Christian Krohn-Hansen

Christian Krohn-Hansen is Professor emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology. He has for many years studied, and written about, political and economic processes from a comparative perspective. He works in particular on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. (For more on publications, see at the bottom of this page.)

Academic Interests

Thematic: Power and violence, social hierarchies, anthropology and history, urban ethnography, the state, environmental politics, economic life, globalization, migration, ideas about race

Regional: Caribbean studies, Latin America, The Dominican Republic, New York

About

I have done fieldwork in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and Colombia, and my research interests are centred upon understanding forms of power and violence, contemporary political and economic life, resource politics, processes of migration, commerce and labour, forms of masculinity, and history. My last book is Jobless Growth in the Dominican Republic: Disorganization, Precarity, and Livelihoods, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2022. The book discusses, and seeks to tackle, the more general challenges that the phenomena of jobless growth and "no (wage) labour" futures raise for political-economic analysis. The Dominican Republic has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past 25-30 years. In spite of this, the generation of new, good jobs has been remarkably weak. How have ordinary and poor Dominicans worked and lived in the shadow of the country's conspicuous growth rates? In this book, I consider this question through an ethnographic exploration of the popular economy in the Dominican capital. For a conversation about Jobless Growth (and parts of my earlier research), you may listen to this New Books Network interview: https://newbooksnetwork.com/jobless-growth-in-the-dominican-republic

I am currently working on two new projects:

(1) Important amber deposits lie in the Dominican Republic, and there is a small-scale form of amber extraction in the country, and a trade with, and a demand for, "Dominican amber." The oldest and hardest amber in the country comes from the Cordillera Septentrional / the Dominican Republic's Northern Mountain Range (just north of the country's second-largest city Santiago). My goal is to develop new, empirical research on processes linked to the amber in the Dominican Republic. Some of my interests are: (a) the amber extraction in the Northern Mountain Range; (b) the trading of Dominican amber and Dominican fossils; and (c) the role of Dominican amber in scientific research and museum exhibitions. This is a long-term project. I started anthropological fieldwork in the Cordillera Septentrional region in the fall of 2025.

(2) My other project is a writing project: I am currently writing a set of independent essays or chapters that have in common that each essay discusses a general topic, or question, for the anthropology of politics. The aim is to gradually develop these texts into a coherent book manuscript about the analysis of political life. This work draws on reading of theory and others' works, and on my earlier research.

I was a member of the advisory board of Ethnos until December 2025, and was from 2008 to 2012 editor of Norsk Antropologisk Tidsskrift (The Journal of the Norwegian Association of Social Anthropologists).

From 2023 to 2024, I was the Department's Head of Teaching, and from 2020 to 2023 I headed the Department's MA program. From 2011 to 2014, I was the Department's Vice Chair and Head of the doctoral program. I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago (in 2015-2016); at the University of Michigan (in 2005); at Queens College, City University of New York (in 2002); and at Johns Hopkins University (in 1994).