Fulbright Student Conference Papers I.

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FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE PAPERS

Academic Years 2002/2003 and 2003/2004


FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE PAPERS


Hungarian - American Commission for Educational Exchange, Budapest 2004 The Mutual Educational Exchange Program or the Fulbright Program, named in honor of Senator J. William Fulbright, was established by the U.S. Congress on August 1, 1946. It is now administered under the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, as amended by Public Law 87256. This Act provides the legislative authority for the Program. The main objective of this Act is “to enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries ... and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations, between the United States and other countries of the world.” The program operates in more than 140 countries. Binational commissions were established by executive agreements in 51 countries. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (BFS) in Washington, DC, comprises 12 educational and public leaders appointed by the President of the United States. It has statutory responsibility for the selection of all academic exchange grantees, the establishment of policies and procedures, and the supervision of the Fulbright Program worldwide. Motivated by the need to change the U.S.’s traditional isolationist policy, the Fulbright Program developed into an indispensable resource for scholars and institutions all over the world. Today, international expertise is even more vital than ever as the realities of the postCold war era become far more complex and the emerging international system increases political and economic linkages throughout the world. Since its inception, the Fulbright Program has welcomed more than 260,000 researchers, lecturers and students from the United States and the rest of the world. Many have assumed leadership roles, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, heads of state and prime ministers, artists and ambassadors, governors and senators, professors and physicians, supreme court justices and CEOs. These Fulbrighters, past and present, have enabled the Fulbright Program to become the world’s largest and most prestigious scholarly exchange program. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers opportunities for recent graduates, postgraduate candidates, and developing professionals and artists to conduct career-launching study and research abroad. Since the establishment of the Program, 42,000 students from the United States and 147,000 students from other countries have benefited from the Fulbright experience. The U.S. Student Program awards approximately 1,000 grants annually and currently operates in over 140 countries worldwide. The Fulbright Commission in Hungary was established in January 1992, after a binational agreement was signed between the governments of Hungary and the United States in December 1990. The Hungarian government has acknowledged the importance of the Fulbright Program and also helps financially. The Ministry of Education provides the office space for the Commission and significantly contributes toward the program costs.


FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE PAPERS Academic Years 2002/2003 and 2003/2004

Hungarian - American Commission for Educational Exchange Budapest 2004


Edited by:

Ildikó Huszár Published by:

Hungarian - American Commission for Educational Exchange 1146 Budapest, Ajtósi Dürer sor 19-21. HUNGARY Tel.: (36-1) 462-8040, Fax: (36-1) 252-0266 E-mail: infor@fulbright.ph.hu Website address: www.fulbright.hu

Budapest, 2004

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Foreword U.S. students compose a vital part of the Fulbright Educational Exchange Program between the United States of America and the Republic of Hungary. Members of the student group are typically for one year in Hungary. Like the Program in general, its student component covers a very wide variety of subject fields and types of activities. There are many who take part in different university programs, others concentrate on their individual research project. According to the tradition of the Fulbright Program in Hungary each year close to the end of the grant period students are invited to present a paper on their professional activities in their host country e.g. in Hungary. The Student Conference gives an opportunity to grantees to summarize the results of their grant period presented to the audience of the conference. This audience is composed of the fellow US grantees (including scholars, distinguished chairs, teachers, fellow students) as well as members of the Board of Directors, of the Alumni Association, the mentors and other invited guests, (in many cases among them visiting family members) too. As the director of the program, I’m always impressed by the professional progress of our U.S. students, by the wide variety of subject fields covered, by the students’ deep interest toward and knowledge of their topic. The event gives the student grantees an opportunity to speak about their projects in a real conference setting, which is a chance to gain experience in presenting the results of their work in a professional environment. The papers of the student conference in AY 2002/2003 and AY 2003/2004 can be found in this volume. (The papers are arranged in a certain thematic order, which does not necessarily follows the original program of the conference). I do hope that the readers will like and value them as much as I do and will join me to help as many young U.S. student grantees as we can to be productive and proud bridge builders among the nations. We need them! June 15, 2004 Dr. Huba Brßckner executive director


TABLE OF CONTENTS 7

Foreword

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Program of the 2003 Conference

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Ms. Cecily Morisson: Not about Nationalism: The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process

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Ms. Monica Szabo: Hungarian Art Song

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Ms. Maxine Sleeper: The Movement Toward Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary

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Mr. Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present, and Future

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Ms. Amy Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on the Hungarian Agrarian Sector

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Mr. Jesse Alama: The Logical Structure of Relativity

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Mr. Richard Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University


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Program of the 2004 Conference

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Ms. Mary Taylor: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Historical and Institutional Precedents of the Hungarian Dance-House Movement

105

Mr. David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre: A Narrative and Dramatic Account of a City, its Stages, and an Interloping Writer

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Ms. Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities in Hungarian Urban Discourse

137

Mr. Dallas Long: Unlocking Hungary’s Libraries: a Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College

149

Mr. Karl Brown: Stalinization and its Discontents: Crime, “Deviance,” and Subcultures in Hungary, 1948-1956

Mr. William J. Eichmann: 999

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Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Carpathian Basin And the Spread of Agriculture in Europe

Mr. Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems in Extremal Combinatorics

219

Mr. David Eger: Internationalizing Software and Other Projects: A Day in the Life of an Open Source Developer

241

Ms. Angela Bennett: Instructing and Advising: the Dual Role of a Teaching Assistant in Budapest


PROGRAM FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE Wednesday, April 10, 2003

SESSION ONE CHAIR: DR. ÁKOS MÁTHÉ President of the Hungarian Fulbright Alumni Association 10:00-10:10 Greetings 10:10 - 10:30 Ms. Cecily Morisson: Not about Nationalism: The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process 10:30 -10:50 Ms. Maxine Sleeper: The Movement Toward Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary 10:50 -11:10 Mr. Jesse Alama: The Logical Structure of Relativity 11:10 -11:30 Ms. Monica Szabo: Hungarian Art Song

COFFEE BREAK

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SESSION TWO CHAIR: MS. SUSAN KUTOR Member of the Hungarian – American Fulbright Board 11:30 – 11:50 Ms. Amy Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on the Hungarian Agrarian Sector 12:10 - 12:30 Mr. Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present, and Future 12:30 - 12:50 Mr. Richard Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University

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Not about Nationalism:

The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process Cecily Morrison

........................................................................................... Columbia University 3009 Broadway NY, NY 10025 www.columbia.edu Cecily_Morrison@hotmail.com

Óbuda Traditional Music School H-1034 Budapest, Nagyszombat u. 27 Adviser: Tamás Kiss

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ationalism has been one of the preferred topics in both academic and popular discourse within the last few years. However, its vagueness and significant emotional content often muddy the arguments surrounding it. Taking one step back and looking at national identity through the lense of folk music, particulary as it has been used in Hungary by Bartok and the Dance House movement, one can see the process by which folk music has helped to create and afterwards maintain a sense of identity. This paper looks at how Bartok and the Dance House Movement defined a Hungarian population, how the two used age or historic factors in doing this and how they reacted respectively to Hungary’s multi ethnic population in the context of categorizing and working with folk music. This discussion takes into account Hungary’s history with its triple legacy of desire for unification, a multi-ethnic character, and the role of the nobility in Hungarian life, particularly their attempt to create a national song type called “verbunkos.” Finally, it examines the actual use of folk music itself to create an identity and the consequences of this mechanism for the future.

Introduction Nationalism has been the topic nouveau for the past ten years in a variety of disciplines. Yet despite its popularity, there remains little agreement about the definition of the word. Used not only in academic but also in person-

al and political discourse, the word has gained substantial emotional content as well. To either encompass its vagaries or attempt to objectify them, most papers about nationalism argue the use and merits of the label. 13


Student Conference 2003 However, little has been done to clarify the force that nationalism describes and even less to understand its process. To begin to do so, this paper will take one step back and examine national identity, a more concrete concept. Identity can be defined as the characteristics that individuals use to group themselves with some people and differentiate themselves from others. National identity, thus, includes those characteristics that bring together as well as differentiate those people who live within the borders of a nation-state. Folk music, from the birth of the idea of the nation-state, has been one means of expressive culture used to generate, define, and reinforce national identity. In twentieth century Hungary, both Bela Bartok, the composer and early ethnomusicologist, and a movement that has become institutionalized and known as the Dance House Movement have been instrumental in this process. By analyzing and contextualizing how Hungarian folk music has been used to define identity, one can begin to understand how folk music actually helps to create and afterwards maintain identity.

History Unified States Hungary’s geography and lengthy history cannot be ignored in the exploration of twentieth century ideas about identity. Situated in the Carpathian Basin, surrounded by mountains on all sides, it is truly the center point of Europe. Budapest is roughly equidistant from Rostok on the Baltic Sea, Genoa on the Ligurian Sea and Burgas on the Black Sea and in the horizontal direction equally distanced from Moscow in Russia and Loire in France.1 Besides its strategic appeal, its central location has also made it

the meeting place of Christianity’s two branches, Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Indeed, Hungary has been occupied by non-Hungarians wanting to utilize its central location for tactical or religious reasons for much of its history. Hungary was first invaded in 1242 by the Mongols, who ravaged the countryside and left behind fear of further invasion. Following the death of the last king from Hungary’s original Arpad dynasty in 1301, came two centuries of foreign rule, power struggles, war and border fluctuation as Hungary tried to maintain its ground. In 1526, at the Battle of Mochacs, the Ottomans conquered central Hungary, dividing the country into three parts: Royal Hungary, controlled by the Austrian empire; Central Hungary, Ottoman-controlled; and independent Transylvania. From this point in time, Hungary’s foreign policy focused on reuniting Hungary under Hungarian rule. The Ottomans were forced out of Budapest in 1686 and withdrew completely in 1718. However, Hungary was still unable to realize its dream of unification under Hungarian rule because in 1691, the Austrian King Leopold had himself crowned as Prince of Transylvania and issued the Diploma Leopoldinum of 1690 making Transylvania an independent principality within the Austrian empire. It was not until The Comprise between the Austrians and Hungarians in 1867 that Hungary was once again united. Despite unification at this time, Hungary did not gain complete sovereignty until after the First World War because it had submitted to Austrian rule in order to stave off the Ottomans. Not surprisingly, the idea of unification was (and arguably remains) central to Hungarian thinking.

1 Sugar, P. F. (1994). A History of Hungary. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

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Cecily Morrison: The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process

Multi-Ethnic State Constant fighting in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries decimated the Hungarian population, leaving the country in need of human resources. Efforts to repopulate from 1720 to 1787 caused an increase from three and a half to nine and a half million people. However, this influx of people drastically changed the demographic mix with the result that over half the population became non-Hungarian. With no ethnic majority, Hungary became a truly multiethnic state. However, these groups did not intermingle in the American melting- pot style. Instead, they remained in ethnic enclaves with significant homogenous populations in different parts of the country, Slovaks in the North, Serbs in the South, and Romanians in the East. A gradual assimilation of these new people never occurred. When the idea of the nation-state became popular in the eighteenth century with its goal of assigning each ethnicity its own borders and government, Hungary faced the problem of combining a successful multiethnic population with the idea of the nation-state.

The Nobles’ State The nobility maintained a special place in Hungarian society throughout its history, significantly influencing economic and cultural development. The Golden Bull of 1222, similar to the United Kingdom’s Magna Charta, established as nobility anyone who owned land, giving them significant rights. A very clear and deep chasm subsequently developed between the peasants and the nobility. This dichotomy has been maintained through the twentieth century. Furthermore, the system of land-ownership prevented the feudal system of Western Europe

with its share-cropping practices from developing in Hungary, causing its economy to lag behind that of the rest of Europe. When the international economy forced structural changes upon Hungary in the nineteenth century, nobles who continued to refuse to work were left penniless or obligated to serve as bureaucrats in the administration of the government. Consequently, the petty nobles reconstituted their role in the nineteenth century as Hungary’s political class and its self-appointed culture bearers.2 The above summary of events in Hungary’s history does not do justice to its complexity, but does serve to highlight the major issues affecting the creation of a national identity. The desire for unification underlies Hungary’s continuing need to have and protect such an identity. In the past this has been called nationalism, with pejorative connotations. However, for the moment we will put aside this potent label in order to understand the implications of the desire for identity. Two particular hurdles in creating a national identity have been the multi-ethnicity of the population and the question of who constitute the actual “Hungarians” – the nobles, the peasants, or some mixture of the two. This paper will pay specific attention to how these issues have been addressed and thus have affected the process of identity creation.

Identity In eighteenth century Europe, the idea of nation-states, ethnically homogenous political entities joined in brotherly union, began to develop. Although the idea reached Hungary, it caused little change in the country’s actual political organization. Different ethnicities continued to live side by side as they had for centuries. The factor that separated people remained class or noble status rather

2 Frigyesi, J. “Bela Bartok and the Concept of Nation and Volk in Modern Hungary.” Music Quarterly: 255-278.

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Student Conference 2003 than ethnicity. However, the decision of King Joseph of Austria to switch all of the empire’s governmental proceedings from Latin to German in 1784 caused a reaction in Hungary that resulted in a sense of national identity based on language. The majority of the nobles in central Hungary (as opposed to the German speaking Austrians of Royal Hungary) were Hungarian-speaking, making the Hungarian language the basis of Hungarian identity. The nobility began to support the creation of an Hungarian literature and soon the establishment of a suitable history followed in the form of Andras Dogonics’s best-selling Hungarian novel of 1788, Etelka, a fictionalized portrayal of Arpad’s conquest and establishment of Hungary. As the nobles looked to develop this identity by incorporating the culture around them, they had two options: local folk traditions, which though unique in Europe, were a peasant phenomenon, or to Hungarianize famous works. The latter was more acceptable for the nobility considered the peasants a dirty, uncultured lot. Thus, Mihaly Vitez Csokonai notes the indiginization of one of Voltaire’s metaphors, saying [it has been] “dressed in new clothes and Magyarized.”3 Slowly, a specifically Hungarian expressive culture began to emerge. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the nobles developed a third option, and that was to create a national music called verbunkos. Songs of a patriotic character, verbunkos were composed by individual members of the nobility and passed around at gatherings and disseminated by gypsy bands. The intention of the songs was to create a national music not restricted to any one group but that all Hungarians could share. Verbunkos were sung at celebrations but also

used in military recruitment. Although such songs affected the peasants somewhat, verbunkos remained the music of the patriotic nobility, helping them to fulfill their new responsibility as the bearers of Hungarian culture. At the same time as Hungarian speakers began developing their ethnic identity, so too did the other language groups in Hungary. For example, the Slovaks began to demand the right to use their language in official proceedings and started creating a literature written in Slovak. However, since most of Hungary’s nobility in the eighteenth century were ethnic Hungarian, and they constituted the governmental bureaucracy, the Hungarian national identity and its supporting language and expressive culture superceded other ethnicities in the political realm. Indeed, Hungarian speakers assimilated the entire governmental zone, giving it a Hungarian identity without acknowledging other ethnic groups. Yet, those other ethnicities, although not wanting to breakoff from Hungary, saw themselves as culturally distinct.4 The nobility all but ignored the multi-ethnic composition of Hungary. Thus, when the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 split up Hungary into relatively homogenous ethnic nation-states, decreasing “old Hungary,” the term often used, to 1/3 of her previous size, Hungarians, were deeply shocked. Moreover, it precipitated an identity crisis that has complicated the issues of unification and plural ethnicities in the construction of identity as approached by both Bartok and the Dance House Movement..

3 Sugar, P. F. (1994). A History of Hungary. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. 4 Hodson, B. (March 10th, 2003). Interview.

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Cecily Morrison: The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process

Bartok Bartok, in his prolific writings, painstakingly and repeatedly defines peasant music. His first distinction is between popular art music (verbunkos), which he also calls urban folk music, and rural, or peasant folk music. Although to many they appear the same, as both are oral song traditions, the first is usually created by a single composer, where the latter, handed down from generation to generation and freely improvised around in performance, is considered the “spontaneous expression of a people’s musical instinct.”5 In other words, peasant music, because of its communal nature, was thought of as more reflective of the group than the individual. Certainly, this was Bartok’s perspective and he privileged folk music over the nineteenth century verbunkos. He rejected the nobility as the bearers of Hungarian identity, transferring this responsibility to the peasants, who were in the majority. In this situation, Bartok’s simple choice of repertoire became a powerful indicator of identity. His second distinction between the music of the nobility and the music of the “folk” was age. As with all entities, age and history lend credibility and give rights to a people. Bartok suggested that folk music represented the “ancient psyche” of the Hungarian people, imbuing Hungarians with a defining uniqueness. The expression of this Hungarian quality in folk music rendered it more important than the more recent, “nobilitycreated” verbunkos. The most important implication of this statement is that identity does not change and develop in the same way as people do. Further, despite its identity’s being an inherent part of the folk, or peasant population, urbanized people are

unable to maintain it, only retaining it symbolically through folk music. Within folk music, Bartok not only defined the Hungarian character by indicating who “the people” were, but also addressed the idea of an ethnically based state by analyzing the relationship of Hungarian music to that of the other ethnic groups living in the surrounding area. For example, he calculated exactly the influence of Slovaks on Hungarians and vice versa. He even extended his research as far as Turkey, “establishing” Turkey and Hungary as ancient relatives. In a sense, Bartok tried to create a family tree for Hungary in order to determine how groups did and should relate to each other. Bartok also confronted the “multi-ethnic state” question directly by arguing that “racial impurity” in music brought about Hungary’s incredibly diverse repertoire. He explains this diversity as the result of Hungarians’ learning new songs from the neighbors and relearning from the neighbors songs that were originally Hungarian. Through his musical research and arguments then, Bartok offered a solution that provided for both a multi-ethnic state and the nation-state ideal of the “brotherhood of nations.” However, as in his solution to the problem of identity, he considered the relationships between ethnicities fixed. Therefore he did not leave room for any negotiating of identity. Bartok’s Hungarian identity was based on language, history, a population base that was rural, and music. Indeed music was not only an aspect of the identity but like language, a principle metaphor. This becomes clear when one examines the mechanisms through which Bartok presented his case. Prevalent in Bartok’s work is an emphasis on the scien-

5 Suchoff, B., Ed. (1976). Béla Bartók Essays. London, Faber & Faber.

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Student Conference 2003 tific process of collecting and systematizing his data. His use of science became a means of finding and legitimating answers to the question of what it meant to be Hungarian. He used folk music to clarify the relationships between the peoples of Eastern Europe. Bartok explicitly stated that the ultimate aim of folk music research was to “clarify problems of settlement [and] history. [By using folk music], one could point to [the] form of contact, to the relationship or contrast of the spiritual complexion of neighboring nations.”6 Bartok, for example, predicts very exactly the influence of one people on another through an analysis of their respective folk musics. He states that 25% of Romanian folk music is influenced by the particular Hungarian group called the Szekely; 20% of Slovak music by Hungarian music; and 40% of Hungarian music shows foreign influence. At a time of political unrest, this method gave concrete, “scientific” answers of what the Hungarian identity was in a credible and unquestionable way. From 1934 until 1940, before Bartok took political asylum in the United States, he developed his categorization system and researched the connection between the music of neighboring ethnicities with support from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although he published many articles on the topic of what constituted Hungarian folk music (defining the Hungarian identity) and the music of other ethnic groups and their musical relationships, he never published the full collection of songs that he collected and transcribed. One might argue that he did not have enough time to finish this work, or that the songs themselves were not as important to him as the research itself. Although the songs carried Hungarian identity, that identity could only be elucidated

through research. Publishing the songs was merely for people’s enjoyment. Publishing the research was the means for building and maintaining Hungarian identity.

Dance House Movement The Dance House movement began in the early 1970s to revive Hungary’s folk music. The establishers of the movement focused not only on the music, as Bartok had, but also on the institutions that surrounded it, notably the village dance house. It is now a highly developed movement with tanchaz, an evening of dancing and teaching with live music, occurring several times a week in Budapest, summer camps every week from mid-June through the end of August, numerous professional dance and music groups, even more amateur groups, and many traditional music schools throughout the entire country. Now in its third generation, about 50,000 people participate in this community. Interviews with musicians who have been participants and organizers from the movement’s beginning reveal the nature of the identity they sought through its creation.7 The seventies brought several important events to Hungary: significant industrialization, a dramatic shift of population from rural to urban environments, the loosening of political restrictions, and the introduction of disco music. Disco music frequently incorporated snatches of folk music. This phenomenon caused some Hungarians to wonder about their own folk music, according to Kiss Tamas, the director of the Obuda Nepzenei Iskola. It stimulated many first generation revival musicians to go in search of that music, “their music.” They had become convinced that what they had learned about Hungarian folk music in

6 Ibid. 7 An examination of the present movement goes beyond the scope of this paper.

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Cecily Morrison: The Role of Folk Song in Identity Process school was “not the whole story, [because] the feeling was just not there.”8 Many Hungarians, having grown up in the city in the cement high-rise housing typical of the Communist era, had not experienced the village world of their parents and grandparents. In particular, they had never experienced the joys of communal gathering to sing and celebrate because such communal gathering was illegal during the 1950’s and 60’s. Furthermore, travel restrictions prevented many Hungarians with grandparents in “old Hungary,” from seeing them. With the loosening of political prohibitions, people began to make pilgrimages back to the village to collect music and learn about village life. The people who participated in these activities came from many walks of life; some were university professors, others urban poor, and still others from villages without a strong musical tradition. In this case, as distinct from Bartok’s folk music or the nobility’s verbunkos, the inherited repertoire did not define “the people,” the bearers of Hungarian identity, but rather voluntary participation in the Movement and the learning of the songs did. Thus, identity was not fixed but something one could acquire. Although playing the music was the activity undertaken in these village pilgrimages, focus was on the learning process. Many musicians describe the importance of their village teachers. Few revival musicians traveled to many villages with the aim of just collecting. Many focused on one village and several performers, spending significant amounts of time learning one person’s specific repertoire and way of life. Similarly in the dance houses, the teaching of others, particularly children, is the most important activity. The passing on of the music, and thus identity, from one person to another

becomes the focus. The songs as a result become less important as signifiers of age, (as with Bartok), than as providers of continuity between the generations. In contrast with Bartok, the revivalists brought back not only the music, but the whole context in which it existed, the Dance House. However, they did not try to replicate village life in the city, but to incorporate elements of it into their own lives. The revivalists used the songs to establish and structure a community.9 Like the village, the dance house in Budapest serves to bring people together in a community within which they can structure their own identity. The flexibility of adapting one’s identity in the dance house also allows for a different set of responses to Hungary’s multi-ethnic character than did Bartok’s rather rigid definitions. Revivalists, for example, were able to mediate their relations to other ethnicities by the interactions that took place within the Dance House and festivals. In contrast with Bartok’s definition of ethnic identity based on prescription, ethnic relations did not need to be fixed because there was a community that could negotiate them.

Conclusion The difference in the process of identity creation by Bartok and the Dance House Movement respectively leads ultimately to different uses of these identities. Bartok conceived identity as part of the “ancient psyche,” old and unchanging. He argued that this spirit had been lost in the cities, or modern Hungary, and had been preserved only in rural areas and in the folk songs. He did not suggest that one could continue to renew this identity by singing the songs, but rather that Hungarian identity was held in the songs

8 Kis, T. (March 20th, 2003). Interview. 9 Morrison, C. (2002). Culture at the Core: Imagined Communities and Invented Traditions in Scottish Traditional Dance. World Dance/Ethnomusicology. New York, Barnard College, Columbia University.

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themselves. The folk songs functioned as a primary metaphor or trope of Hungarian identity. When Bartok was faced with the “ethnic question,” he dealt with it in the same way. It was a static problem that could be solved once and for all through researching the connections between different ethnic groups’ folk songs. This paper will call this kind of identity, symbolic identity. Symbolic identity, once determined, remains static. In contrast, identity in the Dance House Movement functions differently. Instead of focusing on finding the crux of Hungarian identity as Bartok did, its participants concentrate on the continuity of a living identity and its transfer from the elders to the youngsters. Through this transmission, identity adapts itself to new conditions, the urban environment, for example, and rejuvenates itself. It is a constantly changing entity. Likewise, the treatment of the “ethnic problem“ is fluid. As the Dance House Movement has begun to find its place within a Europeanwide folk revival, it continuously re-negotiates its identity. Such lived identity stands in opposition to symbolic identity, since it continually changes, absorbs, and adapts.

This paper only begins to examine the process of creating and maintaining identity. Yet, the distinction between lived and symbolic identity can be used to make preliminary predictions of how Hungarian identity will change in the face of continued globalization and EU integration. Identity, as Bartok and the nineteenth century nobles before him defined it, will continue to be symbolically Hungarian but unused in daily life. Thus, it will do little to assimilate foreign influences into something peculiarly Hungarian. However, the revival movement will be able to do just that. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bartok distinguished between urban and rural folk music for just this reason, that folk music was a living tradition as opposed to the artificial verbunkos. Perhaps now we can make the same distinction between music used to live identity and that used to symbolize identity. Only the former will allow Hungarians, as Hungarians, to assimilate the ever-increasing information received from outside communities.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verson, 1991. Bartók, Béla. 1971 (Ed. Demény, János, Trans. Péter Balabán and Istvan Farkas). Béla Bartók Letters. Farber and Farber: London. Bartók, Béla. 1976. (Ed. Suchoff, Benjamin.) Béla Bartók Essays. St. Martin’s Press, New York. Bartók, Béla. 1979. (Ed. Calvocoressi, M.D.) Hungarian Folk Music. Hyperion Press: Connecticut Bartók, Béla. 1981. (Ed. Suchoff, Benjamin.) The Hungarian Folk Song. State University of New York: Albany. Bartók, Béla. 1997. (Ed. Suchoff, Benjamin.) Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. Frigyesi, Judit. 1996. “The Aesthetic of the Hungarian Revival Movement” in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe. (Ed. Mark Slobin.) Duke University Press: London. Frigyesi, Judit. 1994. Béla Bartók and the Concept of Nation and Volk in Modern Hungary. Musical Quarterly 78(2): 255-87. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Morrison, C. (2002). Culture at the Core: Imagined Communities and Invented Traditions in Scottish Traditional Dance. World Dance/Ethnomusicology. New York, Barnard College, Columbia University. Sugar, P. F. (1994). A History of Hungary. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Csoori, S. (January 13th, 2003). Interview. Hodson, B. (March 10th, 2003). Interview. Janosi, A. (February 10th, 2003). Interview. Kis, T. (March 20th, 2003). Interview.

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Hungarian Art Song Monica Szabó

........................................................................................... Towson University 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252 www.towson.edu monicaszabo@hotmail.com

Liszt Ferenc Zenemûvészeti Egyetem Budapest 1061, Liszt Ferenc tér 8. www.liszt.hu Adviser: Klézli János

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Art music has existed in Hungary for centuries. However, often this music was imported or in styles that had developed elsewhere. During the nineteenth century with the rise of the independence movement came a nationalistic desire by the foremost composers in Hungary, to establish a unique Hungarian school of music. The initial attempts at this project left some notable pieces, but did not completely succeed. The twentieth century opened with the folk song expeditions of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály and it was under the influence of of this authentic folk idiom that these composers were able to truly put forth to the world a unique musical language. Songs were not an essential part of Bartók’s output, but they were the heart of Kodály’s. Often the composers would add their own harmonization to a collected song. They also wrote more traditional art songs in the sense of that music was added to works of poetry. These composers along with others such as Erno˝ Dohnányi, Ferenc Farkas, László Lajtha, Sándor Balassa, and György Kurtág built and continue to contribute to the both the Hungarian national school as well as internationally to the art song genre.

Introduction Although art music and art song have been present in Hungary for hundreds of years, they did not truly come into existence as a separate indigenous musical entity until the twentieth century. Before that time, the music that falls into the classification of art music and art song10 can be linked to other,

foreign schools of music (i.e. Gregorian Church Music, Italian and German Classicism, or German Romanticism). It was only when Hungarian musicians, educated in western European music theory and practice, began studying their native folk music and wrote pieces influenced by the sensibilities of

10 Art song is generally defined as music for voice and instrument(s) with an identifiable composer and which does not fall under the category of popular music. Historically, there has been a strong link between the arts of poetry and of art song.

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Student Conference 2003 both, that a truly Hungarian school of art music and by extension art song, began. Indeed, arguably some of the best of Hungarian art song is actually in the form of folk song melodies and texts with a more elaborate piano accompaniment added to it. Most of the major figures of the twentieth century worked in this genre. Besides these songs, many composers have written art songs of a more classic definition. These range from the relatively tonal Kodály songs to the posttonal songs of György Kurtág. Unfortunately, the language of these songs poses a barrier to many singers and they often remain on the periphery of the repertoire. While there are some sounds unique to Hungarian, I have found that I can apply what I learned about singing in other foreign languages to my studies of Hungarian songs. Undoubtedly it has been extremely helpful to have native speakers help with issues of diction and style.

The Nineteenth Century Along with the patriotic movements for independence that flourished in the nineteenth century Hungary, came a corresponding movement in music to inaugurate a unique national identity. The two composers who best exemplified this desire were Mihály Mosonyi (1815-1870) and Ference Erkel (1810-1893). Mosonyi, inspired by Hungarian poets such as Sándor Petôfi and János Arany, contributed some numbers to the to the art song literature. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the collection Hat Népdal (Six Folksongs). Unlike compositions by later composers, Mosonyi’s are not actual folk songs, but original works to verse by poet Kálmán Toth, written in the then contemporary popular style. One of these songs gained

such popularity that it even entered into the actual folk song repertoire.11 While Mosonyi’s songs elegantly led the way for Hungarian art song composers, they, like a lot of his other non-vocal works, display a strong link to the German Romantic style. Erkel’s compostions also furthered the creation of a national style, but they too reveal foreign Italianate and Germanic stylistic influences.12 However, Erkel did not write any songs. The third and most outstanding Hugarian composer of this generation was Franz Liszt (1811-1886). In many ways, Liszt was a person who transcended national boundaries. Born in a German speaking part of the Habsburg empire to an ethnically Hungarian family, he never learned to speak Hungarian. His musical language reflects his cosmopolitan European life, containing German, French and Italian elements. His songs, the vast majority of which are in German, are typically classified as belonging to the German lied tradition. He composed just a handful of Hungarian language songs. In his other compositions, he used Hungarian elements to give the music a national identity, however, according to Bartók these elements are not authentic. “It is the general view that only in the nineteeth century did folk music begin to have a significant influence, especially on Chopin’s and Liszt’s art… That is not absolutely correct in that this influence must be attributed not so much to folk music as to popular art music… Popular art music melodies generally lack the absolute perfection so very characteristic of pure folk music.”13 Therefore, while the idea and desire for a national school of music was born in the nineteenth century, it was still necessary to wait for its maturity.

11 Felleg borult az erdôre is its title. Bónis, Ferenc. Mihály Mosonyi, p.19. 12 The two composers had a falling out over, of all things, Wagner. Mosonyi wanted to promote Wagner’s work as the wave of the future. Erkel did not. When Mosonyi publicly reprimanded Erkel, the latter, wielding considerable influence, shut him out of the mainstream musical life. Bónis, p. 23. 13 Suchoff, Benjamin, ed. Béla Bartók Essays. p.317.

