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American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms,
and the Search for a ‘Normal’ Life
in Postsocialist Hungary
Krisztina Fehérváry
University of Chicago, usa
abstractThroughout the post-Soviet bloc, people regularly describe as ‘normal’ highquality
commodities and living environments otherwise considered extraordinary in their
local context. In Hungary, this discourse of the normal indicates that middle-class aspirants,
claiming ‘European’ status, now evaluate their own standards of living by comparison
to imagined western ones. Looking to the socialist period, I argue that the construction
of a socialist modern consumer led to the equation of western standards of
living with self-value and dignity. Western material worlds were perceived to be conducive
to a form of family life and personhood impossible under the ‘abnormal’ conditions
of state-socialism. As this new standard comes to dictate middle-class fashioning, it
becomes instrumental in the ongoing social, economic and material transformation of
the country.
keywords Postsocialism, material culture, domestic furnishings, middle class
I
n the 1 990s in postsocialist Hungary,astonishing transformations to public
space were often surpassed by those made within the confines of private
homes. Hungarians aspiring to middle-class status, who had lived most
of their lives in one- or two-room apartments, proudly showed me around
newly constructed, detached family homes with spacious living rooms, hightech
kitchens, multiple baths, and extra rooms for laundry and hobbies – often
built at a cost far above their means. Others displayed renovations of their
newly privatized socialist-era apartments, arched doorways and open spaces
created by tearing down walls, new tiles in the hallway and in the modernized
bathroom, and the coveted ‘American kitchen’ (amerikai konyha), meaning
a kitchen open to the living area. During this period of economic uncertainty
and inflation, studies conducted nationwide showed that the average
size of new houses was significantly larger than had been considered comfortable
by the standards of the socialist 1 980s (1 22 m2
). Furthermore, these
© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, on behalf of the National Museum of Ethnography
issn 001 4-1 8 44 print/ issn 1 469-5 88 x online. doi: 1 0.1 080/001 41 84022000031 21 1
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Hungarians seemed willing to make sacrifices elsewhere in order to obtain
the highest quality materials possible, from Italian tiles and domestic porcelain
fixtures to German appliances and American floor heating systems (Magyar
Nemzet 1 0/ 1 5 / 96). But when Iexclaimed over the size of these new spaces,
the quality of the materials used, or the novelty of design, I was met repeatedly
with the puzzling response, ‘Why, it’s totally normal, isn’t it?’ (Hát, ez
teljesen normális, nem?).1
As I was to discover, this reaction was not limited to my fieldsite, nor to
Hungary. Throughout the post-Soviet region, scholars have reported similar
uses of ‘normal’ to refer to objects, services and standards of living which are
clearly extraordinary in their local context – and yet are imagined to be part
of ‘average’ lifestyles in Western Europe or the United States. Accounts from
the Baltic and Central European states in particular make clear that what I
call a ‘discourse of the normal’ indexes a profound adjustment of identity set
in motion by the sudden geopolitical shift of these countries from Soviet satellite
to aspiring members of a reconfigured ‘Europe.’ 2
Those nations and peoples
once identified as the most western of the Soviet bloc states suddenly
found themselves situated on the undefined eastern border of greater Europe,
with all the loss of prestige this entailed. Now they were in the unenviable
position of having to prove their ‘westernness’ in a new context – to themselves
as much as to a European Union reluctant to grant them membership.
Around the time of the Soviet collapse in the early 1 990s, much was made
of the profound disillusion experienced by citizens, of dashed expectations
of rapid transformation and absorption into the much-fantasized world of
the West. The difficulty of the ensuing years has indeed been a ‘reality check’
of sorts, as citizens have adjusted to the notion that it will take years, perhaps
decades, for their nations to ‘catch up’ to the West; in many places, they are
resigned to the possibility that it will not occur within their lifetimes. Nonetheless,
as the present essay will demonstrate, the discourse of the normal
illustrates that people have not abandoned expectations of western standards
of living in their private lives. These longings are most evident in the
realm of the material, as objects, built environments, consumer goods, and
even the human body, have been subject to rapid shifts in meanings and value
as their contexts have changed. Material culture, indeed, is emerging as a
particularly revealing site for the investigation of the effects of the fall of state
socialism on practices, values and subjectivities.3
Citizens of these postsocialist nations are not unique, of course, in comparing
themselves to an idealized West. As Richard Wilk has written of Be-
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lize, a ‘global standard has become an ever-present (and perhaps internalized)
significant other by which the local is defined and judged’ (Wilk 1 995 :1 27;
also Howes 1 996). Such comparisons were certainly true of Hungarians in
the socialist era, as Western standards of living set the implicit standard –
however unattainable – by which Hungarians evaluated their own material
worlds. In the postsocialist context, however, this standard has been often
seen less as an ‘other’ to be emulated, than a measure of a ‘true’ identity, or
self, tied to a pre-socialist, bourgeois-democratic past, the development of
which was suppressed or distorted by Communist rule. Without the taint of
Soviet dominance, Hungarians now demand recognition of their European
identity based on the nation’s history, culture, educational level and professionalism,
pointing to Hungarian contributions to western civilization in fields
as disparate as theoretical physics, classical music and Hollywood cinema.
With the removal of all apparent obstacles to rejoining Europe, the consensus
has been that the country must strive to become what it would or should
have been if its history had followed a ‘normal’ course.4
As the realm of the
possible is perceived to have expanded dramatically for citizens within this
changed national context, so have internalized expectations of realizing a
‘normal’ life.
Yet settling on identification as ‘western’ or ‘European’ leaves many underlying
questions unanswered. How is it that this peculiar kind of identity
formation manifests itself through material culture, and more specifically, in
notions about ‘comparable’ standards of living? What accounts for the cultural
logic that dictates that only imagined European standards of living are
acceptable for middle-class fashioning, even when it makes realization of such
‘normalcy’ increasingly out of reach for much of the population? Finally, what
is the significance of the modesty implied by the normalization of these extraordinary
material aspirations, given their context? In the following, I describe
the discourse of the normal, drawing in particular upon fieldwork done
among professionals and entrepreneurs in the Hungarian steel town of
Dunaújváros. Expanding upon studies of ‘normal’ which focus on questions
of identity, status and morality (Pesmen 2000; Rausing 1 998; Wedel 1 986), I
examine how, in the realm of material culture, this discourse both emanates
from transformations to the material landscape and serves to transform it.
In order to understand the power ofthis concept of‘normal’ to shape practices
and subjectivities, particularly in exerting intense social pressures to acquire
these material worlds, I turn to the state-socialist period. Drawing on popular
socialist-era publications on interior decor and house-building,5
I exam-
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ine the diverse forces shaping the socialist citizen as modern consumer.6
I
suggest that the mass consumer society and consumer subjectivities fostered
by state socialism led to the equation of modern standards of living, always
calibrated against those considered average in the West, with a self-value and
respectability accessible to a large middle stratum. While elite taste-makers
attempted to develop a modern citizenry through modern commodities and
living environments, the private, domestic sphere became idealized as a site
of autonomy and refuge from an intrusive state and the ‘abnormal’ social,
economic,and political conditions it fostered. Although abnormal conditions
have not disappeared with the fall of state-socialism, the desire for the private
spaces of new houses, American kitchens, and luxurious bathrooms stems
from a cultural logic in which such spaces are fantasized as conducive to idealized
lives – and selves – long imagined to exist elsewhere.
This historical background will help us to understand how the struggle
for ‘modern’ standards of living is not a new phenomenon; such standards,
adjusted for the conditions of state-socialism, have long been a criterion for
social respectability and harmonious family relations. As the discourse of the
normal reveals, what has changed is the perception that ‘normal’ worlds of
western standard are now within the realm of the possible and must be attained
in order to access the dignity accorded to European middle classes
elsewhere.
