Object structure
Title:

Strictly Confidential Anthropology: Post-Truth, Secrecy and Silence in Society and Academia in Hungary

Subtitle:

Ethnologia Polona 42 (2021)

Creator:

Kürti, László

Publisher:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

Place of publishing:

Warsaw

Date issued/created:

2021

Description:

ill. ; 24 cm

Type of object:

Journal/Article

Subject and Keywords:

secrecy ; silence ; surveillance ; personal anthropology ; academic hierarchy ; Hungary

Abstract:

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests

References:

Bailey, Fred G. 1977. Morality and Expediency: The Folklore of Academic Politics. New York: Transactions Publishers
Beidelman, T. O. 1993. “Secrecy and Society: The Paradox of Knowing and the Knowing of Paradox.” In Secrecy: African Arts of Concealment and Ambiguity, edited by M. Nooter, 41–47. New York: Museum of African Art
Bell, Peter D. 1984. Peasants in Socialist Transitions. Life in a Collectivized Hungarian Village. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press
Bellman, Beryl L. 1981. “The Paradox of Secrecy.” Human Studies 4 (1): 1–24
Borsányi, László. 1976. “Közművelődési munka a Magyar Nemzeti Múzeumban.” Folia Historica 4: 179–187. Borsányi, László. 2009. “Emikus perspektívából”. anBlokk 3: 64–67
Chinon, Mark A. 2009. “Secrecy and Democratic Decisions.” Quinnipiac Law Review 27 (1): 1–53. https:// digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty/149 (accessed 02.28. 2021)
Deletant, Dennis. 1994. Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe
Demeter, Márton. 2020. Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South. Questioning Inequality and Under-representation. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
Dilley, Roy and Thomas G. Kirsch, eds. 2015. Regimes of Ignorance. Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge. Oxford: Berghahn Books
Forte, Maximilian C. 2010. “Anthropology, Secrecy, and Wikileaks.” Zero Anthropology, December 24. https://zeroanthropology.net/2010/12/24/anthropology-secrecy-and-wikileaks/ (accessed 03.05. 2021)
Gieseke, Jens. 2014. The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945-1990. New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Graeber, David. 2014. “Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-managerial Class.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 73–88
Hann, C. M. 1980. Tázlár, a Village in Hungary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hann, C. M. 2012. “Faltering Dialogue?” Focaal 63: 39–50
Herzfeld, Michael. 2009. “The Performance of Secrecy: Domesticity and Privacy in Public Spaces.” Semiotica 175 (January): 135–162
Hollos, Marida C. 2001. Scandal in a Small Town: Understanding Modern Hungary Through the History of One Town. Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe
Horn, Eva. 2011. “Logics of Political Secrecy.” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (7–8): 1–20. Jones, Graham M. 2014. “Secrecy.” Annual Review of Anthropology (43): 53–69
Könczei, Csilla. 2019. “Úgy táncoltok, ahogy én húzom… A kolozsvári táncház és a Szekuritáté viszonya 1977 és 1989 között.” http://szinhaz.net/2019/02/20.konczei-csilla-ugy-tancoltok-ahogy-en-huzom (accessed 15.05.2021)
Kürti, László. 2001. The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press
Kürti, László. 2002. Youth and the State in Hungary: Capitalism, Communism and Class. London: Pluto Press
Kürti László. 2003. “Hungary in Anthropology and Anthropology in Hungary.” In Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology. Learning Fields Volume, edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers, 126–138. Oxford: Berghahn Books
Kürti, László. 2011. “University, Autonomy, and Diversity: Higher Education in Hungary Since 1989.” In Les Universités En Europe Centrale, 20 Ans Aprés. Volume 1: Transformations Et Enjeux, edited by Thierry Come and Gilles Rouet, 187–198. Bruxelles: Bruylant
Kürti, László. 2013. “Cold War Happiness: Singing Pioneers, Internal Enemies and Hungarian Life under Stalinism.” In De-Centering Cold War History, edited by Jadwiga Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza, 75–98. London: Routledge
Kürti, László. 2016. “Nomadism and Nostalgia in Hungary.” In Memories on the Move: Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past, edited by Monika Palmberger and Jelena Tosic, 217–246. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
