The Hungarian State’s Good Catholic Pastor: Reading Foucault’s Provocations on Christian Institutions and Governmentality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Given Michel Foucault’s immense influence on anthropology, assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on this Special Issue’s theme by returning to Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay, ‘The Subject and Power’ to consider what Foucault had to say about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to Foucault’s provocative claims about the declining vitality of pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian government-funded effort to canonise ‘Transylvania’s good pastor’, the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania, Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault’s work, a lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major twentieth-century political trends.