The Discourse of the Normal
In looking at the discourse of the normal, I am casting a net of inquiry
wider than a precise definition of the word itself and the mechanisms of its
use. I see the use of ‘normal’ to be a particularly provocative instance of a
wider discourse incorporating other terms and communicative behaviors,from
gestures to gift-giving practices. With this caveat in mind, I turn here to the
definition of the word, examples of its use,and other discourses it builds upon.
As with regional variants, the Hungarian normális is taken from the Latin.
According to a Hungarian dictionary of foreign words and expressions (Bakos
1 994), normális has much the same meaning as ‘normal’ in English: according
to norms, standards; what is customary, normative, ordinary and average;
in addition, what is nice, natural, healthy, dependable, rational, sane.7
In
my experience, synonyms for ‘normal’ include ‘humane,’ ‘livable’ and ‘respectable,’
while equivalent expressions for ‘not normal’ include ‘unbelievable,’ ‘catastrophic,’
and ‘inhumane.’ Not mentioned in the dictionary is its countercontextual
use, originating in the perception – common in most Soviet bloc
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countries during much of the socialist period – that everyday life was generally
‘abnormal’ under conditions of constant material shortages, all-encompassing
bureaucratic entanglements, and political anxiety. Hungarians have thus
regularly used ‘not normal’ and its equivalents to refer negatively to the familiar
and the expected, to the accustomed workings and environments of
everyday ‘abnormal’ life. Conversely, ‘normal’ is often used to refer to the
extraordinary, to things that are neither customary nor normative within their
local context, but, since the fall of state socialism, are expected to become so
in the future.
What one means by referring to something as ‘normal’ or ‘not normal’ in
Hungary varies of course by speaker and with context – on whether it is used
seriously or with sarcasm, or whether it is applied to people, to organizations,
or to the material environment. In general, when Hungarians use ‘normal’
they are referring primarily to economic, political, and social spheres,
much as Norbert Elias (1 978) described the use of the term ‘civilization’ in
nineteenth-century England and France, rather than to inner states of being
or spirituality. In fact, when normális is used to describe a person, it usually indicates
acceptable social behavior rather than imputing anything more profound
to his or her character. As we shall see, however, ‘normal’ economic,
political, and social systems can be seen as necessary conditions for the possibility
of ‘normal’ social behavior and private life,with consequences for the construction
of personhood. This point is critical for understanding how the discourse
of the normal has come to mark the regime change as a turning point,
even though the discourse itself is not new to the postsocialist period.8
Evaluating aspects of one’s existence in this way arises from discourses of
identity in which peoples on the periphery of a conceptual ‘West’ position
themselves in some relation to it. Susan Gal (1 991 ) has described the mechanics
of such a discourse in Hungary, as the oppositions between terms
West/ East, Europe/ Hungary, Hungary/ Orient, modern/ traditional, and so
forth, shift in value depending on context. In this discourse, western or European
qualities are not always positively valued, but can suffer in comparison
to indigenous analogues, such as the ‘alienation’ brought on by European
civility opposed to Hungarian ‘community’(Elias’s kultur). The postsocialist
discourse of the normal – at least as it was used by middle-class aspirants in
the mid-1 990s – diverges from the West/ East discourse in that its value remains
constantly positive, even though what is being designated as ‘normal’
can shift with context relative to what it is being compared to and who constitutes
the audience.9
‘Normal’ (especially when referring to material cul-
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ture or to governmental and commercial systems) makes reference to what
is considered modern, civilized, or western, and thus fixes Europe and the
West as the hegemonically positive norm for Hungary in opposition to state
socialism, now permanently aligned with the East.10
The values of this discourse are reinforced by the ways they are analogous
to those of long-standing anti-socialist discourses. ‘Normal,’ with its association
with what is natural and healthy, is equated with the market capitalism
and the bourgeois middle classes of European states as well as those of the
pre-socialist era in Hungary.Such economic and social institutions were thought
to produce forms of order, or legal, political, and economic systems which
were understood to work ‘normally’ in the West. ‘Normal’ was commonly
used to describe services, goods or constructions new to Hungary since 1 989,
things in keeping with socialist era expectations of life under a capitalist, freemarket
system. New telephone systems, automatic teller machines, 24-hour
convenience stores and courteous sales clerks were examples of a ‘normal’
world available to most of the population. These were amenities that Hungarians
associated with a certain dignity accorded to bourgeois citizens of
the ‘first world.’
In contrast, ‘not normal’ usually indexed spheres of life which had not
changed or were seen to have deteriorated since 1 989, vestiges of state-socialism
deemed unnatural and even inhumane. My fieldnotes are full of people
registering their discontent with or disassociation from out-of-date and
inefficient technologies and infrastructures, corruption and rude behavior,
and the frantic pace of everyday life. While the phrase ‘this is not normal!’
continued socialist era discourses on the abnormality of everyday life, it now
also signified disappointment in the regime change for not ushering in an
expected normalcy. As my friend Timea, a successful manager at the steel
factory, once explained to me: ‘Here, it’s still not enough to work hard at
several jobs. One has to go through friends to get things done; one can’t simply
make a phone call, but must do errands in person; it’s not possible to trust
a professional to take care of house-building or repairs, you have to do it
yourself; if you come home at night tired, you can’t go out to eat somewhere
but have to cook. All these things burden a person, make them feel that they
are scattered in all directions at once.’ Occasionally the phrase referred to
new and unexpected changes brought on by market capitalism and democracy,
but again, socialism was implicated in the lawless and disorderly – ‘not
normal’– form these new institutions had taken throughout the former socialist
bloc because of the legacy of a state-socialist system. Like some eerie
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inversion of socialist realist discourse, which posited the future-in-the-present
with hope (Fitzpatrick 1 992), the discourse of normális posits the past-in-thepresent
with bitterness, that is, the abnormal way the state-socialist past is
clinging to and interfering with a ‘normal’ present.
Discourse of the Normal and Material Culture
If the discourse of the normal served as shorthand for identifying aspects
of life which had or had not been transformed according to expectations after
1 989, its application to material culture – from consumer goods to the built
environment – seemed to mark the Hungarian landscape spatially and temporally,
distinguishing objects and spaces contemporaneous with the West
from those that remained behind a European standard, caught in the quicksand
of the socialist past. Throughout the former Soviet bloc, the abundance
in shops of consumer goods once available only by traveling to the West or
through contacts has been much elaborated in the western press as well as in
academic literature. Though more gradual, change to the built environment
in the 1 990s was no less dramatic. In cities like Budapest, the ground floors
of many buildings blackened from soot and pollution over decades have been
painted bright colors and often house small shops, restaurants, and boutiques,
creating a bright corridor for pedestrians. Sometimes a single building on a
soot-dark city block is renovated, revealing for the first time in a half-century
intricate facades and sculptures but heightening the dinginess of the buildings
surrounding it. The construction of new commercial spaces – post-modern
office and bank buildings, luxury hotels, medical clinics and malls – has
boomed. Billboards and neon signs, which existed in limited form during socialism,
have proliferated. In the meantime, maintenance of existing socialist
era buildings, both civic and private, has often deteriorated as state funds
have evaporated.
Changes to the landscape in and around the former ‘socialist city’ of
Dunaújváros since 1 989 have been particularly conspicuous. With its steel
factory, modern architecture and urban planning, the city was a showcase
for the aging symbols of a modernist utopia, but now provides a backdrop
for the eclecticism and color of the postmodern. The steel support arches of
an enormous cathedral under construction rise to break the gray, angular
uniformity of socialist era residential estates, which continue to house 90 percent
of the city population. Downtown, the first new structures to appear
were a mirrored-glass bank and an oval-shaped shopping center, contrasting
sharply with the cube-like socialist savings bank and department store next
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to them. Just as striking are the new neighborhoods of single-family houses,
painted bright sherbet colors and adorned with red-tile roofs, which are emerging
on the outskirts of the surrounding villages. Hidden within houses and
apartments, but made ‘visible’ by ubiquitous advertising, specialty stores,television
depictions and home decorating publications, are the transformations
made to interior space.
