There is an expressive German term, Grenzgänger, used to describe
people who, fully aware of the limits which exist in politics, society,
and of course science, spend their whole lives transgressing these real
or fictitious borders. For such people, moving along these borderlines
and cutting across them constitute something of an intellectual adventure.
They realize that limits do not simply close off or delineate something;
they indicate less the end of something than the beginning, the beginning
of what lies hidden beyond them. At the same time, they know that any particular
“borderline” which they may happen to be proceeding along—and this is particularly
relevant with regard to scholarship—may be understood in another fashion,
as a periphery. One could go on dissecting this metaphor, but it is hardly
necessary to do so here. I have introduced it only because, to my mind,
Tamás Hofer is a typical Grenzgänger, whose work clearly illustrates
what happens to people who cut across borders in particular social and
political situations.
In ethnology and anthropology there is a wealth of theory concerning
borders—it is sufficient to point to Victor Turner’s theory of liminality
as a basic condition of human existence, or to Mary Douglas’s ideas on
order and purity; both approaches are rooted in the tenet that the symbolic
borders which exist in a society are a reflection of that society’s concept
of order. If one were to describe Tamás Hofer’s academic career
and to assess its significance from this perspective, the first thing that
would have to be mentioned would be the paradoxical situation in which
he was compelled to work for many decades. On the one hand, until the early
and mid-1980s, when he joined the Ethnographic Research Group of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, in which he became a head of department and later
deputy director, Hofer held virtually no formal office within the institutional
structure of Hungarian ethnography—he was marginalized. On the other hand,
as the editor of the journal Ethnographia and, even more importantly, because
of the international recognition that he enjoyed, he was a permanent fixture
of Hungarian ethnography and, what is more, shaped its way of thinking
to a considerable extent. Hofer’s status was more than contradictory.
From the 1960s Tamás Hofer has been the internationally best
known and most widely recognized Hungarian ethnographer—a status he still
retains. He was invited to every conference of any significance on ethnography,
ethnology, and anthropology from the United States to Scandinavia, and
from Germany to France. Through his writings and lectures he has been a
constant presence in the various fora of the international scene. Hofer
was obviously not particularly bothered by his lack of official status
within Hungarian ethnography and was much more concerned to try and act
as a mediator. On the one hand, he almost obsessively tried to change the
rather unfavorable image of Hungarian ethnography among social scientists
in Hungary: he sought contacts and organized conferences on a smaller or
larger scale. Then, in the second half of the 1980s, he initiated research
projects, which brought together historians, sociologists, and ethnographers,
people who were looking for—and doing—something a little different in their
respective fields of expertise. In addition, he often managed to invite
colleagues from abroad, start international co-operation projects, and
get hold of books which no one had ever heard of before; in other words,
Tamás Hofer managed virtually by himself to keep some sort of intellectual
ferment on the boil, an achievement which had a more than refreshing influence
on Hungarian ethnography in the 1980s. One could also learn from Hofer—and
here it is sufficient to look at his publications in English or German—that
the international scientific community does not always speak the same language
as Hungarian ethnography, and how one might “translate” the problems faced
by Hungarian researchers to make them intelligible in other environments.
Moreover, in a range of international fora, he was able to present the
issues raised by scholars, who worked and thought within a rigidly national
framework.
But this is already something more than mere mediation between Hungarian
and international science; it is much more a matter of how to make movement
possible across the borders dividing various traditions and horizons in
the history of science. Regrettably, it seemed that in Hungary the borders
between ethnography and cultural anthropology had become entrenched; in
reality, however—as Tamás Hofer’s work testifies—the borders lay
elsewhere. One far-reaching theoretical conclusion demonstrated by Tamás
Hofer was that ethnography may have, apart from a historical aspect, a
cultural–analytical dimension. Today, it seems little more than a commonplace
to say that ethnography—particularly in Central and Eastern Europe—came
into being as a national discipline whose paramount social mission and
function was to construct a national culture, deemed “necessary” for national
independence, and that it successfully accomplished that mission. Later
on, problems arose primarily when ethnography continued to “produce” national
culture and national traditions even when the political and socio-historical
situation no longer demanded it. Ethnography came up with cultural patterns
and dubbed as “traditional” cultural models which, in a political and social
sense, amounted to alternative models of anti-modernization; in this way
it obstructed the evolution of analytically inclined cultural research.
Leaving aside directly politically or ideologically motivated research
projects of the 1950s and 1960s, we are forced to conclude that, in the
decades following the Second World War, Hungarian ethnography became a
cultural history discipline with an orientation whose primary purpose was
to reconstruct and describe a “traditional folk culture” which is extremely
difficult to define in socio-historical terms, and is in that sense also
imaginary. This does not mean that this is what Hungarian ethnography was
about as such—the discipline was distinguished precisely by the peaceful
coexistence of confused researches into symbolism on the one hand and,
in the 1970s, such modern research projects as structuralism and semiotics
on the other, to mention only two examples—but rather that it was the spirit
which dominated Hungarian ethnography at that time. This was the environment
in which Hofer—cautiously but very firmly—formulated his theoretical position.
I would like to mention two areas of research which resided at the heart
of Tamás Hofer’s work and which, in my opinion, clearly demonstrate
the main elements of his cultural theory.
Perhaps all that is worth saying about the Átány research
project has already been written; today, these volumes are regarded as
classics of European ethnography. What is important here is that, in the
volumes about Átány, one may clearly discern for the first
time a cultural theory and methodological standpoint which rested fundamentally
on two pillars: first, it viewed culture as social praxis; secondly, it
interpreted tradition not as the remains of a period of time which had
already come to an end, but as something
which was part of social praxis.
At the time this approach seemed revolutionary. That Hofer regarded the
culture of the Átány peasants as social praxis meant that
he was not looking for the remains of something—a former way of life, a
period of history, and so on—but instead focused his ethnographic research
on the question of how a particular group of people constructed their own
lives under given social, political, and historical circumstances, what
cognitive strategies they used, and what cultural means they employed—in
other words, how they found their place in the wider social context. This
concern was shared by classic social and cultural anthropology and would
become important for historical anthropology later on—that is, the problem
of the cultural organization of particular worlds which existed and functioned
in different periods of history. If culture is social practice in this
sense, then obviously tradition cannot be anything but part of this practice.
Here we are dealing with an attitude which was fundamentally new at the
time: Hofer regarded tradition not as the archeological remains of some
imaginary past, but described it rather as social experience in particular
circumstances. Ample proof of how lasting a theoretical discovery this
was for Hofer is provided by the fact that in the late 1980s—that is, the
last “historic moments” before political transition—when Hofer headed a
large-scale research project on life histories, the question of tradition
as social experience was a theoretical postulate which held the whole project
together: the fundamental questions for this project too concerned micro-worlds—groups
and individuals caught up in the great historical processes; individual
decisions, and the role which various cultural strategies played in these
processes.
The other area where, in my opinion, Tamás Hofer created something
of lasting theoretical value was his deconstruction of the traditional
definition of folk culture. This topic was one of his central interests,
stemming perhaps from Hofer’s research into folk art, where he convincingly
proved that particular Hungarian motifs regarded as “ancient” in fact had
their origins in the nineteenth century. It is good to encounter such level-headed
and moderate writings from a period such as the last decade, when confused
symbolic interpretations and encyclopaedias appeared in succession, and
when authors’ imaginations linked 'ancient Hungarians’ and Hungarian folk
art on the basis of the wildest fantasies. Hofer began to produce his most
important writings on the subject in the second half of the 1980s, when
he was searching for the forms and patterns through which Hungarian national
culture was constructed, first within the framework of a joint Swedish–Hungarian
project, and later in an independent research project. Today, ethnographic
research—particularly in Europe—is virtually flooded with research projects
on national culture and identity: almost everyone seems to be analysing
the symbolic and cultural construction of (the) nation(s). When Tamás
Hofer launched this project in the mid-1980s with the Ethnographic Research
Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, very few working in European
ethnology realised the significance of this new area of research or its
prospects. One of its aspects was explored by Hofer with special consistency,
the demonstration of how and in what contexts nation and folk culture became
politicized, starting from the middle of the nineteenth century. This had
previously been almost a taboo subject. Folklore research, which had its
heyday in Hungary in the 1970s, carefully avoided this topic—with some
exceptions—while in other fields of research the question did not even
arise. One of Tamás Hofer’s greatest merits was that—in a political
as well as a theoretical sense—he drew the attention of scholars to this
issue.
In this brief review I have concentrated on only two aspects of Hofer’s
rich and multifarious work, and have barely touched upon the matters I
believe to be particularly important. In fact, I found it very difficult
to put together even these few pages and I would probably be unable to
approach Tamás Hofer’s work from an objective distance. From the
early 1980s I worked at the same place for nearly a decade, and during
that time I was privileged to have been involved under Hofer’s leadership
in several of the research projects mentioned in this article. During this
time I learned more from him than from anyone else—and I know that I am
not alone in this. Hofer never headed a university department and did not
even lecture much in universities, yet many of us learned the science of
ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology—whatever one likes to call it—from
him. Of course, this does not mean that we have always agreed about everything—but
without Tamás Hofer no one from this community would have made it
to where they are today.
Notes
* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Fall 1998, 326–32 pp.
http://www.c3.hu/scripta