Az intézet több munkatársa részt vesz az alábbi előadásokkal az European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) július 26-29. között Belfastban megrendezésre kerülő 17. Biennális Konferenciáján:

 

Balazs Gosztonyi (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Judit Durst (Institute for Minority Studies, Hungary): Bailiffs as street-level bureaucrats and the debt contestations of rural poor households in Northern Hungary

Paper short abstract:

This research focuses on the contested and unequal relationship between private bailiffs and poor rural households in Northern Hungary. We look at bailiffs as street-level bureaucrats and uncover their formal and informal practises and the ways households bureaucratically contest their debts.

Paper long abstract:

Creditor-debtor relationships are understood as either universal moral relationship (Graeber, 2011), or as particular and contextually embedded in specific legal environments and practices (Riles, 2011; Gregory, 2012). We look at the organisational and institutional context of debt by applying the street-level bureaucracy framework to the legal-financial field (Ortiz, 2021), and specifically examining the practices and their contestations of contracted-out bailiffs as part of the state bureaucracy in Hungary. Bailiffs are are semi-autonomous state-appointed legal professionals acting as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), and actually administer and enforce debt payments through coercive deduction from debtors' savings account, wage garnishments and/or the auctioning of movables or immovables. The formal operation of bailiffs is organised and prescribed by the procedural 1994 Laws of Debt Enforcement, yet their actual operations are based on informal practices and their own morals and logic common to the interpretive agency of SLBs (Bierschenk and Sardan, 2019). The tension between the formal and the informal has resulted in nationwide scandals and an unequal but contested relationship with debtors. Our research focuses on micro-contestations of poor household debtors in rural Northern Hungary by analysing official documents, interviewing debtors and bailiffs, and accompanying debtors to bailiffs' customer service bureaus, which are the primary sites for such contestations. Debtors encounter bailiffs - or rather their assistants - to contest their debts and such encounters can be treated as "meetings" (Brown et al, 2017), which allow debtors to negotiate and question the debts, the amounts, and the legality and fairness of debt enforcement.

Margit Feischmidt (Center for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Violetta Zentai (Central European University), Eszter Neumann (Centre for Social Sciences): Solidarity work, new forms of responsibility and the reconfiguration of political commons in the first wave of COVID-19 in Hungary

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to uncover forms, visions of solidarity actions in Hungary during the first wave of coronavirus pandemic. We will investigate the conceptual opportunities to refine the modalities of being political instead of separating the political and the apolitical forms of civic engagement.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the nature of solidarity work during the coronavirus and also the solidarity actors’ aspirations and visions to initiate social transformations. The research which informs this article was conducted by a team of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Minority Studies at the Centre of Social Sciences, Budapest.

Critical social science passionately tries to differentiate between the politically salient and the apolitical helping actions. These accounts attribute significantly less social and moral value to the latter and view apolitical assistance as contributing to social inequalities and the existing power structures. There is no agreement over what counts as political and apolitical, however, actions that meet basic human needs tend to be interpreted as apolitical, similarly to activities by institutionalized civil society actors which cooperate with the state. We discovered various forms of solidarity that practiced empathy, enacted new sociabilities, and reflected upon various societal problems. Even if they produced social capital for the helpers or yielded to paid assignment, it did not undermine the political potentials of the engagement and did not coalesce in the logic of the market, competition, and individual ownership. In reverse, most observed solidarity acts were aspired by the duty to care.

These modalities of solidarity engagements contributed to shaping up new commons, at least for the extraordinary time of the pandemic. We will investigate the conceptual opportunities to refine the modalities of being political instead of separating the political and the apolitical forms of civic engagement and contemplate the potentialities of transformative solidarities.

Kristof Szombati (Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest), Cecília Kovai (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies), Gergely Pulay (Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest): BUILDING THE ‘WORK-BASED SOCIETY’: STATE-ENABLED GRASSROOTS CLIENTELISM AND THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF ORDER IN PRESENT DAY HUNGARY

Paper short abstract:

We probe the Hungarian government's ‘public work' programme and show that rural mayors played a key role in its effort to ‘restore order’. Mayors acted as brokers by implementing public work schemes in a way that was in synch with the needs of the poor and projected an image of communal development.

Paper long abstract:

We propose to investigate the Hungarian government's landmark ‘public work programme’, which has been a key vehicle of its effort to ‘restore order’ in the countryside in the aftermath of the Great Recession. We focus on the figures of rural mayors who were assigned a key role in the building of a ‘work-based society’: they are responsible for organising local public work schemes. Relying on ethnographic material we collected in two peripheral villages and a small town, we argue that mayors' principal task is to mediate between the interests and aspirations of welfare-dependent ‘surplus populations' and crisis-stricken ‘post-peasant’ petty bourgeoisies. We show that to fulfil the state-assigned role of brokerage mayors drew on the historical archive of rural clientelism to forge new types of patron-client relations with the poor, and organized public work schemes in a way that projected an image of community cohesion and development. The key takeaway is that state-enabled grassroots clientelism has successfully tamed social conflicts in the countryside through the hierarchical reincorporation of socio-economically excluded surplus populations and by upholding the simulacrum of development in economically stagnating rural regions. Our interpretation is at odds with scholarly interpretations of public work, which emphasize its top-down character or portray the poor as passive suffering subjects. Instead, we emphasise that the programme reserves a certain room of manoeuvre for mayors and that clientelism creates mutual - if asymmetric - obligations and is therefore amenable to building consensus.