Christof Lammer

Christof LammerNetwork Member

Christof is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society Studies (sts) at the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt. He studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and China Studies at the University of Vienna, Tianjin University and Renmin University of China. Since 2011, he has conducted more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China. From 2013 until 2017 he was a predoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna and in spring 2017 a fellow at the ZiF-Research Group “Kinship and Politics” at Bielefeld University. In summer 2019 he visited the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle as a guest researcher.

Current position
Postdoctoral Researcher
University affiliation
Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt

Research

Combining his interest in political anthropology, kinship studies, and economic anthropology with sts, Christof’s current projects ask how science and technology are intertwined with belonging and value. How are kinship measurements employed in negotiations of belonging in bureaucracy and medicine and translated into differentiated access to resources? How do infrastructures and related practices shape the value of agri-food?

For his PhD project, Christof studied rural development initiatives that promote ecological agriculture and the participatory administration of state assistance for the poor in Sichuan Province, China. “Performing State Boundaries” (2018) brings the concept of boundary work from science and technology studies to the anthropology of the state. Examining how both state officials and other citizens perform the boundary between state and various non-state others (such as civil society and kinship), Christof showed how these performances in front of different audiences shape legitimacy and power.

Publications