The growing presence of these new, postsocialist spaces sharply contrasted
with and transformed the significance of the older spaces around them, creating
disjunctures in temporal and spatial experience. These ‘normal’ spaces
were much like those Foucault describes as heterotopias, spaces which have
the ‘curious property of being in relation with other sites, but in such a way
as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to
designate, mirror or reflect... Unlike utopias, which have a relation to society
and existing spaces through analogy, they are absolutely different from all
sites that they reflect or speak about’ (Foucault 1 986:24). And indeed, some
of these new spaces – brightly lit gas stations in the middle of agricultural
fields, malls with fantasy themes, the interiors of luxury cars speeding through
the landscape – were seen to be ‘absolutely different’ from and opposed to
those spaces associated with a backwardness of the socialist era – most notably,
aging commercial spaces, bad roads and shoddy residential areas.
First Cathedral in Dunaújváros, under construction in 1996. Photo: K. Fehérváry.
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I use the term ‘heterotopias’ with some reservation, not wanting to imply
that the Hungarian landscape in the 1 990s could so easily be divided into
static, socialist and postsocialist material worlds rather than transformations
in process (Vörös n.d.). Not only were new styles doomed to become dated,
but some, such as the distinctly Hungarian ‘organic’ architecture influential
in the 1 980s, continued in prominence in the 1 990s. Furthermore, to my untrained
eye, a friend’s re-upholstered socialist-era couch looked as though it
came from ikea, an error in aesthetic judgment she found incomprehensible.
Instead, with this concept I am pointing to widespread perceptions of aesthetic
differences distinguishing the material objects and built environments
of the postsocialist era. More than just postmodern trends, these differences
were linked to impressions of quality,to intent in design and production,rather
than to foreign origins.11
The notion of heterotopias helps to elucidate the qualities of these spaces
for those excluded from them as well as those struggling to achieve them. As
Foucault observes, heterotopias often result from attempts to create spaces
that are irreducibly ‘other’ and perfect in contrast to the messiness around
them; they are spaces ‘not of illusion, but of compensation’ (Foucault 1 986:27).
As such, they are predicated on a sharp division between spaces, the heterotopic
space being a kind of all-encompassing ‘interior’ creating its own reality
within a problematic context. In Hungary, interiors of private homes have
long been idealized as potentially heterotopic spaces, condensing qualities
of a transcendent nature divorced from concerns with status and social display.
As I will return to below, they appear to be places where a ‘normal’ life
can take place, contained within but isolated from the not-normal world surrounding
them.
Postsocialist Middle-Class Fashioning
and the Discourse of the Normal
In its capacity of evaluating the material world in terms of past and present,
socialist and postsocialist, Soviet and European, the discourse of the normal
both reveals and creates social imperatives to position oneself discursively
and associatively within a transforming material landscape. (Such social pressures
parallel more familiar norms in the modern world to adjust one’s position
vis-à-vis changing fashions, but in the postsocialist context they are an
extreme manifestation.) Sigrid Rausing (1 998) has written with particular eloquence
of the powerful incentives to ‘normalize’ the meanings and values of
objects once considered unfamiliar or exotic in the shifting contexts of post-
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socialist Estonia. Estonians were forced to reconcile their socialist-era identity
as ‘western’ with recent experience with the material trappings of such
an identity, such as newly available and expensive western consumer goods
from jeans to detergent. These goods could no longer be ‘occasions for surprise,
enthusiasm or confusion,’ but had to be ‘redefined as already takenfor-granted’
(1 998:1 90). Affecting a posture of disregard towards such goods
not only established a person with a timeless ‘European’ and ‘anti-Communist’
identity, but identified one as a successful participant in the capitalist
economy (1 998:208).
In Hungary, western commodities had become increasingly commonplace
during the 1 980s; many items such as razors designed for women and blue
jeans had already been demystified and allotted the status of everyday ‘normal’
items, though other items replaced them as ‘special.’ Nonetheless, the
sudden shift in Hungary’s geopolitical status combined with the abundance
and availability of such commodities for cash created confusion about how
people were to respond to them. While it was necessary to mark success in the
postsocialist world with status goods, it was no longer appropriate to express
delight with a commodity simply for its western origins or inventive design;
on the contrary, normalizing or even denigrating such goods was a way of
demonstrating one’s active participation in and knowledge about a transformed
social and economic order. An example is the slang expression ‘Pure American!’
(tiszta amerikai ), used primarily by teens and twenty-somethings to refer
to novelties like the handy screw-top opening on a juice carton (in fact, of
Scandinavian design). While it expressed appreciation for designs maximizing
user comfort, particularly in contrast to state-socialist products, it often
carried with it a note of amused disbelief and even disdain for innovations –
associated with American culture – so sincerely dedicated to the pursuit ofease.
New material environments were also the subject of normalization, while
older ones were recontextualized. For example, the ‘modern’ indoor bathrooms
installed by peasant families wealthy from the second economy during
the 1 970s and 1 980s were often only used for display, as family members
continued to frequent the outhouse; after 1 989, these baths were ‘normalized’
and put to use.12
The emergence of new, postmodern office buildings
or renovated historic castles and cobblestone streets were representative of
a ‘normal’ – that is, European – built environment for postsocialist Hungary,
and therefore part of a much anticipated, nationwide transformation. In
Dunaújváros, some friends in their mid-twenties took me for a walk by a strip
of small boutiques with ornate facades set in the ground floor of a state-so-
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cialist housing complex, commenting that it came close to being a ‘normal’
space. In the same vein, these friends often complained about the lack of a
‘normal’ café or theater in town, while teenagers were embarrassed that there
was still no McDonald’s. Early suggestions for turning Dunaújváros into a
socialist theme park for tourists were shot down by the city council, illustrating
the widespread sensitivity to being associated with a backwards commu-
nism.13
Instead, the council and the steel factory management embarked on
aggressive modernization campaigns to transform the city’s socialist image
– from hosting American car festivals and creating an ‘incubator’ for small
businesses to investing heavily to imbue the old village area of town with
‘historic charm’ (történelmi hangulat).14
Not surprisingly, the contrasts between spaces Hungarians designated as
‘normal’ and ‘not-normal’ generated tremendous tensions, as they seemed to
confirm the widely held sentiment that Hungary was being divided into ‘winners’
and ‘losers’ of the transition (see Bódnar 1 998) – even though, statistically,
income discrepancies remained considerably smaller than those in western
Europe (Róna-Tas 1 996:39). Such material inequalities contradicted egalitarian
principles cultivated under the state-socialist system, but also jarred
with reinvigorated cultural notions of what kind of person was deserving of
a ‘middle-class’ lifestyle.
Post-modern facades of boutiques set in the ground floor of a panel construction housing estate.
Photo: K. Fehérvary
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After the collapse of socialism, an assumption held across the political spectrum
was that the emergence of a bourgeois-citizen class (polgári középosztaly),
was essential for the success of the new, market capitalist, democratic nation
state. While the size and character of this elusive Hungarian middle class
were endlessly debated,15
the population was bombarded with media images
depicting the various middle classes being imagined, their ‘culture’ and comportment,
and their domestic trappings. Predominant among these,especially
in urban centers, were the characteristics attributed to an urban bourgeoisie
or polgár dating to the turn of the century, its foreign origins elided. Family
lineage was less important than claims to some sort of high-culture status –
the intelligentsia, the performing arts, and so forth – to legitimize appropriation
of a polgári material culture, one featuring high-ceilinged apartments or
suburban villas, furnished with antiques, Persian carpets and book cases. In
Dunaújváros, with its working class and agricultural roots, the polgár furnishing
style and its referent were met with ambivalence; far more salient were
images of an entrepreneurial and professional ‘middle class,’ with comfortable
but elegant,modern decor, and ensconced in sherbet-hued family houses.
This suburban form, closely associated with middle-class living in the West,
differentiated residents from the populations left behind in the prefabricated
construction ‘panel’ apartments in the city, or in the smaller, brown and grayroofed
peasant houses in the old village. Although the newly built, suburban
family house was fast becoming the most important indicator of middle-class
status nationwide, it was a particularly striking development in Dunaújváros,
where the professional classes before 1 989 had adhered to more prestigious
city apartments.
Those middle-class aspirants who had managed to acquire high standards
of living, however, were far from content. On the one hand, they complained
bitterly about the extraordinary difficulties of achieving such worlds
given the realities of the Hungarian economy of the 1 990s and the ‘not normal’
context of daily life. On the other, they felt unable to enjoy the fruits of
their labors, given the mixed implications of such lifestyles in a society transforming
its moral standards and systems of value. This is well-illustrated by
the contradictory responses of one family, themselves living in a detached
family house built in the 1 980s,to an eclectic array of new single-family homes.
Driving me by this area one day, they proudly referred to it as a ‘normal’ part
of town comparable to suburbs in ‘the West’; later, in the context of a discussion
about the opportunism and corruption of the factory elite, these homes
were transformed into clear evidence of immoral economic and political acti-
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vities as well as a conspicuous extravagance associated with a despised nouveau
riche. Thus comfortable lifestyles were not only burdened by associations
with corruption, illegal entrepreneurial activities and abuse of privilege,
but were also tainted by pretensions to an undeserved class status. In new
suburban neighborhoods, professional athletes and uneducated entrepreneurs
lived alongside doctors and lawyers able to ‘privatize’ their services. Normalizing
relatively extraordinary living conditions by reference to a west-European
context was an important way of deflecting charges of illegitimate
gain and maintaining the respectability accorded to a normative ‘middle.’ One
woman, for example, described herself as belonging to a ‘middle stratum, not
rich but not poor.’ She related that when people came up to her new loft
apartment, they ‘sucked in their breath at the feeling of space.’ For her, it had
become ‘entirely normal,’ though she acknowledged the deplorable fact that
‘the average Hungarian doesn’t live like this, but in horrible oppression.’16
The tensions engendered by visibly diverging standards of living stemmed
from expectations by a large segment of the population for European standards
of living, expectations arising from their former membership in a socialist
‘middle stratum.’17
Although members of the unskilled working classes often
felt disenfranchised by new class politics, many other members of the former
‘middle stratum’ struggled to reposition themselves and their families as members
of this newly legitimate ‘middle class’ – often unsuccessfully. An editorial
in the Dunaújváros newspaper explaining the long lines at the lottery
window captures the bitter sentiments of many people who were in professions
or from backgrounds that had faced a loss of prestige along with declining
standards of living since 1 989:
A new neighborhood of detached housing. Photo: K. Fehérváry.
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Most people know ... that unfortunately in this world it takes a lot of money for a
full life. If you want to update your library, travel, see the world; if you want a
livable (emberleptekü) home, drive a normal car, and occasionally have a respectable
dinner – for these one needs a small fortune (Dunaújvárosi Hirlap 6/ 3/ 97).
The terms used – normal, livable and respectable – emphasize the perceived
modesty of these aspirations for a ‘full life’ and a continuity with expectations
from the past (see Dessewffy 1 998). Nonetheless, while economic conditions
had eroded the social position of this population, their expectations
had shifted. A state-allotted apartment, a Trabant, and camping vacations
were no longer the criteria for a dignified standard of living. A ‘livable home’
referred to a detached family home or a spacious loft apartment. A ‘normal
car’ was one purchased from the new local Opel,Suzuki or Daewoo dealerships.
And a ‘respectable dinner’ did not refer to dining at the company cafeteria.
Heterotopias of Normality
The sense of bitterness accompanying the discourse of the normal stemmed
in part from an acute consciousness of its counterfactual nature. As a
young man ruefully commented to his seat mate, nodding to the silver car
flying by the bus we were on, ‘If everyone had a car like that, that would be
normal!’ Yet, as suggested above, it also derived from people’s perceptions of
the modesty of these aspirations in contrast to the extraordinary difficulties
they faced in obtaining them (see also Galbraith for Poland n.d.). These difficulties
were indicative of the continuing abnormalities perceived to be a
legacy of socialist, dysfunctional systems and the attitudes they produced, as
well as a perception of the ‘failure’ of the new, capitalist, democratic state to
incorporate Hungary into an idealized European world.
Ironically, this perception of a continued abnormalcy in service, bureaucratic
and social spheres reinforced among citizens the desire to focus time
and energy on creating spheres of ‘normalcy’ in spaces within their control –
furthering the inclination fostered during the socialist period to invest emotionally
and financially in the domestic private and remain detached from
civic life.18
The Hungarian ideal of a single family home with a garden (kertes
családi ház) exemplified an anti-socialist heterotopia, and was often described
with metaphors of withdrawal – an island, an oasis or a castle. But the interiors
of all homes had this potential for heterotopic separation. An oft-cited
compliment was that when one stepped into the ‘enchanted,’ personalized
space of an apartment, one immediately forgot one was in mass housing. As
one journalist wrote in the local steel mill newspaper about do-it-yourself
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renovations: ‘If I can’t do it on the outside, then at least let me enchant from
the inside... I don’t want mass housing, I want a home, a real one, where not
just my body, but my spirit can rest! ... Even within panel walls we can create
for ourselves a little island... one which can mirror our dreams’ (Dunaferr 6/
28/ 95 ).
In the postsocialist era, kitchens and bathrooms have been singled out for
transformation by residents, a trend reflected in special issues of home improvement/
interior decor publications. Though following trends elsewhere,
this phenomenon has special significance in the Hungarian context. Within
the idealized spaces of interiors, new ‘American’ kitchens and luxury bathrooms
can be seen as nested heterotopias, sites of particular potency for condensing
‘the modern’ with their concentration of advanced household technology
and hygienic standards, and for differentiation from a dated socialist
modernity. New kitchens and bathrooms are also spaces in the home where
anti-socialist values (for family and individual growth) are most powerfully
opposed to the ‘unnatural’ and ‘inhumane’ designs of state-socialist construction.
I elaborate the particularly compelling qualities of American kitchens
and luxury baths at the end of this article, but here want to emphasize their
divergence from Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, one which seems to deny
the possibility of a utopia. Hidden within interiors, new kitchens and bathrooms
are less revealing about local status concerns than they are about how
people want to objectify themselves as part of an idealized reference group
and system of values. With their high-tech, hygienic and high-standard qualities,
these spaces are not only ‘normal’ enclaves within a ‘not-normal’ context,
but become conducive links to utopian imaginings of ‘modern’ lifestyles
beyond Hungary’s borders.
Even though it was well known that attempts to create spheres of ‘normal
life’ within the walls of one’s own home, as in the socialist period, exacted a
high toll on friendships, family relations, peace of mind, and finances,longings
for these heterotopic spaces persisted. In order to understand how western
standards of living were the immediate criteria for middle-class belonging
after 1 989, and the continued idealizations of such ‘normal’ private spheres,
we must turn to the socialist period.
State-Socialist Logics and Respectable Standards of Living
The logic by which the postsocialist middle class demands equivalence
with the West was fostered during the state-socialist era, when the aim of
achieving and surpassing western standards of living was both a state and
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popular objective. Modernizing the country had been an elite obsession since
the 1 9th century, but it was championed as never before by the postwar statesocialist
regime. Modernization campaigns focused on heavy industry and
infrastructure development, as well as transforming the ‘backward’ rural, agricultural
population into a modern, urban working class. The latter was to
be accomplished through education and work, but also through what were
thought to be the transformative powers of a modernist built environment
and culture ofmass consumption – showcased in the new socialist cities.While
the dominant motif during the Stalin era was of the new socialist man, the
working-class hero building socialism through hard work and self-sacrifice,
it was paired with visions of future rewards of consumer abundance.19
After the Hungarian revolution in 1 95 6, the terrible years of deprivation
and state oppression were eased somewhat by the policies of the new Kádár
regime (1 95 6–1 988). Attempting to appease a hostile populace, the government
prioritized improving standards of living by increasing production of
consumer goods and housing in exchange for political acquiescence. Thus
began a thirty-year era of gradual and uneven improvements to the material
quality of life, as more and more of the population moved into housing with
running water, electricity and indoor heat, and acquired televisions, refrigerators,washing
machines,modest summer cottages and even cars for a lucky
minority (Andorka & Harcsa 1 999:36–37). By the 1 970s, as discussed above,
a broad-based ‘middle stratum’ had arisen, defined in terms of expectations
for modern standards of living. In an innovation unique to Hungary among
the east bloc, the state gradually increased opportunities for semi-autonomous
economic activities and introduced market initiatives to create an active
second economy. Finally, the state retreated from private family life –
allowing the development of what came to be idealized as an apolitical and
sacred domestic ‘private sphere’ opposed to the politicized public sphere of
the state (Goven 1 993; Konrad 1 984).
