Anti-kitsch, or How to Make a Socialist Doily: The Politics of Amateur Art in Communist Czechoslovakia
Scholars often observe that communist states In Easter Europe appropriated the ‘folk’ traditions in support of their own ideological legitimacy, presenting appropriation primarily as a process of cultural dispossession. In this talk, I seek to problematize this approach by throwing light on a different set of mechanisms and discourses through which these regimes transformed and popularized vernacular culture. Focusing on the promotion of vernacular textile crafts in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, I show how the authorities successfully promoted traditional needlecrafts as a popular kind of amateur arts, exploring their attempts to create a moral and aesthetic synthesis between the material culture of the peasantry and modern, socialist domesticity. Along the way, I use the material to interrogate a number of concepts and categories in the study of material culture, most importantly the notion of kitsch.
Date: 8 November 2019, 13:00 (Friday, 4th week, Michaelmas 2019)
Venue: Pitt Rivers Museum, South Parks Road OX1 3PP
Speaker: Nicolette Makovicky (University of Oxford)
Organising department: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Topics:
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Kate Atherton