Session Information
17 SES 12, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
Focusing on oral recollections about a non-formal education space, the paper scrutinizes the socialization strategies of the cultural elite in Socialist Hungary. More specifically, using the interpretive method of narrative biographic interviewing (Breckner et al. 2000, Rosenthal 2002, Rosenthal 2004), our research investigates the social memory of a private summer vacation held between 1938 and 1978 by Eszter Leveleki, a protestant primary school teacher. The informally organized camps stemmed from the heritage of bourgeois philanthropy and revived the reform pedagogy movement of the 1920s and 1930s (Hametz et al. 2008). As counter alternative to communist pioneer camps, the summer vacations centered on powerful rituals of community-building in an era that suppressed family and national traditions incompatible with the ruling Socialist ideology. Hence our research promises an insightful case study about the changing meanings attached to the alternative pedagogies and bourgeois private schooling traditions in the centralized communist education system.
In the recollections, being a “child of Bánk” is described as a form of oppositional existence. The activities focusing on autonomy, creativity and spontaneity contrasted formal pedagogic practices and the emptied official ideology of collectivism. The frame-story of the summer vacation was an imagined “constitutional monarchy” whose citizens were nurtured to become autonomous, solidary, independent thinkers. Behind this universe, was the suppressed heritage of the intellectual habitus (Bourdieu, 1984) emphasizing originality and creativity, and enacting a specific critical-ironic relation to state power. The integrative inner norms enacted and strengthened the symbolic powers of the elite by a complex hierarchy based on various components of the intellectual habitus. Given that the children of cadres also attended the informally organized vacations, the complex relationship of the elite with the state power also provided informal legitimacy for the camp and maintained its „tolerated” status. In the narratives, Bánk is often described as an island of freedom in the paternalist state what considered its citizens as minors and compelled them to compromises and concealment. Additionally, the story of the camps intertwines with post-war Jewish identity strategies primarily characterized by the silencing of familial religious background, nonetheless gaining strength from a dense informal network and a complex system of cultural codes (Erős, 1996).
The analyses of the narrative constructions ponder over the following questions. Can we understand the “constitutional monarchy” of Bánk as alternative, reform pedagogy experiment and utopia? Or perhaps as a socialization space that found ways to deconstruct the half-truths of tabooing State socialism? In its peculiar, symbolic language, was the Bánk vacation in itself a criticism of the dictatorship, or was it rather the genuine product of the regime? What was the rebellion of Bánk and what did revolt mean there?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bicskei, E. (2006) Our Greatest Treasure, the Child: The Politics of Childcare in Hungary, 1945-1956, Social Politics 13, 2, pp. 151-188. Breckner, R, Kelekin-Fishman D. and Miethe I. (eds) (2000) Biographies and the division of Europe: experience, action and change on the ‘Eastern’ side. Opladen: Leske and Budrich Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Erős, F. (1996) The Construction of Jewish Identity in Hungary in the 1980s, In: Y. Kashti, F. Erős, D. Schers, D. Zisenwine (eds.): A Quest for Identity. Post War Jewish Identities. Studies in Jewish Culture, Identity and Community, School of Education. Tel Aviv University: Tel Aviv, pp. 51-70. Hametz, M., Peto, A., and Szapor J. (eds) (2008) Tradition Unchained: Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe From the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Berghahn books. Konrad, Gy, Szelényi I. (1979) The intellectuals on the road to class power. Harvester Press, 1979, p. 252. Rosenthal G (ed) (1998) The Holocaust in three generations: families of survivors and perpetrators of the Nazi regime. London: Cassell Rosenthal, G. (2004) “Biographical research”. In: C. Seale, G. Gobo, J. Gubrium, D. Silverman (eds) Qualitative research practice. London: Sage Publications Rosenthal, G. (2002) Family history: Life stories, The History of the Family, Vol. 7, Iss. 2.
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