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Monica Szabó: Hungarian Art Song

Song Collecting and Folk Song Arrangements At the turn of last century, new, emerging technology teamed with desire to preserve the authentic Hungarian folk idiom spurred many collecting expeditions. The first person to scientifically attempt this was an ethnographer named Béla Vikár in 1896. Soon following in his footsteps were the young Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) and Béla Bartók (18811945). This work was still later continued by László Lajtha (1892-1963) and Pál Járdányi (1920-1966). The composers often took these collected melodies and texts and harmonized them. These harmonizations range from the fairly simple such as Bartók’s and Kodály’s joint collection of twenty strophic Magyar Népdalok from 1906 to the more extensive, through composed works of Kodály’s great eleven volume Magyar Népzene collection composed between 1924 and 1932. Combined with these accompaniments, these folk songs also enter into the realm of art song. Bartók notes how the delve into authentic Hungarian folk music allows for an authentic school of art music as well. “We had no traditions whatever in the Hungarian art music to serve as a basis on which we could have advanced further. The declamatory attempts in vocal works of our predecessors were nothing else but imitations of Western European patterns which were inconsistent with the rhythm of the Hungarian language... We Hungarians have nothing but our parlando peasant melodies as the means of enabling us to solve this question.”14 Fortunately for the art form, most composers did not stop at harmonizing folk songs but went on, informed by those experiences, to compose original art songs.

Individual Composers Given how much the folk idiom, which is of course derived from song, penetrated Bartók’s works, he composed surprisingly few art songs. Opus 15 and Opus 16, both composed in 1916 are the only non-folk song vocal compositions which date from his mature composing period. It has been suggested that these works arose out of a personal time of crisis in the composer’s life: his opera, A Kékszakállú Herceg Vára (Bluebeard’s Castle), had been rejected in a composition contest, his attempts to organize a concert series for the Society of New Hungarian Music came to nothing and the outbreak of Worls War I prohibited further planned folk song collecting expeditions.15 The poems he selected to set share themes of night, longing and death. It has been suggested that perhaps at this low point in his life, Bartók sought expression through words as well as music.6 Another particular point of interest with the Opus 15 is the authorship of the poetry. In his lifetime, Bartók did not want to have this cycle published because he wanted the author of the first, second and fifth poems to remain unknown. Research has revealed the author to be Klára Gombossy, a fifteen year old girl from the town of Kisgaram with whom Bartók had a relationship from the summer of 1915 through September 1916. The poem for song number four was a rewritten version of one of her poems and that of number three was written by another girl from that town. Later on, Kodály chose to set this cycle of songs for voice and orchestra. For Opus 16, Bartók chose a more reknowned poet, Endre Ady. Bartók was known to be an admirer of the great Hun-

14 Suchoff, p. 306. 15 Béla Bartók. Complete Edition: vocal music, lp. essay by László Somfai (trans. by Rosemarie Prockl), p.11.

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Student Conference 2003 garian poet and here he pays his tribute to his passionate and often desperate verse. Solo art song plays a slightly larger role in Kodály’s entire output. Opus 1, 5, 6, 9 and 14 as well as an unnumbered set of four songs dating from 1925 are all that he composed in addtition to his extensive folk song collections. Opus 1, entitled Énekszó, takes popular folk song poems and intertwines them with original folk-like motivs. For Opus 5 and 6, Kodály used nineteenth century poems by Berzsenyi, Csokonai and Kölcsey, while for Opus 9, he turned to the recently deceased Ady. For his final art song cycle, he reached to even older poetry than previously, setting a poem by Bálint Balassi and two other anonymous poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Opus 5 and 14 are voice accompanied by orchestra, while all the others are voice and piano. Internationally, after Bartók and Kodály, probably the best known composer of the twentieth century was Ernô Dohnányi (1877-1960). Opus 14 and 16, his only cycles of original art songs date from his stay in Berlin and are in German. His only Hungarian language songs is the group of seven folk songs he set in 1922. These simple, yet effective pieces are strophic, retain traditional major-minor modality and use the piano to emphasize the beauty of the melodies, which were chosen for special features such as tonal vagueness or asymmetrical rhythm. In two songs, number four, Újfaluba, hazám földjén and number six, Az én ökröm a Virág, he makes a theme and variations in the piano accompaniment which helps the intensity of these poignant songs climax.16 Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000) significantly added to the the Hungarian art song reper-

toire. Having done some song collecting himself, he is well informed by Hungarian art song while having a tremendous openness in his work. He set the works of great poets of many nations, often having editions of those works in two languages. He composed over twenty sets of songs, often using unique ensembles. A great example of these two qualities is his Gyümölcskosár (Fruit Basket), dating from 1946. Written for voice, piano, viola and clarinet, he set children’s verses by Sándor Weöres. Some of these songs employ sophisticated devices such as unusual meters (such as 7/8 in Altatódal) or changing time signatures (between 5/4, 4/4 and 6/4 in A Tündér), but yet retain a simplcity that could captivate a child. There are many other composers who to greater or lesser extent have augmented the repertoire of Hungarian art song. József Soproni (b.1930) freely experimented with serialism. He also played with tonal and non-tonal elements in the same work (for instance in his nine German language songs set to poems by Georg Trakl composed in 1993). His style has progressively simplified, often following the characteristics of the languge he sets, and he expressed his thoughts in 1997 as follows: “With the restoration to their rightful place of melody, harmony and singability, it is to be hoped that twentieth century song literature will find its way back to performers and audiences.”17 György Kurtág’s songs come from a slightly different approach. Using highly unique medium, he has virtually created his own musical language which creates atmospheres which emphasize the meanings of the texts. An good example of his work’s singularity is

16 Dohnányi, Ernô. Complete Songs, cd. essay by Anna Dalos (trans. by Dávid Oláh), p. 4.

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Monica Szabó: Hungarian Art Song the Attila József Fragments Opus 20. For unaccompanied voice, he sets not poems of this great poet, but fragments he scribbled down. Another unusual pairing is that of voice and violin for his Kafka-Fragmente Opus 24.18 Of all the Hungarian composers still writing, it is Kurtág who has gained a significant international audience.

My Experiences The above is but a sketch of the whole genre of Hungarian art song, touching on some of the highlights, but is by no means exhaustive. Obviously there is a great wealth of material with which to become acquainted. In my time here so far, I have mainly focused on the sub-genre of folk song arrangements. Given that I was a beginner with the Hungarian language, I found their musical straightforwardness as well as sheer beauty to be a good starting point. I have prepared a program that consists of the Dohnányi Magyar Népdalok cycle, a selection of seven pieces from Kodály’s great Magyar Népzene series as well as three from the Farkas Gyümölcskosár. Overall, the Dohnányi folksongs have a decidedly feminine perspective, whether it is the betrayed protagonist in Szerettelek, álnok lélek and Ázok, ázok, the desolate in Újfaluba, hazám földjén and Az én ökröm a Virág, the battered in Tanuld asszony or the furious in Valaki jár udvaromon. I have been especially haunted by the Kodály piece, Ifjúság mint solyommadár. Throughout the entire song, the piano plays strummed chords to resemble a lute, hearkening back to the early music, which I worked on for three semesters as a

undergraduate. In Zöld Erdo˝ben the unsteadiness of the syncopation hints at the lack of certainty in this girl who begs her lover to wait. In Este, Rózsám, ne jöjj hozzám, the first three verses ceaselessly build up into a rage that expodes and spends itself. A no˝vérek gives the singer the opportunity to play with the contrast between a rich life and a poor one, with a surprising conclusion. In Akkor szép az erdo˝, there is wonderful piano interlude in which a singer can practise her acting skills and the spacial grandeur of Magos ko˝sziklának is of almost operatic proportion to me. I have found the three Farkas children’s songs I have worked on to be so enchanting, I am contemplating whether I have time to learn the other nine. I have also studied some Bartók arrangements from the original Twenty Folksong collection he completed with Zoltán Kodály. These works are extremely bare and leave a great deal to the declamation. I found that they emphasized the text to an extent that was a little uncomfortable for me as a beginner with the language. The Liszt songs, while lovely, are so akin to the other German Romantic pieces I studied in my while a student in America that I have come to believe that although they can be technically classified as Hungarian, it is not necessary to study them here, specifically, to absorb the style. In my remaining time, I would like to learn at least one of the Bartók art song cycles, one of Kodály’s and perhaps some songs by composers I haven’t worked on yet, such as Sándor Balassa and András Mihály.

17 Csengery, Kristóf. József Soproni. p. 22. 18 Halász, Péter. György Kurtág. p. 18.

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Catalogue of Selected Composers’ Solo Vocal Compositions Balassa, Sándor: Dalok a Rottenbiller utcából, op.1 (words by the composer) Two songs, op.16 (poems by Dezsô Kosztolányi) Bartók, Béla: Hungarian Folk Songs , # 1-10 (1906) Eight Hungarian Folk Songs (1907-1917) Five Songs, op. 15 (several poets) Five Songs, op. 16 (poems by Endre Ady) Village Scenes- Slovak folk songs-for voice and piano (1924) Twenty Hungarian folk songs for voice and piano (1929) Dohnányi, Ernô: Six poems by Victor Heindl for voice and piano, op. 14 Waldelfelein (1906) (poem by Victor Heindl) Im Lebenslenz, op. 16 (six poems by Conrad Gomoll) Hungarian Folksongs for voice and piano (1922) 19

Farkas, Ferenc : Eszterlánc- four songs with piano (1936) (poems by Ernô Számadó) Gyümölcskosár- twelve songs for clarinet, viola, piano and voice (1946) (poems by Sándor Weöres) Zöld a kökény- twenty Hungarian folksongs with piano (1954) Török dal Júliához Berben, with guitar (poem by Bálint Balassi) Gitár dalok (1983) (poems by Jenô Dsida) Párisban járt az o˝sz, with piano (1983) (poem by Endre Ady)

19 This is only part of Farkas’ solo vocal literature, as his output is quite extensive.

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Monica Szabó: Hungarian Art Song Kodály, Zoltán: Sixteen Songs, voice and piano, op. 1 (folk texts) Two Songs, voice and orchestra, op. 5 (poems by Endre Ady) Seven Songs, voice and piano, op. 6 (poems by Dániel Berzsenyi, Ferenc Kölcsey and Mihály Csokonai Vitéz ) Five Songs, voice and piano, op. 9 (poems by Endre Ady) Three Songs, voice and orchestra, op. 14 (Bálint Balassi and anonymous sixteenth and seventeenth century poets) Hungarian Folk Music 11 vols. (1924-1932) Five Songs of the Mountain Tscheremis (1961)

Bibliography BOOKS: Bálint András Varga, ed: Contemporary Hungarian Composers. Edito Musica, Budapest, 1989. Benjamin Suchoff, ed: Béla Bartók Essays. Faber & Faber P, London, 1976. Dobszay, László: A History of Hungarian Music. Corvina P, Budapest, 1993. Hugarian Composers: vols. 3, 10, 11, 3. György Kurtág. Péter Halász, Magus P ,Budapest, 1998. 10. Mihály Mosonyi. Ferenc Bónis, Magus P, Budapest, 2002. 11. József Soproni. Kristóf Csengery, Magus P, Budapest, 2002. Ujfalussy, József: Béla Bartók. Corvina P, Budapest, 1971. Young, Percy M: Zoltán Kodály: A Hungarian Musician. Ernest Benn Limited P, London, 1964.

RECORDINGS: Bartók Béla Complete ed. vocal music, vols.I and II: stereo mono SLPX 11603 and 11610. Various performers. Hungaroton, ca.1970. Bartók: Five Songs Op. 15, Five Songs Op. 16, Hungarian Folksongs: digital stereo HCD 31535. Hamari Júlia, mezzo-soprano, Prunzi Ilona, piano, Hungarian State Orchestra, Kovács János, cond. Hungaroton Classic, 1992. Dohnányi: Complete Songs: digital stereo HCD 31949. Kertesi Ingrid, soprano, Gulyás Márta, piano. Hungaroton Classic, 2001. Famous Folk Song Arrangements by Bartók, Kodály, Lajtha: mono stereo HCD 18242. Török Erzébet, mezzo-soprano. Hungaroton Classic, 1999. Ferenc Farkas: Fruit Basket, Omaggio a Pessoa, Rose Madrigal, Correspondances, Aspirationes Principis: stereo HCD 31978. Various performers. Hungaroton Classic, 2000. Zoltán Kodály: Songs for voice and piano. stereo mono SLPX 11766-67. Various performers. Hungaroton, 1977.

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The Movement Toward Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary Maxine G. Sleeper .................................................................................. Columbia University School of Law New York, NY

ELTE University School of Law Budapest, Hungary

http//:www.columbia.law.edu mgs19@columbia.edu

http//:www.elte.hu Adviser: Dr. Ágnes Kövér

..................................................................................

Hungary has made important advances toward the incorporation of an anti-discrimination norm. Hungary prides itself on having effective minority policies, and in being a leader in the field of minority rights in this region. However, the discrimination against Roma and the marginalization of this community in many spheres of life reflect the need for stronger policies and a dedication to adequate implementation of these policies. As international pressure mounts, the adoption of a comprehensive anti-discrimination law is seeming more likely. This law would be a welcome addition to Hungary’s current legislative framework concerning minorities, but would not be sufficient. The discrimination against Roma in the field of education is perhaps the most harmful and extreme form of prejudice and racism against the Roma population. Through the Ministry of Education, Hungary is now developing an educational integration program in an attempt to combat the substandard education and the isolation of Roma in many of Hungary’s schools. These programs must be wellfunded and properly supported on a local, national and international level.

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Student Conference 2003

1. Introduction At present, there are 13 officially acknowledged minority groups in Hungary.20 Under Article 68 of the Constitution of Hungary, these ethnic minorities represent a constituent part of the State and shall be ensured their collective participation in public affairs.21 Hungary prides itself on having effective minority policy and in being a leader in the field of minority rights. While there have indeed been significant advances in the legislative and political development of minority rights policy, some minority groups, most notably the Roma, continue to suffer grave discrimination and have recourse to few, if any, remedies. The discrimination against Roma and the isolation of this community in many spheres of public life reflect the need for stronger policies and a well-resourced dedication to adequate implementation of these policies. In no area is this more crucial than in the field of education. As will be discussed in greater detail below, discrimination and segregation in education has perhaps the most debilitating effects on a community. This paper seeks to present information on the issue of Hungary’s national policies on the issue of discrimination, and provide an understanding of some of the primary obstacles facing equal rights in education. In light of Hungary’s emerging legislative developments in the area of anti-discrimination, the paper will also examine whether or how these legislative frameworks can be implemented. In this gap between legislation and implementation, or laws and enforcement, lies the most fertile ground for advocacy, law reform, and other initiatives promoting effective change. Discrimination affects

many sectors and areas of society. Its elimination is conceptually inseparable from our understanding of democratic governance. The goal, and perhaps the hardest to achieve, is for non-discrimination to be operationally inseparable from effective democratic governance. Hungary has developed important legal traditions and a respect for the rule of law which will allow it to be a model for the development of minority policies for other countries in this region. Hungary must now build on the foundation it has laid in order to strengthen its legislative framework and ensure that its policies are implemented so as to be effective tools for combating discrimination.

2. General Background Today, in Hungary, as in many countries in its surrounding regions, racially and ethnically diverse states have become the norm. Globalization and the enlargement of the European Union have increased the movement of people across borders, and have thereby threatened to bring an end to former notions of the nation state. In recent years, Hungary and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe have begun to witness the emergence of a norm against racism and discrimination. As the legal norm has grown stronger through legislative directives from the European Union, protocols from the Council of Europe, and further reaching international instruments addressing issues of discrimination, the principles of anti-discrimination have not yet developed into a societal norm. Reports of the rise of nationalism throughout the region, right-wing extremists in power, or the rise in anti-Semitism and anti-Roma sentiment, coupled with

20 Hungarian Helsinki Committee, The Situation of Minorities in Hungary, October 1999, at p. 5. As provided under Article 61 of the Minorities Act, the following ethnic groups qualify as minorities: Bulgarian, Gypsy, Greek, Croatian, Polish, German, Armenian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian and Ukranian. 21 Constitution of Hungary, Article 68, para. 1, 2.

