What is it about?
This paper is about survival strategies in the Hungarian Communist Regime, analyzing a New Age group established in 1979, that was shifted towards Neo-Paganism in the 80s. It included e.g. detecting the secret police activity, constructing an ideology-conform façade and some members’ activity in the Socialist Party. They lived in parallel realities, activating one or another in different situations.
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Why is it important?
Research of New Age and Neo-Pagan groups during Communist Era in Hungary is a very rarely studied field. This case study recognizes a cognitive survival strategy within a "communist society": creating and living in parallel realities, and acting in appropriate frames in different situations. Another survival technique was the joining the Communist Regime's only party, the Socialist Party, but there were several other strategies to be kept out of the "system", and creating micro-freedom in a dictatorship. The paper lists these strategies of a Hungarian religious group in the 80s, which age strongly effects Hungarian society's current mentality even in the 21st century. Nowadays - in spite of Soviet Forces - EU policy (and bureaucracy) can be considered as the Forcing Authority by a growing number of the participants.
Perspectives
As a social and cultural anthropologist I conducted long term fieldwork among a Neo-Pagan group, where I found many sources of their roots, the beginning at the end of the 70s and in the 80s. I made many interviews, collected documents, photos, so I decided to give a short outline how they could survive and develop their movement under the Socialist regime. I also focused on the perception of their own past in the present, three or four decades after the heroic beginning. It was very interesting to see how the "role of feared authorities" was shifted from the Communist one towards the contemporary political power (government, EU).
László Koppány Csáji
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “I joined the Party to keep ourselves out of the System.” Neo-Pagan Survival Strategies in Socialist Hungary, Open Theology, January 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/opth-2017-0017.
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