Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
91
company executive council (
vállalati tanács
). By the time I arrived, talk about socialist economy
was passé and most people mentioned second economy as the real force to be reckoned with.
Studying both the formal and the informal but legal second economy was a real challenge; youth
spent more and more time in the factories and obviously earned more money. Some of my young
informants were asking about the best and latest VCRs they should buy!
Complex organizations create complex and highly structured bureaucracies that offer
anthropologists new possibilities to study inner-workings of institutions. At one of the company
executive meeting I was able to sit through, I noticed how personal conflicts were solved through
hours of negotiations. Surprising happenings also occurred. As usual for anthropological
fieldwork method I was ready to take notes of the discussions taking place. In no time, one of the
managing directors came informing me that I should not bother. My initial reaction must have
shocked him because he immediately explained that I will receive complete written minutes of
the meeting the next day. This is not something one gets while conducting participant
observation in a village setting. Photographic fieldwork techniques were also lot more
challenging than I expected. Although I had some previous uneasy situation with my camera,
especially in Romania but also in Hungary, factory management asserted the no-photography-
rule inside the factory gates. No people, no machines, not even seemingly innocent bystanders in
an alley-way were considered proper subjects by my guides (Kürti 1999). Industrial plants were
considered, after all, military installations as most industries in state socialist societies were
considered as such. What this entailed was that the foreign anthropologist’s technological
violation of the workplace added a considerable distance between natives (them) and outsiders
(me). Such a limitation was no more present during the mid-to-late 1990s when I returned for a
follow-up fieldwork.
By 1985, when I first arrived to conduct my research, Csepel’s population reached
90,000, and Csepelers faced yet another crisis period. The leadership, for its part, was desirous of
finding ways to cope with the declining workforce in metallurgy and boost production by
initiating various new forms of second economy activities. To alleviate the shrinking workforce
new labourers were hired, many of them unskilled Roma from the countryside. Although there
were Roma migrants living in rather squalid conditions in Csepel, new ones were not really
welcomed. Interethnic strife and rivalry became vicious and open. The situation further
deteriorated as high politics became overtly nationalistic.
One fundamental aspect of urban fieldwork is that anthropologists are able to witness
how industries are facing and responding to challenges both from national as well as
international players. As I found out from living in Csepel, local and national politics often clash
in multi-ethnic working-class urban neighbourhoods suddenly with unexpected results. In the
intervening months, these critical issues, taken together with international economic instability,
contributed to the escalation of a crisis that catalysed the situation at hand. On October 23 1989,
Hungary declared itself to be a Republic; a multi-party system was legalized and free elections
took place on 25 March 1990; the socialist (formerly communist) party lost its monopoly in the
industrial enterprises; joint ventures between Hungary and the West began to proliferate in an
attempt to invigorate the country’s sluggish economic performance.
