Producing the nation through philanthropy: Legitimising coethnic and prorefugee civic action in Hungary

Abstract

This paper explores interconnections between nationhood and philanthropy, namely, how philanthropy works as a domain of meaningful social practice framed by national ideologies and how interpretations born in the institutional contexts of philanthropy may play a central role in making sense of the nation. We observe how various divisions inherent in philanthropic practices—between helpers and the helped and between those who take part in helping as opposed to those who do not—become reflected in concepts of nationhood shaped by these activities. The study of two cases—first, the philanthropic actions of Hungarian citizens towards Hungarian minority communities in Ukraine and Romania, and second, humanitarian volunteer initiatives aimed at supporting refugees during the summer of 2015 in Hungary—makes it possible to understand how philanthropic practices become a site for reproducing competing definitions of nationhood.

Kinship Idioms and Care-Control Dynamics in Hungarian Co-ethnic Philanthropy

“…Readers may challenge the generalisability of the results of such a specific form of philanthropy, based on an explicitly particularistic ideology, and its relevance to phenomena usually conceptualised as based on universalist concepts of poverty alleviation or humanitarianism. Against these challenges this paper claims that studies of philanthropy, charity, or humanitarianism have recently explored potential particularistic roots of various allegedly universalist initiatives, and questioned clear-cut divides and boundaries between them (for example Malkki, 2015;Drazkiewicz, 2020;Zakaria ´s & Feischmidt, 2020). These scholarly works have revealed that, instead of defining distinct types of philanthropic support, various conceptual frameworks and ideologies-particularistic as well as universalist-are rather layered upon each other and may simultaneously, in concert provide the moral foundations of giving and helping.…”

“…As for philanthropy, various ethnographic, anthropological and sociological studies focus on the possible enhanced role of personal relations between donors and recipients of help (for an overview of the topic: Fechter, 2019). Among these several authors have taken notice of the working of kinship and familial idioms and metaphors in the construction of personal donor-recipient relationships: in case of international development and humanitarian child-sponsorship (Bornstein, 2001(Bornstein, , 2012Dra ˛_ zkiewicz, 2020;Fechter, 2019;Noh, 2019;Rabbitts, 2012;Zarzycka, 2016;Zakaria ´s & Feischmidt, 2020), in personal mentoring schemes of disadvantaged students built upon volunteering in educational and welfare settings (Molpeceres et al, 2012), in a historical account of donor identity formation by the Red Cross (Dromi, 2021), and more recently in personalised helping and mentoring of refugee minors residing in Western European countries (Raithelhuber, 2019;Scheibelhofer, 2019;Aflaki & Freise, 2019).…”

‘We Are That In-Between Nation’: Discourses of Deservingness of Hungarian Migrants Working in Institutions of Refugee Accommodation in Germany

“…The article aims to contribute to understanding how intra-EU migrants, employed or volunteering in these organisations, rely and mobilise various frameworks of deservingness while relating to their refugee clients and students. Despite these wider stakes, we narrowed our empirical focus on workers of Hungarian background as a direct continuation of previous research conducted in Hungary on pro-refugee civic initiatives (Feischmidt and Zakariás, 2019; Zakariás and Feischmidt, 2020).…”

Education for a Christian nation: Religion and nationalism in the Hungarian education policy discourse

“…In such a polarised political field, education has become a battlefield of a symbolic struggle for reinstating the nation since 2010 (Zakariás, 2014). In the following, I draw a quick sketch of the main compulsory education policies to provide my analysis with background.…”