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• The New Challenges and Situation of an Ethnic Minority within a Local Community in the Light of Social Changes

  151-177

  Gyöngyi Kormányos Katona

  Views:

  83

  Our memory is largely shaped by the way we look at the peoples currently living within the Carpathian Basin. Once a well-known tobacco-growing village in Historic Hungary, Torda (also known as Torontáltorda in Hungarian) is now a dispersed settlement with a Hungarian ethnic majority located in the Banat region of Vojvodina, Serbia.

  The shifting of national borders, the two World Wars, the events of the Yugoslav Wars and migratory movements have collectively changed and decimated the lives of Hungarians who had found themselves outside their motherland’s borders after the 1920s.

  In spite of the decline in population, the emigration of young people, and the everyday struggles resulting from hard living conditions, this village in the Central Banat district could attract further socio-ethnographic interest. In the micro-communities of rural settlements, education and religion play a key role in creating social value, maintaining Hungarian culture in the area and forming a national, local sense of identity within the community. Commemorative rituals, local traditions and national holidays often cross each others’ paths and blend together through education and religion, highlighting the reality and cultural values of the community, as well as the array of connections between community life and ethnic culture. This study discusses Torda’s present in the light of social change and the process of cultural mapping, touching on the importance of the local cultural association in the community’s life. This study also explores the events of the past few decades that have left a deep imprint on the micro-community’s life in a cultural, social and ethnic sense.

• “We Came to a Village...”: Value Systems in a Changing World

  71-98

  Róbert Gyökér

  Views:

  93

  Although we experience an increasing level of cultural foreign experience in our time intensified by the pressure of migration and the development of information technologies, the conventional view of value systems still pre­vails in modern nations. Change in culture is a never-ending process, though. The persuasive power of stability and uniformity seems to decline in post­modernity transforming the role of nation states, as well. Peripheries and “partial truth” come into view. Value systems are also affected by these changes. Value systems are no longer cast from a single mold, but rather derive from a dynamically changing framework that is shaped by the dialogistic connection of the elements of the sociocultural realm, the central role of the subject’s interpretation and the positioned meaning of values. This paper attempts to describe the changes brought about by postmodernity through the everyday life of four families settled down in Hosszúhetény. After having embraced traditional values at a certain point in their life as a result of a conscious decision, families are compelled to reevaluate their former worldview. This process results in the revision of their identity, as well. In the end, they are trying to establish themselves through various representational practices in a village that has already been modernized. While trying to analyze the components of their value system, I define so-called correlations in the hope of realizing a more relevant understanding of the postmodern age.