Mary N Taylor

The safeguarding of heritage is touted as an important step in protecting cultural diversity. The emphasis heritage projects put on preservation, however, obscures the part they play in transformation. This article argues that heritagization can be viewed as a kind of Bildung that draws diverse practices tied to diverse worldviews and value systems into a space of equivalency and civil society, amenable to capitalist social relations. Drawing on research on a Hungarian folk revival movement, the article calls for comparative research on how heritagization depoliticizes the very effects of neoliberal capitalism that it addresses and offers solutions that may be tied to dispossession.

as an important revolutionary institution, The National School of the Arts (la ENA, Escuelas Nationales De Arte-also known as "the City of Arts") was founded in March 1962 in the Cubanacan neighborhood of Havana. The campus, with five buildings set on the grounds of what was once the exclusive golf course of the Havana Country Club, was designed by architects Ricardo Porro, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti. UNESCO lists this compound as among the most outstanding examples of the Modernist Movement in Cuba. While your beautifully shot and edited film la ENA, which also features an incredible soundtrack, captures these unique structures built for this purpose, your interest is in documenting it as a cultural and educational institution. As someone who has researched the role of cultural institutions of state socialist Hungary in civic cultivation and is also an editor of LeftEast, I have many questions. First, can you speak a bit about yourself? What led you to make this film? What was the process of making it like? Photo: Amilcar Navarro. Amilcar Navarro: I'm a huge Jazz listener and I was invited to a concert in Brooklyn with Bobby Carcasess. He was the pianist of Columna B, and through that concert I met a whole generation of Cuban musicians who now live in NYC. We became friends and I met a whole universe of artists who all had been students at ISA. I just felt there must be something special about the school and I started to do some research. Of course the buildings themselves are remarkable, and the backstory of Fidel and Che's desire to manufacture a "new man" via state institutions was interesting as well as honest. At the time I was watching a lot of Fredrick Wiseman films and his work is all about institutions; the people who run them and the people who are shaped by them. So that was a point of inspiration. Making the film was pure luck. It was impossible to get official permission. I had a green light and then it was cancelled due to student protests over the food being served, so the state didn't want cameras inside the school. Just as it was cancelled I met a producer in Havana after selling a camera to a Cuban who lives in NYC. He suggested I speak with his friend who was a producer on the film Juan of the Dead and he had the state contacts to get a green light for the film. It was tough. It's a very controlled society when trying to make a film about a state institution. It was a great experience but not something I would do again. It is a headache dealing with Soviet-style bureaucracy with its "you can film this, but not that." I would have a shoot day canceled the night before, and of course I needed to get each professor to agree to let me into each classroom. Not a fun process.

This is the second of a two-part interview with Mary Taylor. You can read the first part here. The result of a collaboration between LeftEast and Mérce within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet, the interview was also translated into Hungarian by Kristóf Nagy and Ferenc Kőszeghy.

The first of a two-part interview with Mary Taylor. The result of a collaboration between LeftEast and Mérce within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet, the interview was also translated into Hungarian by Kristóf Nagy and Ferenc Kőszeghy.

This conversation was first instigated by Malav Kanuga (of Common Notions press and Making Worlds Bookstore in Philadelphia). It follows a previous conversation between the authors held at Making Worlds to celebrate the joint launch of Janet’s Letters on the Autonomy Project and Mary’s coedited The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization.
Both dialogues reflect a common investment in conversation as a relational method that is central to the authors’ social-movement work and is reflected in the texts themselves. This dialogue was held over email and has been edited for length and clarity.

The Hungarian government is currently dominated by two rightist parties, Fidesz and Jobbik, drawing comparisons with Hungary’s interwar period. The term “populism” dominates (neo)liberal media discourse, pointing to the rise of antiestablishment parties, usually on the right (but often providing a critique of neoliberalism) and sometimes on the left. What can we learn by examining what was called populism in the 1930s and today, in Hungary, or more generally? This chapter approaches this question via the Hungarian népi (folk/populist/popular) movement in the context of global economic crisis following the stock market crash of 1929, and the radical shifts in the organization of territories, peoples, and borders in the making of new nation-states in this region after World War I. A comparison between political questions in Hungary over time gives us valuable insight into how to think about the work of “populism” and antipopulism in the making and unmaking of hegemonic blocks.

*ERRATUM: Please note the unfortunate typographical error on page 190 in this text. Where it says an estimated 50,000 Jews were deported and murdered, it should read 550,000, as in the reference cited.

The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because "liberty" is what must be exercised-Michel Foucault 1

A medida que la lógica del Capital se vuelve universal, su opuesto asumirá cada vez más los rasgos del " fundamentalismo irracional " … El punto de vista liberal que opone la " apertura " liberal-democrática a la " cerrazón " nacionalista-orgánica —la visión sustentada en la esperanza de que una sociedad " realmente " liberal y democrática surgirá una vez que nos deshagamos de las restricciones protofascistas y nacionalistas—se queda corto, ya que no logra tomar en cuenta la forma en que el marco liberal-democrático — supuestamente neutral— produce la " cerrazón " nacionalista como su opuesto inherente.

This paper, based on participant research amongst folk revivalists, interviews with cultural managers, and extensive archival research, discusses the táncház (dance house) folk revival movement as the actualization of interwar efforts of " folk national cultivation " in Hungary. By putting the dance house in relationship with inter-war folk critiques, the paper illustrates both continuities and discontinuities between them, most notably in conceptualizations of the relationship between the ethical or political roles of such critiques and of the folk itself. The paper argues that folk critiques , now and then, can play an important role in state formation by reproducing the folk and acting to secure its citizenship. Nevertheless, how the folk is defined is historically determined, as is the kind of citizenship entailed. Since folk national cultivation is premised on the idea that Hungarianness is produced through engagement with the folk and its traditions, the historical approach of this paper problematizes this process.

Since the early 1990s, language used to speak of cultural practices once thought of as " folklore " has become increasingly standardized around the term intangible heritage. Supranational intangible heritage policies promote a contradictory package that aims to preserve local identity and cultural diversity while promoting democratic values and economic development. Such efforts may contribute to the deployment of language that stresses mutual exclusivity and incom-mensurability, with important consequences for individual and group access to resources. This article examines these tensions with ethnographic attention to a Hungarian folk revival movement, illuminating how local histories of " heritage protection " meet with the global norm of heritage governance in complicated ways. I suggest the paradoxical predicament that both " liberal " notions of diversity and ethno-national boundaries are co-produced through a number of processes in late capitalism, most notably connected to changing relations of property and citizenship regimes.