Encountering Materialities: Making Cold War Archival Collections Evidential for the Study of Religions

• In Event: Cold War Archives and Religion: Methodologies in Hidden, Secret, and Silenced Archives

Abstract

Taking the private archive of Zsuzsa Horváth (1950-1995), a sociologist of religions who worked in 1970s and 80s Hungary, as a starting point, this paper explores the significance of collections of material religious images, objects and ephemera for the study of religion during the Cold War. Zsuzsa Horváth researched communities that were under surveillance by the secret police whilst herself also being the target of the security services. I relate the context, affordances and connectivities of material religious items found in her collection to secret police practices of archiving similar objects and images. These two very different archives contain collections of material religion that are the product of the peculiar tendency, albeit in the pursuit of opposing aims, shared by the secret police, by scholars of religions and by Cold War western advocates of religious freedom to collect material manifestations of religion as evidence of the persistence of religious life. I argue that the scholarly archive of Zsuzsa Horváth, with its collection of religous ephemera, offers us valuable access to the complex moral and methodological choices and entanglements of the scholar of religion working under the shadow of the secret police.

Author

• James Kapalo, U College Cork (Ireland)