Hans Peter Hahn

Hans Peter Hahn (born 1963) is a German ethnologist, member of the board of the Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland (VAD E.V.) and program officer of the 'Franco-German Master of Arts : Ethnology and its German-French perspectives' (degree program variant of the Master of Arts Social and Cultural Anthropology).

Biography
From 1984 to 1989 Hans Peter Hahn studied ethnology, archeology and biology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. From 1989 to 1994 he was a research associate in the collaborative research program Culture and Environment in West African savanna (SFB 268). From 1995 to 1996 he studied as a postdoc at the graduate school Intercultural Relations in Africa at the University of Bayreuth where he worked from 1996 to 2006 as a research assistant at the Institute for Ethnology. After his PhD in Frankfurt 1994 he has been teaching as a full professor for ethnology with a regional focus on West Africa at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

Hahn heads the graduate school on "value and equivalent". During his stay as a fellow at the DFG College Research Group 2615 – Free University of Berlin (April–September 2019), Hahn examined the role of material culture for social differentiation. While there are numerous ethnographic examples of the 'architecture of power', important anthropologists, e.g. Edmund Leach, criticized such a linking of objects and meaning. Together with Aegidia Souto and Jean-Louis Georget, he also directed a Franco-German doctoral college entitled 'Representing the 'Other': Museums, Universities, Ethnology' at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3. The college focuses on the future of ethnological collections and museums. It contributes to the internationalization of the debate and to clarify the status of collections, especially those with holdings from colonial contexts. It started its work on 1 January 2023.

Research focus
West Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo), material culture, ethnological museums, consumption, migration and mobility, and globalization.

Publications (selection)

 * Monographs


 * Editorship