Although the Kádár regime was unique in how far it was able to push market
innovations within the framework of a socialist system, the emphasis on
raising standards of living had become a priority throughout the Soviet sphere
by 1 960. Satellite communist regimes followed Khrushchev in claiming that
through the scientific advantages of socialism, socialist countries would soon
‘catch up with and surpass’ Western countries. Orchestrated in part by United
States intelligence agencies, popular culture and mass consumption became
a major battle ground of the Cold War (Hixson 1 997). Using ‘normal’ as a
synonym for ‘modern’ or ‘up-to-date’ at one time could refer to innovations
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produced by a state socialist system. In 1 95 9, for example, an editorial in the
Dunaújváros local paper hails the impending completion of a new modern
filming room, and with it ‘the city’s second “normal” movie theater...’ (Sztálinvárosi
Hirlap 2/20/5 9). While in 1 95 9, state socialism could still be considered
a bearer of modernity and therefore aligned with the ‘modern,’ by
the end of the 1 970s, it had become clear to the populace – and to the regime
itself – that the slogan ‘a socialist way of life’ was coming to be associated
with backwardness (Vörös 1 997:1 9).Bourgeois middle-class norms rather than
a working-class aesthetic had been the unspoken basis for Stalinist ideals for
the cultured, modern, socialist subject (Dunham 1 990[1 976]). However, with
the gradual devaluing of a ‘socialist modernity,’ in Hungary a bourgeois modernity
was in ascendance, one based on idealized notions of modern, bourgeois
lifestyles in the West as well as the continuing cultural prestige of historic,
Hungarian bourgeois (polgári) ways of life and aesthetics (S. Nagy 1 987;
Szelényi 1 988).
By the early 1 960s,Hungarians understood,thanks to media images, movies,
travel and stories brought home by countrymen, that average citizens in the
West – even the working classes – enjoyed higher standards of living than
any the Soviet system could offer. Furthermore, they became aware that in
comparison to the artifacts produced by the socialist state, western consumer
products were more modern, better designed, and of higher quality (Reid &
Crowley 2000:1 0). Western material worlds were only accessible in fragments,
as certain commodities could be purchased in special hard-currency stores
or made their way into the Soviet bloc as gifts or through black-market routes.
As in other Soviet bloc countries,once there,even products intended for everyday
use were often put on display. Daphne Berdahl (1 999:1 24) discusses the
tremendous symbolic significance of these consumer items as evidence of
western connections; I maintain that they were also appreciated for their intrinsic
properties: their color, quality, design, or craftsmanship in comparison
to state-socialist products. Such western commodities became displaced
metonyms of another world, as the opposition between the state-socialist
system and the capitalist system became embodied in their products. Statesocialist
mass production emphasized quantity over quality to make goods
available to everyone in society, but the inferior quality of these products in
comparison to western products came to represent the inferiority of the socialist
system, and unintentionally, came to imply the state’s low regard for
its citizens. Western products, in contrast, were seen to be designed either to
make people’s lives easier, or to provide entertainment and pleasure. Struc-
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turally equivalent to heterotopic spaces in the postsocialist era, in the statesocialist
period many western goods not only reflected a better production
system, but seemed to encompass an entire way of life and valuation of human
dignity.20
Despite the inability of the Hungarian production system to fulfill state
promises to ‘surpass’ western standards of living, state-sponsored publications
regularly featured articles geared towards assisting Hungarians in achieving
the highest standard of living possible and encouraging them to imagine
these material environments to be closely approximating western ones. From
its inception in the mid-1 960s, the popular state interior decor magazine
Lakáskultúra (Home Furnishing) frequently exhorted the population to be
‘more demanding’ of their material environments.For sociologist Zsuzsa Ferge
(1 979), this expression of being demanding or exacting (igényes) originated
in early socialist concerns with raising the working class and peasantry’s levels
of ‘need,’ and became part of a broader modernization and enculturation
project. The normative importance of being materially demanding, of ‘giving
to oneself ’ (ad magára) in a specifically material way, had long been a way of
constructing respectability for a ‘proper peasantry’ (Fél &Hofer 1 969) as much
as for a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois class. During the socialist period, however,
in the hands of professional elites, it came to indicate a level of selfrespect
obtained by having high standards for the modernity of one’s material
environment and appearance.21
State-socialist understandings of a modern, discriminating subjectivity focused
on hygiene and an informed consumer consciousness. Hygiene was
central to notions of modern lifestyles, as in this description of the up-todate
bathroom in a 1 977 article in Lakáskultúra: ‘The bathroom is the home’s
most intimate place. If there is any place one can pass judgment on the [family,]
this place offers the most opportunities. The family’s hygienic demands
(igények) and their level of culture is displayed’ (1 977/5 ). An article on new
state-produced kitchen items from 1 967 implies that the modern, cultured
person was responsible for keeping abreast of constantly changing technologies,
design innovations and even fashions, striving to incorporate them into
his or her own life:
Every day, contemporary objects produced with up-to-date technology and design
come into circulation... Cultured dining, table setting, and serving, is not a
secondary question for home culture. Let us be more demanding and instruct our
family members to be so. Let us follow novel things with attention (Lakáskultúra
1 967/ 1 :1 1 ).
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Such encouragement from state sources to develop a modern consumer consciousness
seems strange in a context of shortages in consumer goods. As
Verdery (1 996:28) and Borneman (1 991 :17–1 8) have pointed out, a paradox
of state-socialist consumer culture was the state’s unwillingness or incapacity
to satisfy the desires it was itself often responsible for stimulating. However,
of the Soviet bloc nations, Hungary in particular recognized the consumer’s
‘determining influence’ early on (Reid &Crowley 2000:1 1 ). In Lakáskultúra
editorials spanning two decades, design professionals suggest a link
between such ‘demandingness’ and enhanced supply, arguing that ‘exacting
consumers’ were key to the development of the service and production sectors
of the planned economy, ‘bringing new forms of production into being
and insisting on more customer-friendly service’ (1 967/ 3:1 8–1 9, 1 985 / 1 :7).
Perhaps to compensate for its deficiencies in production, in Hungary the
state fostered a do-it-yourself culture in which modern standards might be
achieved in unorthodox ways, practices legitimized by their popularity in the
United States and England. On a large scale, the housing shortage and low
quality of housing built by the state conspired to create a mass movement of
private home-building – strongly supported by the state after 1 960, that was
‘clearly driven by western norms of comfort and taste’ (Szalai 2000:21 6). In
Lakáskultúra, photographs of a space-saving fold-down kitchen table were
accompanied by ‘do-it-yourself’ instructions since it was not available in stores.
These ‘do-it-yourself’ sections, regular features in local newspapers as well
as national magazines, were wildly popular.22
They were part of what Katalin
S. Nagy (1 997) has described as a socialist consumer strategy in which objects
for interior decorating were valued according to the mode by which
they were acquired. This strategy included being on ‘constant alert for tips
on when, how and what kinds of home-furnishing objects were currently
obtainable, making what couldn’t be acquired, and finally, seeking venues
for getting goods smuggled in from abroad’ (1 997:5 ).