Kürti, László. 2018. “The Plow and the Stallion: Political Turmoil in a Working-class District of Budapest.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography, edited by Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, 221–241. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
Kürti László. 2019a. “Dance Populism: The Potato Principle and the New Hungarian Dance Craze.” In Cycles of Hatred and Rage: What Right-Wing Extremists in Europe and their Parties Tell Us about the US, edited by Katherine C. Donahue and Patricia R. Heck. 169–194. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
Kürti, László. 2019b. Lajosmizse: Falu, Puszta, Község, Város. I-II. Lajosmizse: Mizsetáp Kft
Kürti, László. 2020. “Orbánism: The Culture of Illiberalism in Hungary.” Ethnologia Europaea 50 (2): 62–79. https://doi.org/10.16995/ee.1055 (accessed 15.05.2021)
Lampland, Martha. 1995. The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary. Chicago: The Uni- versity of Chicago Press
Leach, Edmund. 1984. “Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 1–24
Mair, Jonathan. 2017. “Post-truth Anthropology.” Anthropology Today 33: 3–4
Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press
Nakane, Ikuko. 2012. “Silence.” In The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication, edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel, 158–179. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell
Nespor, Jan. 2000. “Anonymity and Place in Qualitative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry 6 (4): 546–569. Salamone, Frank A. 1977. “The Methodological Significance of the Lying Informant.” Anthropological Quarterly 50 (3): 117–124
Sampson, Steven. 1983. “Some Notes on Coping with Romania’s Secret Police.” https://stevensampson- texts.com/ (accessed 15.05.2021)
Sárkány, Mihály. 2016. Társadalom és Gazdaság. Válogatott szociálantropológiai írások. Budapest: L’Harmattan
Shore, Chris and Wright, Susan. 2015. “Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society.” Current Anthropology 56 (3): 421–444
Sidky, Homayun. 2020. Science and Anthropology in a Post-truth World: A Critique of Unreason and Aca- demic Nonsense. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books
Simmel, Georg. 1906. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11 (4): 441–498
Szőnyei, Tamás. 2005. Nyilván tartottak. Titkos szolgák a magyar rock körül 1960–1990. Budapest, Tihany: Rév Kiadó
Takács, Tibor. 2013. Besúgók a besúgásról: ügynök-visszaemlékezések a Kádár-korszakból. Budapest: L’Harmattan
Taussig, Michael T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Thelen, Tatjana. 2003. Privatisierung und soziale Ungleichheit in der Osteuropäischen Landwirtschaft. Zwei Fallstudien aus Ungarn und Rumänien. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag
Thompson, Denise et al. 2005. “Central Questions of Anonymization: A Case Study of Secondary Use of Qualitative Data.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 6 (1) https://www.qualitative-research. net/index.php/fqs/article/view/511/1103 (accessed 03.02.2021)
Vatulescu, Cristina. 2010. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Vasary, Ildiko. 1987. Beyond the Plan: Social Change in a Hungarian Village. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press
Verdery, Katherine. 2018. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press

Relation:

Ethnologia Polona

Volume:

42

Start page:

79

End page:

97

Resource type:

Text

Detailed Resource Type:

Article

Format:

application/octet-stream

Resource Identifier:

0137-4079 ; eISSN 2719-6976 ; doi:10.23858/ethp.2021.42.2670

Source:

IAiE PAN, call no. P 366 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 367 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 368 ; click here to follow the link

Language:

eng

Rights:

Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Terms of use:

Copyright-protected material. [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] May be used within the scope specified in Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, full text available at: ; -

Digitizing institution:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Original in:

Library of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Access:

Open

×

Citation

Citation style: