Belvedere Meridionale (Sep 2013)
"Koszos lóra bársony nyereg nem illik." Cselédek és urak – egykor és most. - "You Would Not Put a Velvet Saddle on a Dirty Horse." Manorial Servants and Their Masters: Then and Now
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to reconstruct the past and present life of the inhabitants of a former manorial village through the deep analysis of a narrative biographical interview. The hermeneutic case reconstruction focuses mainly on a person’s biography, seeking to grasp lived experience and its narrative account both separately and in their dynamic interrelation. Although every biographical narrative is unique, the present analysis tries to extract the elements of social history from the individual life story and in this way to reconstruct the mentality, common knowledge and norms, or generally speaking, the life of the manorial servants in the studied Transdanubian manorial village before World War II. In order to improve our knowledge of the manorial servants, which has so far relied on sociographies, or ‘snapshots’, of their lives produced by various authors from the 1930s to the 1980s, the time frame of the analysis has been extended to the post-socialist period following the democratic transition as well. In addition, the study pays a particular attention to the presence of cultural continuities, discontinuities, and eventual traumatic breaks in the life stories. Certain historical turning points are also highlighted as potentially traumatizing events, in connection of which the analysis seeks answers to the following questions: How did the former manorial servants experience these events? What was their typical, individual and collective response? What kinds of survival strategies did they choose to endure radical changes that tended to reshape the life style, rewrite the norms and values, and affect the whole world of their community? What traces did these events leave on their individual and collective identities?
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