox of German Kinship Ties. In: Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds.): The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage, 221-242.
• 2005   Caring Grandfathers. Changes in Support between Generations in East Germany. In: Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine (eds.): Generations, Kinship and Care: Gendered Provisions of Social Security in Central Eastern Europe. Bergen: Universität Bergen, 163-188.