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This paper is an experiment in understanding the logic of communism from the perspective of political psychology. In Hungary, communism became a means for transforming the entire psychical make‐up of a country in a moment of reduced intensity of consciousness, a transitory or liminal period, produced by the Second World War. In liminal conditions, unconscious impulses are set free that are channeled by the use of archetypical images. As an empirical case study, this paper discusses the speeches of the first post‐war Hungarian Communist Party leader, Matyas Rakosi, delivered in the years immediately after the devastations of the war, in an effort to discern the techniques and mechanisms by which the Communist Party managed to capture the allegiance of a large segment of the population. The analysis of these speeches and their effects indicates that communism was not merely a consequence of Soviet occupation, and therefore the withdrawal of the troops did not eliminate the lasting, mostly hidden but still predominant, effects of communism on the countries that were in its grip.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Plato and other guides -- Thinking about evil -- The flux and the void -- The living dead -- Chapter structure -- Notes -- PART I: Presenting the trickster -- 1. The trickster in anthropology: The figure as seen from the outside -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 2. Techniques of trickster entrapment: The nets of spiders and magicians -- The Zande trickster, and what might it mean that a trickster is a spider -- Trickster formulas and short cuts -- The trickster as transformer-fixer -- Why these are the Zande whose trickster is a spider? -- Other spider tricksters -- Zande witchcraft and sorcery -- Back to the present: concluding parables -- Notes -- 3. Hermes the trickster and the Kabeiroi: Moving towards evil -- Hermes, the enchanting Greek trickster -- The Homeric hymn to Hermes -- Kerényi's Hermes -- Dionysus the ecstatic trickster -- Prometheus the titan trickster -- The Kabeiroi as the arch-tricksters -- Hermes in modernity -- Notes -- 4. Plato' s Theaetetus: The Sophists and secret trickster knowledge -- The troubles with knowledge -- Secret knowledge in the Theaetetus -- Trickster knowledge -- Knowledge and its secrets -- Conclusion: revisiting the indestructible -- Notes -- 5. Vedic tricksterology -- Introduction -- The problem of meat-eating and what is behind it -- The rise of self-consciousness -- Vedic mentality -- Vedic sacrifice -- Sacrificial mentality -- The sacrificial vision -- From split self-consciousness to Gnostic world-rejection -- Substitution -- Imitation and metamorphosis -- The negligible -- Self-divinisation (theosis) -- Conclusion -- Notes -- PART II: Tracking trickster traces: evil machinations -- 6. Prehistoric trickster: Archaic outlines of evil.

Introduction -- Walking into sense -- The experience of walking -- The language and culture of walking -- The dilemma of representing the void : Michel Foucault and Francis Yates -- The flourishing and demise of walking culture -- Chauvet : the cave of wonders, or representation as transgression -- Pergouset : the cave of monsters, and its aftermath -- Natufian settlement : technology, representation, standing reserve -- GÖbekli Tepe : sanctuary as trickster bestiary, or the revival of transgression -- çatalhÖyük : the culmination of settlement -- Tassili : incubating transformation, or a training ground for the magi -- Returns to walking -- Walking in philosophy and religion -- Walking in mountains : the vocation of losing oneself -- Experiencing walking -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedicated -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: on the political anthropology of walling -- Part I: Theorising walling: processes of transformation in history -- 1 Walling Europe: the perverted linear transformation -- 2 The meaning and meaninglessness of building walls -- 3 Oppressive walling: Babel and the inverted order of the world -- Part II: Contemporary examples for transformations through walling -- 4 Walling as encystation: a socio-historical inquiry -- 5 Border-crossing and walling states in humanitarian work in Kolkata -- 6 Liminality and belonging: the life and the afterlives of the Berlin Wall -- 7 The Great Wall of China does not exist -- 8 Breaching Fortress Europe: the liminal consequences of the Greek migrant crisis -- 9 Imaginary walls and the paradox of strength -- 10 Identities frozen, societies betrayed, communities divided: the US‒Mexican wall -- Conclusion -- Index

Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems