Routledge Proper Peasants: Social Relations in a Hungarian Village

Based on an intensive fourteen-year study of a Hungarian peasant village, Proper Peasants greatly expands our knowledge of Eastern European social organizations with its accurate portrayal of a rapidly vanishing peasant way of life. Centering on the village of Átány in central Hungary, the study presents a dramatic account of peasant life through the turbulent centuries. It is based largely upon evidence given by villagers themselves and is a moving human story of a community with a tragic historical background and a complex, demanding present.Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer begin by locating Átány within the historical, geographical, and cultural context of Hungary as a whole. The following chapters describe units of social organization and the human relationships within and among these units. There is a special analysis of stratification and mobility within the changing structural situations of the past hundred years. Objective information about all the dimensions of village life is obtained from a comparison of Átány with nearby villages and from the use of local records. The book portrays the attempts of the community to classify, organize, and understand the universe within which lives and to control the unexpected and varied demands that have been made upon it by changing circumstances.This work makes excellent use of the strong 150-year tradition of ethnographic research in Hungary. The discussion of the warm personal relationships among the Átány people is supplemented with extensive statistical material on demographic processes, economic structure, and stratification. The picture that results is rich and fruitful, particularly so in a post-communist nation. Review -Proper Peasants deals with a Hungarian village and describes some of the institutions of its society... This venture has its meaning not only in the context of Hungarian national culture, but also, we believe, in the light of the anthropolgist's goal of recording and analyzing those forms and conditions of life under which mankind has lived in the past and is living today.- --Current Anthropology -Credit is due to all those who have made this fine example of central European community studies accessible to Anglo-American social anthropologists and others not well acquainted with the considerable achievements of this genre. The authors, Edit FEl and TamAs Hofer, have taken pains to make the work a bridge between their own scholarly tradition and the Anglophone social anthropological idiom... The book has the welcome charm of not exhausting itself in routine generalizations.- --W. Weissleder, Man -Proper Peasants is the result of over 14 years of field work done by two Hungarian ethnographers and published in cooperation with the Wenner-Gren Foundation.... It is to be hoped that similar cooperative projects will be conducted again. Such efforts are to be encouraged, not only because they give English readers access to the relatively inaccessible fruits of Central European ethnographers' labors but also because the cross-fertilization enriches both ethnographic traditions. Proper Peasants should be read by anyone with an interest in Europe or in peasant societies.- --Richard Ackley, American Sociological Review -FEl and Hofer have produced a rich and detailed monograph using historical data which on population at least starts in 1780, and for several other factors is extensive in the nineteenth century... [I]t is a most welcome addition to European ethnography available in English.- --Peter LoIzos, The British Journal of Sociology -The express purpose of the authors of this valuable and welcome addition to the English-language literature on Central Europe is to provide British and American social anthropologists with an example of the tradition of European ethnography that is rooted in concern with the unique contributions local peasant culture has made to the fabric of national life in particular European states... [A]n excellent