This article explores the questions what is an ethno-national community and how is it understood in the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n context. The focus is I\u00e1id on ethnic iden-tification, group formation and maintenance and the importance of belonging. An important aspect of the analysis is that during the communist era the prob-lems of identity-building and ethnicity were ill-concealed or neglected, thus the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n ethno-national community as a whole, has not had a chance yet to face the effects of the historical legacies of the 20th century. This paper is an introduction to my dissertation project that aims to compare the identification processes within the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n territorial minority in Slovakia and the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n diaspora community in Sweden.<\/p>\n
Ethnic identifications are not eternally fixed. They are part of a continuous interplay between history, power and culture. Ethnic boundaries are main-tained by a limited set of cultural features but most ‘cultural matter’ is not constrained by such boundaries. The texture of myths, memories, values and symbols builds up a cultural substance of what is usually referred to as ‘col-lective memory.’ The manifestations of collective memory – certain traditions of cultural heritage – have been invented and they are readily naturalized as “historical”. Nevertheless, collective memory is selective and exclusionary of actual events, ideas, and memories of sets of persons who do not easily fit the alleged mainstream narrative of “who we were”.<\/p>\n
The collective memory of Hungarians – embedded in the narration about “the nation”, united under the Holy Crown of St Stephen – is considered not simply as a cultural heritage or historical p\u00e1st but as a mysterious, quasi sacred element at the core of the collectivity. Another habitus component of Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n ethnic identifications, that has assumed great importance in ethnic boundary creation and maintenance, is the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n language.<\/p>\n
The ‘Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n’ intelligetsia’s awareness about the protection of the language was facilitated by the process of modernization and a growing concern about the survival of the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n language. The Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n language has, at least in the p\u00e1st 200 years, played a functional role of differentiating between “us” and “them.” In minority contexts language remains the core of ethnicity in the case of those territoral (national) minorities whose numbers are considerable, for example the Hungarians in Slovakia and Transylvania; in other cases, lik\u00e9 in the case of the Hungarians in Burgerland or the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n diaspora-communities throughout the world the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n language has lost its essential character and Hungarianess have increasingly become limited to other hapitus-type knowledge.<\/p>\n
The Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n communities outside Hungary are ‘products’ of the coun-try’s 20th century history. However, the era of communism has hindered the development of a debate about ‘who we are’ after Trianon, after the the cata-clysm of WWII. During the p\u00e1st two decades different versions of a definition of the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n nation’ have been designed and than re-defined. The national discourse makes a clear distinction between ‘Hungarians beyond borders’ of the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n state, often referred to as national minorities, and the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n diaspora communities. The motherland, as Hungary is oftentimes referred to in minority and diaspora contexts, takes very seriously its home-land role vis-f-vis its national minorities in the Carpathian Basin. As indicated in various statements, Hungarians beyond borders are seen as the spiritual extension of the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n national community. This is why their ethno-nation-al identification deserves attention and is promoted in different ways. On the other hand the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n diaspora communities deserve less attention from the mother-land. This paper does not intend to present “the end of the story” I chose rather to concentrate on the processes of inclusion and exclusion as different ways of mapping a nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This article explores the questions what is an ethno-national community and how is it understood in the Hung\u00e1ri\u00e1n context. The focus is I\u00e1id on ethnic iden-tification, group formation and maintenance and the importance of belonging. An important aspect of the analysis is that during the communist era the prob-lems of identity-building and ethnicity were ill-concealed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":695,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[556,555],"tags":[],"post_year":[44,48],"coauthors":[538],"class_list":["post-1130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agora-en","category-forum-social-science-review","post_year-44","post_year-2003-4"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n