The socialist-era importance attributed to demandingness sheds light on
conceptions of the normal in the postsocialist 1 990s, showing how respectability
had been tied to the struggle for material modernity under ‘abnormal’
conditions. Value and dignity continue to be accorded to people actively transforming
their material environments – but now, the stakes have risen in accordance
with Hungary’s transformed geopolitical status. In Lakáskultúra, a
young professional couple is praised for ‘creating a relatively pleasant, livable
and even enjoyable home out of the much maligned world’ of the panel
apartment by ‘removing everything one expects in the standard housing es-
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tate pattern: taking out doors, the boring area rug and the wallpaper which
spoke of undemanding people’ (igénytelenségröl árulkodó ) (1 993 /3),or,in other
words, which spoke of a ‘socialist-era’ apartment. While such demanding
transformations demonstrate a sense of self-worth, the goals are nonetheless
considered modest: a ‘relatively pleasant, livable’ home.
Material Culture and the Search for a Normal Life
The insistence on the modesty and morality of what in Hungary counted
as a high standard of living stemmed from an understanding – fostered during
the state-socialist era – that the material standards of living in the West
were more than just luxuries. They were essential for the development of
harmonious family relations and for becoming the kind of person one wished
to be. As Milena Veenis (1 999:95 –98) points out in writing of the former East
Germany, the West gradually became the materialization of all the unfulfilled
promises of the socialist utopia as it became clear that the future ‘beautiful
life’ socialist ideology had used to justify years of hardship and toil were never
going to be realized. Contemporary desires for heterotopic spaces – for miniworlds
of normalcy like new houses, kitchens and bathrooms – arise as much
from state-socialist understandings that ‘transcendent’ goals for selfand family
are made possible by western material conditions as from reification of the
domestic sphere itself.
To elucidate this notion, I draw on Daniel Miller’s discussion (1 994:60–
65, 78–80) of two forms of temporal consciousness, contradictory but coexisting,
which arise from the conditions of modernity and are made possible
by the radical expansion of material culture. ‘Transience’ is defined as a
centrifugal force celebrating ‘an ephemeral present ... of a sense of freedom
within the maelstrom.’ The centripetal force of ‘transcendence,’ constructed
in opposition to such transient values, stems from the desire for continuity,
permanence and stability through the reification of family and tradition (1 994:
1 32). Critically, the custom, tradition, and family bonds central to ‘transcendence’
are not given, but are systematically cultivated with tremendous effort
in direct refusal of transience (1 994:1 33). Central to this project, Miller argues,
is family property, specifically the objectification of the family in the
home, made inalienable through the process of renovation and decoration
(1 994:1 43–1 44). Both of these value systems, transience and transcendence,
are implicated in the discourse of the normal in postsocialist Hungary. The
desire to spend money on ephemeral pleasures such as vacations, eating out
and even filling up the gas tank without worry,are examples of transient values
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expected of a ‘normal’ life. However, amidst economic uncertainty and anxieties
over maintaining status positions, middle-class aspirations for transcendence
have come to the fore as people attempt to create a ‘normal’ life
through investment in the concrete and seemingly permanent materials of
private property, specifically a house or apartment.
As suggested above, middle-class lifestyles in the West had long been imagined
to provide the conditions for such transcendent ideals as peace, quiet,
and harmonious family relations (see Gullestad 1 992:1 37, for Norway). In
Hungary, many continue to share one Dunaújváros lawyer’s assumption that
people in London, for instance, live a more ‘normal’ life, one free of the hassles,
conflict, and exhausting pace (rohangálás) that permeate Hungarian existence.
Such a life of civility, efficiency, and order is also a life conducive to
the existence of a different kind of person, imagined to be calm and dignified.
This fantasy of a civilized persona is the antinomy of the type of person thought
to be necessary for survival in Hungary, someone who is characterized by
grasping at things and situations in a panicked, spastic way (kapkodás). Both
rohangálás and kapkodás come up often in conversation, often with exclamations
of ‘this is not normal!’ as women especially describe their impossible
schedules, late buses, insolent store clerks, and never-ending run-ins with
bureaucracies. Even horoscopes assumed that the typical Hungarian reader
was stressed out and overworked, and consequently someone who would
act or react in haste – who would allow emotions of panic, anger, perceived
slight or despair to govern their behavior.
The discourse of rohangálás, glossed as ‘anxious, exhausting,rushing about,’
is not new to the 1 990s, but is evocative of how life in the 1 980s and even the
1 970s was characterized. Then, the difficulties of daily life under state-socialism
were attributed to the inefficiency and corruption of the socialist state,
but also to the sense that the state bureaucracy intentionally erected obstacles
to control as well as wear down the populace (Verdery 1 991 ; Berdahl
1 999a). After 1 989, the collapse of the state was accompanied by the realization
that many of these daily hassles – the multiple forms to fill out at the
post-office – were the product of nothing more than a dysfunctional system.
Consequently, in the 1 990s any such difficulties were seen to be the legacy of
the socialist system and the kinds of people it created, and therefore ‘not normal.’
(Even immoral practices of the capitalist 1 990s were often attributed to
the destruction of a moral code during state socialism.) As one engineer working
in the steel factory said, complaining about having to arrive at six a.m.
with the shift workers: ‘I’m not objecting to the insecurity and the risk’ (of
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post-89 capitalism), he said, ‘Ijust want a more normal,a more humane, order!
The simple things that smooth the day’s progress.’
As mentioned above, when applied to people, ‘normal’ indicated someone
who was well-behaved, polite, dependable – indeed ‘civilized.’ Nonetheless,
as in other places in the former Soviet bloc, Hungarians had a sense that
‘not normal’ conditions forced otherwise decent people to behave unethically
(see also Pesmen n.d.:1 –2; Wedel 1 986:1 5 1 –1 5 2). Dale Pesmen writes that
Russians ‘who called themselves “normal” either appealed to the value of their
poverty, or, at least, mentioned that a “normal” level of material comfort ought
never to be achieved at another’s expense’(n.d.:1 ). Thus, it was thought that
to become wealthy or politically powerful – that is, to achieve a ‘normal’
material life – one had to be ‘abnormal’ inside. In the Hungarian context, this
same dilemma was approached with the reverse logic: one had to try to achieve
‘normal’ standards of living in order to live an ethical, spiritually-meaningful
life, defined in terms of the family. As a friend confided to me: ‘it’s not normal
that I don’t want to go see my sister. But I feel so claustrophobic in her small
apartment!’
This correspondence between ‘normal’ material conditions and the possibility
of being a ‘normal’ person was linked to long-standing ideals for a
pre-socialist bourgeois mode of life, one reinforced by state-socialist era publications
attempting to raise the level of ‘culture’ in the population. For example,
despite the preponderance of entire families living in one- or tworoom
dwellings, Lakáskultúra regularly discussed the necessity of creating a
separate child’s room or corner which the child would ‘know to be their own’
(1 967/ 3). Another constant issue was how to separate functions in space –
to recreate bourgeois ideals of front-stage and backstage areas, dining and
studying areas, socializing and solitary, public and private, all within the confines
of tiny apartments. This was to be done through movable screens, plants,
platforms and lofts, multi-functional furniture, and finally, by using times of
day to differentiate functions for the same space (the sofa doubling as a bed
at night). While writers recognized the ‘unfortunate small size’ of mass-produced
apartments, they nonetheless insisted that creating a livable and practical
home ‘doesn’t depend on the number of meters’ but on ‘some compromise
and rational thinking’ (Lakáskultúra 1 976/1 ). In postsocialist interior
design magazines, particularly those geared towards the 2.5 million people
living in panel construction apartments, the time and effort put into rearrangements
of small spaces, the ingenious solutions for insoluble problems,
continue to take up a significant amount of space. Szép Lak (Beautiful Home),
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for example, encourages its readers to spend what little money they have on
transforming their apartments into ‘Enchantment in 67 m2
’ or ‘Panel Luxury.’
