By Zsuzsa Gille
In this unique and provocative examine, Zsuzsa Gille examines 3 scandals that experience shaken Hungary because it joined the ecu Union: the 2004 ban on paprika because of infection, the 2008 boycott of Hungarian foie gras via Austrian animal rights activists, and the "red dust" spill of 2010, Hungary’s worst environmental catastrophe. In every one case, Gille analyzes how practices of construction and intake have been plagued by the proliferation of recent criteria and rules that got here with access into the european. She identifies a brand new modality of power―the materialization of politics, or reaching political targets with the possible apolitical instruments of tinkering with know-how and infrastructure―and elucidates a brand new method of knowing globalization, materiality, and transnational politics.
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Additional info for Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union
Sample text
16 What is more important to acknowledge in these two cases, however, is that they represent an intentional act, rather than the kind of inadvertent contamination with aflatoxin that occurred ten years later. In the latter case there may have been an intent to mislead customers about the national origin of the spice, but not to taint it. Many scandals such as these were seen, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of state socialism, as the manifestation of the “Wild East” phenomenon, which, depending on one’s political attitude, was chalked up either to liberalization and the collapse of the state or to eastern Europeans’ newly liberated and thus excessive and gullible consumerism.
Given this transnational origin, it is quite amazing that this spice has insinuated itself so fully into Hungarian cuisine and self-image. 14 My search in the socialist-era archives of the various food safety authorities has not turned up any record of adulteration or contamination cases involving paprika. One would expect to find evidence of such instances in the archives, given that many other adulteration or contamination cases, most notably of dairy and meat products, were documented in confidential government documents.
They wage their battles much less with a localist and defensive agenda, and rather enter political struggles with alternative views of what globalization should mean and how it could work in their favor. Here the emphasis is on the material power of global imaginations. This is what this methodological framework does, even as we the researchers are located in particular sites (sometimes more than one): inasmuch as we are interested in hooking up the local to the global, in the above-detailed three ways, we really study the concrete at the level of the global.
