History paper by Barát, Erzsébet
Crossing the Border: From ‘Autochthonous Hungarian’ to ‘Migrant Hungarian’
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
In my talk I shall explore the ideological underpinnings of the meaning production of the categories of autochthonous and migrant Hungarians in various media representations at the time of the 2005 referendum on citizenship in Hungary against my ethnographic findings based on semi-structured interviews carried out with Hungarian migrants who came to live in Szeged from Serbia or Romania in the past twenty years. My major theoretical concern is to explore and demonstrate the equally exclusionary logic of apparently oppositional stereotypical (prejudiced thinking) of liberal and nationalistic positions. It is the ‘same’ ideological assumption they share, though attributed only to their opponents to discredit each other and thereby eventually keeping each other at bay – and in power in the eyes of their followers. This ideological meaning of “Hungarian migrants’/autochthonous Hungarian” distinction draws upon the conflation of linguistic and cultural dimensions of identity formation (Blommaert and Verschueren, 2007). The former, liberal position, falsely, ends up depoliticizing the negotiation over conditions and meanings of belonging and foreignness, as a result of a discourse strategy of multiculturalism that is “too-ready to accept that culture matters [in a way that] helps to nourish cultural stereotypes” (Anne Phillips 2007:21). The latter, the conservative discourse of nationalism ends up treating language as an origin of cultural “being”, paradoxically, leading to situations where those immigrating to Hungary, speaking the officially (and linguistically) non-acknowledged regional dialect of their country of citizenship (Romania or Serbia) comes to be inflected with the meaning of ‘foreign’ and will inevitably bring about new, cultural and economic kind of difficulties to negotiate. This is an equally oppressive move, one that pushes the migrants in the direction of “integration” on the terms of the “locals”, the ‘more original’ Hungarians.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
computer projection