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Everyday Life Under Socialism

Ferenc Hammer’s four studies play out in pre-democratic Hungary. Their key figures, though ordinary people like us, are younger and have a relationship to objects and ordinary days that is entirely different.

For this, the eighth volume of the MaDok series, everything has changed a little. Take the matter of authorship:  until now, every volume in the series has had multiple authors, each affiliated in some way with the museum scene.  Here, by contrast, the work of a single sociologist is featured.  Also for this volume, the definition of “contemporary” has been expanded: before, our view was restricted to the time following the fall of Hungary’s previous regime. Here, instead, we reach back further, but for what purpose?

In …Jeans Don’t Need Ironing:  Everyday Life Under Socialism, sociologist Ferenc Hammer presents four studies on life in socialist Hungary, featuring objects, people, and places both familiar and unfamiliar. The topics are jeans, board games, truck drivers, and night life, respectively. The period under study is not the present that surrounds us now, but the recent past; its stories end where the “present,” as it has been understood in this series thus far, begins. Again, the question arises: why?

As a methodological decision, however, the intent was not to rip people, objects, and terrain from their chronological context, with the thinking that these things do not have their own stories, that their forms and patterns do not change over time. To grasp the role played by a Chinese-made nylon shirt on the stage of modern consumer culture, for example, there is little need to examine the entire story from the early galalithite button to the textile industry revolution; it is enough to consider what Asian mass products mean in Hungary today, why consumers choose to buy cheap, unbranded products, how these objects are filled with stories in the course of everyday life, and in all this, where the museum comes in as an important medium for the study of objects. To understand how plastic became a household material during the 1970s, on the other hand, one cannot ignore the first half of the 20th century, World War II, the oil embargo, or the socialist East German and Soviet plastics industries.

In these studies, somewhere beyond the broader connections, tiny details grow sharper: the freedom and longing represented by a pair of jeans, the supportive – or critical – attitude toward the politico-economic system shown by a board game, the near mythical status of the men who crossed borders in their trucks, and the cultural attitude that bred opportunities for free, critical thinking and artistic expression within the Kádár regime. The period that is studied here extends from the 1950s until the 1990s. Through professional literature, interviews, and personal experiences, the reader is taken into the realm of the social sciences, where the terrain is no longer that of the museum and its collections of artefacts, but where the culture of ordinary objects nonetheless serves as a showcase for work-a-day life, one that illuminates the object-centred world of ordinary days, leisure time, and the process of consumption.

Hammer Ferenc: …nem kellett élt vasalni a farmerbe. Mindennapi élet a szocializmusban […Jeans Don’t Need Ironing: Everyday Life Under Socialism. Studies] Budapest, Néprajzi Múzeum, 2013 (MaDok-füzetek 8.)

Photo: Sarnyai Krisztina