Between the Sociologist and the Secret Police: The ethical affordances of material religion in Cold War archives

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dc.contributor.authorKapalo, James Alexander
dc.contributor.funderEuropean Research Council, Hidden Galleries, 677355
dc.date.accessioned2026-01-27T00:32:41Z
dc.date.available2026-01-27T00:32:41Z
dc.date.issued2025-11-17
dc.description.abstractThis article addresses the peculiar challenges and opportunities of researching lived religion in archives produced during the communist era. Inspired by the material turn in the study of religions, this article discusses the significance and uses of collections of the material traces of religion found in communist-era archives in Hungary. Using the private archive of Zsuzsa Horváth (1950–1995), a sociologist of religion who worked in 1970s and 1980s Hungary as a starting point, I relate the context, affordances, and connectivities of material religious objects found in her collection to analogous collections in state security archives. These antagonistic archival collections of material religion are the product of the peculiar tendency of the secret police, scholars of religion, and Cold War western advocates of religious freedom – albeit in pursuit of vastly different aims – to collect material manifestations of religion – images, objects, publications, manuscripts, and spaces – as evidence of the persistence of religious life. I argue that the scholarly archive of Zsuzsa Horváth, with its assortment of religious ephemera, offers valuable insight into aspects of the sensorial and aesthetic worlds of religious communities and reveals the complex moral and methodological entanglements of a scholar of religion working in the shadow of the secret police. Approaching the problem of lived religion through such a material phenomenological lens offers the opportunity to place diverse and opposing archival collections in dialogue with each other in order to unlock their evidential potential for the study of religions during the communist era in Eastern Europe.en
dc.description.sponsorshipHidden Galleries ERC project (no. 677355)
dc.description.versionAccepted Version
dc.format.extent29
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.authororcidKapalo, James Alexander§0000-0001-6920-8828
dc.identifier.citationKapalo, J A 2025, 'Between the Sociologist and the Secret Police : The ethical affordances of material religion in Cold War archives', East Central Europe, vol. 52, no. 2-3, pp. 254-282. https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-20252005
dc.identifier.doi10.30965/18763308-20252005
dc.identifier.endpage282
dc.identifier.issn0094-3037
dc.identifier.issued2-3
dc.identifier.journaltitleEast Central Europe
dc.identifier.otherORCID: /0000-0001-6920-8828/work/203692547
dc.identifier.startpage254
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/18473
dc.identifier.volume52
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherBrill Academic Publishers
dc.relation.urihttps://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105021935206
dc.rightsPublisher Copyright: © James A. Kapaló, 2025. Published with license by Koninklijke Brill BV.
dc.rights.accessrightsopen access
dc.statusPeer reviewed
dc.subjectCommunism
dc.subjectHoly cards
dc.subjectHungary
dc.subjectMateriality
dc.subjectReligion
dc.subjectSamizdat
dc.subjectSecret police
dc.subjectSociology
dc.subjectsamizdat
dc.subjectsociology
dc.subjectmateriality
dc.subjecthungary
dc.subjectreligion
dc.subjectholy cards
dc.subjectsecret police
dc.subjectcommunism
dc.titleBetween the Sociologist and the Secret Police: The ethical affordances of material religion in Cold War archivesen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)
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