Politics of the Blessed Lady
Catholic Art in the Contemporary Hungarian Culture Industry
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3395490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marc Roscoe Loustau (0000-0001-8655-8715, College of the Holy Cross, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 577 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel12080577 |
| OpenAlex | W3183790480 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
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
Embodied Eye
The Meaning of Things
The Sacred Gaze
The political lives of dead bodies
National Ideology Under Socialism
Cultural Policy in an Illiberal State
The Practice of Conceptual History
Neoshamanism, National Identity and the Holy Crown of Hungary
Text, Context and Performance
Socialism and King Stephen's right hand
Patriotism, Orthodox religion and education
The New Socialist Man in the Plattenbau
Of Crosses, Winged Victories, and Eagles
National Cemeteries and National Revival
War Dead and the Restoration of Military Cemeteries in Eastern Europe
More East than West
Europeanising Hungarian Waste Policies
Transgressing the Right to the City
Visual Piety
The Old Faith and the Russian Land
Making Trash into Treasure
Ideology in Infrastructure
Beyond blasphemy or devotion
Belief Beyond the Bugbear
Clothing of Piety, Clothing of Poverty
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |