According to the Introduction to the 1972 German edition of Arányok
és mértékek, Richard Weiss—who had completed his ethnographic
monograph on Switzerland not long before—had urged the authors as early
as 1951, (that is, from the very beginning of the work), to describe the
peasant world of Átány in a German-language monograph in
order to make it accessible to foreign readers. He obviously knew what
he was doing. Neither he nor his fellow-scholars who joined him in supporting
this work later could have believed that they were dealing with an experiment
with an uncertain outcome. Edit Fél was in charge. She had chosen
Tamás Hofer, in his early twenties at that time, as her collaborator.
They regarded Edit Fél’s track record as a guarantee. They had no
cause to worry that she, in the midst of the current of changes that were
then taking place in Central Europe, would embark on a kind of anachronistic
exploration of a peasant idyll and write an ethnographic monograph in the
traditional sense.
Edit Fél belonged to a school of multi-disciplinary orientation
which grew up around István Györffy. In writings dating from
the 1930s and 1940s she partly developed theoretically and partly implemented
in practice a concept of ethnography according to which—to provide a very
superficial summary—ethnography is a close relative of social history as
such, its purpose is to explore peasant life in its totality.1 Her ethnographic
monographs explore data on a range of issues, from family hierarchies as
manifested in the sleeping arrangements of its members, to social hierarchy
as manifested in the arrangement of buildings on a plot of land.
But they also address many issues which, generally speaking, have only
been discovered fairly recently in the social sciences. Her bibliography
shows clearly that Edit Fél was quick to seize upon any new trend
or idea. Her extraordinarily numerous book reviews are evidence for this.2
Edit Fél was writing about the manner in which small communities
function at a time when the very notion of the “small community” still
had to be defined. She described forms of behavior in terms of the relation
of age groups or individuals to a particular social formation, at a time
when terms such as “cohort” or “peer group” were neither theoretically
nor in practice considered by the relevant scientific disciplines as something
which it was necessary to investigate.3 She also used the method of depicting
the general through the particular in an approach which could best be described
as literary and which was to gain acceptance only much later. She described
a horizontally and vertically extended pattern in families in contrast
to the contemporary picture of social groups tending towards the nuclear
family pattern.4
Bäuerliche Denkweise must have surpassed all the expectations
of its foreign supporters. It appeared when heated polemics about ethnography,
conducted mainly in German, were at their height. A collection of studies
tellingly entitled Abschied vom Volksleben is regarded as the principal
summary of anti-ethnographic views.5 One of the studies in this volume
contained a personal attack on the then already deceased Richard Weiss,
who was a personal friend of Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer; by
and large, however, the views expressed were directed against ethnography
as a discipline. The authors cited examples ranging from the Grimm brothers
to their own contemporaries. In addition to a number of methodological
considerations, their basic argument was that ethnography presents the
people [Volk] as a healthy organism; in other words, it serves the powers-that-be
by portraying a state of order.
It was in these circumstances that a bulky volume appeared, whose ethnographic
nature was apparent from its subtitle, not to mention the fact that it
was published by an ethnographic institution. It had nothing to do with
power or the ruling regime in Hungary at the time; in fact, it was opposed
to it, despite the fact that it did indeed approach its chosen subject,
the lives of the people of Átány, in terms of the functioning
of a healthy organism. At the start of their narrative the authors make
it clear that the community which is the subject of their investigation
is made up of families who all use the same methods of farming, but who
were in a minority in the local population. The Göttingen institute
and the publisher of the volume, who was also among those under attack,
could hardly have imagined a more powerful argument against the assault
on ethnography.
The fact that the book owed nothing to the regime in Hungary at the
time should not be interpreted to mean that Edit Fél and Tamás
Hofer had smuggled some kind of samizdat into Germany; the Átány
project and its findings were common knowledge among all those who took
an interest in such matters. The Introduction to Bäuerliche Denkweise
in fact explicitly mentions that the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography had
funded the entire field work, which lasted for fifteen years, and that,
by the time of publication in German, the Museum had acquired a special
collection of artefacts from Átány and a volume dealing with
its findings had been published in Hungarian,6 in addition to several studies.