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary economic difficulties have helped to bring the issue of discrimination to the forefront. Discussions of discrimination and the machinery for combating discrimination have become increasingly important in an environment of ethnic conflict, marginalized communities, and gender inequalities. International pressure is an important impetus in helping countries realize that anti-discrimination policies (and a societal acceptance of this norm) will be an essential element in creating a more productive society. It is in Hungary’s best interest to foster harmony and equal opportunities in order to have a more active workforce, a more educated population and therefore a stronger state. Anti-discrimination norms exist at a number of levels: international, regional, national and even local. International instruments have taken the first step in promoting this norm of anti-discrimination. Nearly all human rights documents, both international and domestic, include provisions relating to the guarantee of equality. But treaties which speak specifically to discrimination and minority rights set the standard for how states must provide the legal framework and adequate implementation mechanisms to promote anti-discrimination and the rights of minorities. The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women set out important standards for the respect of human rights. Standards for the protection of minorities have been established in the OSCE’s Copenhagen Document on the Human Dimension, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, and the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. More recent developments within the

European Union and the Council of Europe have helped shape national policies on discrimination. The EU’s Race Directive of June 2000 prohibits discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnicity and requires that states provide effective remedies for violations. This directive must be incorporated and implemented in domestic law by all EU member states by July 2003, and is part of the acquis communitaire – the body of law with which all candidate states must comply. Protocol 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights provides that “the enjoyment of any right set forth in law shall be secured without discrimination…No one shall be discriminated against by any public authority on any ground.” Ratification of Protocol 12 would allow for an individual right of access to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds of discrimination alone (without this protocol, discrimination may only be claimed before the Court under Article 14, which requires that discrimination be present in conjunction with a violation of another article of the Convention).

3. Defining Discrimination What is discrimination? Traditional conceptions of equality provide us with a general understanding of discrimination. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, discrimination includes any restriction, distinction, exclusion or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.22 31


Student Conference 2003 Because issues of discrimination are inherently linked to minority rights policy, it may be useful to examine briefly theories of minority rights which shape discrimination efforts, minority policies and integration initiatives. The dominant view in AngloSaxon political thought held that collective rights protecting minorities or ethnic groups conflicted with the notion of individual liberty.23 Minority rights discourse fell out of favor following World War II primarily because the rise of communism suppressed most ethnic or cultural identities and communities. Minority rights are often controversial because they seem to be at odds with basic principles of nondiscrimination and individual liberties. However, a more modern approach blurs this distinction. Will Kymlicka’s “Multicultural Citizenship” supports the liberal theory of minority rights which asserts that collective rights need not conflict with individual liberties. Essentially, special rights do not necessarily violate the liberal equality principle.24 The primary question underlying this debate is whether governments should address concerns of minority citizens on the basis of their membership in a cultural or minority community or as individual citizens of the state. Some experts have questioned the importance of this distinction by asserting that non-discrimination is where minority rights discourse and anti-racist discourse overlap.25 Non-discrimination is a key principle of minority rights, and minority rights are becoming inseparable from the rights of the individual. This paper does not seek to elaborate further on this theoretical

distinction, but merely introduces the distinction in order to highlight some important questions surrounding antidiscrimination policies.

Direct / Indirect discrimination While there is no uniform approach to the definition of discrimination, current European law makes a distinction between “direct” and “indirect” discrimination. The EU Race Equality Directive defines direct discrimination as that which occurs when “one person is treated less favorably than another is, has been or would be treated in a comparable situation on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin.”26 Direct discrimination is clearly based on the concept of equality as consistent treatment. One major problem with discrimination policies that address only “direct” discrimination is that anyone who suffers from discrimination on this ground must find a similarly situated individual not of that minority group (or of the opposite sex in cases of gender discrimination) as a comparator. The definition indicates that a comparison is the basis for this legal claim. In the case of sex discrimination, a woman would have to prove that she has been treated less favorably that a man in her same situation. Anti-discrimination advocates and international organizations are urging countries to adopt legislation that goes beyond targeting just direct discrimination. Indirect discrimination, as defined by the European Union Directive, occurs when an apparently neutral provision, criterion or practice would put persons of a racial or ethnic origin at a particular disadvantage compared to others, unless that provision, crite-

22 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Article 1. 23 Swenden, Wilfried and Vermeersch, Peter, “The Dynamics of Ethnic Minority Policy: The Hungarian Roma and Australian Aborigines Compared” (2002), at p. 2. 24 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (1995) at p. 34-48. 25 The Dynamics of Ethnic Minority Policy, supra note 4, at p. 2. 26 Council Directive (EC) 2000/43 of 29 June 2000, Article 2, para. 2(a).

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary rion or practice is objectively justified by a legitimate aim and the means of achieving that aim are appropriate and necessary.27 The incorporation of indirect discrimination as an essential part of anti-discrimination policies represents a move toward substance over consistency. In the European Union, this has been most apparent in the area of gender discrimination and women with child-care responsibilities. In many countries throughout central and eastern Europe, facially neutral policies often have a disparate impact on the Roma, women, and many other vulnerable groups. Common examples include situations in which governments define a family unit in such a way that those who are indigent and not married in a civil ceremony (this includes a great majority of Roma families) cannot qualify for full family benefits under healthcare laws. In addition, governments may characterize Romani homes as “temporary” and thereby exclude the people living in these homes from establishing official residency and receiving the benefits associated with such residency.28 Some experts argue that there are limits to both direct and indirect anti-discrimination provisions in that neither adequately require governments to make affirmative efforts to promote equality – rather they are simply negative requirements to refrain from discriminating. “Fourth generation” (as they are often called) anti-discrimination provisions are based on a positive duty on the part of the state to compensate victims, restructure institutions, and promote equality. This reformulation of anti-discrimination policies eliminates the need for proof of individual prejudice or of unjustified disparate impact as a result of a certain condition or practice. All that is required is an acknowledgement

on the part of the state that there is structural discrimination and that the State must play an active role in combating this discrimination.29

4. Discrimination: Actors and Victims The perpetrators of Discrimination: Government officials, the public sector, private sector actors, society Discrimination can come from many different sources in society, but is often most harmful when it comes from government officials or governmental policies. By international instruments and Constitutional provisions, governments are typically not legally permitted to enact discriminatory laws or policies. But discrimination from governmental bodies, actors, or agencies is, in too many cases, widespread. Some have argued that racism and other forms of discrimination are linked to political power. One manifestation of this power is of discrimination as a political agenda: according to one theory, political elites may use or strengthen racism and discrimination to shore up political support and achieve their goals. Alternatively, political elites may be responding to existing racism, and institutionalizing it for political purposes. The reality is often a combination of these two theories – those holding political power seize racist sentiments and legitimize them by incorporating them into the political or governmental structure. Many governments deny the existence of discrimination within their country’s borders – an obvious indication of the country’s unwillingness to devote resources to eliminating discriminatory practices. In addition,

27 Id. Article 2, para. 2(b). 28 Zoon, Ina, On The Margins: Roma and Public Services in Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (2001) at p. 10-23. 29 Fredman, Sandra, Discrimination Law (2002), at p. 12-14, 176-195.

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Student Conference 2003 legislation opposing discrimination which lack “teeth” or enforcement mechanism not only fails to abate discrimination, but may be interpreted as the government’s intention to turn a blind eye, or grant permission. An extension of this situation is the complete lack of remedies available for victims of discrimination in many countries throughout the region. In addition, many policies of governments or governmental actors are accurately categorized as instruments of indirect discrimination: testing of Roma students and subsequent placement in special schools for the mentally disabled; failure to provide legal defense to Roma or other marginalized minorities in criminal cases; failure to provide economic opportunities for women; inadequate government response to violence against women. But these actors, specifically national and local government officials, are the very actors who must take responsibility for eliminating and providing remedies for discrimination. The responsibility lies with the party with the most power to effect change, and that is indeed the governments. Private actors are also frequent perpetrators of discrimination. Discrimination by private employers, restaurant owners, etc. also contributes to the disempowerment and marginalization of vulnerable groups. Women are refused jobs, and ethnic minorities are turned away from jobs, restaurants, and bars on a regular basis. Private actors are often less accountable to their victims of discrimination because they often fall outside of laws proscribing racist or discriminatory acts. For Hungary and other accession countries to the European Union, policies specifically addressing the private sector must be adopted. The Race Equality Directive applies to “all persons, as regards both public and private sectors.” While this Directive is clearly not relevant to all the countries in the region, 34

it represents an important shift toward broader accountability. Private actors may also be punished or sanctioned through domestic criminal or civil law systems. Societal discrimination can be especially harmful because it may shape government policies or lend support to government inertia in developing anti-discrimination policies. Experts have asserted that the elimination of prejudice from a society toward minorities or other vulnerable groups is more challenging and presents more of a long-term problem than legal and institutional forms of discrimination. Fear and dislike of foreigners and other categories of “others” by the society affects work performance, ambition, and interest in participation of individuals in vulnerable groups. And because, of course, members of society are the individual actors in the government and in private enterprise, broad-based societal traditions of prejudice and discrimination influence all sectors and all actors in society. Social and culture stigmas can also negate actions taken by the government. For example, many countries have laws which outlaw rape or domestic violence and may even provide avenues for remedy for violations of these laws. However, women who are victims of domestic violence or rape often refuse to approach the authorities because of the stigma assigned to the victim of such crimes and the shame it is thought to bring upon the victim’s family.

5. The Roma in Hungary Some have argued that racism operates on at least three axes. The first is that of denigrating stereotypes, prejudice, hatred, and even violence. The second is a cycle of disadvantage – political, economic, and social. And the third axis is a negation or obliteration of culture, religion or language.30 These axes are merely component manifestations of


Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary discrimination, and do not represent an order of events, escalation or hierarchy of impacts. Policies to combat racial and ethnic discrimination must address each axis with particular attention paid to the political context and the group in question. The Roma community in Hungary has historically been one of the most marginalized and persecuted minorities. Their marginalization is reflected in their material situation, as Roma experience some of the worst poverty and suffer disproportionately high unemployment. While discrimination against Roma has persisted for centuries, an understanding of the recent historical context provides an important foundation in analyzing the role of discrimination against the Roma in today’s societies.

a. Historical Background During communism, ethnicity was suppressed or ignored through a movement known as “automation.”31 Ethnicity and cultural identity was expected to disappear automatically and a new socialist identity would take its place. Because culture and ethnicity was seen as a byproduct of financial or material inequalities, the socialist and communist regimes expected that establishing equity would eliminate the need for cultural identity. Toward the end of the 1970’s Hungary replaced policies on assimilation with discourse on “integration.” Recognition of minority culture and language rights paved the way for the transition in 1989, when Roma gained official recognition as an ethnic group and a national minority in most of post-communist Europe. A new emphasis on “multiculturalism,” which served as a complete rejection of Marxist-Leninist theories, began to emerge in Hungary. But the legal recognition

and protection of culture and language failed to bring about major improvements in the actual status of Roma in society.32 With the collapse of communism, the Roma lost their relatively secure economic position. Because the Roma remained an underdeveloped community with very little education and limited professional skills, the Roma were unable to compete for jobs in the emerging market economy. In addition, because Roma almost never owned land, the Roma did not benefit from laws which dissolved cooperative farms or privatized land. Many Roma families who were housed and employed by big companies lost their jobs, their homes, and their residential permits. A large number of Roma began to emerge in urban centers as homeless and “illegal” residents. However, the transitions to a liberal democratic regime did bring about new opportunities for political participation for the Roma, which was an important first step in allowing the Roma to be more active members of society and assert their rights. In Hungary now, Roma are elected to serve in legislative bodies and are entitled to form self-governments at both the local and national level. In most parts of Hungary, however, Roma are neither an effective or powerful pressure group nor a popular cause for other politicians. In many local areas throughout Hungary, in fact, support for Roma causes if often seen as a political liability. Discrimination against the Roma reaches all sectors of society and creates a complex web of disadvantage, inequality and disempowerment. Programs to remedy some of the crises in the Roma community have been developed and initiated by national and local governments, civil society organizations, and the Roma community itself. The road is long and the scope for improvement is vast.

30 Freedman, Sandra, “Combating Racism with Human Rights” in Discrimination and Human Rights: The Case of Racism (2001) at p. 13. 31 The Dynamics of Ethnic Minority Policy, supra note 4, at p.4. 32 Id.

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b. A brief look at discrimination against the Roma in Hungary According to census figures, Roma comprise around 4.5% of the Hungarian population (according to credible NGO estimates, this population of Roma in Hungary is probably larger, but is likely not more than 7 or 8%). At present, about 2/3 of all Roma live in countries throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Continued discrimination and inadequate policies regarding the Roma will only lead to the creation of a permanent underclass which will place an even greater burden on the economies of these transitioning states. The Roma are overrepresented in all categories in need of social protection: they are uneducated, unskilled, remain unemployed for long periods of time, have large families, and often lack residence permits, identity papers, or citizenship papers. Ironically, however, many of the social protection programs screen out Roma from support. Roma face discrimination in the areas of employment, education, housing, healthcare, law enforcement and access to public places. In the judicial system, complaints by Romani victims of human rights abuses are not adequately investigated and prosecuted. In addition, Romani defendants are subjected to pre-trial detention more often and for longer periods of time than non-Roma. Roma also reportedly receive more severe sentences. Police abuse in Hungary continues to be a serious problem. A 1998 survey revealed high levels of prejudice against Roma on the part of the Hungarian police. According to the study, which took the opinion of 1,530 police officers, 80% of those interviewed considered Roma violent; 54% stated that they believed that a criminal way

of life is a key element of the Roma identity.33 While the health status of individual Romani persons depends on living conditions, lifestyle and socioeconomic status, there is a general demographic trend that the life expectancy for Roma is significantly lower than that of the majority population in most countries in the region. In Hungary, the rate of childbirth is significantly higher among the Roma population, but mortality is also significantly higher. As a result, life expectancy is correspondingly shorter.34 In Hungary, children under 15 years of age make up 38% of the Roma population (twice that of the total population).35 Roma children often have a higher rate of malnutrition, anemia, and other nutritional related diseases than their non-Roma peers. Substandard living conditions, the lack of safe drinking water and poor hygiene exacerbates susceptibility to infectious and digestive diseases. Roma also often have very restricted access to healthcare. With no money to pay for private consultations and no family doctor to refer them for treatment, the healthcare system is essentially closed to the Roma. The discrimination is not limited to single doctors – healthcare institutions have also been known to refuse treatment to Roma patients. At best, Roma patients have access to emergency care. In addition, Roma suffer disparate impact from neutral healthcare laws which provide that only a wife or husband has the right to noncontributory health insurance. Because a higher percentage of Roma live in commonlaw marriages, they are disproportionately affected by this provision of the law. In Hungary, Roma communities also suffer from a lack of information about the healthcare system and the discretionary power of social workers who can withhold or withdraw their health insurance.36

33 Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Center Concerning the Republic of Hungary, For Consideration by the United st Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at its 61 Session, 5-23 August, 2002, at p. 16. 34 Bureau for European Comparative Minority Research, A Roma’s Life in Hungary: Report 2000, at p. 47. 35 Id.

