U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2002-2003

Margit Feischmidt

Assistant Professor
University of Pecs
Rival Nations, Symbolic Conflicts and their Social Perception in Eastern Europe
Hungary

Margit Feischmidt is a cultural anthropologist and works currently as an assistant professor at the Department of Communications, University of Pécs, Hungary, where she leads the Cultural Anthropology Unit of the Department. She teaches courses related to ethnicity, nationalism, migration and social memory, as well as qualitative methods. She studied linguistics and literature in Cluj, Romania and cultural anthropology at Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary where she graduated with an MA in 1994. Supported by TEMPUS and KAAD, she spent more than one year in Berlin, where in 2001 she defended her doctoral thesis at the European Ethnology Institute of the Humboldt University. Her thesis in under publication at the LIT-Verlag, with the title Ethnizität als Konstruktion und Erfahrung: Symbolstreit und Alltagskultur im siebenbürgischen Cluj (Ethnicity as Construction and Experience: Symbolic Conflict and Everyday Life in the Transylvanian City of Cluj).

Margit Feischmidt carried out anthropological fieldwork on different sites in Romania and Hungary. Her most significant project is on nationalism, symbolic conflict, and ethnicity in the everyday life in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. The results of this research have already been presented in different papers and conference lectures and constitute the core of her doctoral thesis as well. She also maintains research interests in social memory and the politics of commemoration. In her first joint project with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker, she studied the public representation of historical conflicts in three East European countries in comparison on the example of the 150th anniversary of the revolutions of 1848.

Margit Feischmidt has a theoretical interest in issues related to new normative approaches toward cultural and ethnic difference. She published some years ago an edited volume on multiculturalism in Hungarian and held in 1999 an Open Society Policy Fellowship for a project on the implementation of multiculturalism into the East European context.

Selected Publications :

"1848 in 1998: The Politics of Commemoration in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia." (Co-
authored with Rogers Brubaker.) Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(4) (2002):
700-744.
"Symbole und Räume rivalisierender Nationalismen. Ein Beispiel der multiethnischen Stadt
Cluj (Symbols and Places of Rival Nationalisms. The Case of the Multiethnic City of Cluj)."
Ethnologia Europaea 31(2) (2001): 59-76.
"Symbolische Kämpfe der Nationalisierung. Die Auseinandersetzung um ein Denkmal im
multiethnischen Ort Cluj (Symbolic Struggles of Nationalization. A Debate on a
National Monument in the Multiethnic Settlement of Cluj)." In Beate Binder, Peter
Niedermüller, and Wolfgang Kaschuba, Eds. Inszenierung des Nationalen. Geschichte,
Kultur und die Politik der Identitäten am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Köln-Weimar-
Wien: Böhlau, 2001: 263-284.
Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. Local Government
and Public Service Reform Initiative Monographs. Budapest: Open Society Institute, 2001.
Report on Ethnic Relations in Cluj. Policy Recommendations towards the Implementation of
Multiculturalism in Transylvania. OSI Fellowship Research Report and Policy Paper, 2001.
Also available at the OSI website: www.osi/ips.hu.

The goal of my NCS project is twofold. First, I intend to complete a book on nationalism and ethnicity in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. The tentative title of this book is Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Transylvanian City: Between Politics and Everyday Life. This book will be the product of an ongoing research project with the participation of Rogers Brubaker (professor of sociology, UCLA), Jon Fox and Liana Grancea (Ph.D. students, UCLA), and myself. Second, using the unique opportunities offered by the NCS program, my goal is to compare the Transylvanian case with similar multiethnic regions and to write a comparative study on symbolic conflicts, rival nationalisms, and their social perception in Eastern Europe.

There is already a consensus among scholars that the 'nation' is a social and political construct. However, we know less about the process of how this construction occurs in concrete social environments. As one the authors of the above-mentioned book, I think that nationalism should be analyzed as an interactive process between different elite groups and discourses representing the dominant nation and ethnic minorities. Moreover, I wish to come closer to the understanding of the social impact of such discourses: how and when people accept and use these concepts and what are the limits of their mobilization. I also intend to identify the various moments and situations in which 'nation' or 'ethnicity' matters and the different ways of how ethnicity became a categorical and narrative framework, through which people perceive and understand their social environment.

Cluj is a typical East European city in the sense that nationalism plays a central role in framing politics and the whole urban public sphere, including discourses about education, local administration, social memory and many others. In the course of the ongoing struggles between the representations of 'the' Hungarians - produced by the institutions of the largest ethnic minority in the city and in the region - and 'the' Romanians - produced by the nationalist parties and organizations -, a new and dual symbolic structure of the town has gradually emerged, together with a nationalist political strategy based on symbolic conflicts and rival forms of collective representation. However, nationalist politics and public discourses did not facilitate mass mobilization. There were many ritual public events, national celebrations and commemorations, demonstrations and contra-demonstrations, but there was no violence or threat of violence. In order to understand why this was so, one should approach the topic from a novel perspective: by studying everyday perceptions and practices of ethnicity, on the one hand, and the memory and representations of former conflicts, on the other hand. In more concrete terms, we should ask what does ethnicity and ethnic identity mean in the everyday life of people who live together with 'others' in certain circumstances and separated from them in others? The question here is not what ethnicity is, but rather how it is lived: how people experience ethnic difference and sameness, how they use ethnic categories to describe persons, situations, and events.