Overheated Underdogs: Civilizational Analysis and Migration on the Danube-Tisza Interfluve

Chris Hann

doi:10.4324/9781315182322-9

Abstract

Overheated Underdogs: Civilizational Analysis and Migration on the Danube-Tisza Interfluve

Highlights

Overheating is no longer a phenomenon of the rural economy, which has lost the dynamism of the socialist decades and experiences deprivation in absolute as well as relative forms
I shall argue that in the period with which this project is concerned the heat has been transferred from the rural economy, which boomed under socialism, to identity politics and symbolic legitimation
There followed an experiment lasting less than half a century with an alternative variant of an industrial social order, a “socialist civilization” which did more to develop and transform Hungarian rural society in just a few decades than capitalism had been able to accomplish in the preceding century

Summary

Introduction

For an ethnographer whose first studies in a particular location are focused emphatically on the present and near past, it seems a natural progression in later research to take a closer interest in the more distant past (Hann 1980, 2015a). Their life-worlds were transformed under socialism but the years since the end of the Cold War, in particular the period since accession to the European Union in 2004, have ushered in new forms of peripherality.

Results

Conclusion