Paper short abstract:

It became difficult to perform multi-sited ethnography, especially participant observation during COVID-19, but new topics have emerged in the online space, and we studied how some Hungarian NRMs, and pupils reacted to the pandemic and broke some legal regulations.

Paper long abstract:

Ildikó Tamás performed European ethnological research among students and pupils and László Koppány Csáji performed anthropological fieldwork among new religious movements throughout the Carpathian Basin during the last decade. The participant observation became nearly impossible in the offline space from March 2020, so we had to adapt to the situation so our online ethnography became dominant (what we have already started in 2015), and we shared our experience how the groups we study reacted to the situation. We recognized how some group tried to avoid, circumvent and break the legal regulations in the offline space. So we also started to perform the “anthropology of breaking the rules”, but it was quite hard to observe it in the offline space. When we made some statistics of their activity, we recognized that their adaptation has affected only some of their social media channels, while some of them also tried to find unlawful offline ties, even if it was less frequent, and the majority of the participants refused to do so.