ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses early-nineteenth-century Hungarian nation-building focusing on the foundation of national cultural institutions. These ‘gifts to the nation’ were given and received within the political framework of ‘representative publicity’. Accordingly, while being celebrated as acts of patriotic generosity, aristocratic donations in fact reaffirmed the traditional political-economic hierarchy; prioritizing inherited over acquired wealth they justified the given distribution of capital and thereby concealed the political origins of social inequality. In a circularity typical of gift economies, the donations were reciprocated through the popular cult of the main donators. As ‘counter-gifts’ from the nation, these increasingly institutionalized cults pervaded national literature, art, historiography, and politics at a time when the old hierarchies of gift economies were challenged by the rise of the market economy. Gift nationalism thus seemingly created a complex self-contained symbolic and material economy embedded in social, political, and theological frameworks and based on mutual reinforcements between givers and recipients (‘the Nation’). However, the dangers inherent in this culture are apparent in the infrequent but substantial ruptures in this seemingly harmonious equilibrium between givers and receivers and come into sharp relief at moments, such as 1848, when national institutions became sites of competing visions of the nation.
