Convenors: Dr Nicolette Makovicky, (REES, OSGA) and Dr Agnieszka Kościańska (Leverhulme Fellow at REES, OSGA)
Speaker: Dr Juraj Buzalka (Comenius University)
Dr Buzalka employs the perspective of cultural economy of protest that is best suitable to discuss the paradox of European project as actual societal progress and at the same time cultural trauma of post-peasants, the bulk of post-socialist citizens who are connected to the countryside and feel that real power in society shall be defined and based there. He argues that it is the post-peasant origin connected to the state-socialist cultural economy that makes the radical populists, such as those in Slovakia, into a special kind of fascists – the village fascists.
Dr Juraj Buzalka is an associate professor of social anthropology at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. His research interests include anthropology of social and political movements, cultural economy, politics of memory, populism, politics of religion, particularly in the region of East Central Europe, and anthropology of wine. He has recently published his monograph Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union: Village Fascists and their Rivals (Routledge 2020). His first monograph was Nation and Religion: The Politics of Commemoration in South-east Poland (Lit 2007).
