EN
In our article we will present two Eastern European examples of how sociological research
on everyday life in the 1970s has been influenced by political and cultural circumstances
and particular scientific traditions. From the early 1970s, sociology flourished in
some countries of the Eastern Bloc, institutes were refounded, and research projects
were heavily subsidised. Research into daily life – the so-called “socialist lifestyle”
– was one of the main foci of sociological inquiry. Recently, similar data collections
from two such projects were discovered in the archives of academies of sciences in
Hungary (HAS) and Poland (PAS). In both cases, we can see that the researchers stand
decisively on the side of “high” culture, while taking a normative view of “low” cultural
consumption. Even though there was no direct cooperation or interdependence between
Hungarian and Polish “lifestyle” researchers, we can observe similar structures of
thinking about socialist society. Western influence, mostly implicitly, is also visible.
