| This dissertation examines the material culture of domestic space in Dunaujvaros, Hungary, specifically the discourses, practices, and material worlds of Hungarians aspiring to middle-class status in this former Socialist model town. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the postsocialist mid-1990s, and an analysis of the 'consumer' history of the socialist period through documents and cultural artefacts, it addresses the production and transformation of subjectivities as mediated by "house" and "home." I argue that new standards of normalcy in Hungary, defined by political systems and standards of living assumed to be the equal of those lived by citizens in the West, are not just the product of Hungary's post-socialist immersion in a neoliberal capitalist world order. Instead, they arise out of the modern consumer culture emerging during the socialist period, one in which cultural understandings of "normalcy" were forged by the state's prioritization of "modern" material worlds emulative of western standards but determined by a Modernist ideology and aesthetic. This investigation sheds light on the question, increasingly relevant across the globe: By what processes have certain forms of consumption come to be, not just a dominant mode of identity production eclipsing other markers of identity (class, workplace, even caste), but primary indices of human value? In so doing, I am contributing to the ongoing study of the relationship between the socialist and postsocialist eras, as well as to anthropological understandings of the home as a privileged site of productive consumption for embodied subjectivity. |