These publications all offer sections on how to do the labor oneself to save
money, allowing those who have ‘grown tired of their old bathroom’ to renovate
with new,colorful tiles,even if they ‘don’t have capital in the bank, haven’t
won a larger amount in the lottery, and must live within the narrow confines
of their monthly salary’ (Családi Ház 1 997:38).
From the 1 960s to the present, there is an underlying sense of bad faith in
rhetoric attempting to convince the populace that it is possible – with the
right amount of energy and creative thought – to transform tiny apartments
into a transcendent ‘private’ sphere. Since 1 989, such claims have lost credibility.
Instead, a different kind of rhetoric fills new interior (and exterior) design
publications, one echoed in the ways many Hungarians described to me
their material aspirations. This is a rhetoric of ‘liberation’ from claustrophobic
spaces, from unhealthy mixing of business and private life, of finally inhabiting
‘dream’ houses, where demands (igény) are no longer compromised. In a
typical example from the privatized Lakáskultúra, a new home owner is asked
whether he and his family had grown out of their old place. The answer: ‘Yes,
it was very small, we didn’t fit,’ replies the man. ‘Agnes and I ran our advertising
studio out of a corner. The constant mixing of our family and business
lives became increasingly difficult to bear ...I love it here because it is of such
“human-scale.” There are places where one can always retreat, like the office,
the bedroom, the children’s room. And the rest is open, all in one,the kitchen,
dining room and living room. No one is shut out or left out’ (1 995 /7:80).
American Kitchens, Luxury Baths,
and Heterotopias of Anti-Socialist Normalcy
As mentioned above, the kitchen and bathroom have been singled out for
transformation in the postsocialist era as particularly potent sites for condensing
the ‘modern,’ but at the same time for materializing transcendent
anti-socialist values. The state-socialist kitchen became one of the most reviled
and ridiculed features of state planning, coming to symbolize socialism’s
detrimental effects on the Hungarian family as it effectively prevented
– as the modernist planners had intended – simultaneous seating of an extended
family for dinner.23
Such kitchens continue to be considered ‘not normal,’
another example of state-socialism’s ‘unnatural’ social policies. Cramped
and cluttered socialist-era bathrooms, clothes drying overhead, likewise suffered
from modernist assumptions that laundry would be done in a common
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space in the building. These bathrooms had little to do with notions of privacy
or the cultivation of the individual body and self; they were strictly spaces
for the functional fulfillment of hygiene and waste elimination.
The concept of an open ‘American kitchen’ had gained in popularity in
the 1 980s (although it was officially prohibited on the grounds that kitchen
smells would permeate the rest of the house). After 1 989, even people in privatized
panel construction apartments began to hack holes in kitchen walls to
‘open’ them onto the living room, giving the illusion of more space and allowing
the mother/wife to watch television or be engaged with the family
while she cooked. Such a kitchen, with new tiles, cabinets, lighting and modern
appliances, is now the standard for a ‘normal’ kitchen – indexing equivalence
with western material standards. This index is made explicit by an advertisement
for a home-improvement loan, placed under a photo of a typical
socialist-era kitchen, pots crammed into tiny cabinets: ‘Our fridge is Swedish,
our coffee maker is German: Why can’t our kitchen be “American”?’ The
Home improvement loan advertisement showing a typical socialist-era kitchen, reading: ‘Our fridge is
Swedish, our coffee maker is German. Why can’t our kitchen be American?’
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normalization of the American kitchen also has implications for family life.
In a 1 998 Lakáskultúra, an editor reiterates the common derision of the modernist/socialist
design of the ‘future kitchen’ based on the notion that the
kitchen would eventually lose its importance in the house as the woman shed
her role as housewife and most dining would take place outside of the home.
She asserts, instead, that ‘humanity has been “kitchen loving” since ancient
times,’ and emphasizes the importance of this site for family relationships.
Opposing the kitchen to the conditions characterizing the outside world,she
describes it as a ‘place where one doesn’t have to be harried and nervous ...
[where one can] speak earnestly while engaged in tasting and sipping. That
is why ... the center of family life ... will always be the kitchen’ (1 998/6:3).
If American kitchens appear conducive to modern, bourgeois family life,
then luxurious bathrooms promise to be spaces for self-indulgence and even
rejuvenation for the soul. In show-rooms and magazines, ‘theme bathrooms’
(from terra cotta Roman to country style) reinforce a message ofself-improving
leisure with objects like soft towels draped casually over the tub, soaps, a
book, candles, a champagne glass. In Dunaújváros, acquaintances drew from
these images to create approximations in their own homes as space, finances
and ingenuity allowed. The bath had become a place fantasized as an escape
from the sights, sounds and smells of the outside world, as well as, perhaps,
the turmoil of family life. It evoked the qualities of ritual space for healing
through the powers of water, meditation and solitude, and at the same time,
allowed for self-pampering and attention to physical appearance through mirrors
and the paraphernalia required for preening. While publicity for new
baths helped to construct desire for these heterotopic spaces as places to recover
from the stresses of everyday life, expressions of longing were mixed
with an ambivalence missing from similar expressions for new kitchens. The
individualism and leisure implied by new bathrooms violated cultural norms
equating respectability with constant, productive labor (Lampland 1 995 :31 5 –
321 ). Thus, a couple who considered the bathroom the centerpiece of their
new suburban house, a combination of a design they’d seen in Lakáskultúra
and a hotel bathroom they occupied in Paris, installed an enormous, tiled,
walk-in shower, explaining, ‘In this world, who has time for a bath?’
Conclusion
While state-socialist regimes were known for their inability to produce
abundant consumer goods and high standards of living, I have argued that it
was nonetheless under these very regimes that mass consumer society and
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krisztina fehervary
modern consumer subjectivities emerged – and with it, particular relationships
to material culture. Reinforcing rather than contradicting widespread
temporal and moralizing discourses of modernization, the socialist state prioritized
the material project of becoming modern over other modes of attaining
social respectability. In the postsocialist era, the discourse of the normal
reveals the tensions of situating one’s sense of value in both local and global
social hierarchies. The pressure to transform personal material worlds goes
beyond local class positioning. It stems from the correlation between ‘upscale’
material environments and a level of belonging in an imagined international
order, where ‘winners’ are somehow coeval and thus accorded the value and
dignity of the West. In normalizing material environments clearly not ‘average’
in their local contexts, Hungarians aspiring to middle-class status are
thus insisting on their right as Europeans to such environments, their equivalence
in value with an imagined European citizen, and finally, the inherent
modesty and morality of such aspirations. Thus, even renovating a panel construction
apartment was a way of participating in the wider transformation
of the country. As an elderly character on a popular television series exclaimed,
‘This will be my apartment’s regime change!’ 24
The discourse of the normal also reveals that home furnishing practices
are often attempts to objectify in material form a kind of ‘transcendent’ life
that had long been imagined was being lived elsewhere. While throughout
the socialist period, Hungarians attempted to construct their homes as islands
of privacy and normalcy, in the postsocialist period they can imagine
themselves to be in touch with a wider world through the Internet, international
bank cards, and a lifestyle associated with high-quality, material goods
– thus bypassing the not-normal world of their immediate surroundings and
the people inhabiting them. American kitchens and renovated bathrooms
operate on this same structural principle. They epitomize attempts to create
heterotopias of normalcy within a not-normal local world and yet, with their
high-tech hygiene and postmodern decor, incorporate Hungarians into an
imagined world and lifestyle beyond Hungary’s borders.
