Groceries are supposed to be provided with an expiry date—books are
not. But in general, their life-span is not very long: publishers and bookstores
aim for quick stock turnover for economic reasons, and as for scientific
publications, their period of validity is limited by the continuous progress
in the disciplines. Thus, it is quite unusual that after almost three decades
an academic work is as bright and lively as it was when it first appeared.
This applies to Edit Fél’s and Tamás Hofer’s book. The German
edition, under the title Bäuerliche Denkweise in Wirtschaft und Haushalt,
was published in 1972, and it has meanwhile become a classical work of
cultural anthropology.
There are several reasons for this success story. An important one
is that by depicting in detail the history, the problems, and structure
of a Hungarian village the authors provide a comprehensive concept of a
whole world. I will try to explain this in terms of two elementary dimensions:
space and time.
Átány, of course, is different from villages in Spain,
Germany, or Norway (not to mention more exotic places in other continents);
in Fél’s and Hofer’s book, there are precise descriptions’
of the specific valencies of soil, plants, animals, work, food, clothing,
dwelling, household economy. But the peasants’ way of thinking has much
in common with observations from other parts of Europe. In the same decade
as the Átány monograph, Utz Jeggle’s study on the German
village Kiebingen was published at Tübingen. In many respects, it
revealed the same or similar ways of thinking although economic prerequisities
and other conditions were different. Different in detail but not in the
pivotal and basic structures defined by the constraints of survival and
subsistence. Ethnological research all over the world has exposed the enormous
variability of rural life dependent on morphological conditions, climate,
but also the political and cultural framework; looking at the requirements
and styles of work, “the” peasant simply doesn’t exist. But there seems
to be a basic structure of rural thinking which is valid in quite different
regions.
Jeggle’s Kiebingen study was not a synchronic description but a historical
investigation based on archive records from the late 18th to the end of
the 19th century. Nevertheless, the main results are comparable to the
Átány findings, and even in the publication by Carola Lipp
and Wolfgang Kaschuba, which extended the Kiebingen investigation up to
the middle of the 20th century, there are many references to structures
and attitudes which are not far removed from Átány. This
means that the Átány world, to a certain degree, has been
the world of farmers in many regions for many centuries. Átány,
as depicted by Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, is a model of premodern
rural society and culture.
It is this quality which makes the book so useful and accessible. A
realistic description, it represents at the same time the ideal type (in
the sense of Max Weber) of the world of “proper peasants”. It is a universe
which was already fading away when the material for the book was collected
and which, in the meantime, has almost totally disappeared. Thus, it became
a contrasting concept to the modern world which, even at the peripheries
of Europe, has only a few small remaining pockets of premodern production
and life.
By now, even the modern structures seem to be left behind; sociologists
and philosophers have sketched out a new, “postmodern” type whose main
biotope is the big city but which affects rural areas, too—although with
reduced impact. The analysts of postmodern society see a reduction of commitments
to collective bonds and a pluralization and individualization of morals.
They hold that the importance of work—and by this they mean the significance
of professional careers—has diminished and that more and more areas in
peoples’ lives have become aestheticized. Ulrich Beck, one of the leading
diagnosticians of postmodernity, headed an essay with the impressive formula
“Gesamtkunstwerk Ich”—an approximate translation: “Synthesis of the arts:
one’s self”.
It goes almost without saying that here—as in every attempt to reduce
new developments to a common denominator—certain trends are overtaxed and
overgeneralized; I doubt if a scholar searching for postmodern traits in
today’s Átány would find more than very slight trace elements.
But on the whole, the arguments point in the right direction. And once
more, the tight portrayal of the traditional Átány world
recommends itself as a contrasting background which provides a better understanding
of the new developments.
A close reading of the book, however (and this might be a sort of punch
line in this brief review), will show that there are not only contrasts
but also surprising parallels or at least similarities between pre- and
postmodern life. It turns out that the common short accounts of preindustrial
agrarian society ignore or fail to fully acknowledge important differentiations.
I shall confine myself to three points in which the depiction of the Átány
people is not that far off from their purported opposite.
First, the lives of the people living in that traditional framework
were not determined in every respect. Their culture—taking the term in
the widest sense—was a complex field of obligations and liberties, chances
and restrictions, with risks continually impeding. One of the more important
demands made on them was, as Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer underline,
“elastic adaptation” to changing conditions.
Second, their day and their life were marked and shaped by intense
body feelings: They felt and observed their bodies getting slower and feebler
towards the evening (the evening of their lives and the evening of the
day) and even calculated the time by these impressions.
And third, their lives were moulded and their life paths marked by
a far-reaching fatalism which helped them to cope with misfortune and failures;
and this meant, too, that despite failures, innovations were carried on
and not hindered or dispensed with.
It is quite evident that postmodern “bricolage” is different from the
old elastic adaptation, that today’s corporeality is not the same as the
physical state and feelings of the Átány people, and that
their fatalism had a strong religious implication which is now missing.
But perhaps it might be productive to ask whether a typical postmodern
existence with changing professional orientations, with changing (and often
insecure) livelihoods is not, in a way, closer to the premodern situation
with its unavoidable and unpredictible vicissitudes of life than to the
orderly life structures in industrial society with its ideal of a rather
static professional status and its mechanisms of assurance and security.
In the same way, it might make sense to investigate whether or not the
new empiricism of the body can be interpreted, at least partially, as a
return to experiences in the old agrarian world. And it might be interesting
to find out to what degree and with which variations the risks of the old
rural subsistence society turn up in our own risky society, our “Risikogesellschaft”
(to use another term coined by Ulrich Beck)—an affluent society for which,
however, the principle of limited goods becomes more and more evident.
Difficult questions, to be sure, and perhaps not always very promising.
But it seems encouraging to me that even they can be derived from a research
project which was definitely on a different wavelength.
Notes
* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Winter 1998, pp. 377–78.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta