ABSTRACTS

Imre J. Balázs

Stories from Working-class Subcultures

The author analyses the works of young writers of the 1960s like István Szilágyi, János Pusztai, Tibor Bálint. Their fiction dealt with the life of workers, and according to the main thesis of the article they approached the culture(s) of these workers as subcultures rather than as a dominant culture of the communist period. This way, they participated in the renewal of fictional discourse in Transylvanian Hungarian literature. The text presents how these writers represent the workers’ homes, entertainment, their drinking and eating habits, their presence in pubs, the delimitations of their communities, their usage of language.

Töhötöm Szabó

Borders: the Creation of a Cultural Group

Though the Gypsies, the Hungarians and the Romanians of the Transylvanian villages in most of the cases share the same space, the other two communities know the ways to exclude the Gypsies. The goal of my paper is to present some methods of exclusion, arguing that there are two separated localities of the Gypsy and the other ethnic communities. Contacts between the groups are ruled by the non-gypsies, who control the resources and the division of labour. In this way the border between these groups is created and kept even when the gypsies enter in the non-gypsy space, and the gypsies interiorize these rules.

The paper puts a methodological question too: how can the ethnographers get closer to the gypsy local knowledge if they are identified as a part of the ruling community.   

Vilmos Keszeg

Groups and Cultures

What is „under” culture? Nowadays this question as well as the answer is quite rhetoric: culture. More precisely: subculture. Mankind has found out in the last four centuries that we can find culture not only in Europe, but in the new world before the arrival of the white man, not only in metropolises or cities of any kind, but in the countryside, in mountain villages, not only in libraries or concert halls, but on the streets, in the railway stations, not only on squares, but in the subway as well. And we found out that besides inherited values, culture means renewal and revolution – besides normative values, revolution has its own culture that can be considered nothing else but culture.