Society and Morality in Eurasia
On 7 July 2021 three internationally renowned scholars from the disciplines of history, archaeology, and socio-cultural anthropology delivered plenary lectures to open the conference ‘Society and Morality in Eurasia: From Prehistory to the Present Day’. The conference served as the culmination of the ‘International Max Planck Research School for the Anthropology, Archaeology and History of Eurasia’ (IMPRS ANARCHIE), which began in 2012, and was organized by Chris Hann, Director of the Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, in cooperation with archaeologist Franҫois Bertemes and historian Andreas Pečar of the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg.
Historian Alan Strathern (University of Oxford) began this transdisciplinary conversation on long-term changes in the moral constitution of human communities with his lecture on ‘The Eurasian Moral Revolution: Transcendentalism and its Implications’.
In the second lecture, archaeologist Stella Souvatzi (University of Thessaly) continued the transdisciplinary conversation on long-term changes in the moral constitution of human communities with her lecture on ‘Morality, Egalitarianism and Social Complexity in the Early Farming Societies’.
In the third and final lecture, cultural anthropologist Joel Robbins (University of Cambridge) rounded off the transdisciplinary conversation on long-term changes in the moral constitution of human communities with a lecture titled ‘When Did It Become Hard to Be Good? Axial Dynamics and the Problem of the Moral Self’.