Politics in Color and Concrete

Krisztina Fehérváry

Description

Winner, 2014 William E. Douglass Prize in Europeanist AnthropologyHonorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social StudiesHungarian Studies Association Best Book Prize Honorable Mention, 2016 Laura Shannon Prize

Author website Politics in Color and Concrete website New Anthropologies of Europe series page on Facebook

Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.

Introduction: The Qualities of Color and Concrete
1. Normal Life in the Former Socialist City
2. Socialist Realism in the Socialist City
3. Socialist Modern and the Production of Demanding Citizens
4. Socialist Generic and the Branding of the State
5. Organicist Modern and Super-Natural Organicism
6. Unstable Landscapes of Property, Morality and Status
7. The New Family House and the New Middle Class
Epilogue
Conclusion: Heterotopias of the Normal in Private Worlds

Sujets

• contemporary
• architectural history
• HISTORY
• History of architecture
• History of Europe
• Anthropology
• Europe
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 16 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253009968
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE
Matti Bunzl and Michael Herzfeld, editors
 
Founding Editors
Daphne Berdahl
Matti Bunzl
Michael Herzfeld
POLITICS in COLOR and CONCRETE
SOCIALIST MATERIALITIES AND THE MIDDLE CLASS IN HUNGARY
KRISZTINA FEHÉRVÁRY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders     800-842-6796 Fax orders     812-855-7931
© 2013 by Krisztina Fehérváry
All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fehérváry, Krisztina.
Politics in color and concrete : socialist materialities and the middle class in Hungary / Krisztina Feh Fehérváry.
    pages cm. — (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00991-3 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00994-4 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00996-8 (ebook) 1. Hungary—Social conditions. 2. Hungary—Economic conditions. 3. Hungary—Civilization. 4. Material culture—Political aspects—Hungary. 5. Consumption (Economics)—Political aspects—Hungary. 6. Middle class—Hungary. 7. Post-communism—Hungary. I. Title.
HN420.5.A8F44 2013
306.09439—dc23
2013005870
1 2 3 4 5  18 17 16 15 14 13
For my parents
Deborah S. Cornelius and István L. Fehérváry
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Qualities of Color and Concrete
1    Normal Life in the Former Socialist City
2    Socialist Realism in the Socialist City
3    Socialist Modern and the Production of Demanding Citizens
4    Socialist Generic and the Branding of State Socialism
5    Organicist Modern and Super-Natural Organicism
6    Unstable Landscapes of Property, Morality, and Status
7    The New Family House and the New Middle Class
8    Heterotopias of the Normal in Private Worlds
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
T HIS BOOK MOVES between the seemingly disparate worlds of state socialist material culture and postsocialist middle-class life. This structure is an outcome of my own experience of Hungary as two distinct places, separated by time, in which my own status was as implicated in the shifting landscape of identity and belonging as those of the people populating the narrative—and as grounded in the constantly transforming material environment. My fieldwork in the 1990s was focused on the building and renovation practices of an aspiring middle class in a former “socialist new town.” The picture of everyday life I came away with was one overwhelmed by economic insecurity and status anxiety, but also one at odds with the world I had known from my travels to socialist Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a picture easily explained, or so it seemed, by the fall of state socialism and the effects of the neoliberal form of capitalism that then enmeshed the region. And yet there were glaring problems with such a view. It posited Eastern Europe during the state socialist period as an economic and material wasteland, in which the absence of a “capitalist” economy somehow implied the absence of consumer culture—with its accompanying panoply of dreams and frustrations, forms of sociality, and social distinctions. Focused on transformations of material worlds—especially of that particular place called “home”—this book lays bare the ways in which the embodied experience of state socialism, in all its robust materiality, structured the decade after its fall and continues to shape attitudes and practices in the region.
My first trip to Hungary was in 1972, when my American mother bravely ventured across the “Iron Curtain” so that my brother and I could visit my father's family. We traveled to Budapest, the southern town of Mohács, and also to the socialist, planned “new town” of Dunaújváros, where I first became friends with Laura, then aged twelve, and her family. My father stayed behind, sure that if he returned to Hungary, Communist authorities would return him to the political prison system in which he had already spent eight years of his life between 1948 and 1956. 1 After this trip, I returned every couple of years. So began an ongoing debate with him about what was happening in his homeland—one I experienced during the more lenient and prosperous 1970s and 1980s of the Kádár era, and one he remembered from his youth and had seen darkened by the oppression of Soviet Russian occupation and 1950s Stalinist Communism.
In my trips to Hungary, I was embraced as Hungarian despite my kitchen knowledge of the language and mixed parentage. Once past the compulsory ordeal of reporting in to the local police, my presence was valued in ways not in keeping with my age and gender because I was from “the West.” When the women retreated to the kitchen after a meal, the men would keep me with them to discuss politics, hungry for what I could tell them of what was going on “out there” ( oda kint ). In return, they regaled me (and each other) with their analyses of otherwise inexplicable state machinations—scrutinizing why authorities had allowed the American film The Deer Hunter to be shown, or what it meant that it was suddenly possible to open a savings account of foreign currency when possession of such currency over a small amount was still illegal. The socialist state's combination of secrecy and unpredictability made it appear omniscient and omnipotent, as Daphne Berdahl so cogently observed (1999a). This state also enchanted the material world, making any event that was out of the ordinary seem a potential sign of the behind-the-scenes working of an inscrutable state.
Later, traveling by myself, these trips were framed by tense border crossings with armed guards who inspected train compartments for banned items—not just drugs, but those things feared by a paranoid state: samizdat publications and pornography, computer equipment, cigarettes, and other contraband consumer goods. Once beyond the border, my journals of these trips describe reunions with relatives and friends; wonderful meals and evenings spent discussing politics and life; trips on crowded Ikarusz buses flying by fields of sunflowers; sitting in Old World cafés and swimming in Olympic-size pools; and enjoying the summer ritual of watching Wimbledon on TV with Laura's father, gorging on bowls of dark cherries in their Dunaújváros apartment.
Of particular relevance here was that my material status in socialist Hungary— even as a poor student—was extraordinary. This was true of the purchasing power of the meager amount of foreign currency I brought with me, but also of the cachet I possessed merely through my embodied knowledge of Western goods, fashions, and practices. I also came as bearer of (often requested) artifacts of this material culture: pink Flicker women's shavers, a Fleetwood Mac album, jeans and Cover Girl makeup, Band-Aids and tinted acne medication. In retrospect, the inordinate pleasure I felt I was able to bring with my otherwise modest gifts was central to the dynamic that I now find myself describing in this book: a profound asymmetry in the lifestyle opportunities and the meanings they signify between people who otherwise understand themselves to be of the same status and coeval in the world. John Borneman describes the profoundly complicated mixture of joy/desire and humiliation/resentment that East Germans felt for the “care packages” they received from relatives in the West, often poisonous gifts that implied derogatory assessments of East German consumer goods and living standards while inadequately materializing East Germans’ fantasies of “the West” as a consumer utopia (1991:147–49). In my case, my youth, affective ties, and genuine appreciation of the gifts I received in return—from hand-painted tablecloths to albums by the Hungarian disco band Neoton Família—mitigated the potentially ugly interpersonal dynamics associated with such exchanges.
When, in the postsocialist 1990s, my trips became anthropological fieldwork, I witnessed firsthand the long-term effects of this asymmetry in the determination of friends old and new to create Western-standard material worlds. My research questions arose out of seeing the dramatic changes being wrought to the material environment, not just to public, commercial spaces, but in the homes of friends and family. That they had long been dissatisfied with the kinds of material environments possible for them unde