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary The issue of housing is of particular importance for Roma in Hungary. The great majority of Roma live in residentially segregated areas. Many live in slums or unplanned settlements that lack proper roads, access to drinking water, electricity or sewage disposal. There are no Hungarian laws that address discrimination in access to housing. Roma are therefore even more vulnerable to the effects of increasing incidents of evictions, as a result of anti-squatting amendments adopted in May 200037. These amendments give notaries the power to order eviction from council housing within eight days. These new policies have triggered a wave of evictions which are though to be motivated by racism toward the Roma.38 The Roma Civil Rights Foundation reports an increase in evictions of Roma from 2-3 per month in 1999 to 3-4 per week in 2000.39 It is estimated that the unemployment rate among Roma in Hungary is 70%. In some villages, 90-100% of the Roma population is unemployed. The Minority Ombudsman noted that there have been many discriminatory job advertisements, but that Hungary’s legal regime provides no effective remedy.40 Such systematic discrimination compounds the effects of other factors that contribute to high levels of unemployment. As noted above, Roma were particularly hard hit by the transition to a market economy. In addition, industrialization has presented an additional challenge to Roma who traditionally survived on more traditional trades. But per-

haps most important, low levels of educational achievement among Roma further reduce prospects for employment.41 Policies and practices of providing social protection often discriminate directly or indirectly against the Roma. International and European law call for states to provide a minimum amount of social support for their citizens. One major challenge in measuring the magnitude of discriminatory practices by governmental and private actors is the Hungarian authorities’ refusal to generate and make public data on the relative situation of the Roma and other vulnerable groups. Under Hungary’s data protection law, gathering data according to ethnicity is illegal, absent the express written consent of the person concerned.42 Many minority rights activists claim, however, that the argument that gathering data is illegal is used mostly to hinder efforts of civic organizations and independent researchers to show patterns of discrimination. This gives rise to local suspicion that Hungarian authorities may not be serious about combating racial discrimination in Hungary. Perhaps one of the most important and damaging area of discrimination against the Roma occurs in the area of education. Across the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, the education of Romani children is characterized by both segregation from the mainstream system and poor quality schools. In Hungary, Roma children are placed in special schools and may also be placed in seg-

36 Id, at p. 51. 37 Act No LXI of 2000. 38 Open Society Institute – EU Accession Monitoring Program, Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Minority Protection (2001) [Hereinafter: Minority Protection 2001] at p. 234. 39 Annual Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for National and Ethnic Minority Rights 2000, p. 118. 40 Annual Report of the Parliamentary Commissioner for National and Ethnic Minority Rights, 1 January – 31 December 1998, at section 4.2.5. 41 OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Report on the Situation of the Roma and Sinti in the OSCE Area, 2000, at p. 33. 42 Written Comments of the European Roma Rights Center Concerning the Republic of Hungary, For Consideration by the United st Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination at its 61 Session, 5-23 August, 2002, at p. 29.

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Student Conference 2003 regated classes in the mainstream schools. This discrimination in education has taken on various forms throughout the region but the effects are the same: Roma children receive a lower quality education than their non-Roma peers and are therefore unprepared and uncompetitive in the job markets. The position of both Romani children and adults is, in a sense, part of a vicious cycle – poverty and a lack of material resources mean that Roma children are not going to school or are not going to decent schools, and the resulting lack of education forces the community as a whole to remain at the bottom of the social and economic ladder.

6. A Closer Look at Roma Education in Hungary Government officials, NGO representatives and other Roma activists have acknowledged that the current situation of Roma education in Hungary has reached a crisis point. Many regard education as the key field of public activity. Education can be used, therefore, as a tool for combating discrimination, and schools must be prepared to play an important role in this effort.43 While there is arguably a universal recognition of the crucial role of education in the development of the free and autonomous individual, discrimination against Roma in the field of education is pervasive. Discrimination in education can take many different forms: segregation in schools or classes for the mentally handicapped; segregation in substandard schools or classes in the mainstream educational system; school segrega-

tion resulting from residential segregation (gypsy “ghetto” schools); exclusion from the school system; abuse in schools, including racially motivated physical abuse.44 In any form, disadvantage in education and access to education is a strong force in perpetuating cycles of isolation, disadvantage and marginalization. The percentage of the Roma population in elementary school roughly corresponds to the percentage in the population (around 5%), but decreases to less than one percent in secondary school and to around 0.1% at the university level.45 Schools throughout Hungary are becoming increasingly ethnically segregated – due in part to the growing Roma population in many areas of the country. Of 192 schools surveyed, the proportion of Roma students in 1989 was 25.1%; in 1999, the proportion was 40.5%.46 As the proportion of Roma students in a school increases, non-Roma parents seem more likely to transfer their children to schools that have fewer or no Roma students. In one Budapest school, the proportion of Roma pupils increased from 40% to 100% between 1989 and 1999.47 Even in schools where Roma and non-Roma students are present, Roma students are often placed in separate classes (remedial or “catch-up” classes). Romani children in segregated classes are often taught according to an adjusted curriculum, not designed to provide education on an equal footing. The effects of such schooling arrangements is to exclude Roma from equal education, thereby eliminating any possibility of developing the needed knowledge and skills to compete for jobs in a market economy. In Hungary, estimates indi-

43 Interview with Minority Ombudsman, Jenö Kaltenbach, March 14, 2003. 44 European Roma Rights Center, Barriers to the Education of Roma in Europe: A Position Paper by the European Roma Rights Center, May 5, 2002, available at http://errc.org/publications/position/education.shtml. 45 European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), Second Report on Hungary, March 2000, para. 33. 46 Institute for Education Research, as cited in G. Havas, “Kitoresi pont: az iskola” (“Breaking point: the school”), Beszelo, November 2000, p. 50-65. 47 Minority Protection, 2001, at p. 226.

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary cate that Roma make up 84.2% of the students in “catch-up” classes.48 An unfortunate aspect of this arrangement is that school authorities have a financial stake in maintaining these catch-up classes because they can receive supplementary grants for the education of minority children (as provided under the 1993 Public Education Act).49 Catch-up classes, therefore almost never catch the students up to the appropriate level. Most Romani children are never mainstreamed into the normal school system. They finish their educational career in the separate system and rarely go on to secondary school or university. In practice, these classes are typically substandard, offering poor quality education in separate classes, and even separate buildings.50 In January 2002, The Roma Press Center reported that an investigation carried out by the Minority Ombudsman’s office found that Romani pupils at a primary school in Verpelét in Heves County are educated in separate classes from the first grade on, without the express consent of the parents.51 The Minority Ombudsman declared that the segregation of the Romani students is unlawful and that students are subject to discrimination as a result of the practices. In addition to separate classes, Romani children are often also channeled into “special schools” for the mentally disabled. These schools offer a limited curriculum with lower educational requirements. Roma

children are often over-represented in these special schools. The percentage of Roma children attending special schools grew from 25% in 1974-1975 to 90% in certain parts of Hungary in 1990.52 According to the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), despite the fact that rules regulating entry to the special schools have been tightened over the years, Roma children still constitute around 60% of the total number of children in these types of schools nationwide. This channeling, “which in principle is carried out by an independent board, is often quasi-automatic in the case of Roma/Gypsy children.”53 A relatively new phenomenon is that of declaring as “private students” those problematic students who are disruptive in class.54 This private study scheme does not involve school attendance. This has had a disparate impact on many Romani students and has excluded them almost entirely from education. Because these students are still expected to take final examinations, many drop out of school entirely.55 A particularly illustrative case of school segregation in Hungary is the case of the village of Jászladány in Szolnok County. In May 2002, the local government announced that is would open a private school for students “who are indeed willing to study” in order to provide schooling exclusively for non-Romani children. According to Nép-

48 Barriers to the Education of Roma in Europe, at p. 6. 49 Interview with Viktoria Mohacsi, Ministerial Commissioner – Office of Minister’s Commissioner for Integration of Roma and Disadvantaged Children, Ministry of Education, March 21, 2003. Since 1993, these Roma Minority programs have spread in Hungary, and significant amounts of state funds are distributed for “minority education.” 50 Barriers to the Education of Roma, at p. 6. 51 European Roma Rights Centre, “Ombudsman Finds Discrimination against Roma in Education in Hungary” Nr 2, 2002, available at http://errc.org/rr_nr2_2002/snap14.shtml. 52 Minority Protection at p. 226. A 1998 survey in Borsod county by the Minority Ombudsman’s office showed that over 90% of students attending special school in that county were Roma. 53 European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, Second Report on Hungary, March 2000, para 30. 54 According to the Act on Public Education, section 1, paragraph 7, compulsory education can me met by attending school or as a private student depending on the choice of the parents concerned. Traditionally, private study arrangements were reserved for very gifted students.

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Student Conference 2003 szava, a Hungarian national daily newspaper, the mayor of Jászladány, Mr. István Dankó, stated that “peoples who bear different cultures cannot be locked up together by force, so the best way to avoid confrontation is to set up alternative institutions.”56 Jászladány is a village of 6,443 people, of which 665 are registered Roma. According to Mayor Danko, the population of Roma in the village is closer to 1,800.57 In the primary school in the village, 40% of the students are Roma. From 1995 until 2001, more and more students in the village began attending school in other villages because the schools were reportedly not preparing students adequately for secondary schools. Teachers and the principal of the state school in Jaszladany reported that discipline problems among the Roma is the primary reason that the other students are not able to learn. “When there were fewer than 30% Roma in each classroom it was fine, but when the Roma population in the school went above 50%, it was too many.”58 The director of the school and the teachers agreed that it is the “arrogance and violence” of the Roma students which makes the school environment intolerable for the non-Roma students. In order to provide an alternative school in Jaszladany, the town started a foundation which would run a private school for students who are willing to learn and behave according to the “house rules.” According to

the hired principal of the Foundation School, the main purpose of the school is to raise local and national patriotism and to provide a moral education. While these goals seem somewhat vague, the impact on segregation in the town is abundantly clear. The state school became over 90% Roma, and the Foundation School is 90% non-Roma.59 The local government has provided the Foundation School with the use of public buildings. But the creation of this private school became the topic of great controversy in 2001. The Minister of Education and the Minority Ombudsman both voiced strong opinion that this school was simply a mechanism for racial segregation and was unconstitutional.60 The head of the local minority government in Jászladány raised strong protest over the creation of this school on the grounds that the minority self-government was not consulted in its formation and that this new school was simply a means of segregating the students.61 The mayor claimed that the matter did not require consultation with the minority self-government because it did not involve issues of minority education.62 In September 2002, the Minister of Education refused to grant registration to the Foundation School, and the school was forced to shut down. In November 2002, a county court found that the foundation functioned legally. The school is now reportedly not operating, and is hoping to begin official-

55 Petrova, Dimitrina, “Racial Discrimination and the Rights of Minority Cultures” in Discrimination and Human Rights: The Case of Racism (2001) at p. 58. 56 Népszava, Roma Press Center, as cited in ERRC Snapshots, “Ombudsman Finds Discrimination against Roma in Education in Hungary,” Nr 2, 2002. 57 Interview with Mayor István Dankó, March 28, 2003. 58 Interview with Gonda Sándorné, Principal of Jaszladany Public School, March 28, 2003. 59 The principal of the state school noted that the Roma attending the Foundation School were the “elite” Roma who are just as appalled and annoyed by Roma behavior in the state school as are the non-Roma parents. 60 Élet és Irodalom, EXLVI, September 20, 2002. 61 Népszabadság, “Két Tanévnyitó Jászladány” August 30, 2002. 62 Roma Press Center, “Ombudsmani intelem a Jászladány polgármesternek” July 18, 2001.

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary ly in September 2003. In practice, however, the school is functioning. The students and the teachers who had planned to enroll in the Foundation School have been attending classes in a separate (and far more modern and well-kept) building since September; the curriculum is more challenging, and those students who could not keep up have returned to the state school (of the 10 students who have returned, 8 are Roma). The mayor reports that this is not actually the Foundation School because the students are not paying the 3,000 HUF monthly tuition to attend the separate school. The result, therefore, is that the public school system in Jaszladany is now almost completely segregated along racial and ethnic lines. The story of segregation in Jászladány highlights some of the more disturbing and discouraging aspects of discrimination against Roma in education. As Hungary is trying to move toward integration in its classrooms, this village is institutionalizing segregation. The situation serves to underscore the importance of a national initiative regarding desegregation, and the challenges for which it will most certainly face. Desegregation programs will require both national and international support and funding, but must be tailored to meet the needs of the local environments. They must be well funded in order to provide for smooth implementation on the local level. But any successful desegregation program must take into account the all-encompassing nature of the problem. Parents, teachers, and students must all be involved and educated about the importance of integration. Assistance to families, both social and financial will be crucial. Additional training of teachers will be required to begin to overcome the prejudice which is pervasive in many classrooms.

7. European Legislative Framework for Anti-Discrimination Policies The Council of Europe and the European Union: Progress and Limits Both the Council of Europe and the European Union have made great strides in protecting minorities and combating discrimination. The emphasis on human rights and principles of anti-discrimination principles within the laws of the EU indicate a movement toward a vision of the European Union as a guarantor, not just of economic integration, but of fundamental human and social rights. In 1999, the Treaty of Amsterdam came into effect which created two new important provisions to the founding treaties of the EC. Article 13 provided the legal competence for the EU Council to take “appropriate measures to combat discrimination based on sex, racial, or ethnic origin, religion, belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.” In addition, Article 29 was amended in order to specify that one of the key objectives of the European police and judicial cooperation was to prevent and combat racism. The European Charter on Fundamental Rights also indicates a departure from the economic orientation of European integration. The strength of its provisions, however, is severely limited by its non-binding status. Human rights advocates around the region must now encourage the governing bodies of the EU to see this vision through, and to ensure its implementation and adequate enforcement on a national level. The enlargement of the European Union holds great promise for national policies on discrimination in Hungary. The Race Equality Directive: Perhaps the most significant development in EU law, the Race Equality directive forbids discrimination on the grounds of racial 41


Student Conference 2003 or ethnic origin, and requires member states to adopt domestic anti-discrimination laws and to enforce these laws with enforcement bodies. The Directive is perhaps most significant and innovative in its provisions on remedies and enforcement. The Directive allows for organization claims, as long as organizations have a “legitimate interest” in the claim. In addition, the Directive calls for a shifting of the burden of proof to the respondent where “facts from which it may be presumed that there has been direct or indirect discrimination” are established.63 The Directive calls for states to create or designate bodies dedicated to the promotion of equal treatment. However, the Directive fails to provide guarantees against discrimination in criminal justice. This is a particularly significant weakness because criminal justice represents an area where discrimination, especially on the grounds of race and ethnicity, is rampant and possibly most harmful. Employment Directive: Also arising out of Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty, the European Union Directive seeks to present a framework for combating discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation as regards employment and occupation. This Directive provides a broader scope of protection than the Race Equality Directive, but also specifically refers to direct and indirect discrimination. The provisions of this Directive must also be incorporated into domestic law and must be backed by effective judicial and/or administrative procedures available to all persons. Like the Race Equality Directive, this employment directive calls for the burden of proof to fall on the respondent, and also allows for organizations or associations to bring claims as long 63 Council Directive (EC) 2000/43 of 29 June 2000, Article 8.

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as they have a “legitimate interest.” The employment directive may prove to be especially useful in promoting equal rights because, as mentioned above, discrimination in employment and high levels of unemployment is a common factor contributing to poverty, marginalization, and social isolation of many vulnerable groups. Protocol 12: Protocol 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights makes up for one of the inherent weaknesses of the Convention by providing an independent right to non-discrimination. Prior to the adoption of Protocol 12, discrimination could only be claimed under Article 14- and must have been claimed in connection with a violation of another right provided in the Convention. Protocol 12 is far more comprehensive in the range of grounds of discrimination to which it applies. These grounds include sex, color, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status. This list is not exhaustive by virtue of the phrase “any ground such as” in the article. But Protocol 12 has not yet entered into force. It requires ten ratifications for entry into force. As of March 30, 2003, only three countries had ratified the protocol. Hungary signed the protocol in April 2000, but has not ratified it. These recent developments within the European legal context are especially important for Hungary and other countries within the Council of Europe and seeking accession to the European Union. Implementation of anti-discrimination laws Perhaps the greatest challenge in incorporating regional and international norms into a


Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary domestic framework is in the enforcement and implementation of these laws. Countries may force through their parliament some type of palliative law which satisfies the compliance requirement of the accession countries to adopt the acquis communitaire, but fails to provide real remedies or to make significant progress in the area of anti-discrimination. Implementation will depend largely on adequate funding and political will. Central and Eastern European countries have benefited from PHARE assistance, but more assistance must be dedicated specifically to the area of “institution building.” Additional resources can help develop the political and societal will be necessary in transforming the law reform into reality.

