¹ The literature on political culture as values and attitudes concerning government was broadly inspired by Talcott Parsons, and is perhaps best represented by the work of Gabriel, Almond and Sidney, Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980).Google ScholarMarshall, Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar and Clifford, Geertz in Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, N.J., 1981)Google Scholar are among those who have shown how concepts like interest, power, and sovereignty are not self-evidently rational, but constructed differently under different cosmologies. David, Kertzer'sRitual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, Conn., 1988)Google Scholar reviews this line of work and its roots in Emile, Durkheim and Max, Weber, stressing the importance of ritual in politics. In Imagined Communities (London, [1983] 1991),Google Scholar Benedict Anderson argues that the idea of “nation” was similarly invented and disseminated; in “The Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 58–89,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Philip Abrams suggests studying the “state” as an ideological and hence cultural entity, belief in which legitimates subjection; see also Philip, Corrigan and Derek, Sayer, The Great Arch (Oxford, 1984) for an empirical example. Foucault's writings on governmentality lead in a similar direction.Google Scholar

² The standard reference for this is Eric, Hobsbawm and Terence, Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1983),Google Scholar but a sophisticated literature on the mechanisms of social memory is equally relevant here, and must start with Maurice, Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York, 1980).Google Scholar A useful overview is provided by Paul, Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York, 1989).Google Scholar For quite different approaches, see Pierre, Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–25,Google Scholar and Richard, Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993).Google Scholar

³ The German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, reviewed and analyzed in Maier, Charles S., The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), is the most discussed case of recent years.Google ScholarKatherine, Verdery'sNational Ideology under Socialism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991) discusses the social mechanism of historical construction and the struggles around it under state socialism.Google Scholar The more general issue is that of historians defining events and turning them into narratives with tropic structure and moral and political relevance; see, for instance, Hayden, White, Metahistory (Baltimore, Md., 1973).Google ScholarThe 1991 edition of Anderson's Imagined Communities brings together in its final chapters recent work on museums as memory;Google Scholarsee also James, Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988),Google Scholar and George, Stocking, ed., Objects and Others: Essays in Museums and Material Culture (Madison, Wis., 1985),Google Scholar as well as John, Gillis, ed., Commemorations (Princeton, N.J., 1994).Google Scholar

⁴ Needless to say, several other lines of research have also contributed importantly to addressing the questions raised by this essay. For instance, I am not directly discussing the question of personal versus historical memory and its mechanisms (for recent discussions of this in the region, see Tony, Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus 21, no. 4 [1992]: 83–118,Google Scholar and Esbenshade, Richard S., “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations 49 [1995]: 72–96.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar There is also a growing literature around monuments; see, for instance, Gillis, , Commemorations,Google Scholar and Anderson, , Imagined Communities, among others. Because my own research currently focuses on Hungary, the examples are drawn from that country, but the phenomena I discuss are more generally characteristic of the region.Google Scholar

⁵ Thanks to David Cohen, from whom I borrow the phrase “the political life of dead bodies.”

⁶ The removal of monuments to public figures is also related to reburials and works through semiotic processes similar to the ones I outline here. Each is concerned with putting a person “in the right place”: as rediscovered and newly honored ancestor or as dishonored and rejected ancestor. In each case one can also ask, Whose ancestor?

⁷ Andrei, Pippidi, “Graves as Landmarks of National Identity,” Budapest Review of Books, 1995, 104.Google Scholar

⁸ I am drawing here on Charles Peirce's distinctions between the sign relations of index, icon, and symbol. See, for instance, his “Logic as Semiotic,” in The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings (London, 1940).Google Scholar

⁹ See my extended discussion of this in “Bartók's Funeral: Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,”Google ScholarAmerican Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 440–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ For detailed discussions of the Nagy funeral, see Susan, Gal, “Ritual and Public Discourse in Socialist Hungary: Nagy Imre's Funeral” (paper delivered at the 90th meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington D.C., 1989);Google Scholar and István, Rév, “Parallel Autopsies,” Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 15–39.Google Scholar

¹¹ Rév, , “Parallel Autopsies,” discusses Petőfi's bones, as well;Google Scholarthe quote from Pippidi, is from “Graves as Landmarks,” 180.Google Scholar

¹² The larger argument of this section was first made in Gal, , “Bartók's Funeral.”Google Scholar

¹³ See Larry, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994), for a discussion of this shift.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Maria, Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 453–82;Google Scholar and Marko, Živković, “Stories Serbs Tell Themselves about Themselves: Discourses of Identity and Destiny in Serbia since the Mid-1980s,” Problems of Post-Communism 44, no. 4 (1997): 22–29,Google Scholar have described very similar identity processes; for Greece, see Michael, Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking Glass (New York, 1991).Google ScholarSvetlana, Boym's “From Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia,” Representations 49 (1995): 133–56,Google Scholarprovides excellent examples for this thesis, as does Verdery's, National Ideology under Socialism.Google ScholarFurther examples are cited in Gal, , “Bartók's Funeral.”Google Scholar

¹⁵ For descriptions of Hungarian self-fashioning, see, for instance, Tamás, Hofer, “Constructions of the ‘Folk Cultural Heritage’ in Hungary: Rival Versions of National Identity,” Ethnologia Europaea 21, no. 2 (1991): 145–70,Google Scholar and the collection Helyünk Europában (Our place in Europe), ed. Berend, Iván T. (Budapest, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁶ See the work of Jakobson, among others, for the concept of a relational, indexical term that derives its referential meaning from the context in which it is used, for example, “Shifters and Verbal Categories,” in On Language: Roman Jakobson, ed. Waugh, Linda R. and Monique, Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar

¹⁷ For a more detailed discussion of just this process, with examples from the Hungarian case, see Gal, , “Bartók's Funeral.”Google Scholar