Politics of the Blessed Lady

Catholic Art in the Contemporary Hungarian Culture Industry

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3395490
AutoresMarc Roscoe Loustau (0000-0001-8655-8715, College of the Holy Cross, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen12
Número8
Páginas577
Fecha de publicación2021-07-27
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaReligions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel12080577
OpenAlexW3183790480
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas29

I examine Hungary's Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of national construction and contestation. Ethnographic data come from thirty-six months of fieldwork in Hungary and Transylvania, and focuses on three museum and gallery exhibitions of Catholic devotional objects. Building on critiques of subjectivity- and embodiment-focused research, I highlight how the institutional legacies of state socialism in Hungary and Romania inform a national politics of Catholic materiality. Hungarian cultural institutions and intellectuals have been drawn to work with Catholic art because Catholic material culture sustains a meaningful presence across multiple scales of political contestation at the local, regional, and state levels. The movement of Catholic ritual objects into the zone of high art and cultural preservation necessitates that these objects be mobilized for use within the political agendas of state-embedded institutions. Yet, this mobilization is not total. Ironies, confusions, and contradictions continue to show up in Transylvanian Hungarians' historical memory, destabilizing these political uses

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Communism · Ethnography · Exhibition · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Subjectivity · The arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Religious Tourism and Spaces