ABSTRACT
Democratic politics is envisioned primarily as a politics of words. Nothing illustrates this better than the etymology of the term ‘parliament’, which comes from the Old French ‘parlement’ and refers to speaking or talk. Yet, as the imposing parliament buildings all over the world show, the politics of words is highly dependent upon a complex, well-aligned infrastructure that involves bodies, texts, symbolic objects and many other entities. Using the Hungarian parliament as a specific case, this chapter shows how ethnography might help in tracing and describing such alignments in practice, pointing at what could be called a ‘politics beyond words’. Before doing that, however, a short historical detour is necessary.
