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1 normal life in the former socialist city The New Normal in the mid-1990s in Dunaújváros, half a decade after the fall of state socialism, long lines once again formed in front of shops, but now for lottery tickets. An editorial on the front page of the local newspaper attempted to articulate the sentiments of the people standing in these lines, people still living in concrete apartment blocks, whose standard of living had declined rather than improved in the tumultuous years since the incursion of market capitalism. 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 to have a livable home, drive a normal car, and occasionally have a respectable dinner—for these you need a small fortune. (Dunaújvárosi Hírlap, June 3, 1997) Throughout my fieldwork, people used terms like “livable,” “normal,” and “respectable ” to refer to services, goods, and material worlds that met their expectations of life after the end of state socialism. new telephone systems, automatic teller machines, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, and courteous sales clerks were amenities that many hungarians associated with the dignity accorded respectable citizens of a “first world.” in contrast, they understood obsolete technologies and infrastructures, corruption and rude behavior, and the frantic pace of everyday life to be vestiges of a discredited socialist system. scholars have reported similar uses of “normal” throughout central eastern europe and the Baltics during this period, as people used it to refer to things that were clearly extraordinary in their local context, but were imagined to be part of average lifestyles in western europe or the united states. one could argue that such a normalizing discourse is precisely the mechanism by which older forms of consumption are replaced by newer, more elaborate forms. But that explanation forecloses a different set of questions: why were such material environments and consumer goods normalized in these countries rather than explicitly marked as of european standard, as they were in russia in the same period (shevchenko 2009:128)? what functional and aesthetic qualities endowed certain places and things with such idealized normalcy, given that the ability to distinguish what counted as normal was not self-evident to outsiders like me? 27 28 | Politics in color and concrete The discourse of the normal indexed a profound adjustment of identity set in motion by the sudden geopolitical shift of these countries from soviet satellite to aspiring member of a reconfigured “europe.” once envied within the soviet bloc as the most western (and thus modern) of the socialist states, these nations suddenly found themselves situated on the undefined eastern border of greater europe, with all the loss of prestige this entailed. After 1989 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. hungary was disproportionately affected by this shift in status, having once been a popular vacation destination for residents of other soviet bloc nations, who had regarded it as a paradise of freedoms and consumer affluence. But closer attention to the Dunaújváros editorial suggests that the “full life” promised by winning the lottery was not a new desire and thus not one that can be fully explained by hungary’s entry into a global capitalist economy. while the imagined lifestyles of respectable citizens in western europe were certainly a model for the aspiring middle classes in hungary, the full life referenced here is not one of mimetic transformation. Desire for high-quality comforts, conveniences , and health care, as James ferguson (2002) has argued, is not the same as imitation and loss of cultural authenticity. it is a claim to membership in a wider society where citizens enjoy the tangible benefits of advanced technologies and economic prosperity. Qualities in material goods such as durability and functionality , innovative styling, and user-friendly or beautiful design were material evidence of the well-being that many people had long assumed their counterparts in western europe enjoyed. This well-being was made possible by a private life that ensured harmonious family relations, hard work rewarded with the means for dignified living, and a state that treated its citizens with care and respect. As we will see, “normal” materialities were regarded as signs of the emergence of a modern, civilized country, one that conferred citizens with the...

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