‘I partied my way to [my] Hungary’: The agency-driven engagements of Hungarian-Australians to shape feelings of place and belonging outside their diaspora tourism programme

ABSTRACT

The Balassi Institute is Hungary’s cultural diplomacy organisation. The Institute’s 10-month ‘Balassi program’ invites Hungarians from the diaspora to participate in a culturally immersive and educational experience in Hungary. This paper draws on interviews with 17 Hungarian-Australians who attended the programme between 2001 and 2018. Bourdieu’s Habitus, capital and ‘field of possibles’ are used to analyse their experiences of belonging during their time in Hungary, particularly everyday engagements where they partied, danced, and formed friendships in nightclubs, folk bars, and community groups. The paper highlights that while the Balassi programme’s curriculum aims to habituate national consciousness, the defining elements of belonging were agency-driven. By manoeuvring their capital and prioritising everyday social engagements, participants constructed ‘relationships with the nation’, while maintaining a minimum commitment to the programme. Thus, when exploring the aims of State-led diaspora tourism programmes, participant choices outside these programmes must be considered a prominent force in shaping belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora tourism
• belonging
• home
• Hungarian-Australian
• agency
• field of possibles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use this term to describe this program (along with similar birth-right and homeland education tours) which invite people from the diaspora to experience life in the homeland and receive government or partial-government sponsorship throughout their stay. This description draws from the ‘from above’ perspective of transnationalism which interprets diaspora engagement as initiated by governments and carefully planned to reflect their ideological and political intentions.

2 ‘Balassi program’ is a term used in this paper to describe the program offered at the Balassi Institute and reflects how the programme was named by interview participants.

3 Numerous difficulties exist in determining the total number of current Hungarian diaspora members given their sheer diversity and the lack of sufficient evidence (see Gazsó, 2016; Gazsó et al., 2019).

4 The authors recognise the great richness of literature and research on birth-rights programs, diaspora and later-generations homeland tourism, and gap-year experiences, they wish to narrow their focus through the lens of Bourdieu’s analytical concepts including the analogy of a ‘field of possibles’ (1984, 1993).

5 Bourdieu (1990, p. 53) defines the habitus as ‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes’.

6 Capital refers to a variety of value-laden resources and assets within a field. The main forms of capital include economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. See Bourdieu (1986) and Hillier and Rooksby (2002) for further information.

7 In Australia, New South Wales has the largest Hungarian born population (6,420) followed by Victoria (4984), Queensland (3432) and South Australia (1274) (ABS, 2018).

8 The ‘lock out’ laws were introduced by the New South Wales government (Australia) in 2014 to reduce the perceived concentration of alcohol-fuelled violence in the Central Business District of Sydney. A series of curfews on entry and drink service were enforced in all nightclubs and pubs in this area.