Dr. Jan David Hauck

Jan David Hauck is an anthropologist interested in the ways in which children acquire, transform, and develop awareness of language, culture, and morality through everyday interactions with caregivers and peers, especially in contexts of sociocultural and environmental change. At the RCC, he is the director of a project investigating how environmental transitions impact the moral socialization of children, for which he received an ERC Starting Grant. He holds an MA in sociocultural anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His previous research was awarded funding through a Newton International Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a postdoctoral fellowship in the Geography of Philosophy project at UCLA, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, as well as two language documentation grants from the Volkswagen Foundation at Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 2007 Dr. Hauck has conducted ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork in the Indigenous Aché communities in eastern Paraguay, a former hunter-gatherer collective recently settled on reservations after witnessing dramatic transformations of their environment.

RCC Research Project

Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies

Selected Publications

• with Francesca Mezzenzana. “Growing Up in the Face of Change: Environmental Transformation and Child Socialisation in Indigenous South America.” In “Child Socialisation and Environmental Transformation in Indigenous South America.” Ed. Jan David Hauck and Francesca Mezzenzana. Special issue, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 33, no. 1 (2025): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3167/saas.2025.330101.
• “‘We All Live Well Together Now’: Ethics, Ontology, and the Face of the Other.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 31, no. 3 (2025): 874–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14311.
• “Language Otherwise: Linguistic Natures and the Ontological Challenge.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2023): 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12384.
• “Grammaticalization, Language Contact, and the Emergence of a Hortative in Guaraché, a New Mixed Language in Paraguay.” Languages 7, no. 3 (2022): 173. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030173.
• with Teruko Vida Mitsuhara. “Sorry Not Sorry: Political Apology in the Age of Trump.” In Linguistic Inquiries into Donald Trump’s Language, edited by Ulrike Schneider and Matthias Eitelmann. Bloomsbury, 2020.
• “The Origin of Language Among the Aché.” In “Language in the Amerindian Imagination.” Ed. Guilherme Orlandini Heurich and Jan David Hauck. Special issue, Language & Communication 63 (2018): 76–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.03.004.