8. Hungary’s Legislative Framework a. Anti-Discrimination Measures The Hungarian legal system is regarded as “dualistic” from the point of view of the status of international law. In a dualist system, the supremacy of international law is recognized, but the rules of international law may not be applied directly on the domestic level until they have been officially integrated into domestic law through acts of either Government or Parliament.64 Hungary is a party to several international treaties which aim to protect the rights of vulnerable groups and combat discrimination: The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, The Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Convention

on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Hungary has come under some criticism from international human rights organizations for its failure to adopt a comprehensive anti-discrimination law. As will be discussed below, a concept paper is now open for comment which could develop into a draft for a comprehensive law. For now, Hungary’s prohibition against discrimination is enshrined in several different documents. But this present system is not as effective as it could be. Some legal fields have anti-discrimination provisions, while others do not. Some have an elaborate system of sanctions, while others have no sanctions at all. Human rights groups have criticized this system as being incoherent.65 The Constitution of the Republic of Hungary provides that everyone is equal before the law, and that the Republic of Hungary shall respect the human rights and civil rights of all persons in the country without discrimination on the basis of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origins, financial situation, birth or on any other ground whatsoever.66 Several of Hungary’s legal codes provide for anti-discrimination measures. According to Act XXII of 1992 on the Labor Code, it is prohibited to discriminate between employees in connection with employment according to their gender, nationality, race, origin, religion, or political conviction.67 The Labor Code provides for the imposition of sanctions for violations of this provision. However, until June 30, 2001, these provi-

64 Hungarian Helsinki Committee, The Situation of Minorities in Hungary, October 1999, at p. 4. Hungary’s Constitution (Article 7, paragraph 1) states that the legal system accepts the generally acknowledged rules of international law and guarantees that domestic law be harmonized with international obligations. 65 Open Society Institute – Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Minority Protection, Volume 1, 2002, p. 265. 66 The Constitution of the Republic of Hungary, Article 57, para. 1, Article 70 / A, para. 1. 67 Act XXII of 1992 on the Labor Code, Article 5.

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Student Conference 2003 sions were not applied in cases in which there was no existing labor relationship between the parties. As a result, discriminatory refusals to hire on the basis of ethnicity were not subject to sanction. Even now, however, there have no reported cases of courts punishing employers or other authorities for discriminatory hiring practices.68 Under Hungary’s Public Education Act, all forms of discrimination are prohibited in public education.69 The Minority Ombudsman has urged that amendments be adopted which would allow for the imposition of sanctions for discrimination in the educational system.70 In the 1998 modifications to the law, no such provisions were adopted. Hungary has shown that it is committed to taking important steps in combating discrimination. The government established the Parliamentary Commissioner for Ethnic and National Minorities (Minorities Ombudsman) who is charged with investigating infringements of the rights of national or ethnic minorities, and may initiate measures for remedies. The Ombudsman is entitled to investigate any authority, including the armed forces, the national security services, and the police. While the Ombudsman has played a significant role in promoting rights and developing a stronger minority rights based agenda in Hungary, its powers remain somewhat limited. The Ombudsman has no power to impose legal sanctions directly on perpetrators of infringements of minority rights. Some human rights activists have argued that the Ombudsman’s office should have broader powers in order to

bring cases before administrative or regular courts. Still, the office has had a significant impact. Reports estimate that 60-75% of the Ombudsman’s office’s recommendations, initiatives and legislative suggestions, many of which have been aimed at fighting discrimination, have been accepted by the respective government offices concerned.71 Among Hungary’s legislative initiatives designed at improving the situation of the Roma is the 1999 Medium-term Package for the Improvement of the Living Conditions and Social Situation of the Roma Population. This package outlines policy objectives in the area of education, culture, employment, agriculture and regional development; anti-discrimination programs; and social, health and housing programs. According to the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, the tasks defined in the package are intended to promote the social integration of the Roma without reinforcing segregation processes.72 While this initiative was seen as an important step in addressing the concerns of the Hungarian Roma, very little has been done to implement these policy objectives. Several experts and NGOs argue that Hungary must adopt a comprehensive antidiscrimination act. This act would develop an adequate system of sanctions which would be sufficient for the prevention of discriminatory acts and the effective punishment of offenders, and setting up an effective institutional system which would guarantee the implementation of the anti-discrimination act.73 Currently, a comprehensive anti-discrimination concept paper,

68 ERRC Written Comments to CERD, supra note X at 25. 69 Act LXXIX of 1993 on Public Education, Article 4, para. 7. 70 The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, The Situation of Minorities in Hungary, October 1999, at p. 7. 71 Open Society Institute, EU Accession Monitoring Program: Minority Protection, 2001, at p. 254. 72 Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, Government Measures to Improve the Living Conditions of the Roma in Hungary 2000-2001, Budapest, 2002, p. 1. 73 International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights in the OSCE Region: Report 2001, at p. 164. 74 Interview with Minority Ombudsman, Jeno Kaltenbach, March 14, 2003.

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Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary which was drafted by two experts in the Ministry of Justice and done in coordination with the Minority Ombudsman, is open for comments and is expected to become draft legislation by the summer of 2003.74 b. Desegregation Measures The current government has taken important steps to show that addressing discrimination in education is a top priority. Within the office of the Prime Minister, a new state secretariat for Roma integration policy issues was established under the leadership of Mr. Lászlo Teleki, President of the National Allicance of Roma Organizations. State Secretary Teleki took several important first steps upon entering this new position. He submitted and had approved an increase of HUF 400M available for scholarships to Roma students for the 2002/2003 academic year. Almost 20,000 Roma students were able to receive grants (a 50% increase from the 12,777 students who received grants in 2001/2002).75 The Minister of Education has appointed Viktória Mohacsi as the Ministerial Commissioner in the Office of Minister’s Commissioner for Integration of Roma and Disadvantaged Children. Along with her staff and in conjunction with representatives from the Roma community, Ms. Mohacsi has begun to develop concrete policies aimed at integrating local schools throughout the country. This plan, the “Preparation for Integration from September 2003”76 is based on the principle that it is the government’s task to focus attention on the inclusion of Roma

children in schools and the elimination of segregation. The Decree OM 57/2002 of the Minister of Education does not require schools to implement integration, but it provides guidance, additional funding, and programmatic support for those schools that commit to integrating their Roma students with non-Roma students.77 Developmental funds will come in the form of a new per capita support system. As of 2003, if a school commits to the integration program, it will be possible to increase the per capita support for the education of each Roma child by as much as 50%. The Hungarian Government will provide 50% of the funding for these programs with European partners providing the rest. In the 2003/2004 school year, schools that join the integration process will receive EUR 2.5 million from the Phare Program. Roma community centers will receive another EUR 4 million in support from Phare. This may allow some communities and schools to begin planning for extracurricular study programs. The integration plan also includes the development of the National Education Integration Network. This network, with its headquarters in Budapest, will have 53 other offices around the country and will provide coordination assistance among the local kindergartens, elementary schools, and community centers. Local education authorities have until May 2003 to decide whether or not to participate in this integration program. 400 schools around the country have already agreed to participate.

75 Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, “Selected News on the Social Integration of the Roma in Hungary” July-August 2002. 76 This is a program describing the implementation of Decree OM 57/2002. (XI.18) of the Ministry of Education. 77 Interviews with Viktoria Mohacsi, Jan. 20, 2003 and March 21, 2003. Most information related to the Integration Program was gained from these two interviews.

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Student Conference 2003 While this program is receiving broad support from many representatives of the Roma community, it has also come under some strong criticism because it only addresses integration within the context of separate classrooms, not separate schools. This leads to an addition, and even more divisive disagreements over the fact that this program will not provide additional funding for “ghetto schools.” The only schools that will benefit from this program are those that have a mixed population of students. “Ghetto schools” as they are often called, are almost always exclusively Roma. Significant debate continues about whether improving Roma education necessarily requires the closing of all ghetto schools. While the Minister of Education’s plan does not require the ghetto schools to close immediately, but does look to their eventual elimination as a longer term goal. As this integration program is in its very earliest stages, much remains to be seen about how it can be effectively implemented on the local level, but monitored and supported on a national level. Its creation and development is an encouraging first step in raising awareness about issues with Roma education, and focusing attention on education as an essential tool in combating discrimination.

IX. Conclusion NGOs and other civil society organizations must continue to play a dynamic role in shaping discrimination laws and policies in Hungary and in insisting upon adequate enforce-

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ment and remedies. Local NGOs may be the most useful in raising awareness and urging action because they are often awarded greater legitimacy among local populations, and have a greater reputation for accuracy than international organizations or even governments. While NGO efforts are not sufficient, they are essential in developing initiatives, shaping policies, and monitoring government performance. The role of governments in combating discrimination will, of course, be paramount. National legislative frameworks and effective implementation measures are necessary for any anti-discrimination and integration initiative. In addition, the involvement of international organizations and donor bodies can not be overlooked. As the European Union seems to be making a shift toward more comprehensive human rights policies, so too are other powerful organizations such as the World Bank. With broader mandates to work with local organizations in its effort to promote development and eliminate poverty, the World Bank should be encouraged to focus on issues of discrimination, and to support national anti-discrimination institutions. NGOs can play an important role in attracting foreign and international funding to support government anti-discrimination laws and enforcement mechanisms. Hungary has now taken important first steps toward combating discrimination and promoting equality and integration. It must now make sure that it develops comprehensive and effective legislation, and ensure that this legislation is backed by adequate resources, institutional capacity, and political will.


Maxine G. Sleeper: Anti-Discrimination and Integration of Roma in Hungary Bibliography Act LXXIX of 1993 on Public Education Act XXII of 1992 on the Labor Code Act No LXI of 2000 Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Opinion on Hungary (Adopted 22 September 2000) Annual Report on the Activities of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities, 2001 Annual Report on the Activities of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities, 2000 Annual Report on the Activities of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities, 1999 Bell, Mark, Anti-Discrimination Law and the European Union, 2002 (Oxford University Press) Bíró, Anna Mária and Kovács, Petra, Open Society Institute – Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-Ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe Bureau for European Comparative Minority Research (BECMiR), A Roma’s Life in Hungary: Report 2000. (Budapest) Cahn, Claude, Roma Rights Quarterly, “Smoke and Mirrors: Roma and Minority Policy in Hungary,” Nr 4. 2001 Constitution of the Republic of Hungary Council Directive (EC) 2000/43 of 29 June 2000 (European Union Race Directive) Élet és Irodalom, “A Jászladányi iskolapélda” September 20, 2002. European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), Second Report on Hungary, (Adopted 18 June 1999) European Roma Rights Center, Roma Rights Quarterly, “Discrimination Against Roma in Hungary” Nr 1. 2001 European Roma Rights Center, Roma Rights Quarterly, “Ombudsman Finds Discrimination against Roma in Education in Hungary” Nr 2. 2002 European Roma Rights Center, Position Paper, “Barriers to the Education of Roma in Europe: A position paper by the European Roma Rights Center” May 5, 2002 available at http://www.errc.org/publications/position/education.shtml European Roma Rights Center, Written Comments of the European Roma Right Center Concerning the Republic of Hungary. For Consideration by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (5-23 August 2002) Fredman, Sandra (Ed.), Discrimination and Human Rights: The Case of Racism, 2001 (Oxford University Press) Fredman, Sandra, Discrimination Law, 2002, (Oxford University Press) G. Havas, “Kitoresi pont: az iskola” (“Breaking point: the school”), Beszelo, November 2000 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2002: Hungary, Human Rights Developments available at www.hrw.org Hungarian Helsinki Committee, The Situation of Minorities in Hungary (October 1999) International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Adopted December 1965) International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights in the OSCE Region: Report 2002. International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Human Rights in the OSCE Region: Report 2001.

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Kádár, András, Lilla Farkas and Márta Pardavi, Legal Analysis of National and European anti-discrimination Legislation (September 2001) Report submitted for European Roma Rights Center, Interights, and Minority Policy Group “Implementing European Anti-Discrimination Law” Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (1995) Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI), White Booklet 2001. Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI), White Booklet 2000. Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI), White Booklet 1999. Népszabadság, “Két Tanévnyitó Jászladányban” August 30, 2002 Office for National and Ethnic Minorities, Selected News on the Social Integration of the Roma in Hungary (July – August 2002) Open Society Institute – EU Accession Monitoring Program, Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Minority Protection (2001) Open Society Institute – EU Accession Monitoring Program, Monitoring the EU Accession Process: Minority Protection (2002) Bíró, Anna Mária and Kovács, Petra, Open Society Institute – Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-Ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) High Commissioner on National Minorities, Report on the Situation of Roma and Sinti in the OSCE Area (2000) Roma Press Center, “Ombudsmani intelem a jászladányi polgármesternek” July 18, 2001 Swenden, Wilfried and Vermeersch, Peter, “The Dynamics of Ethnic Minority Policy: The Hungarian Roma and the Australian Aborigines Compared” (Working paper for presentation at ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, March 2002) Zoon, Ina, On the Margins: Roma and Public Services in Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, 2001 (Open Society Institute)

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Ethnic Hungarian Minorities:

Past, Present, and Future Patrick Burlingame

.................................................................................... At-Large pgburlin@yahoo.com

University of Szeged H-6725 Szeged Tisza Lajos krt. 103 Adviser: Dr. György Szo˝nyi

....................................................................................

1. Introduction "!Today, there are roughly 5 million ethnic Hungarians living outside the national borders of Hungary "!Most of these Hungarians live in neighboring countries of the Danube Basin. In particular: Romania (Transylvania/Erdély), Slovakia, and Serbia (Voivodina/Vajdaság) "!In many cases, portions of these countries are predominately Hungarian and have substantial historical and cultural importance for all Hungarians "!Unfortunately in a region known for its nationalism and recent conflicts, Hungarian minorities have suffered from discrimination and ethnic conflict

"!This presentation seeks to answer what the future holds for ethnic Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries given their past and current realities

2. The Treaty of Trianon "!In 1920, the victorious allies of WWI drafted and imposed the Treaty of Trianon to punish Hungary and Axis powers for their participation in the war "!France, Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom were the principle allied powers present at the Treaty. Also present were states that stood to gain including Romania, and the newly formed Serb-CroatSlovene and Czechoslovakian states 49


Student Conference 2003 "!The victors of WWI , in particular the French were eager to weaken the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and wanted to reward various nations that had assisted in the war "!Hungary lost approx. 2/3 of its former 1 territory (325,411 to 92,916 sq. km) , ⁄2 of its population (20,880,487 to 8,522,230 people), and 90% of its natural resources (including industry, railways, and other infrastructure) "!Likewise, Trianon is the basis for the substantial Hungarian ethnic minorities of present (1/3 of the population lost was Hungarian speaking) "!Although the treaty made Hungary an ethnically homogenous state, it seems small adjustments to Hungary’s borders as specified in the treaty could have been drawn to include many more ethnic Hungarians

3. The Hungarians of Romania (Transylvania/Erdély) Historical Background "!In the 10th century Hungarians settled in Transylvania "!Transylvania was part of a powerful medieval Hungarian Kingdom with 3 historic communities 1.) the Hungarians 2.) the Szekleys 3.) the Saxons. Hungary’s most famous king Matyas Korvinus was born in Kolosvar Transylvania "!Following the invasion of the Turks in 1526, Transylvania became an independent principality ruled by elected Hungarian princes "!Following the expulsion of the Turks 50

from the Carpathian Basin, Transylvania became part of the Austrian empire in 1711 and by the mid 19th century a key part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. "!Throughout the 18th century ethnic Romanians (who first appeared in the late 13th century) immigrated in greater and greater numbers to Transylvania to represent 58% of the population by 1780 (49.6% in 1720). Nonetheless, most Romanians refute these historical facts (wrongly) and claim the ancient Romans of Dacia (Transylvania) as their ancestors "!Transylvania prospered greatly under the Austro-Hungarian empire until it’s collapse in WWI and delegation to Romania under the Treaty of Trianon. A declaration of Transylvania’s union with Romania was made by the Romanian assembly in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia) on December 1, 1918 (currently Romania’s national holiday to the dismay of ethnic Hungarians) "!The Alba Iulia Declaration, considered to be the starting point in the creation of the modern Romanian state, promised broad–range rights to the “co-habiting nations” but Romania never ensured these rights. The 1923 Constitution declared Romania a unitary nation-state and made no mention of the rights promised in the Alba Iulia Declaration. Furthermore, the successive Romanian governments also ignored the minority agreement, which was signed before the Trianon Treaty on November 9th 1919, and was never ratified by the Romanian legislature "!After 1918, the national minority policy of the successive Romanian governments was aimed at depriving the Hun-


Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present and Future garians of Transylvania of their financial resources and network of institutions "!The Second Vienna Award of August 30, 1940 which returned Northern Transylvania and the Szekler Region (43,000 sq km with a population of 2.5 million, including 1 million Romanians) to Hungary, and the events which followed left indelible marks in the memory of Transylvania’s Romanian, Hungarian and German population. To this day Romanian nationalists manipulate the Romanian masses through the one-sided and distorted description of those wartime events "!After 1945, as a result of Soviet pressure, Romania regained Northern Transylvania, including the Szekler Region. For a brief moment, it looked as if the new Romanian government would seek a more equitable solution to the nationality problem. Law No. 86 adopted on 6 February 1945 (Nationality Statute), which has not been formally rescinded to this day, for the first time guaranteed collective rights for national minorities. In practice, however, the Nationality Statute was never implemented "!The events of December 1989 ending Ceaus¸escu’s dictatorship did not bring the anticipated liquidation of the communist–nationalist minority policy. The new Constitution and the legislation of the 1990s lagged far behind the rightful demands of the Hungarians in Romania and the promises of the Romanian political elite which carried out the changes of 1989. At the same time, the selforganization of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians once again became possible "!In December 1989, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (DAHR) was established, and took upon

itself the interest protection and political representation of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians. Even though the DAHR is made up of several different interest groups and platforms, it has to this day preserved its unity "!Current Situation- Some Positive Developments "!The Hungarian Consulate opened in Kolosvar in 1996 "!The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians (DAHR) participated in the ’96-’00 Constantinescu government in Romania "!Romania has signed and ratified numerous international treaties concerning minority rights most notably including The Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1997), European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (but still to be ratified), The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of National, Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992), and The Bi-lateral Friendship Treaty between Hungary and Romania (1996) "!Economically, Hungarians are one of the best off groups in Romania (linkages with Hungary/work ethic). There are over 3000 Hungarian ventures in Romania amounting to more than 140 million in Hungarian capital investment. "!The development of a strong Hungarian civil society with more then 300 NGO’s "!Substantial Hungarian language media has surfaced though with limited Romanian financial support "!Thriving Primary and Secondary Hungarian language schools, and some Hungarian language faculties at Babes-Bolyai University in Kolosvar 51


Student Conference 2003 "!Current Situation- Some Negative Developments "!Romanian Policy of resettling ethnic Romanians has continued to a certain extent (offering economic incentives) "!The ethnic Hungarian population has been decreasing due to lower birthrates (esp. when compared to ethnic Romanians) and massive emigration (over 100,000 people since the 1970’s) "!Though the new Romanian Constitution promises many minority rights, it is not observed or practiced to a great extent in actuality. Window dressing? "!The public administration law, adopted in 1991, mandated the exclusive use of the Romanian language. Only recent changes in 2001 have made an exception for areas where Hungarians consist of more then 20% "!Still no adoption of a proposed National Minority Law proposed by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians "!Continued racism and discrimination by ultra-nationalist Romanian political leaders (Funar the mayor of Kolosvar/ ’00 presidential candidate Vadim Tudor) and local Romanian police in Hungarian-majority areas "!Substantial controversy still persists over a watered down Hungarian “Status Law” and an independent Hungarian University in Transylvania (The Sapientia) "!Romania’s increasing importance as a future and highly strategic NATO ally, and possibly Romania’s substantial oil infrastructure, has made minority issues a distant issue in the eyes of the U.S.A and other international powers

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4. The Hungarians of Slovakia Historical Background "!The Hungarians of Slovakia first became a minority in 1918 with the establishment of the state of Czechoslovakia. Until then, their political, cultural, and national existence was similar to that of Hungary proper "!Of the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary which was part of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy, 61,633 square kilometers were attached to Czechoslovakia, with a total population of 3,517,568 according to the data of the previous census. Of these, 30.3% were Hungarians, 7.4% Germans, 48.2% Slovaks, and 12.3% Ruthenians "!Czechoslovakia assumed obligation under Trianon to observe minority rights but this obligation was ignored by the government. By the end of December 1920, 105,000 Hungarians were ethnically cleansed and forced to leave Czechoslovakia "!On January 1st 1923, the country’s administrative arrangement was changed. The creation of large counties with territory apportioned in a northsouth direction aimed at ensuring that the Hungarian population would remain a majority in few areas "!The dissatisfaction of Czechoslovakia’s numerous minorities was exploited by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. This resulted in the First Vienna Awards made in 1938, 11,927 square kilometers with 869,299 inhabitants (86.5% of them of Hungarian mother-tongue) were given back to Hungary


Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present and Future "!Following World War II, these territories were returned to Czechoslovakia, which resulted in the total deprivation of the civic rights of the Hungarian population and in a substantial second ethnic cleansing of Hungarians. President Eduard Benesˇ of Czechoslovakia advocated the complete removal of Hungarian ethnics minorities "!Under the so-called re-Slovakisation decree of June 1946, 327,000 persons were obliged to renounce their Hungarian nationality "!Following the complete communist takeover in February 1948, the open deprivation of civil rights suffered by the Hungarians diminished for a while "!However, after the famous “Prague Spring” of 1968, nationalism in the now dual Czech-Slovak state began to grow and further disenfranchise ethnic Hungarians "!This hatred would later be compounded with the independence of the Slovak state from Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1993 and the ultra-nationalist tendencies of PM Vladimir Mecˇiar and his followers "!However, with the collapse of communism in 1989, the Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia were able to start organizing themselves. In the wake of the change of political regime, they set up four political parties which merged 1998 to become the Hungarian Coalition Party (MKP) "!Current Situation- Some Positive Developments "!Slovakia and Hungary signed a bi-lateral friendship treaty in 1995 making special references to minority rights

"!Slovakia has been given a 2004 EU entry date. EU membership could well alleviate many problems for the Hungarian minority as the Slovakian government will have to answer to EU regulations and institutions "!In 2001 Slovakia joined the European Charter on Regional and Minority languages despite the fact that Slovakian law still directly conflicts with the charter in several areas "!On October 11, 2001 – Slovakia in partnership with Hungary rebuilt the Maria Valeria bridge between Esztergom and Parkany (Sturovo), the old remains of which had served as a bitter symbol to the bad relations between the two countries due to the minority issue "!Since 1998 and the replacement of ultranationalist Vladimir Mecˇiar (strongly anti-Hungarian), relations have improved somewhat. The Hungarian Coalition Party (MKP) even maintained 15 seats in parliament, making it the 4th biggest party in the country. "!Current Situation- Some Negative Developments "!There has been a slight decline in the Hungarian population, mostly accredited to “assimilation” (In 1961 Hungarians made up 12.4% of the population as opposed to 9.7% in 2001) "!Hungarian education has been in a poor state ever since WWII. There are inadequate and poorly funded Hungarian primary and secondary schools. In addition, 20% of native Hungarian speaking children in Slovakia are attending Slovakian-only schools. There are no Hungarian universities in Slovakia (only some cross-border cooperation with 53


Student Conference 2003 schools in Hungary) and no Hungarian faculties at Slovakian Universities despite a government promise for one at Konstantin University in Nyitra "!The recent Slovakian Constitution spells out minority rights in VERY general terms and fails to draft any definite legal guarantees. Serious amendments need to be spelled out in the years to come "!Economically speaking, Hungarian regions are significantly worse off due to 1.) Previous ethnic cleansing of landed peasantry and middle class before and after WWII 2.) Very little government investment in Hungarian regions 3.) Principally being agricultural regions with little opportunity and high unemployment "!State-funded Hungarian media and cultural activities almost non-existent "!Ethnic hatred has persisted in the past several years (vandalism of Hungarian consulate in Kassa/defaced Petofi Sandor statue near Bratislava) "!The Law on Re-privatisation which came into force in January 1991 allows only for the restitution or reclaiming of properties nationalized or collectivised after 1948. This is clearly detrimental to the Hungarian population. Likewise, the Land Law adopted in 1991 stipulates that lands whose owners are unknown or whose legal status is unsettled will become the property of the State Land Fund and not of the local self-governments. To this category belong all the lands confiscated from the Hungarian population between 1945 and 1948

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V. The Hungarians of Serbia (Voivodina/Vajdaság) Historical Background "!The Voivodina (Vajdaság) region has constituted the southern part of historic Hungary for a thousand years. During the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin, this territory has been the border region for both the Byzantine and Bulgarian empires "!By the end of the 14th century, the southern half of the vast territory between the Danube and Tisza Rivers had become the wealthiest, most densely populated and entirely Hungarianinhabited part of the Kingdom of Hungary "!The immigration of Serbian ethnic groups fleeing from the Turks began at the end of the 14th century "!The 1514 peasant revolt led by György Dózsa and the subsequent arrival of the expanding Ottoman empire in the following decades led to the destruction and depopulation of the region "!The area between the Danube and Tisza rivers was liberated from the Turks after Prince Eugene of Savoy’s victory at Zenta in 1697. Likewise, the region became a military border region for the Austrian Empire "!Between 1703 and 1711 the region between the Danube and Tisza rivers south of the Szeged–Szabadka (Subotica)-Zombor (Sombor) line became depopulated once again as a result of the mutually brutal campaign against Ferenc Rakoczi’s war for Hungarian independence and a subsequent plague.


Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present and Future "!The 19th century was overall a positive era (esp. after 1867), characterized by population growth, prosperity, and economic development. Peaceful relations between nationalities prevailed in spite of opposing national reform movements. The region became the rich food-pantry of the entire Austro–Hungarian Monarchy, with plenty left for export to the European markets. While retaining its dominantly agricultural character, its rich villages, modern cities, dense railroad network and busy waterways elevated this region to the level of the developed European countries "!Under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon following WWI, the predominantly Hungarian and German-inhabited Voivodina (55.4% of its population in 1910) came into a disadvantageous situation within the new Southern Slav State. Development came to a halt even in Szabadka (in 1910 the third largest city in Hungary), now located on the fringe of Hungary’s southern border. During the interwar period more then 80,000 Serbian “colonists” re-settled in Voivodina "!At the start of WWII the Kingdom of Yugoslavia fell apart and capitulated as a result of the attack by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria. Hungary re-occupied the northern part of the Voivodina region between the Danube and the Tisza "!Retribution followed WWII with thousands of executions and internments of Hungarians by Serbs, already decimated by war losses. Both the substantial Jewish and the German populations had dissapeared "!Under Tito’s Yugoslavia, Voivodina was given substantial autonomy and thrived, though Hungarian nationalism was seen

as very dangerous given it bordered Soviet aligned Hungary "!However, autonomy was swept away in 1988 by the “yoghurt” revolution, characterized by the collapse of Tito’s communist Yugoslavia and the rise of extreme Serbian nationalism at the hands of Milosˇevic´ "!The Yugoslav civil war of the 1990’s ended with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, sanctions by the international community, aerial bombings by NATO, and the fall of Milosˇevic´. Thus Ending one of the most difficult periods in contemporary history for the ethnic Hungarian population of Voivodina, while making possible the development of a qualitatively new and better political atmosphere in the region Current Situation- Some Positive Developments "!Since the early 1990’s various Hungarian political parties have appeared and participated in the Serbian government. Of particular significance is the Alliance of Hungarians in Voivodina (VMSZ) which since the elections of 2000 (postMilosevic) has gained 3 seats in the Federal Parliament and 6 seats in the Serbian Parliament as well as significant regional posts in Voivodina "!The Parliament of the Serbian Republic on February 24, 2001 repealed the illfamed law on information. This made it possible for information in minority languages to no longer come into conflict with discriminatory legal rules "!On February 4th 2002 the Serbian parliament under the post-Milosevic government passed a law returning regional

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Student Conference 2003 spheres of authority abolished under Milosevic. However, this has not meant a return to Autonomy nor the full recover of rights guaranteed under Tito’s generous 1974 Yugoslav Constitution "!On February 26th 2002, both houses of the Yugoslav Federal Parliament passed the law concerning the protection of the rights and freedoms of national minorities. In itself the law represents significant progress in the field of Yugoslav minority protection and its most important element is the recognition of the right of self-determination "!Relations between Hungary and Serbia have improved since the fall of Milosevic. The Hungarian government has donated 500 million HUF to assist and promote ethnic Hungarians in Voivodina "!The final version of the autonomy concept for Voivodina’s Hungarians was completed in 1999 with the participation of experts from Hungary. The document entitled “Agreement on the Political and Legal Frameworks of the Self-Government of Voivodina and the National Communities of Voivodina” puts the emphasis on the restoration of the provincial autonomy of Voivodina on the basis of an agreement with the government. The concept contains three forms of autonomy: personal self-government, territorial self-government, and provincial autonomy for Voivodina Current Situation- Some Negative Developments "!The issue of renewed Autonomy for Voivodina has not been granted or even been seriously considered by the

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National Parliament. Voivodina merely a geographical term by Serbian legal standards "!With the recent assassination of Serbia’s reformed minded Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003 minority issues in addition to most reforms could suffer a severe set-back "!Possible return to more nationalistic Serb attitudes depending on the outcomes of autonomy or independence for Kosovo and Montenegro "!Reminiscent of the recent Milosevic era, the January 25th 2001 ruling of the Serbian Constitutional Court prohibited the official and public life usage of Hungarian locality names "!Hungarian media suffered greatly under the Milosevic regimes hated “information law” (including loss of funding) from which it has not been able to recover. In addition, the consequences of the bombing of Hungarian radio and broadcast infrastructure in Voivodina by the US during the NATO air campaign remains "!A decreasing Hungarian population accredited to ongoing assimilation tactics, mass emigration (between 50,000100,000 people since 1991 in response to the war and to avoid military service), census manipulations, and the subsidized influx of “Serbian refugees” from Bosnia and Croatia "!Continued ethnic tensions against Hungarians, esp. by “Serbian refugees” who often have weapons. Examples include Hungarian grave desecrations, blackmail, and racist Graffiti


Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present and Future

6. Future Scenarios…

tives to remain in native countries has failed for the most part (the status law)

Migration Under this scenario, Hungarian minorities will continue to immigrate to Hungary or the west until essentially there are very few if any ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries. Regions where ethnic Hungarians have lived for hundreds of years will be abandoned. A sad prospect. Why this scenario might unfold…. "!There have already been tens if not a few hundred thousand migrants since the changes of 1989. The German community of Transylvania may serve as a good example of what may happen "!It is relatively easy for ethnic Hungarians to migrate as they 1.)Require only 5 years of residency in Hungary to achieve Hungarian citizenship 2.) Speak the language/understand the culture 3.) Often have substantial contacts and family members in Hungary "!Educational and economic opportunities in Hungary are significantly better then in neighboring countries "!Continued ethnic discrimination and harassment in neighboring countries gives people reason to leave "!The benefits of EU citizenship via Hungarian citizenship. Out of the neighboring countries, only Slovakia stands to enter the EU at the same time as Hungary, Romania has been given a 2007 entry date (highly subject to change) , whereas Serbia is very far from EU prospects "!Hungary’s attempts to stem migration by introducing educational/financial incen-

Assimilation In this scenario, ethnic Hungarian minorities feel abandoned or choose to stay behind for a number of reasons. Eventually they are assimilated into their respective countries of residence. Why this scenario might unfold… "!It may be argued that the massive waves of post-communist migration has ended leaving an aging and unskilled population with no desire or reason to leave Refuse to leave family, friends and their home town/village behind "!Undoubtedly, once Hungary becomes a member of the EU, stricter barriers and conditions will prevail for those wanting to leave Romania and Serbia. Hungary’s 2001 Status Law was passed in order to stem migration. "!Many ethnic Hungarians from neighboring countries feel rejected and looked down upon in Hungary. Accused by some of “stealing” jobs due to their willingness to work for less. Why leave home? "!Many ethnic Hungarians come from agricultural villages with no prospects in an urbanized Hungary. Better opportunities at home (esp. for those who choose to assimilate) "!Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia have all employed to varying degrees tactics of assimilation in their educational systems. A slow but on-going phenomenon "!Imposition of national pop-culture via

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Student Conference 2003 the media and the changing demographics of Hungarian towns and villages

Integration In this scenario, nationalism dissipates and regional partnership and trade increases. Regional Hungarian minorities become protected and cherished multi-cultural elements of historically multi-cultural regions. Hungarians may even serve as a “bridge” between Hungary and neighboring countries bringing a never scene before age of prosperity and understanding. Why this Scenario may unfold… "!EU membership seeks an agenda of integration, democracy, and regional prosperity. Hungary and neighboring countries are on an irreversible path to membership (Hungary/Slovakia in 2004, Romania in 2007, Serbia at some later date). Might EU membership make the issue of minorities irrelevant? "!Hungary and it’s neighbors have already made significant strides in improving their bi-lateral relationships through friendship treaties guaranteeing minority rights and continued partnership "!Hungarian investment and trade has significantly increased, especially in relation to ethnic Hungarian regions "!Attempts by Hungary to introduce legislation (such as the Status law), and by offering substantial aid and grants shows a commitment to support minorities in neighboring countries "!International treaties protecting minorities such as the The Council Of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the

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European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of National, Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities insure future Integration of which Hungary’s neighbors are signatory (to varying degrees) "!Prospects for regional autonomy are distinct possibilities in some localities, in line with EU norms "!It may be argued that neighboring states have made significant attempts to improve the situation of their minorities given their transitions from communist dictatorships not so long ago. Naturally, this is an ongoing process where only time is needed

Disintegration As witnessed in nearby countries, relations between ethnic communities might become inflamed and lead to independence, or reintegration with Hungary proper through regional referendum. Why this scenario may unfold… "!Similar scenarios of “disintegration” have recently occurred in the region including the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia or Slovakia’s break from Czechoslovakia "!Many Hungarian majority areas border Hungary in Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia "!In Serbia, Kosovo may become independent as well as Serb speaking Montenegro leaving the Hungarians as the only significant minority population. Why will they remain?


