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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the origins, life, and afterlife of one social question—the so-called “Gypsy question” [cigánykérdés]—as it was presented and acted upon by political and parapolitical actors within state socialist Hungary (1949–1989). It further examines how Roma of the Hungarian People’s Republic lived under and resisted its descriptions. It argues that, despite regime change, the state socialist approach to this question evinces continuities with assimilatory and exclusionary practices pursued within the Habsburg monarchy and, after 1920, the independent state of Hungary. Further, this question persists into the present and finds frequent uptake in contemporary speech. Its analysis is built upon two contentions. First, there is no “Gypsy question” without an underlying “Magyar [Hungarian] question.” Historical and present-day expressions of the “Gypsy question” serve to stabilize an ideal of the Magyar. Second, if the “Gypsy question” appears as a stable constant in Hungarian history and politics, it is because uncertainties remain about how one is to live as a Magyar. “Solutions” to this question—before, during, and after state socialism—evince tight linkages with other, though not always clearly stated social questions. These include labor and migration, population and demography, and even what it means to consume in an orderly way.
Drawing upon historical, ethnographic, and linguistic anthropological methods, I examine state socialist “solutions” to this question first, by tracing its origins in Habsburg policy and through the academic debates that supported them. I then undertake an analysis of four sites of intervention in Romani life pursued by the Hungarian socialist state after 1949: 1.) labor and its reproduction; 2.) love and the structure of the family; 3.) housing and spatial organization; and 4.) consumption and health. Each of these chapters argues that, despite the stated aim of socialist policy to facilitate the “social integration” of Roma into the Magyar majority, its actual effects upon everyday Romani life produced ambiguous results. Labor politics aimed at “sedentarization,” for example, may have fit Roma into the labor market, but this often entailed labor mobility and commuting. To take another example, housing policies to effect Romani home-buying within Magyar-majority communities deepened spatial segregation rather than resolved it.
The recurrence of the “Gypsy question” in academic and everyday discourse, this dissertation contends, reveals something important about the way historical actors reinterpret the past in order to reanimate the present. Change therefore coils around continuity as so-called “solutions”—before, during, and after state socialism—have become enfolded into and so renewed the seemingly singular question itself.