With this book, Maya Nadkarni cannot be accused of selling a pig in a poke; its central notion—based on her 2009 dissertation in anthropology at Columbia University—is in the title: “remains.” Remains, as she makes it clear in her introduction, comprises a relatively broad category:

Nadkarni is a superbly well-informed anthropologist. It is almost a hopeless endeavor to scrutinize her text for factual inaccuracies, misunderstandings, or mistranslations. Her grasp of both the language and the gestures of her interviewees likely finds those anthropologists struggling to make sense of the production of meaning in their field research envious. (Nevertheless, Nadkarni's comparison, on equal terms, of Péter Esterházy's nearly 1,000-page magnum opus, Harmonia Celestis + Corrected Version—one of the greatest Central European literary achievements of recent decades—with a 500-word reflection in a literary weekly does not seem fair.) Paradoxically, this familiarity with the field, its inhabitants, their history and disenchantments, and the fact that the book is rooted so firmly in Hungarian soil, might restrict interest for this valuable study. Although the phenomena Nadkarni patiently presents and interprets (nostalgia for a past that perhaps had never been, disenchantment with a future that never arrives, dissatisfaction with a present that is swallowed by the tension between an opaque past and fading future, the uncertainties and inconsistencies of one's narrated or remembered biography, etc.) are not uniquely Hungarian notions or experiences, the book sharply concentrates on Hungary, as if it narrates an incommensurable story. What happened with/in Hungary following the unexpected political changes of 1989 was not historical destiny, a Hungarian Sonderweg, but a specific version of a historical path taken—in slightly or remarkably different ways—by other former Soviet satellite states like Poland, Slovakia, and some Central Asian former Soviet republics. By disassembling the democratic structures—eliminating the freedom of the press, checks and balances, and the freedom of the judiciary—and initiating a process of wholesale historical revisionism, from 2010 on Hungary served as an example and laboratory for other emerging neonationalist authoritarian regimes in the world. It would have been instructive to show how these seemingly unique Hungarian historical traits could be imported and localized into other historical settings. And in the end, what at first appears to be a country-specific path-dependency in a wider temporal and spatial perspective could turn out to be an important local variant of a broader historical phenomenon.

“Who knows the river better,” once asked the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the hydrologist or the swimmer?” Geertz had in mind here the “limits of local knowledge,” what one can or cannot see “from the native's point of view” compared with the usually radically different perspective of the “outsider,” the anthropologist. Maya Nadkarni is neither hydrologist nor swimmer. The object of her field research is the swimmer (and even those who were thrown into the water after 1989, without knowing how to swim), struggling with the unpredictable currents and undercurrents and desperately trying to remain above the waves. She visits sculpture parks, museums, fake communist-era bars; reads “retro dictionaries”; follows scandals and media reports of the scandals; sees formerly banned and undeservedly popular films; reads important and even great monumental novels; and interviews village librarians, retired military officials, and unemployed people—those whose dreams could never come true, who were still hopeful at the beginning of their career, who had lost their past, or felt that their life (story) had been confiscated, made empty and retrospectively purposeless.

She tries neither to slip into her informants’ skin nor to rely solely on the experience-distant concepts of anthropologists while trying to make sense of the behavior or explanations of the natives. She attempts to avoid the traps of what the linguist Kenneth Pike has called the emic (insider, native) or etic (outsider, scientific) approach. Relying, however, on the explanations of interviewees has some pitfalls: the local, the native, when sitting face to face with the anthropologist, tries to enlighten and even impress her, and while trying to conceptualize what she or he did, or does, or thought, or hoped for, the interviewee provides an explanation—one that might be far from his or her unarticulated understanding of the intention or the situation. Bronislaw Malinowski once made a distinction between “what they say they do and what they actually do.” The manner in which locals make sense of what they do obviously has an influence on what they do, and yet there is still a difference between their tacit understanding of their own actions, feelings, and unfulfilled hopes and the way they articulate these things to an observer.

The anthropologist arrives armed with learned concepts and makes efforts to put her observations into the procrustean bed of the available conceptual categories. Nostalgia, as understood in Svetlana Boym's seminal The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), is one of those categories that makes the complex and barely solvable problem of being lost in the present too readily describable. The concept does not help in understanding either the power and influence of conscious political manipulation or the helplessness of the vulnerable population that does not have the tools to make sense of the new, frightening world that does not seem to originate from or resemble the life that seems to be—retrospectively—familiar.

Reflecting on the historian's craft in light of Kenneth Pike's distinction between emic and etic, the historian Carlo Ginzburg states: “One starts from etic questions aiming to get emic answers. … The tension between our questions and the answers we get from the evidence must be kept alive, although the evidence may well modify our initial questions. If the difference between our words and theirs is carefully preserved, it will prevent us from falling into two traps—empathy and ventriloquism” (“Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian's Craft, Today,” in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen [Cambridge, 2012], 108–9). Maya Nadkarni carefully navigates between the Scylla of make-believe empathy and the Charybdis of distant theorizing. Natives reading her book would perhaps not quite recognize themselves, but they would surely learn important things about missed opportunities and their responsibility for a present that differs so tragically from the future for which they naively longed.