CIAS Inn: secrets inherited from socialism are dragging Hungary back

Maya A. Nadkarni spent five months as a guest professor at CIAS from February this year. This is not the first time that the American anthropologist, an associate professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has visited Hungary. She arrived in the country in the early 1990s as an English teacher and stayed for four years. It was at this time that she became more interested in the politics of memory and the tensions and contradictions surrounding the Hungarian socialist past. She later wrote her doctoral dissertation on this topic at Columbia University, as part of which she returned to Hungary for a short fieldwork.  

“I’ve come to Hungary almost every summer since then, but these short trips don’t match the opportunity that CIAS has given me to live in the country for a longer period again.  It was a great opportunity to consult with Hungarian colleagues in person while working on my latest publication,” says Maya.  

She is currently working on a project that explores the afterlife of communist state security files in Hungary in contemporary politics and culture. The information and public discourse that emerge from the files are analysed in several dimensions: from a historical approach to mass media scandals and legal battles to political and artistic debates.  

“In the countries of the former Soviet bloc, it is very common for public debates on the issue to revolve around the traitors and the betrayed. In my research I try to go beyond this otherwise understandably important dimension, and focus instead on the impact of the knowledge of those involved on contemporary memory politics.” 

In Maya’s latest publication submitted to the Q1-ranked journal of Memory Studies, “Unmasking the Informer? Memory, authenticity, and the politics of knowledge about the socialist past“, she examines the heated debates surrounding the historical authenticity of The Informer. In her view, the series deliberately tries to shift the politics of memory around the informers of the past regime, and to turn an unresolved public burden into a retro pleasure article that can be consumed by young audiences.  

“I don’t think this type of series should be held accountable for its depiction of the past. To me, the controversial reception of the series is more indicative of the existing tensions between contemporary Hungarian memory politics and knowledge about the past,” the researcher explains.  

Maya’s very first book, Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary published in 2020, also explores the afterlife of domestic socialism through ‘remnants’ as physical objects and cultural products. According to the researcher, the sculptures, files, scandalous secrets and mass cultural products left over from socialism are not merely remnants of the past, but the imprints of a transition period when Hungarians were both struggling to distance themselves from the past and expressing their feelings about the uncertainty of what was to come. Published in 2020, the book has won several professional awards and has recently been translated into Russian.  

The CIAS Guest Researcher Fellowship was recommended to her by her old colleagues, Jessie Labov and György Túry: “This opportunity has exceeded my expectations in every respect, I find the atmosphere at CIAS very friendly and the excellent scientific work in a wide variety of fields is being done at the institute, which is productive for individual research”. 

Although the researcher has visited Hungary on several occasions for extended periods, this time she has spent her free time exploring more of the country’s countryside. She has been to Pécs, Eger, Lake Balaton and Nagymaros, but her absolute favourite is still the capital: “I try to return to the city for at least a week every summer. Budapest is one of my favourite cities in the world, where I love to wander. That and my dear Hungarian friends are the things I will miss the most when I return to the US.”