Torsello–Pappová: Social Networks in Movement- Time, Interaction And

Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe Edited by Davide Torsello and Melinda Pappová NOSTRA TEMPORA, 8. General Editor: Károly Tóth Forum Minority Research Institute Šamorín, Slovakia Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe Edited by Davide TORSELLO and Melinda PAPPOVÁ Forum Minority Research Institute Lilium Aurum Šamorín - Dunajská Streda 2003 © Forum Minority Research Institute, 2003 © Davide Torsello, Melinda Pappová, 2003 ISBN 80-8062-179-9 Contents 5 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .....................................................................7 Studying networks nowadays. On the utility of a notion (C. Giordano) ......................................................9 Social networks and social capital (C. Wallace )....................15 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................27 TIME AND SOCIAL NETWORKS ..........................................................39 1. Identities in change: Integration strategies of resettled Hungarians from Czechoslovakia to Hird (southwestern Hungary) (Zs. Árendás) .......................................................41 2. Managing instability: Trust, social relations and the strategic use of ideas and practices in a southern Slovakian village (D. Torsello) .............................................65 3. Traditional economic life in the northern part of the Danube Lowland (I. Danter) ................................................89 4. Destinies of the post-war colonists in the village of Trate: Unintended phenomena in the appropriation of public spaces (R. Muršiè) ...............................................99 INTERETHNIC SPACES ..................................................................115 5. A village on the ethnic periphery. The case of Dlhá nad Váhom, southern Slovakia (K. Tóth) ....................117 6. Border region or contact zone. Ethnic and ethno-social processes in small regions between the Hungarian-Slovak language and state border (L. Szarka) ............................................................141 7. Between cultural and geographical borders. Denomination of the Mátyusföld region (J. Liszka) ..............155 6 Contents 8. Stable networks in changing states? Borders, networks and community management in the northern Adriatic Istrian Peninsula (E. Kappus) .........165 INTERACTION, MIGRATION AND CHANGE ............................................183 9. Some aspects of the Roma migration from Slovakia (A. Szép) ............................................................185 10. From East to West: The Roma migration from Slovakia (R. Weinerová) ............................................191 11. Migration from the former Soviet Union to the Czech Republic: Comparing the cases of re-settlers from areas affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Kazakhstan and labour migration from Subcarpathian Ukraine (Z. Uherek, K. Plochová) .................................................211 12. Property, power, and emotions. Social dynamics in a Bohemian village (M. Svašek) ....................................229 13. Race and social relations: Crossing borders in a Moscow food aid program (M. Caldwell) ......................255 APPENDIXES .............................................................................275 1. Research on the ethnic problematic at the Institute for Social Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Š. Šutaj) ......................................................277 2. The District State Archive in Ša¾a and regional research (V. Nováková) ....................................................293 3. The Forum Minority Research Institute (A. Lelovics) .......299 EPILOGUE (F. Pine) ..................................................................315 CONTACT ADDRESSES ..................................................................323 Acknowledgements 7 Acknowledgements This book was conceived after the workshop “Social networks in movement”, held in Galanta on October 6, 2001. The organ- ization and sponsoring of the workshop, as well as the publi- cation of this work has been realized thanks to the generous support and precious scientific and technical help of the Forum Minority Research Institute. Károly Tóth, director of the Forum Institute is the first per- son to whom we turned for the organisation of the workshop. The choice was extremely positive; we thank him and all the staff of the Forum for their unlimited assistance and encour- agement towards the completion of this volume. We are grateful to Prof. Christian Giordano, Prof. Claire Wallace, Dr. Longina Jakubowska and Dr. Frances Pine who chaired the workshop sessions and enriched with their pres- ence the scientific contribution of the workshop. We are glad that the event provided to some participants an occasion to taste the local reality of a less known region in central Europe. Although the way to the completion of the book has been longer than expected, we confide that the outcome meets well all expectations. We wish to thank Sándor Bondor for his translation work on chapters 7 and 8. Chapters 3, 5, 6 and Appendix 2 and 3 have been translated by the editor, Melinda Pappová. A special thanks to Juliana Krajèírová, Patty Gray, Deema Kaneff, Frances Pine and John Eidson for their precious comments and polishing of the language. Studying networks nowadays. On the utility of a notion 9 Studying networks nowadays. On the utility of a notion Christian Giordano The book Friends of Friends. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions by Jeremy Boissevain was first published in the now distant 1974. At the time it had a widespread impact in the field of social anthropology (Anglo-Saxon and beyond) especially amongst researchers who where then interested in Europe’s peripheral regions. Resuming in a more empirically cogent way some interesting and important ideas developed by F.G. Bailey in his Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (published in 1969) and other sub- sequent publications (Bailey 1971, 1973), in this work the author endeavoured to formulate a new approach to social analysis based upon the notion of network. If we examine the theoretic assumptions inherent to Boissevain’s project more in detail, we can detect quite a rad- ical criticism to some basic concepts that have won fame to the functionalist perspective of British anthropology and the structural-functionalist paradigm in American sociology (cf. Talcot Parsons and Robert K. Merton). More specifically, we might add that Boissevain (just as Bailey himself besides some eminent representatives of the Manchester school including Victor Turner, J. Clyde Mitchell, and John A. Barnes) at the time carried out a close examination of established and so to speak almost sacred notions as institution, struc- ture and corporate group, which in social anthropology had been popularised even by two such founding fathers as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. Carrying out researches in the Mediterranean area (main- ly Malta and Sicily), Boissevain had become aware that these basic notions were not fully adequate for an analysis of these societies (Boissevain and Mitchell 1973). In fact, at least under two aspects these concepts were found quite wanting. 10 Christian Giordano The first point that needs to be stressed is undoubtedly their inflexibility and static nature. By working only with notions such as the above-mentioned, one always ends up considering the society as a highly integrated and lasting system, thus barring one’s chance to conceptualise mutations, tensions and conflicts within a group (Boissevain 1974: 9 fn.). On the other hand, through these analytical tools the individuals of a collective are essentially confined within an unchanging, as well as ineluctable, iron cage and can only act in conformity with the norms created by the system. However, this is clearly a myth that reduces human action to something genuinely ideal and therefore non-existent in empirical reality (Boissevain 1974: 18). Boissevain’s rebuttal to the functionalist and structural-functionalist paradigm criticises the unre- alistic abstraction by which these social sciences have described and interpreted social action in the societies they studied. At the same time, explicitly following Frederik Barth (Barth 1966: 5), he stresses the need for both a processual and pragmatic approach by which social anthropologists may investigate how social forms are produced (Boissevain, 1974: 19). Obviously, this can also be understood as a criticism to Émile Durkheim’s sociologism and a clear though implicit reference to Georg Simmel’s formal sociology besides Leopold von Wiese’s science of social relations - the well-known Beziehungslehre - can be perceived. The second point concerns the individual’s nature as a social actor. If functionalists assume that people act essentially according to settled, learned, accepted, and sanctioned rules of behaviour, according to Boissevain and his associ- ates theoretically men are above all transactional animals who permanently evaluate what is good or bad for them and act accordingly (Boissevain 1974: 6). The members of a society therefore are not robots who are unable to judge their cir- cumstances. They should rather be regarded as consciously moral beings on the one hand, and as skilled situation manipulators on the other: i.e. as expert administrators of their own resources (Boissevain 1974: 8). We can already

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