Trapped in the Past? The Reproduction of Poverty and Marginality in a Hungarian Manorial Village

Abstract

This article is an examination of the (re)‐production of poverty and marginality among former manorial servants and their descendants in a Hungarian manorial village. Manorial servants were a large subgroup of the agrarian proletariat in interwar Hungary; their long‐term, rural poverty – sometimes conceptualised as ‘traditional’ – has been aggravated by territorial stigmatisation and represents a specific case even within the context of rural poverty. However, the manorial settlement examined here (now the village of ‘Longfield’) is an extreme case given that a highly successful large‐scale farm has remained in the locality despite a long series of social, political, and economic changes. The presence of this farm influenced both this locality’s developmental path and its room for economic manoeuvring, as well as local people’s living strategies and life chances. The empirical basis for this analysis is a collection of 34 family‐history interviews conducted in ‘Longfield’. This article encompasses the continuities and discontinuities both in people’s narratives and in social and economic structures, and is thus an investigation of the dynamic relationships between and among lived poverty, perceptions of territorial stigmatisation which shape local living strategies, and intra‐ and intergenerational patterns of social and spatial (im)mobility.

Social Memory of the Greek‐Turkish Population Exchange in Daily Life: A Case Study of a Tobacco‐Producing Village in Turkey

“…In a similar vein, Setten (2004) employs the concept of habitus and shows how the past is inscribed in the landscape both practically and morally, thus becoming part of the land management rules in the habitus of a specific group of Norwegians. Németh (2019) also focuses on a specific habitus and its transfer through generations in a small Hungarian village and she relates it with poverty and marginality. Although with a non‐Bourdieusian theoretical background, Wheeler (2014) also explores how remnants of mining activity in a British village constitute social memory and place identity within the community with the help of everyday experiences of landscape.…”

The evolution of rural areas influenced by large-scale farming: four case studies from Hungary

“…They belonged to the neighbouring village or town de jure, but in most cases they were detached from the municipality centre physically and usually the role of public administration bodies was minor in influencing local evolutionary processes and path creation. At these localities, the owners and the stewards (farm managers) were the most important actors (Gyáni et al 2004;Féja 1938;Illyés 1993;Mikle 2018;Németh 2019). Stewards organised the everyday work in manorial settlements, they were responsible for making the production as efficient as possible, and they had to be aware of all the production stages.…”

“…In agriculture, these reforms were set in the first half of the 1960s. On the one hand, the former strict central control of state farms was replaced by freedom in terms of strategic decisions, while on the other hand, agricultural expertise became more important than political trustworthiness when it came to the nomination of farm leaders (Izinger 1983;Varga 2010). As a result, state farms initiated experiments on making the production more oriented towards the global markets (Varga 2014).…”

“…The four case studies are on the so called manorial settlements, which were the backbones of large-scale farming until World War II. Scholarly investigation of manorial settlements have already revealed the production practices, working and living conditions under large estates (capitalist latifundia) (Erdei 1974;Féja 1938;Illyés 1993;Tamáska 2013), the transformation of this system during state socialism (e. g. Csoóri 1963;Lampland 2016), and the role of the postsocialist transition (Kovács & Vidra 2012;Németh 2016Németh , 2019. These places are usually seen as localities almost entirely shaped by the logic of large-scale agricultural production, and were characterised by a minor role of public administration bodies and local society in shaping the local developmental paths.…”

Enclaves of Isolation and Neglect in Rural Areas. Evidence from North-Eastern Poland

“…The common feature of such isolated housing estates is, inter alia, a high percentage of unemployment, a low level of education, a high intensity of excluded individuals, a low level of living and sanitary conditions, poor infrastructure, high indicators of deviant behaviours (e.g., alcohol abuse or violence), as well as lowered aspirations and motivation to work [8]. Another problem is the insufficient mobility of their inhabitants, which makes it difficult or even impossible to get out of the enclave [13].…”