When historians of anthropology come to identify the landmarks of the
discipline in the twentieth century, alongside monographs such as those
of Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobriand Islanders and Edward Evans-Pritchard
on the Nuer there will surely be mention of the Átány monographs
of Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer. Recognition of their work domestically
in Hungary was long impeded by the political context, and there is no need
here to recapitulate the extraordinary publishing history of the project.
The question of international recognition is more complicated, for it involves
changes in basic definitions and orientations of the subject in the course
of the century. Let me try to explain from the point of view of a British
social anthropologist.
The outstanding figure in British anthropology in the first half of
the century was Malinowski, a Central European whose Trobriand work during
the First World War set new standards for ethnographic fieldwork. Malinowski
emphasized the study of how societies functioned in the present and was
suspicious of those such as James Frazer who, in the tranquillity of their
Cambridge libraries, assembled fragments of ethnographic evidence to support
arguments about social evolution. This “presentism” was fruitfully adopted
by Malinowski’s many students in the closing decades of Britain’s colonial
empire.
Around the middle of the century Evans-Pritchard became something of
a dissenter. He rejected Malinowski’s functionalism and emphasized the
need to integrate history into ethnographic analyses. More recently, among
the many new trends of postcolonial decades, the shift to “anthropology
at home” is perhaps the most significant, since it calls into question
the most common definition of the discipline. If anthropology is no longer
the study of exotic tribal societies, of “the other”, then what is it?
Is “the other” also to be found at home? Should we content ourselves with
an exclusively methodological definition, to the effect that anthropologists
differ from sociologists and other social scientists only in their reliance
on fieldwork and “qualitative” methods? There is at present no consensus
on these questions among anthropologists in Britain.
I entered the subject in the mid-1970s, excited by the “otherness”
of socialist societies. Compromises were required from the start, since
the socialism that was really “other”, in China, the Soviet Union or Cuba,
was closed to foreign anthropologists. Hungary, however, was already very
open to the West and it was not difficult, in the framework of inter-state
cultural cooperation, to arrange a year’s rural fieldwork. One of the first
books I read in preparing this project was Proper Peasants, published in
Chicago in 1969. I remember the trouble I had in classifying it. It contained
a mass of ethnographic detail, descriptive and anecdotal, of the sort that
British anthropologists tended to dismiss as “butterfly collecting”. The
village Átány had been selected precisely because of its
traditional qualities and the attention of the ethnographers “was focused
primarily on the more antiquated features” (p. 6). Yet Proper Peasants
also dealt systematically with its social structure and broke the conventions
of the
Volkskunde tradition, e.g. by engaging with the emerging comparative
literature on peasants. It was the work not of a “lone ranger” fieldworker
suddenly immersed into an exotic culture, but of two natives whose fieldwork
among their compatriots consisted of regular short visits over some fifteen
years.
Above all I was struck by the temporality of the work. Proper Peasants
is not concerned with broader questions of social evolution, nor even with
a full treatment of the history of Átány peasants; but neither
is it presentist. In a distinctive sort of salvage anthropology, the authors
reconstruct the social institutions of the village as they were before
the impact of socialist changes, i.e. the recent past rather than the present.
This was of course a deliberate aim, related to the political context and
impending collectivization. I remember spying in this a glimmer of hope
for my own project: a foreigner could hardly hope to match the comprehensive
coverage and cultural sensitivity of these two natives, but perhaps he
could instead occupy a presentist niche which, for political reasons, was
less accessible to native ethnographers. (Only later did I realise the
error of this assumption, since in fact other natives, such as Mihály
Sárkány, had already undertaken work on the socialist transformation
of rural society, not to mention the large szociográfia literature.)
It is a pity that Proper Peasants remains unavailable in Hungarian,
and that Arányok és mértékek, though at last
available in Hungarian, remains inaccessible to English readers. Simplifying
somewhat, one might say that the former complements the latter in much
the same way that British social anthropology complements the focus on
culture that has taken priority in the American anthropological tradition.
By culture is meant the concepts and the values which create unique local
meaning and shape all social interaction. Hofer himself makes the link,
in his new Preface, to the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz,
as well as to the “moral economy” arguments of E.P. Thompson in England
and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “habitus” (see pp. xvii–xx). It seems
that, independently and unconsciously, throughout all their meticulous
descriptions of “material culture” that make up the great bulk of this
volume, the Átány researchers were pioneering a research
agenda which has since spread throughout and even beyond the social sciences.
In both volumes they present an unforgettably rich picture of these “proper
peasants”, who took such pride in their hard work and their independence,
who saw themselves as the people of the soil (a föld népe),
and who saw their village as the center of the world.
The leitmotiv of “moderation”, derived from the statements of the Átány
peasants themselves, provides a fine synthesizing concept which allows
the ethnographers to explore all that most formal models of a peasant economy
exclude, whether these be based on “rational choice” theories or Marxist
class analysis. This concept also serves to highlight the tension between
the local culture of Átány and the national culture of Hungary,
which for much of this century has been shaped by political ideologies
that were anything but moderate. Three such ideologies stand out. The first
is nationalism itself, the cultural construction of which has been explored
in innovative ways by Tamás Hofer in some of his more recent work.1
Here he has begun to look critically at the origins of those conceptions
of the “motherland” (anyaföld) to which the Átány peasants
were strongly attached, but which were not so carefully scrutinized in
his monographs with Edit Fél. This work directs attention to the
contributions of historically situated intellectual elites, well outside
the boundaries of Átány and of the traditional discipline
of ethnography, a discipline which took the national framework very much
for granted. It is perhaps in this recent work, in which reifications of
national culture are critically exposed, that the reader can perceive most
clearly the “habitus” of this author, suspicious of all extremes and embodying
all that is most attractive in the culture of the Central European intelligentsia.
