Common Concerns

In this episode, Biao Xiang and researcher Siqi Tu speak about her ethnographic work on transnational education. Specifically, the phenomenon of affluent Chinese families sending their children to American private high schools at a young age.

What b... more

In the first episode of the “Common Concern” podcast, Siqi Tu and Sohail Jagat speak with Xiang Biao, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Looking back on his experiences and academic career in China and the United Kingdom... more

In this episode, Xiang Biao (Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) interviews Dr. Alf Gerlach, a senior psychoanalyst whose decades-long work bridges German psychoanalysis, Chinese social practice, and the Frankfurt School’s radical... more

In this episode, Xiang Biao sits down with Zhipeng Duan, a design researcher-turned-anthropologist, to dismantle the idea that powerlessness is a lack of power. Isn't it rather a blindness to the world’s hidden possibilities?

This episode reveals ho... more

In this episode, Xiang Biao, Andrew Haxby, and Xenia Cherkaev examine "suspicion" as a Common Concern in Nepal's land market, where people are deeply suspicious of brokers who facilitate land transactions, even though these brokers operate "legitimat... more

In this episode, Xiang Biao, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, interviews Insa Koch, Professor of British Culture at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her work focuses on corruption, power, and political ontolo... more

In this episode, Biao Xiang interviews two extraordinary thinkers: Don Kalb, whose new book "Value and Worthlessness" has been hailed as a landmark in Marxist anthropology, and Xenia Cherkaev, a scholar whose work bridges Eastern European social hist... more

In this episode, Xiang Biao talks to Olaf Zenker, a leading anthropologist whose work spans Southern Africa, Germany, and Northern Ireland. Together, they explore one of the most urgent questions of our time: What happens when people lose faith in li... more