Draft:Agnes Horvath

Agnes Horvath (1957) is a political anthropologist,. She was the founder of the International Political Anthropology Journal. . She is known for her notable approaches to liminality, boundaries, void, divinisation and walling , Eros and beauty , trickster parasitism and charisma in political leadership, alchemy and magic from political anthropological view.

Education
Having studies Law and Economics in Budapest, she gained a doctorate in social and political sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (2000).

Work
The work of Agnes Horvath has three main stages, around three main axes. The first focuses on the question of political power. It started with her study of the Budapest Communist Party apparatus, a research in which she was the project leader (1987-89), and which later was joined by Arpad Szakolczai. It led to book publications, in Hungarian (1989) and English (1992), as well as a series of articles (in English in The British Journal of Political Science (1991), East European Politics and Societies (1991), and Social Research (1990)). This work was extensively used, among others, by Richard Sakwa and Katherine Verdery. This was continued with her PhD (EUI, Florence, 2000), being concerned with the political communication exercised by Communist leaders for gaining and consolidating their power, focusing on Mátyás Rákosi, the (in)famous Communist leader of the 1940s and 1950s in Hungary. It was during this work that she developed the idea that the anthropologically developed term “trickster” is fundamental for understanding the power exercised in modern states and societies; a kind of counter-ideal-type to the charismatic leader, developed by Max Weber for the study of power and political leadership. The novelty and significance of this approach is increasingly recognised. In the 2020 Routledge International Handbook of Charisma, edited by José Pedro Zúquete, Charles Lindholm, author of a classic book on Charisma (Blackwell, 1990), extensively discusses her work on charisma and trickster in his chapter “The Anthropology of Charisma”, focusing on her book Modernism and Charisma (Palgrave, 2013), arguing that “Horvath’s cry of despair [… i.e., that charismatic leaders are increasingly replaced by tricksters] is worth special attention by anthropologists, since she and the others who were inspired by her have made impressively creative use of classic, but often ignored, anthropological paradigms, most obviously Turner’s theory of liminality and Van Gennep’s notion of the rites of passage, as well as Le Bon’s crowd psychology and Tarde’s concept of compulsive mimesis. Of special note is her adoption and expansion of Gregory Bateson’s (1936) model of schismogenesis. For Bateson, conflicts are usually resolved by eventual reaggregation (as predicted by Van Gennep). But Horvath places much more emphasis on escalating tension, the failure of reconciliation, and the resulting systemic collapse and descent into perpetual liminoid madness.” (Lindholm, 2020, pp.39, 44-45). Her related work is also extensively discussed by Oriana Binik, The Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society (Springer, 2020) ; Walter Armbrust (2013), and Kurowska and Reshetnikov (2021) His work on Pulcinella as trickster is also recognised for its qualities.

In the second stage of her work, Horvath extended her interest from charisma to a series of anthropologically developed concepts, and incorporated the political philosophy and anthropology of classic thinkers, especially Plato. This resulted in the founding, with BjørnThomassen and Harald Wydra, in 2008 the journal International Political Anthropology, still the first reference in the Wikipedia page “Political Anthropology”. IPA so far has published 32 issues in 16 years, and also organised ten International Summer Schools (2009-19), an activity only ended by Covid. She contributed both to Elgar Handbook of Political Anthropology (2018), and co-authored the entry on “Political Anthropology” for the SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology (2018). A major related publication is her co-authored 2018 book Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, widely used in studies about long-distance walking. Thus, in a 2021 review article of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, on the therapeutic effects of long-distance walking, authored by four Danish scholars, the book is the first of 67 references; a 2022 article in New Ideas in Psychology again considers the book as its primary reference point (“Other researchers before us have argued for a similar understanding of the long-distance walk”; p.2); just as a 2021 article in Development and Aging. Her interpretation on liminality is also extensively used (see Victoria Loblay, Kate Garvey, Alan Shiell, Shane Kavanagh &amp; Penelope Hawe, in Critical Public Health (2021), or John O&#39;Brennan, in Space and Polity (2023) – her name is misspelled in this publication, as it frequently happens elsewhere, leading to evident problems of identification). Her work on Walling is extensively used in a recent study on higher education. In the third, most recent period, Horvath extended her version of political anthropology to the study of the links between technology and alchemy, magic and science, resulting both in edited collections (A. Horvath, C.F. Roman and G. Germain (eds) Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, 2019; and Horvath, Agnes, and Paul O’Connor (eds) Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism, 2023, this latter, based on a 2021 conference, having the timeliness of focusing on Covid); and single-authored books (Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded, 2021; and Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicity, 2024, in press). The latter book is endorsed by Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, and Lee Trepanier, Chair and Professor of Political Science, Samford University.

Publications

 * Magic and the Will to Science. A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality:


 * Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, 2021. Routledge, 2021. ISBN 9780367894412. 216 Pages


 * Modernism and Charisma, Palgrave, 2013.http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/modernism-and-charisma-agnes-horvath/?K=9781137277855


 * Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery


 * The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology (2020).


 * Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion (2019).


 * Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A political anthropology of transformations (co-edited with Marius Bentza, Joan Davison, Routledge, 2018).


 * Walking into the Void: A Historical, Sociological and Political Anthropology of Walking (co-authored with Arpad Szakolczai, Routledge, 2017).


 * Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, (co-edited with Harald Wydra, Bjorn Thomassen, Berghahn, 2015).


 * The Gravity of Eros in the Contemporary: Introduction to the Special Section. History of the Human Sciences 26 (5):69-78.