In the late twentieth century, culture was adopted as an epistemic object in the life, mind, and behavioral sciences where researchers sought quantitative and mechanical knowledge about the evolution of cultural things. While anthropologists were subjecting the concept to revision and critique, liberal life and mind scientists reconfigured culture as an object for laboratory experiments and mathematical modeling in programs aimed at explaining the evolutionary origins of human sociality. However, by the turn of the century, culture had also become an object of reflection in antidemocratic political movements formed in opposition to political, economic, and scientific liberalisms.
This project examines European sciences of culture and politics of science, focusing on the illiberal Hungarian government’s legislative closure of the Central European University’s (CEU) operations in Budapest and the consequences for laboratory sciences of culture practiced there. After the Cold War, European liberals embraced cognitive universalism and evolutionary humanism to promote the formation of democratic subjects and societies. The CEU was established in 1991 to support post-Soviet nation states in their transition to liberal democracy and global capitalism by training new generations of democratic leaders and citizens in the social sciences and humanities. With massive investments from the European Research Council in the early twenty-first century, the CEU Department of Cognitive Science became a prominent node in a large network of European labs advancing evolutionary accounts of universal human culture. Yet since 2017, the Hungarian government has justified its legislative and juridical efforts to close the CEU as a necessary measure to protect the nation’s white, Christian culture from the subversive influences of liberal scientific institutions and education.
Using archival documents and oral histories, this project traces how the CEU became a vital site for experimental and evolutionary sciences of culture, and why the Hungarian government came to understand the university as a significant threat. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it describes the social, material, and organizational labor involved in moving laboratories across a national border. Throughout, it examines how liberal scientists and illiberal political actors advance conflicting claims on the authority of science to define culture and the human.