Furthermore, in 1962 the Hungarian Historical Society had invited Edit
Fél and Tamás Hofer to present their research. After 1956,
freedom to publish was not always conditional on political loyalty. Edit
Fél herself is a good example of that; in 1958 her book on Hungarian
folk art, written jointly with Klára K. Csilléry and Tamás
Hofer, was published in three languages, and in 1961 her independent work
on Hungarian folk embroidery was published by Corvina in German and English
in Budapest, and in collaboration with Corvina in London.
Bäuerliche Denkweise was never subjected to official criticism
on ideological grounds. Reading the text carefully, however, leaves us
with no doubt: Edit Fél and her associate, intentionally or otherwise,
had produced a polemic against the elimination of private enterprise. Their
work relied on material gathered from 1951 onwards, the time of the establishment
of the first agricultural co-operatives, and did not find anything that
might have called for external intervention. The trilogy about Átány
emphatically presents peasant farms and the social formations which grew
out of them as healthy and well-functioning organisms. By 1972, when the
volume appeared in Germany, the second wave of agricultural collectivisation
in Hungary was already over, whereas Bäuerliche Denkweise was about
people who were proud to be independent, capable of finding their own way
in their natural and man-made environments, and of ensuring the survival
of their enterprise by means of effective decision-making: to be more precise,
it was about people who had behaved that way were set up before the collectives.
All this leaves the critic in the difficult position of being unable
to decide whether, for theoretical reasons, the authors omitted from their
work anything that was not strictly related to traditional peasant life,
or whether, for political reasons, they thought it wise not to ask their
respondents about the changes then taking place. According to the Introduction,
the field-workers lived through “the elimination of family operations
and peasant farms and the setting up of large agro-industrial plants, which
resulted in [the utilisation of] fundamentally different labor methods
and property relations, and the rapid collapse of the order of family life,
interpersonal relationships, and traditional value systems,” while noting
that “[e]valuation or description of the historical necessity of these
processes is beyond the authors’ competence” (p. 17).
The reader, however, who has the sovereign right to provide the final
interpretation of the reality thus presented, has the impression in this
instance that the work does contain a judgment: the whole book refutes
the necessity of the aforementioned historical processes; furthermore,
the reader might well wonder why it should have been beyond the authors’
competence to describe them. Phenomena, once they have gone, may be understood
only in terms of the succession of their emergence, existence, and passing
away. In other words, the collapse of the traditional value system of the
peasantry is just as important for ethnography as its emergence and functioning.
I must repeat, however: the period during which the book was written gives
cause for uncertainty. It is possible that the authors were not motivated
to restrict the scope of their description to the traditional by their
notion of the purpose of ethnography, but because they believed that it
was best not to harass people amidst the ruins of their lost world on the
pretext of doing research; if so, Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer
were right.
From the point of view of the historian the inclusion or omission of
facts which existed at the time the material for the monograph was gathered
is irrelevant. Thousands of works have been written and are yet to be written
about the events of that period; but it would scarcely be possible to find
such a goldmine as this book when it comes to the traditional way of life
and agricultural activity of the peasantry.
The explanation of this richness probably lies in the methodology employed
by Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer; as they themselves put it, they
used a method similar to “participant observation” (p. 15): however, they
did not hide, as “participant” anthropologists generally do, behind the
mask of a fictitious role, but announced themselves as collecting ethnographers,
while not relegating the people of Átány to the status of
mere objects of their field work, but making friends with many of them.
Edit Fél and her associate stayed in the village from time to time
and their Átány friends visited them in Budapest. The field
workers spent 500 days in Átány in all. They stayed with
local families, naturally becoming involved in their everyday lives, and
through them got to know virtually every local resident. They maintained
relatively close ties with 50–60 families.
Historical anthropology did not take off in Hungary before the early
1980s, and even then it aroused little interest in the profession.7 In
contrast, Arányok és mértékek, the manuscript
of which had been finalized some twenty years before, clearly cites anthropological
research projects conducted in Asia, America, and Africa, whose conclusions
the authors used to construct their research framework. In their opinion,
however, reliance on such a wide range of scientific data was, from a theoretical
point of view, nothing more than an effort on their part to overcome the
dangers of bias and partiality to which the ethnographic researcher is
prone (pp. 481–82).
The reader, in turn, when he realizes that Edit Fél and Tamás
Hofer’s work, rather than attempting to come up with new theories, merely
tries to pose a number of new questions and to find answers to them after
expert analysis, begins to regard the book as an informative manual on
the agricultural activities of the peasantry; though not, of course, to
the exclusion of other excellent ethnographic monographs. “Enough” may
not have meant the same in the two-storey peasant houses of the Sárköz
in Transdanubia as in Átány in the Great Plain in Eastern
Hungary, where families lived in only a single room. Yet the influence
and significance of the book are manifest precisely in the way it stimulates
us to make comparisons. The reader constantly compares the information
gleaned from this book with information from other sources; the historian
inevitably looks in the past for variations on the phenomena described
in Átány. The research method of the authors, which looks
at things from all possible angles, as well as their suggestive style,
inspire the feeling that something similar or its opposite must exist also
elsewhere.
Arányok és mértékek is a literary work
only in a loose sense, yet it is possible that it will attain in historiography
something of the status of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, whose scope of interpretation
became ever wider as time went on. On publication, the debate primarily
concerned the persons Thomas Mann had portrayed, and whether the events
described could have happened in that way. Then the novel's many characters
and the family itself emerged as a type; to begin with they were associated
only with the patriciate of the Hanseatic towns, then they came to stand
for the German bourgeoisie. Finally, after a long time and many different
interpretations, by the 1980s the term “Buddenbrooks phenomenon” made its
appearance in the study of economic history; at the World Congress on Economic
History held in Budapest, Theo Barker from the London School of Economics
even conducted a workshop devoted to it.
Users of the term do not, necessarily agree with the inevitability
of the four-generation decline, which Buddenbrooks describes. Rather, “Buddenbrooks
phenomenon” signifies the human factor in economic processes, something
which became widely accessible through Mann's interpretation. In the same
way, Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer made generally accessible the
fact that the traditional agricultural activities of the peasantry were
based on a set of moral and material values. They did not discover this
fact but in the case of Átány they were able to describe
it with precision; one might call it the “Átány phenomenon”
and begin a debate on how the model would have worked under different conditions
and indeed whether it existed at all.
The likelihood is, however, that the term “Átány phenomenon”
will not become a generally used scientific term. The concept of a rationality
transcending formal economics is likely to remain the property of the outstanding
figures who started economic anthropology, Karl Polanyi and E. P. Thompson.
But it is no exaggeration to say that Edit Fél and Tamás
Hofer produced a universally valid description of the subjectively rational
behavior of traditional, real peasants.
* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Fall 1998, pp. 321–325.
1 A magyar népi társadalom életének kutatása
(Research into the Life of Hungarian Peasant Society). Budapest, 1948.
2 Compiled by M. Serfôzô (née Gémes). In
Ágnes Fülemile and Judit Stéfány, eds., Emlékezés
Fél Editre (Remembering Edit Fél). Budapest: Magyar Néprajzi
Társaság, 1993.
3 A nagycsalád és jogszokásai a Komárom
megyei Martoson (The Extended Family and its Self-Regulation at Martos,
Komárom County). Budapest, 1944.
4 Egy kisalföldi nagycsalád társadalom-gazdasági
vázlata. A marcelházai Rancsó-Czibor család
élete (Socio-economic Sketch of an Extended Family in the Small
Hungarian Plain. The Life of the Rancsó-Czibor Family of Marcelháza).
Érsekújvár, 1944.
5 K. Red, K. Geiger, U. Jeggle, and G. Korff, eds., Untersuchungen
des Ludwig-Uhland-Instituts der Universität Tübingen 27. 1970.
6 Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, “Az átányi
gazdálkodás ágai” (Types of Agricultural Activity
in Átány). Néprajzi Közlemények VI, 2
Budapest, 1961.
7 Gábor Klaniczay, in Tamás Mohay ed., Közelítések.
Néprajzi, történeti, antropológiai tanulmányok
Hofer Tamás 60. születésnapjára. (Approaches.
Studies in Ethnograpy, History, and Anthropology to Honor the 60th Birthday
of Tamás Hofer). Debrecen: Ethnica, 1992.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta