A book review always serves a number of different purposes. One goal may be to direct the prospective reader's attention towards the issues presented in the book. The reader has only to turn to the back cover of the present publication to find a series of precisely and intriguingly formulated questions, which, for the past three decades, have been the cornerstones of the academic and teaching work carried out by the author, János Bali. “Where do we belong in Europe? Where do we stand between East and West? …What examples do we know of rivalry between nations? … How do we create national heroes and myths? Where do we seek and find the starting points of national continuity? What do our historical cults reveal? What patterns of values and behaviors do they transmit? … How are national symbols created, reinterpreted, discarded, or revitalized? With which elements of everyday life are national symbols and content associated?” It is these and similar questions that are addressed in this volume of studies. The book also examines, for example, a question that has preoccupied several generations of thinkers: Why do national tragedies play such a significant role in the Hungarian concept of history? But a book review is also intended to help potential readers recognize the author's qualities. In this regard, one important merit of the present volume is that, while adopting a historical perspective, it conveys a sense of the dynamism of change and continuity and provides a graphic illustration of the interrelationships between causes and effects. The volume might perhaps even more justifiably have been given the title “The Ethnology of National Consciousness,” since it essentially examines the various components and phenomena inherent in national consciousness and thinking about the nation.
Importantly, in contrast to ideological approaches that are informed by biases and preconceptions, this volume strives emphatically for objectivity. Rather than adopting the Sollen attitude (“How ought it to be?”), the research is undertaken from the attitude of “What is it?”, “Why is it this way?”, “What does it mean?” and “What follows from all this?”. This is valid whether the author is discussing the development of the ancient Hungarian myth, the question of patriarchal patriotism, or the evaluation of the Austro–Hungarian Compromise in twentieth-century Hungarian public thinking; the discovery of Szekler folk customs; or the symbolism of “Hungarofradism.” The first refers to the agreement, reached between the nineteenth-century Hungarian nobility and the Habsburg Monarchy in 1867, following the defeat of the 1848–49 War of Independence, which formed the basis of the Austro–Hungarian dual imperial system that prevailed for 50 years. The second reference is to the Szeklerland, a part of Transylvania with a majority Hungarian population, which became part of Romania as a consequence of the Treaty of Trianon following the First World War. The Szekler people form a unique ethnic group that is of particular importance from the point of view of national consciousness, being considered by many to be the more authentic guardians of the nation's roots than the Hungarian mother country. Finally, the term “Hungarofradism” refers to emotions associated with Ferencváros (FTC), a soccer team that has won the Hungarian championship on many occasions and that is regarded as the “national” club. All these diverse topics are covered in the present volume. The author always keeps in mind — and emphasizes in several places — that the task of the academic is never to judge but to analyze and interpret. And since he is dealing here with historically determined phenomena, which he describes as “a construction — that is, there is no objective history independent of the later periods that remember” (p. 41), his analyses and interpretations often examine and interpret subjective points of view, the interpretations of reality by others — interpretations that are often in stark contrast with one another and that play a role in the tragic divisions in our present-day society. And he does all this with the extremely sympathetic attitude, far from easy to maintain nowadays, that “It may still perhaps be possible to build a bridge between apparently distant shores.” (p. 65)
For decades, János Bali has been a committed and expert researcher in the fields of economic ethnology and national symbolism, and, like the authors of the present review, has written many exciting papers on these subjects. Over the past three years, we have in fact been working with him on the collaborative research project “Symbols of Hungarianness in Everyday Life.” János Bali has a keen interest in the symbols of everyday life, including symbolic manifestations associated with the nation and national consciousness, whether a Szekler-style carved wooden grave marker, considered by many to be a national symbol; the national flag; or the symbolic role of Trianon in the national memory. In exploring this symbolism, he employs a subtle analytical network that extends from the level of the emergence of the phenomena, through the level of the nation as a “cognitive model” and as a factor that determines our perception of reality, and the level of immediate interpretations and discourses concerning the nation, to the formation of symbolic practices related to the nation (an analytical network that he also presents in the book). And, as an ethnologist, he relies on painstaking fieldwork, to mention only his research among Ferencváros supporters or the Hungarian population of the village of Maradék in Vojvodina.
We also believe the unity of education and research to be an important aspect of János Bali's work — the endeavor to understand the extremely complex interrelationships in the world, and to help others understand them, and all this with an attitude that does not see the role of academia and academic education as an end in itself but is always driven by the very real question of how research can make our world more livable.
The author himself summarizes the essence of the book on several occasions. “How can the nation be interpreted in the context of the state, memory, communication, religion, people, ethnicity, identity, culture, and emotions?” (p. 320) The question immediately highlights the complexity of the relationships surrounding the issue of the nation and the fact that a relevant analysis can be undertaken only if all these aspects are considered. But, as he also points out, “Although the studies in this volume present to the reader a wide variety of subjects, they all spring from a common root: What is the nation, and how has the idea of the nation created actual cultural and social practices among Hungarians in the 19th to the 21st centuries?” (p. 321)
First and foremost, he points to the fundamental challenge facing those involved in this field of inquiry. He describes how the meaning of the concept has changed in different phases of historical time, although “the multiplicity of its spatial manifestations also makes it difficult to arrive at a uniform definition based on a comprehensive analysis.” (p. 175) He therefore attempts a detailed examination of the concept of the nation within the context of its historical development, presenting the different types of thinking, defining supplementary concepts such as East and West (which, while apparently self-evident, are in fact fraught with complexity in the context of Hungarian nationhood), and challenging the dichotomy of the cultural nation / state nation that is frequently raised in the literature. He rightly criticizes this dichotomy, since, if the cultural nation is declared to be inferior to the state nation, it implies the extinction of nations and national cultures — a viewpoint which, by insisting on the negative aspects of the contrasts among individual state nations, would discard one of the extremely important values of humanity: its cultural diversity. At the same time, the author stresses the fundamental importance of separating the concepts of nation and state, since, even if they are intertwined, the nation and the state as systems have quite different meanings and consequences, and in order to have a clear understanding of their relationship, each must be traced back to its own developmental logic. János Bali's analyses show an exemplary level of objectivity, but this does not imply the absence of a personal commitment to his subject. The volume itself makes clear that he regards the nation as an important value to be preserved. “The systems of social classification, including the nation,” he writes, “in their institutionalized form, through the categories they establish, provide a basis for the separation of the good and the bad, the valuable and the worthless, the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’.” (p. 320) This starting point, with its clear ethical basis, also leads the author to conclude, in the words of the writer Gyula Illyés, that the patriot is one who defends rights and the nationalist one who violates them. Furthermore, when he analyzes forms of national identity consciousness that are distorted by prejudices, he does not do so in a way that reinforces the (frequently self-deprecating) image of backwardness (compared to the West). He achieves this by examining the phenomenon in question (using a method perfected by István Bibó) in a higher dimension, adopting a perspective in which derogatory associations are no longer valid. At this point, for the sake of non-Hungarian readers, it is important to mention a particular dichotomy that characterizes the present-day divisions in Hungarian society. On the one hand, as a consequence of the tragic course of Hungarian history, with the successive defeats of uprisings against Turkish, German, and Russian oppression, there is still the hope, as expressed in the national anthem, that the nation will one day experience a period of advancement — of the kind that more fortunate Western nations have already experienced — while there are many who see a commitment to the nation and the emphatic representation of national interests as a means of achieving justice. The distinction between the negativism of large-nation, imperial nationalism and the culture-preserving mentality of small-nation nationalism, as outlined in the above quotation, is thus of great significance. On the other hand, there has always been a contrasting idea, the hope for advancement not from sovereignty but by following greater powers; this view, however, has also implied categorizing one's own culture as backward. The author endeavors to analyze this contrast from an objective, loftier perspective (here, as mentioned above, following István Bibó, a prominent figure in Hungarian political science, who wrote many profound, objective analyses and who was, not incidentally, secretary of state in the revolutionary government of 1956).
The individual studies in the book are organized into units based on the epistemological categories of time and space. They include the nationalization of time — that is, the historical formation of national consciousness; and the nationalization of space, which encompasses the transformation of geographical landscape into home.
The book addresses many fascinating topics and reveals some extremely important connections, only a few of which we highlight here.
When he writes, in the context of derogatory attacks on human culture, that folk culture can become a source of social and economic capital by becoming national, he in fact grasps the essence of organic development, revealingly stripping this category of its mystifying connotations. The development of a society is organic when its cultural foundations — that is, the collective culture of the people, understood in the broad sense — become a material force, development, and growth, through the framework of self-organization (i.e., the nation).
In general, the book is also characterized by its ability to point out correlations, even in apparently distinct phenomena, that have a far broader validity than the subject of the specific analysis. When he writes, for example, that rivalry between soccer clubs and their supporters is based on competition between different variants of the national ideal, he is in fact suggesting a more general law, according to which the relationships and attitudes that determine the functioning of large social units (nation, culture) are also mapped out in smaller subsystems and are reproduced by them (or indeed through them) in everyday life.
By means of a tiny detail, such as whether Hungarian Grey cattle were already present in the Hungarian lifeworld at the time of the Conquest, he illustrates that the potency of a symbol frequently outweighs the veracity of historical facts. Hungarian Grey cattle, as an identity symbol, are inextricably linked with Hungarianness, and even if we know that they arrived in Hungary only later, they are part of the “pure sources” of culture at the level of emotional identification.
Since, in János Bali's approach, such tiny details can bring us close to the heart of the matter, he cleverly finds themes that provide an opportunity for fruitful analysis, such as the underlying value preferences reflected in the choice of the famous figures portrayed on banknotes, or the dominance of Transylvanian names over allusions to other ceded territories in the naming of streets during the Horthy era. On the other hand, he often draws the reader's attention to surprising yet entirely convincing correlations, as in the case of the present-day construction of the cult of the ancient Hungarians, where he points out the extent to which this cult is part of consumer culture despite its apparent incongruence with consumer society. The movement, which took off in the 1990s and which has mobilized thousands of people, is a kind of traditionalist attempt to revive the lifestyle of the Hungarians at the time of the Conquest (e.g., horseback archery, building yurts, etc.) and to reconstruct their beliefs. This movement is consistent with the New Age trend that came to global prominence in the postmodernism of the 1990s, whose connection with consumer society has been highlighted by many. Another interesting observation concerns how the trope of Trianon was reinforced by the defeat of the 1956 Revolution.
Bali's methodology is extremely diverse. As already mentioned, many of his most valuable analyses have emerged from his fieldwork. His strengths include the cautious use of conceptual categories and the painstaking documentation of his themes (such as his tracing of the peculiarities of local, Szekler-style carved grave markers in a succession of settlements), although another of his merits is his analysis of narratives and the fact that he incorporates a great variety of specialist literature into these analyses in order to construct a sufficiently nuanced and complex picture.
While many scholars of nationhood prioritize the study and interpretation of the past, the present volume is also valuable in that the future is seen and presented as being of equal importance to the historical analysis of the past and the cultural-anthropological approach to the present-day image of the nation. It is in this spirit that he raises the question of the relationship between printed and online scholarship, seeking solutions that can continue to be viable in the practice of future generations. With regard to ethnography itself, he also points out that, although the discipline often appears to be essentially tied to the past, younger generations are striving to shift its focus towards the present and the future. The book as a whole provides ample evidence of the author's openness to this idea, which he sees as a guarantee of the survival of the entirety of the topic under discussion.
János Bali's volume The Ethnology of the Hungarian Nation summarizes several decades of research: it will equip readers who are dedicated to their identity, nation, and culture with the capacities for differentiation and tolerance ensured by academic reflection, and will reinforce the joy of identity affirmation among committed scholars.
