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128 Ildikó Sz. Kristóf (Multi-) Mediatized Indians in Socialist Hungary: Winnetou, Tokei-ihto, and Other Popular Heroes of the 1970s in East-Central Europe Indidnosdi as a Multimediatized Practice This study aims to analyse a specific field of the socialist past and its techniques of representation in our east-central European countries. This field, this “cultural field” (champs culturel), or “cultural practice” (pratique culturelle), to use the approach of the excellent French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1996), had two chief characteristics that seemed to be common to perhaps the majority of the scholars present in our conference in December 2015 in Sofia: first, that this socialist past and its cultural representations constituted our childhood—a peculiar childhood whose social context has been held and felt very different from the current postsocialist-early capitalist era, its imagery, and its attitudes;' and, second, that the same socialist past has provided a number of cultural motifs, patterns, and ways of doing for our childhood and early youth that themselves seem to have been (more or less) common in our east-central European countries. One such motif and also a pattern of doing was, I would argue, what we call indidnosdi (Indianizing) in Hungarian—that is, reading, watching, playing, reenacting (North American) “Indians”. The functioning of indidnosdi during the 1970s in the Peoples’ Republic of Hungary is at the same time an excellent example of multimediality, the very topic of the 2015 conference. /ndidnosdi relied upon—invaded, I would say—all the branches of contemporary media and (almost) all the channels of interpersonal communication and bound them closely together. It appeared in the text of printed novels, in the drawings inserted into them (like frontispiece pictures or illustrations; among many examples, see Cooper 1973; May 1973, 1974, 1975; Welskopf-Henrich 1973a, 1973b). Indidnosdi penetrated movie culture—for example, the extremely popular West German and East German “Indian films” as they were commonly called during the period and later on as well. Next to popular “spaghetti westerns”, the latter were qualified somewhat more positively “red westerns”, meaning that they replaced the good old opposition of “good guys—bad guys” with ' Hereafter, I rely on the conversations I led with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances during 2015 and 2016; see my research described under the subheading “Ego-histoire: A Self-History, Personal History Contextualized” in this study.
