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Abstract
In the first part of this study, I will take into consideration the possible relationships between the anthropologist and the subjects being researched with regards to the terms informant, friendship and cooperation, focusing on the possible connections between them and their impacts. It seems obvious that the relationship between the anthropologist and locals can only function if mutual trust develops in an atmosphere that enables research subjects to reveal themselves and the researcher to collect information effectively. It would seem that the prerequisite for this on the part of the researcher is friendliness, but this gives rise to the question of whether friendliness and positive relations are the only elements necessary for the research to be successful. In other words, is it possible to imagine that fieldwork can sometimes benefit from a lack of friendly behaviour? Is it plausible that occasional conflict between the anthropologist and locals or local individuals may facilitate effective research and assimilation? Using an event from my own fieldwork, I will attempt to show how conflict in a given situation can be decidedly constructive to the researcher and how in certain cases unplanned and spontaneous contact that crosses the line of self-censorship toward deliberate confrontation can be significant with regards to the success of the research.
The paper discusses the question of the existence of Hungarian fairy magicians. Fairy magicians is a term to denote magicians who sustain a mediating connection with the fairy other world. One type of Hungarian fairies, usually called a szépasszony (fair woman), is closely related to the fairy world of the Balkans. The paper also analyses the way in which fairy beliefs radiated from the Balkans toward Hungary. The question is whether along with the fairy beliefs and narratives the Hungarians also appropriated the various methods of mediating communication with the fairies. In the light of a few recently published data and of recently discovered historical documents it can be stated that at least two types of Hungarian magicians (healers and weather magicians) as protégés and initiates of the fairies, did exist. There are a number of questions that can be answered better now than earlier, although even the totality of the old and the new data do not allow for a full reconstruction of the presumed system of Hungarian fairy magicians. However, the new data have outlined the geographic area where it is worthwhile to add further fieldwork to the research on contemporary issues. This is the contact zone between Hungarians, Croatians and Slovenians on the south-western borders of the Hungarian speaking area.
The aim of my paper is to discuss the cross-border region of the Tornio River Valley between Finland and Sweden as a religious landscape. The present state border between the two countries was defined in1809, at a time when the border was not between Finland and Sweden, but between Sweden and Russia, and it dramatically severed the Finnish-speaking area in the river valley. First I will discuss the shared religious heritage in this area, the Laestadian Movement. Then I shall discuss the position of the Orthodox religion focusing on the Orthodox Church in Tornio (Finland). The church was built after Finland became part of the Russian Empire. In conclusion I shall focus on the role of religion/church in contemporary life in the cross-border area. Or, how the church is taking into account the profound changes in this cross-border area? Before I turn to my cases, I shall present a brief historical account of this area, because the contemporary situation must be seen in the light of historical and political change. This article is part of my research project in which I am focusing on everyday transnationalism, as experienced by town dwellers.
The modernizational processes have appeared in the Moldavian Hungarian communities, too. Alternative, new religious ideologies have appeared beside the former world view. The church has introduced different reform steps due to the modernization. In my paper, I would like to outline some of these processes.
The authors intend to provide an overview of the diaries, travelogues, and correspondence of Austro-Hungarians who traveled to the Asian peripheries of Russia during the Dual Monarchy. We aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on colonial discourses of otherness, as well as to the historical development of ethnographic scholarship in Europe. Travel writing, orientalism, and colonial encounters with Asian otherness are closely intermingling phenomena in the modern era. We argue that the rich corpus of visual and verbal representations of North-, Central-, and Inner-Asian peoples recorded by the subjects of the Dual Monarchy provides instructive examples of colonial encounters with non-colonizers in 19th century Asia. Furthermore, we believe that these examples will bring forth a more detailed picture of how the ideas born in the centers of German enlightenment (like Völkerkunde) impregnated the intellectual life of more peripheral regions in Europe. As ethnographic scholarship developed within national research traditions rather than in the frame of a monolithic, European intellectual project, our question is whether or not the Dual Monarchy provided a meaningful frame to bridge national research traditions.
One of the main aims of European ethnology in the second half of the 20th century was to create the ethnographical atlases of various nations in Europe. The basic purpose of the cartographical elaboration of the regional variants of certain cultural elements of the given nation in a certain system and that of collecting them into atlases was to create a database on which investigations could be carried out to define the territorial structure of the given folk culture. The easiest way to define this territorial pattern is the computer elaboration of the database, which means the digitalization and the cluster analysis of the data made by computer. On the methods and on the possibilities of the computer elaboration of the Atlas of Hungarian Folk Culture (AHFC) a paper was held by the author at the 11th Conference of the SIEF’s International European Network (Workgroup) on Ethnocartography in Poland (Borsos 2000). At the 12th conference in Slovakia the author talked about the first results of the cluster-analysis (Borsos 2000/2001).In the last decade the computer programs for the digital version of the AHFC have been developed and the digital version has been extended with supplementary maps as well. As in the digital version we can find not simply scanned pictures of the original sheets but the basic structure of the atlas (base-map, collecting points) is also available, it is not only possible but fairly easy to add new (virtual) sheets to the atlas. So the Atlas has been supplemented with maps elaborating some of the statistical data (demographic and agricultural) of the period between 1900–1910, which is the time interval represented by the cultural data of the atlas. This virtual 10th volume of the atlas contains ‘sheets’ about important information on the cultural picture of the settlements shown and of their cultural environment. The new volume can also help to draw a more accurate map about cultural regions. Another type of supplementary maps can be seen in the virtual 11th volume showing the regional distribution of the territory inhabited by Hungarians regarding cultural and non-cultural aspects. The last section of the distributional maps shows the regional structure of the Hungarian folk culture based on the computer elaborated data of the first 9 volumes, as well as the synthetic regional structure based on the comparison of the computer-drawn picture with three other sources: the statistical investigations of the database, the maps of the two virtual volumes and the scientific literature.
Kutatóközpont – L’Harmattan . Frykman , Jonas – Löfgren , Orvar (eds.) 1996 Force of Habit . Lund Studies in European Ethnology 1 . Lund : Lund University Press . Kapitány , Ágnes – Kapitány , Gábor 2013 Látható és láthatatlan világok az
Revisiting the Histories of Mapping. Is there a Future for a Cartographic Ethnology? Ethnologia Europaea 44 ( 2 ): 31 – 47 . Special issue: European Ethnology Revisited. Nie Craith , Máiréad 2008 From National to Transnational. A Discipline en
relationship between history and social sciences, the shifts in the emphasis on European ethnology, the formation of social ethnography, and the narrowing of the traditional research areas of cultural anthropology and legal anthropology. Balázs Fekete clearly
