Community Cohesion and Identity Maintenance in Rural Hungary: Adaptations to Directed Social Change (Peasant, Socialist, Social Networks).

This study considers rural response to centrally-directed social change in the northeast Hungarian village of Cserepfalu. It is concerned with the relationship between fundamental yet often ambiguous political, economic, and sociocultural transformation and the maintenance, perpetuation, and display of community cohesion and group identity. The dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between August of 1982 and August of 1983. Material gathered from participant observation, life histories, and formal and informal interviews is supplemented with archival, statistical, and other documented data. Hungarian society has been radically restructured since World War Two. Rural communities were affected greatly by structural realignment, modeled after the Soviet pattern, which aimed to transform a mainly agricultural, capitalist economy with feudal overtones to an industrially oriented economy under a highly centralized socialist government. The study examines change and continuity in three different aspects of life. (1) Economic behavior: The maintenance of and emphasis on work-related social networks within and beyond Cserepfalu, along with work-related values and attitudes reveal the interplay between economic actions and the ways in which local identity is defined and displayed. (2) Verbal interaction: Even though there are generational differences in the use of and meanings attached to terms of greeting, kinship, and address, they continue to play an important role in expressions of familiarity and mutual concern in the village. (3) Community Rituals: Selective traditionalization and creative innovation in some highly condensed yet clearly articulated events demonstrate how present and former villagers counterbalance disruptive tensions that accompany fundamental social change. In contrast to the postulations of many social scientists, this thesis shows that, while confronting massive social transformation, villagers have continued to maintain both community and positive group identity. Two strategies, mutually reinforcing and intimately linked, comprise this process: (1) Networks of kin, fictive-kin, and neighbors are forged and selectively mobilized; and (2) Group identity, which is positively stereotyped and sharply differentiated and which overrides other identities is manipulated and displayed. These strategies are interpreted as effective organizational and cultural adaptations to rapid social change by which natives of Cserepfalu have constructed meaningful continuity.PhDCultural anthropologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160342/1/8502847.pd