Martha Lampland, Associate Professor

Ph.D. - Univ. of Chicago, 1987

Areas of Specialization: Political Economy, Social and Cultural History, Science Studies, Central Europe (Hungary)

Email Address: mlampland@ucsd.edu
Phone number: 858-534-5640
Office location: 482 Social Science Building

Office Hours

Biography:

Martha Lampland received her B.A. (summa cum laude) and M.A. from the University of Minnesota, and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her specialties include: political economy, history, feminist theory, science studies, social theory, and the symbolic analysis of complex societies. Her book, entitled The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary, analyzes the collectivization of agriculture in Hungary and its social consequences. Other projects include a study of nineteenth century agrarian history in Hungary, analysis of gender images of the Hungarian nation in the nineteenth century, and patterns of Hungarian historical consciousness and revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is now starting a project on scientific management in Hungary during the capitalist and socialist periods (1940s-1960s). Lampland is a core faculty member of the Science Studies program.

Curriculum Vitae

 

Classes to be taught in 2009/10:

Winter 2010

SOCG 238 - Survey of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

SOCG 238 Syllabus

Spring 2010
SOCI 166 - Sociology of Knowledge

SOC 168E - Sociology of Science

Current research:

I am engaged in a study of work science, agricultural productivity and wages in Hungary (1920-1956), studying in particular the rise of economic policies advocating scientifically calibrated wage forms in the 1920s and 1930s, and the influence of these policies on the development and implementation of Stalinist cooperative agriculture in the 1950s.

Two intersecting agendas underlie this project:

**writing a post-Cold War history of the transition from capitalism to socialism in Hungary , with a particular attention to both the continuities and discontinuities in economic theories and expert personnel between the two regimes.

**focusing the analytic strengths of science studies on the study of 20th c. social policy, state formation and labor politics.

Archival research constitutes the primary materials used in the analysis. For the 1920s and 1930s, scholarly and popular publications (journals, pamphlets and newspapers) are studied. From 1945, these materials are augmented with extensive use of government and party documents, from the national and county level. In addition, interviews were conducted with a number of economists and policy-makers who were directly involved in creating a new socialist agriculture.

Publications:

*2009 Standards and Their Stories. How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life. Edited with Leigh Star. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

*2002 The Advantages of Being Collectivized: cooperative farm managers in the postsocialist economy IN Postsocialism: Ideas, Ideologies, and Practices in Europe and Asia , Chris Hann (ed.) pp. 29-56. London : Routledge.

*2000a Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union . Daphne Berdahl and Matti Bunzl, co-editors. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press.

*2000b Afterword IN Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union . Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland, editors. pp. 209-218. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press.

*1998 Corvée, Maps and Contracts: Agricultural Policy and the Rise of the Modern State in Hungary during the 19th Century. Irish Journal of Anthropology 3:7-40.

*1997a Farmers in the Post-Cooperative Economy. Paper written for the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

*1997b The Social Constraints on Economic Transitions. State Wage Policy in the Transition to Stalinism. Paper written for the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

*1995 The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary . Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

*1994 Feminizmus és Társadalomkutatás [Feminism and Social Research] IN Férfiuralom. Irások nokról, férfiakról, feminizmusról [Male Domination. Writings on women, men and on feminism]. Miklós Hadas, ed. pp. 55-62. Budapest : Replika Kór.

*1994 Family Portraits: Gendered Images of the Nation in 19th Century Hungary . Eastern European Politics and Society 8(2):287-316.

Also published in abridged Hungarian version: Cafe Babel 11(1-2):119-129].

*1993 Death of a Hero. Hungarian National Identity and the Funeral of Lajos Kossuth. Hungarian Studies 8(1):29-35.

*1991 Pigs, Party Secretaries and Private Lives. American Ethnologist 18(3):459-479.

*1990 The Politics of History: Historical Consciousness of 1847-1849. Hungarian Studies 6(2):185-194.

*1989 Biographies of Liberation: Testimonials to Labor in Socialist Hungary IN Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn Young (ed.), pp. 306-322. New York : Monthly Review Press.