The other dominant ideologies of this century in this region have been
socialism and capitalism, and it seems to me that the cultural contents
of these also deserve careful examination. This leads me to see the Átány
volumes as incomplete. Together they provide a magnificent hybrid of the
anthropological traditions and a superb portrait of a Great Plain community
on the eve of its “great transformation” (to use Karl Polányi’s
phrase). But the Átány peasants are left standing, as it
were, outside real historical time. Particularly in Arányok és
mértékek, little sense is communicated of change in the community.
Admittedly there is some precise documentation of political and social
change: 1848 was a revolution, the 1870s brought a new house type, and
the 1930s brought electricity to a prosperous few. There is a lot of data
concerning “the vicissitudes of the village over the course of two or three
generations.”2 But somehow the culture is presented as unchanging. The
essentials of the peasant world view in Átány in the 1950s
were no different from that of the peasants described by Gergely Berzeviczy
in 1804.
A related question concerns the internal variation of this community.
Fél and Hofer apply the term paraszt to all people who earn their
living from their land, regardless of their wealth. Proper Peasants contains
detailed discussion of material differentiation, yet we are assured that
the values of “good measure and moderation” applied to the whole
community. I have often wondered if this is not too idealized a representation,
biased perhaps by the particular families with whom the ethnographers stayed
in their many visits to the village; perhaps the teamless gazda really
did share fully in the values of the minority who owned their own horses
or oxen, but I wonder if some of the landless zsellér, not to mention
the Roma, did not hold quite different views, at least in some contexts.
Age and gender differentiation could also be explored more fully in this
regard.
These are the sorts of criticisms that social anthropologists typically
level against even the very best culturalists. They do not detract at all
from the elegance of the analysis and besides, my own much more limited
experience in a quite different part of rural Hungary leads me to think
that the interpretation of Fél and Hofer is fundamentally correct:
peasant values in a community not yet fully integrated by a market
principle really were different, rooted in attachments to the land and
the work that peasants performed on it.
The question which then interests me is: are they still different today?
The brief Epilogue to Proper Peasants implies that the “old order” had
entirely disappeared within a decade of the beginning of the project in
1951. Similarly, we can read in the Introduction to Arányok és
mértékek that “The entire order of life—people’s clothing,
the external and internal appearance of their houses, all their ties to
each other—was radically changed.” (p. 13) This claim seems implausible:
surely there were some continuities at the cultural level? What I should
therefore like to see in further Átány monographs (Hofer
mentions a fourth volume, based on life histories, that will presumably
appear soon; one hopes that more will follow) is an equally detailed account
of how the values of this traditional peasantry have shaped, and been shaped
by, changes in the encompassing society in the last half century. We know
that the ethnographers carried out their research in the years when the
political changes were most dramatic, yet they limit their discussion of
these to a few pages in the Epilogue of Proper Peasants. This follows from
their main goal, which was “to study and describe that traditional peasant
culture which still thrived at Átány in its original undiluted
state”.3 This goal is certainly defensible intellectually, and besides,
to write truthfully about a more contemporary “ethnographic present” was
no easy task in the 1960s. But no such inhibiting political factors remain
today, and it would seem a shame to forego all analysis of the transformation
itself.
This raises larger theoretical issues in the understanding of social
change. We typically assume that human communities have a cultural stream
which flows slowly, in comparison with the speed at which institutional
changes can be imposed; we know that the two streams must influence each
other; but we need detailed anthropological studies to understand better
the mutual causalities between the longue durée of cultural and
ideological continuties and temporally specific discontinuties. Constitutions
and economic mechanisms can be altered from one day to the next, but even
in fields such as law and economics it is hardly possible to start from
scratch, because human behavior itself can never begin from a tabula rasa.
It is evident that socialism was perceived in Átány as
an assault upon the independence of the peasant, and it is easy to understand
how an intimate solidarity developed between the ethnographers and their
informants in the repressive climate of the 1950s. Yet socialist ideology
invoked a production ethic that arguably had some affinity to older peasant
notions of value: can this proposition be tested through a detailed analysis
of the reception of socialism in this village? By the 1970s, when
I did fieldwork, both the rhetoric and the realities of socialism were
very different from earlier decades: what did the peasants of Átány
think about the policies of Lajos Fehér, and how did they respond?
The 1990s have presumably brought to Átány, as to other
Hungarian villages, a further Great Transformation, this time unambiguously
capitalist. There has been a, presumably welcome, restoration of individual
property rights, but it is possible (if my experience in other villages
is anything to go by) that at least some villagers will have a sense of
new injustices and of violations of the moral economy as flagrant as any
others in recent memory. So again, as in the different stages of their
encounter with socialism, some elements of the old world view—culture—are
consistent with the new institutional order, while others seem strongly
dissonant. Can the old Átány ideals of moderation still be
detected at the end of the century, and if so, what influence do they have
on behavior? Or is it the case that, behind the labels of both socialism
and capitalism, a more instrumental economic rationality has continuously
gained in strength over the last half century, at the expense of the cultural
values of the preceding longue durée? Whatever the answers, the
studies published by Fél and Hofer provide an outstanding foundation
on which to base further research into the material culture and social
structure of this village. It would be marvellous if Tamás Hofer
were able himself to return to the project to which he has already contributed
so much, this time with the goal of bringing it closer to the present.
* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Fall 1998, pp. 315–17.
1 Tamás Hofer and Péter Niedermüller, eds., Nemzeti
kultúrák antropológiai nézetben (National Cultures
from an Anthropological Angle). Budapest, 1988; Tamás Hofer, ed.,
Hungarians between East and West: National Myths and Symbols, Budapest:
Néprajzi Muzeum, 1994.
2 Proper Peasants, p.10.
3 ibid, p.10.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta