Aran­ka Ko­csis: A Hun­gar­i­an Low­land vil­lage and power between 1945–1948

Spe­cial­ist think it is gen­er­al­ly char­ac­ter­is­tic for the Hun­gar­i­an peas­antry that was freed from class sub­or­di­na­tion in the sec­ond part of the 19th cen­tu­ry that it could not and did not want to iden­ti­fy itself with the ci­vil ideas, and did not want to be part of the soci­e­ty as a cit­i­zen. As a legal­ly freed indi­vid­ual remained closed in its vil­lage com­mu­ni­ty, since feu­dal inde­pend­ence was altered by a new type sub-­or­di­na­tion – supe­ri­or­i­ty orig­i­nat­ing from own­er­ship rela­tion. His new-­type rights and lia­bil­i­ties were medi­at­ed to him by the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of pow­er. There­fore, there was no rea­son to give up the pre­vi­ous pro­tec­tion mech­a­nisms – like the appear­ance of out­wit­ting, silent resis­tance, sab­o­tag­ing, adap­ta­tion, humil­i­ty – and to be iden­ti­fied with the new sit­u­a­tion.

Those Hun­gar­i­an peas­ants many times expe­ri­enced sub­or­di­na­tion to the pow­ers who after the First World War by defin­ing Tri­a­non state bor­der­s, found them­selves in sub-­or­di­nate posi­tion from lan­guage and cul­tur­al point of view, as Hun­gar­i­an minor­i­ty peo­ple.
How did the vil­lage dwellers „an­swer“ to these changes in these years? What pro­tec­tion mech­a­nisms did they have in order to restore their self-­i­den­ti­ty? How did they adapt to restore the pre­vi­ous states, or on behalf of mere remain­ing or sur­vival? And: behind their selec­tions what kind of driv­ing forces func­tioned, what val­ues influ­enced their deci­sion­s? – the research tried to answer such ques­tions that exam­ined the changes of the peas­ants’ val­ues in the 20th cen­tu­ry. This study sum­ma­rizes some of the par­tial results of a mo­re exten­sive work.
Par­tial­ly, the research was based in ter­rain work, dur­ing which the obser­va­tion known in ethno­graph­ic- and/or anthro­po­log­ic research and by the ques­tion­ing method, and telling his­to­ries, remem­brance and mak­ing inter­views (life-­path, events) the author col­lect­ed data in the vil­lage of Mar­tos between 1999–2002. Besides the pos­si­bil­i­ties of ter­rain work sev­er­al writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion­s, record­s, chron­i­cles were used as sources from the mate­ri­als of the Slo­vak Nation­al Archive, Bratislava, and Komárno Dis­trict Archive, and of the archive of the local vil­lage office.