Public Lecture by Chris Hann on Time's arrow in Tázlár (and in anthropology)
Tázlár is a community on the Great Plain, half way between Danube and Tisza. I began fieldwork there 36 years ago. Agricultural production expanded rapidly in the last decades of socialism but declined thereafter, calling familiar models of progress into question. Similarly, the recent return of village schools to Church control contradicts the usual Western pattern. How to theorise these trajectories? Eastern European elites have long been vigorously complicit in promoting notions of backwardness, socio-cultural as well as economic. It is tempting to revive such theories in the conditions of postsocialism. Yet anthropologists have known for decades that they must not deny coevalness (J. Fabian). What does Fabian's "radical contemporaneity" imply in studying rural Hungary today?
