Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
93
target group was the younger generation, to study them alone was impossible; soon parents,
grandparents and distant relatives were brought in and the original sample was expanding day
by day. Focussing on, say, only political socialization, which was my first and foremost topic,
did not last long, young informants drew me into their leisure activities which revealed their
different personalities. Networks, as I found out, reached well beyond the immediately
observable. I also came to notice very soon that while most of my informants were ‘city-kids’,
their parents and grandparents had strong linkages all across the region and well beyond that,
and relatives sometimes visited from far-away villages.
Opposed to my Csepel study, I also embarked upon another research area that concern
a comparative study of national and local level cultural processes, such as nationalism,
symbolic politics, education and youth culture, by engaging both with ‘locals’ in large cities,
such as Budapest, as well as a smaller towns, like Lajosmizse (population 10,000) or
Ladánybene (population 1600). The latter two are neighbours actually; Ladánybene grew out
from its larger neighbour at the beginning of the 20
th
century. This process is a unique aspect
of modernization and urbanization: the splitting of areas from agro-industrial centres. In this
case, a distant farming area split off from the agro-town forming a new independent town on
its own. Local politics and economic differences as well as religious infighting all contributed
to such bifurcation. I have been able to untangle such processes with great difficulty,
requiring not only in-depth interviews with extended families split between the two
settlements but also arduous archival research (Kürti 2004). This community development
study also gave me a fantastic possibility to study not only urban and rural interaction but
national as well as international ones as well. I have published an analysis about the creation
of a Western venture in Lajosmizse when at the beginning of the 1990s a Swiss meat-packing
plant opened in the town (Kürti 2009).
In comparison to research in such small regional towns, conducting fieldwork in
Csepel thought me numerous aspects of community life that one cannot witness in agro-towns
or peasant villages, not on such magnificent scale and complexity for sure. I have learned
about large housing construction deals that were really ugly and witnessed how from one
minute to the next a cultural institution could be destroyed by powerful party bosses. I have
even seen a court case of a toxic dump, but also was involved with a family feud and tried to
help as much as I could. Not only bureaucracy, hierarchy and population density, but crime,
corruption and vandalism are also part of the city life that one cannot find, certainly not on
such scale, in rural smaller settlements. The size and multifariousness of the urban milieu
really require anthropologists to manage many things at once, and to be able to organize their
life accordingly.
Edmund Leach once noted that social anthropology is packed with frustrations, and,
surely, this could be a proper motto for the urban anthropology of East Europe, a region
sandwiched between the prestigious anthropology of the Mediterranean and Western Europe,
and a subfield which is a minuscule part of the anthropology of Europe. This hiatus should be
countered for the simple reason that research conducted on Eastern Europe has the potential,
while contributing to the more general anthropology of Europe, to offer excellent glimpses into
societies both planned and unplanned, and provide ethnographies which replicate neither those