Acknowledgments
This article is based upon ethnographic fieldwork done in Dunaújváros and Budapest,
Hungary, during the summer of 1 994, the years 1 996 and 1 997, and
follow-up trips in 1 999 and 2000, as well as visits to Hungary during the 1 970s
and 1 980s. Funding for fieldwork was provided by the Fulbright Commission
and the Social Science Science Research Council (irex), while writing was supported
by the American Council for Learned Societies. Earlier versions of the
paper were presented at the meetings of the Annual Association of Anthropologists
3 95American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms
ethnos, vol. 67 :3 , 2002 (pp. 3 69–400)
(1 999), the Annual Conference of the Anthropology of Europe Workshop at the
University of Chicago (2001 ), and the Russian Studies Workshop at the University
of Chicago (2002). I wish to thank the discussants and members of those
audiences for their remarks and questions. In addition, I would like to express
my appreciation to John L. Comaroff, Deborah Cornelius and Susan Gal for
their comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Leora Auslander and
Martha Lampland for their insightful suggestions on a later version. David Altshuler,
Matthew S. Hull and Laura Ring provided extraordinarily careful and helpful
readings, as did several anonymous reviewers for Ethnos. Finally, great thanks to
Jennifer Patico and Melissa Caldwell, editors of this special edition of Ethnos, for
their comments and encouragement.
Notes
1 . All translations are mine. Special thanks to Ágnes Hasznos for her help with
Hungarian diacritics.
2. Altshuler (n.d., 2001 ) for the Czech Republic; Galbraith (n.d.) for Poland; Rausing
(1 998) for Estonia; and Stukuls (1 997, 1 999) for Latvia. This usage is prevalent in
precisely those nations expecting to be among the first ‘granted’ European Union
membership, while in societies for whom the prospect of ‘joining Europe’ is dim,
references to a ‘normal’ world often take on a more abstract character, for example
Pesmen (n.d., 2000) for Russia and Watson (n.d.) for Georgia. For a discussion of
the dual uses of normal in socialist Poland, see Janine Wedel (1 986: 1 5 1 –1 5 2).
3. For example, Barker (1 999), Berdahl (1 999a and 1 999b), Humphrey (1 995, 1 997),
Rausing (1 998) and Veenis (1 999). For recent investigations into the material
culture and consumer societies of state-socialism, see Buchli (1 999), Merkel (1 998),
Reid & Crowley (2000), Nagy (1 997) and Vörös (1 997).
4. Daina Stukuls (1 997:1 31 –1 34) and Sigrid Rausing (1 998:1 90) make similar arguments
about political and quotidian rhetoric of normalcy in post-Soviet Latvia
and Estonia respectively. In Hungary as well, in political rhetoric ‘normal’ refers
both to the West as a standard, but also to a pre-Communist, ‘democratic’ period
in national history.
5 . My primary sources were the state publications Lakáskultúra (1 965–1 998) and
the Dunaújvárosi Hirlap (1 95 1 –5 4, 1 95 6–1 994), supplemented by other media
on home-building and furnishing from the 1 95 0s through the 1 990s, as well as
interviews with editors, journalists and photographers affiliated with these
publications, and architects and city planners.
6. Attention to the consumer culture rather than the production orientation of
state-socialist regimes has been fairly recent. In Hungary, as Martha Lampland
(1 995 ) has argued, behaviors and attitudes associated with capitalism were in
fact the unintended products of the state-socialist system.
7. Normális does not appear in the classic Hungarian-English dictionary by Országos
[1 987(1 971 )], including the foreign words and phrases appendix.
8. The Hungarian expression ‘regime change’ seems a more accurate description
for the events of 1 989–90 than the rhetoric of ‘transition’ with its political and
economic implications.
9. Consciousness of my status as a ‘westerner’ undoubtedly figured in how my interlocutors
used the term; upwardly-mobile Hungarians who insisted that Iunderstand
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krisztina fehervary
their newly refurbished interiors as ordinary or ‘normal’ did so in part to place
themselves on equal footing with me, associating themselves with what they
assumed to be above-average material worlds in the West and thus compensating
for the stigma of years of association with ‘second-class’ material environments.
1 0. This contrasts slightly with its use in Poland, the Czech Republic or Russia,
where a maligned status quo – such as corruption, low-quality products or the
need for constant dissembling to get things done – can at certain times be referred
to as ‘normal’ and even ‘ours’ without irony (Altshuler n.d.; Pesmen n.d., 2000;
Wedel 1 986).
1 1 . I discuss the political nature of this postsocialist aesthetic elsewhere (Fehérváry
n.d.[a]), opposing openness, quality, naturalism, eclecticism, color and rounded
forms to the ‘closed’ socialist system, shabbiness of products, man-made artificiality,
and aesthetic driven by rationality and efficiency with little regard for ‘human’
(i.e., irrational) needs and desires.
1 2. My thanks to Eva Huseby-Darvas for this example. See also S. Nagy (1 987:1 07–
1 09) for accounts of unused luxury living rooms and baths in rural and suburban
households during the 1 970s and 1 980s.
1 3. Unlike the ‘Nostalgie’ experienced by former East Germans, which manifests
itself in a fetishization of decontextualized objects from the state-socialist period
(Berdahl 1 999b), in Hungary, the nostalgia industry has been more successful
targeting tourists. An exception is a comic film by Péter Tímar (Csinibaba),
refashioning – even celebrating – the socialist past through a recontextualization
of the consumer products and pop culture of the 1 960s (Fehérváry n.d.[b]). This
may be changing a decade after the regime change (Nadkarni n.d).
1 4. See Brian Schwegler (n.d.) for a similar phenomenon in Slovakia.
1 5 . There is no consensus on what percentage of the Hungarian population qualifies
as an emerging ‘middle class.’ In Dunaújváros in 1 997, a panel apartment cost about
huf 1 .5 million. A rough estimate of the minimum cost of new houses (all built by
future owners) was huf 5 or 6 million (though differences in financing, labor, acquisition
of materials, and land makes this an unreliable figure). A house designed
and built by a private architectural firm in Budapest ran to huf 80–1 00 million.
1 6. For Ákos Róna-Tas, such bitterness stems from the fact that ‘losses and gains are
calculated in comparison to the state of the developed West ... even those whose
economic situation has improved and who stand on the upper level of the economic
hierarchy of their society perceive their own position as inferior’ (Róna-Tas
1 996:41 ).
1 7. In Hungary, the rehabilitation of sociology in the early 1 960s allowed for modification
of the Stalinist two-class, one stratum model of society (peasants and
workers, plus an intelligentsia) by introducing factors such as occupation, income,
education, gender and generation (see Kolosi 1 988). By such classificatory means,
state rhetoric in the 1 970s assumed a ‘middle stratum’ (középréteg) of society to
be enjoying relatively comparable living standards.
1 8. The discourse of the normal, thus, elucidates cultural dilemmas for the development
of civil society – a discussion beyond the scope of this article.
1 9. See, for example, a brochure published in 1 95 2 of the city’s soon-to-be-built
movie theaters, swimming pools, fashionable department stores, and modern
apartments for workers (reproduced in Miskolczi 1 980:1 5 8–5 9).
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20. I make this argument more fully elsewhere (Fehérváry n.d.[a]).
21 . Julie Hessler (2000) has written of a similar movement in the Soviet Union in
the mid-1 930s, as the Stalinist state embarked on an enculturation project in
which retail spaces, sales clerks and modern commodities themselves would be
the conduits through which more materially discriminating, hygienic, cultured
subjects would be fashioned – despite conditions of tremendous shortages in
consumer goods. Here too, there is an equation between modern material goods
and the assertion of self-value and dignity on an international stage.
22. From the mid-1 95 0s through the 1 980s, the state regularly produced do-it-yourself
designs for private house builders called ‘pattern plans’ (minta tervek) to encourage
higher levels of modernization and more standardized and aesthetically pleasing
(to state planners) constructions. Do-it-yourself movements in Hungary differed
from those in the West in that they were often a replacement for rather than a
voluntary supplement to mass-production.
23. Kitchens were allotted a bare minimum of space, shrinking in size from the
1 95 0s to the 1 970s. Affection and respect in Hungarian families are often communicated
primarily through food (Kántor Károlyné 1 992:30).
24. From the sitcom ‘Neighbors’ (Szomszédok). Jennifer Patico reports a similar conflation
of transformation of political and material worlds in a billboard advertising
new, luxury apartments with the slogan: ‘Move from Leningrad to St.
Petersburg!’
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