Patrick Burlingame: Ethnic Hungarian Minorities: Past, Present and Future "!Ethnic violence in the recent past, ethnic discrimination continues. Governments moving slowly to guarantee protection for minorities "!The possible election of ultra-nationalist politicians that would severely alienate ethnic Hungarians (some past examples – Vadim/Romania (run-off in last presidential election), Milosevic/Serbia, Meciar/Slovakia) and push them into scenarios leading to independence or reintegration

VII. Conclusion In a world where the nation state is often an entity based on one language, ethnicity and religion it will be important for Hungary’s neighbors to give special attention to their ethnic Hungarian minorities that remain central to Europe’s rich cultural heritage. In many instances, Hungarians have played substantial historic and cultural roles in these traditionally multi-ethnic regions. Countries should see their minorities as a strength rather than a weakness. This is especially important given the atrocities taken against minorities in 20th century Europe from the World Wars to as recently as the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. That said, of the four future scenarios outlined in this presentation, integration is the most likely outcome in the long-term not to mention the most optimistic. This is especially true given the agendas of neighboring governments and their drive for membership in the European Union. In accordance, Tibor Szabo, chairman of the government office for Hungarian minorities abroad has stated that:

The Europe of the future will be more united, stronger, more democratic and closer to the citizens than the present one. A Europe in which the notion and importance of absolute territoriality will fade away while at the same time the units above the state and the smaller ones below the state will become stronger. This will resolve the old dilemma of having to choose between the “nations of Europe” or the “Europe above nations” because the Europe of the 21st century will be a “community of communities.” Furthermore, disintegration is almost out of the question given the set nature of Hungary’s borders and the regions disposition for peaceful unity. It seems the scenario would only be remotely possible if dangerous and unlikely events unfolded (such as the failure of the European Union or the rise of an ultra-nationalist dictator). On the other hand, while it appears there has been some limited assimilation, migration will continue to be a the scenario of most probability in the near future. That is, until significant quantities of freedom as well as economic and educational opportunities have become sufficiently institutionalized for ethnic Hungarians in neighboring Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia. Perhaps, these countries can take the positive examples of other European minorities as an example (most notably the Swedes of Finland and the Alånd islands autonomous region).

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Selected References Act on Hungarians living in neighboring Countries (The Status Law). www.hungary.com/corvinus/lib/status/status.pdf Biró, Zoltan & Lôrincz, József D. (editors) (1999). Szeklerland In Transition. Miercurea-Ciuc, Romania: Pro-Print Cadzow, John F. (Editor) (1983). Transylvania: The Roots Of Ethnic Conflict. Ohio” The Kent State University Press. Council of Europe website. www.coe.int Including: - European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992) - ETS No. 14 -Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities (1995) - ETS No. 157 Daruvar, Yves de (1971). The Tragic Fate Of Hungary. Pennsylvania: Alpha Publications. Ethnic cleansing in post-World War II Czechoslovakia: the presidential decrees of Edward Benes, 1945-1948 . www.hungary.com/corvinus/lib/cze.htm European Union Website. www.europa.eu.int Government Office for Hungarian Minorities Abroad. www.htmh.hu Including: -Treaty on Good Relations and Friendly Co-operation between the Republic of Hungary and the Slovak Republic (March 19, 1995) -Treaty between the Republic of Hungary and Romania on Understanding, Co-operation and Good Neighbourhood (September 16, 1996) -Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the Republic of Hungary and the Government of Romania (December 22, 2001) -Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992) - Reports on Hungarians living abroad for Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia-Montenegro - All Graphs and Diagrams presented in this presentation Hevizi, Jozsa: Autonomy in Historic Hungary. A comparison of the treatment of minorities in the rest of Europe and Hungary. Jeszenszky, Géza (Hungarian Ambassador - June 28, 2001 remarks): “Restoration of Voivodina’s Autonomy: Model of Multi-Ethnic Stability”. The Capital building in Washington. Kálman Janics. (1982) Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority. New York: Columbia University Press. Köpeczi, Béla (editor) (1994). History of Transylvania. Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó. Ludanyi, Joó (editor) (1994). The Hungarian Minorities Situation In Ceausescu’s Romania. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Magyarody, S. J.(ed.)(2001):The East-Central European Syndrome.Unresolved Conflict in the Carpathian Basin. Toronto: Mathias Corvinus pub. Molnár, Eva (editor) (2001). Hungary Essential Facts, Figures, and Pictures. Budapest: Kossuth Printing House. Talks with various Hungarian University Students in Szeged from Transylvania and Voivodina. Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers of Hungary signe on June 4, 1920 (Treaty of Trianon) www.hungary.com/corvinus/lib/trianon/trianon.pdf Vadkerty K. (1993). Re-Slovakization. Bratislava/Pozsony: Kalligram Vago, Raphael (1989). The Grandchildren of Trianon. New York: Columbia University Press.

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The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on the Hungarian Agrarian Sector

Amy H. Liu .................................................................................. Smith College 98 Green Street Northampton, Massachusetts, 01063 http://www.smith.edu amy.liu@index.hu

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Budapest 1146 Ajtósi Dürer Sor 19-21 http://www.elte.hu Adviser: Tamás Magyarics

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Since the overthrow of Kadarism Hungary has long sought after a permanent member status in the European Union (EU). Hungarian policy makers have argued that with a membership, the Hungarian national economy would strengthen through the removal of tariffs, the permitting of unrestricted labor migrations, and the available external financial subsidies. Although the psychological and social benefits of such a marriage are additionally immeasurable, the impact of an accession on the agricultural sector is a topic of extreme controversy. Since the early 1990s, Budapest and Brussels have signed various agreements to facilitate the eventual merge, but at the present moment, it seems that the EU would still gain more from the bilateral agreements than its counterpart. This paper tests this preliminary observation on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels through eight case studies and three political scenarios, respectively.

Introduction In the years following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Hungarian foreign policy makers have been forced to seek a political substitute for the Warsaw Pact (WP) and an economic replacement for

the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). This drive would quickly translate into a decade of intense negotiations on one front with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 61


Student Conference 2003 and on another front with the European Union (EU). Along with the Czech Republic and Poland, Hungary entered the ranks of permanent members of NATO in March 1999, and since then, despite Kosovo and Iraq, Hungarian policy makers have praised this development as positive and the guarantee of a Western military assistance as beneficial. Similarly, these leaders have argued that with a membership in the EU, Hungarian economy would strengthen through the removal of tariffs, the permitting of unrestricted labor migrations, and the accessible external financial subsidies. Despite these seemingly advantageous developments, Hungary still needs to determine whether the benefits of an EU membership will outweigh the guaranteed setbacks in virtually all the agrarian sectors, from plum brandy to ground paprika to apple concentrates. Preliminary examinations reveal that the current domestic marketing structures and available qualities involved in the various meat industries–beef, pork, and poultry–do not complement the demands and standards pre-established by Brussels. The vegetable industry is facing similar obstacles; those involved in the fruit markets, especially the apple farmers of Szabolcs, could also fall prey both directly and indirectly to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The structural changes in the Hungarian economy in the past decade have included a decline in the significance of the agrarian sector in the national economy. In 1989 agriculture contributed to 13.7% of the gross domestic product, generated 22.8% of the export revenues, and employed 17.4% of the workforce. Currently, the figures have dropped to as low as 4.7%, 8.0%, and 7.1%, respectively.78

Although these numbers mirror the figures of several EU member states, it is nonetheless important to understand the underlying causes for this negative development. One important factor contributing to this phenomenon is the linear decrease in both the quantity and the quality of agricultural production and the log arithmetic decline in livestock following the reshuffle of the external market and economic conditions. Although Hungarian crop production levels have stabled since the tumultuous drop in the early and mid 1990s, animal husbandry has yet to provide evidence of a substantial recovery. As Hungarian policy makers continue to negotiate with the EU, they hope that with an accession the country will establish growing and steady markets, develop market access, and utilize all EU resources maturely. However, despite these seemingly logical objectives, the EU leaders have their own concerns to address and agenda to fulfill. The issue for Brussels is whether the organization will authorize unrestricted market access and adopt new members that bring to the table the potential to jeopardize the western European agricultural market equilibrium. At the same time, as the EU becomes less competitive on the world agricultural markets, the organization must develop its own untapped market access while minimizing its financial sacrifices. Brussels is also reluctant to pocket the costs of an enlargement despite the looming potential for expanding markets. The Hungarian and the EU basic production and marketing infrastructures, however, do not complement; on the contrary, they are competitive. It is evident that Hungary and the EU both carry different agendas and perspectives with regards to agricultural accession, and

78Statistical Handbook of Agriculture and the Food Industry, Budapest, Central Statistics Office, 1989-1999.

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Amy H. Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact... unfortunately, the latter holds more control in negotiating terms. And now having established the relationship between Budapest and Brussels, this paper will seek to identify the impact of the CAP on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels with regards to the fundamental principles of the trade liberalization agreement.

Fundamental Principles of the Trade Liberalization Agreement To understand accurately the relationship between Hungary and the EU, it is essential to detail the negotiation status between the two parties first. The fundamental preaccession agricultural trade dialogue was established by an agreement on trade liberalization, which in general terms can be divided into four elements–the “double zero,” the “quadruple zero,” the classical list, and the processed products principles. The “double zero” principle, the first component, reciprocally eliminated taxes on over six hundred agricultural products with no quantitative restrictions.79 The second component known as the “quadruple zero” principle abolished export refunds to include 3500 tons of cheese, 50,650 tons of pork, 101,250 tons of poultry, and 400,000 tons of wheat. This regulation, however, would also impact Hungarian imports of 3500 tons of cheese, 25,000 tons of pork and 15,000 tons of poultry.80 The “classical list” principle, the third component, provides further tariff reductions and quota increases without fully eliminating the taxes. This regulation would increase the Hungarian wheat export prefer-

ential quota from 290,000 tons to 400,000 tons, maize export preferential quota from 2000 tons to 100,000 tons, and tariff concessions from 80% to 100%. The quantitative restrictions on honey would be abolished and the tariffs would decease from 16% to 6%. However, in exchange, the EU would enjoy a duty-free benefit quota for 40,000 tons of rice and 100,000 tons of rye. Additional yields include apple juice, ground paprika, honey, mushrooms, and plum juice for Hungary and apples, cut flowers, and tomatoes for the EU.81 The fourth component contained the concession on processed agricultural products. This regulation abolished the industrial element, while granting the EU a 30% concession on the agricultural element, which will increase to 80% according to agreements. This element would translate to duty-free treatment of sweet corn, which currently stands as one of the most important Hungarian export items. In exchange, Hungary would have to reduce tariffs on agricultural product imports by 20% in the first year and 10% annually subsequently.82 It should be noted that this detailed trade liberalization agreement does not pertain to wines or spirits. Regulated by a separate contract, 400,000 hectoliters of wine have already received duty-free treatment as of January 1, 2000; however, these figures only reflect he miniscule benefits enjoyed by this industry with regards to tapping the western European markets. Preparations for more extensive agreements are currently under negotiations.83 Consequently, through the trade liberaliza-

79 “Földmûvelésügyi és Vidékfejlesztési Minisztérium,” http://www.fvm.hu. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 “Földmûvelésügyi és Vidékfejlesztési Minisztérium,” http://www.fvm.hu. 83 A personal interview conducted by the author with Szabó Csaba in October 2002 reflected the Eger vineyard owner’s frustration with the seemingly higher tariffs imposed on Hungarian wine. Szabó noted that certain products such as the Békés plum spirits and the Szabolcs apple spirits receive special benefits as a “protected food.”

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Student Conference 2003 tion agreement just outlined, more than three quarters of Hungarian agricultural exports can enter the EU market free of duty compared to the previous quarter. However in exchange, more than half of EU agricultural exports may enter the Hungarian market duty-free compared to the earlier 10%. According to initial estimates, the agricultural agreement on trade liberalization will increase Hungarian agricultural exports to the EU by 380-100 million, notably in the cheese, poultry, and wheat markets. An additional HUF 5-6 billion will be saved in export subsidies according to the “quadruple zero” principle, and Hungarian firms will also gain HUF 10 billion by the elimination of EU tariffs.84 Despite all these positive figures from the trade liberalization agreement, these advantages simultaneously translate into EU products also gaining easier access to Hungarian markets, which will inevitably prove detrimental for some domestic products. Although the EU has technically eliminated export refunds, the policy only applies to 9% of its agricultural products to Hungary, and thus, the organization sill maintains a competitive strength via export subsidies. According to preliminary estimates, Hungary’s agricultural imports from the EU may increase by as much as 340 million a year. The presence of products sold at lower prices is anything but beneficial to domestic producers, such as the rice and the vegetable oil producers. Both fear the imports of 40,000 tons of duty-free rice and the 10,000 duty-free vegetable oil quotas will prove too competitive for their own businesses. Another aspect of pre-accession negotiation worth noting is the approach to and the

application of the Special Accession Program for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD). Access to the annual 338 million that Brussels has allocated for Hungary depends on three prerequisites: the institution of the appropriate establishments, the compliance, acknowledgment, and fulfillment of proper applications, and the development of co-financing capacity. Current plans calls for the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to administer the SAPARD funds.85 The exact impact of the CAP on Hungarian agricultural prices, production, and exports inevitably depends on the specific industry examined. Nonetheless, generally speaking the agrarian prices are all expected to increase in varying degrees upon accession with the exception of vegetable oil. This development would be the byproduct of adopting higher CAP prices. However, with increasing production prices, consumer prices will naturally reciprocate this trend. This phenomenon could prove detrimental considering one third of the average Hungarian income is already spent on food.86 Therefore, while the farmer income would rise due to higher production costs, the average household income savings will drop. Although negative consequences can be counterbalanced with well-negotiated production quotas and carefully selected reference years, further agreements with the EU should be taken with great care as the detrimental impacts can potentially escalate and explode. An example is the delicate relationship between the beef and pork sectors; benefits enjoyed by the former are unfortunately at the expense of the latter. A detailed analysis of eight randomly selected food

84 “Földmûvelésügyi és Vidékfejlesztési Minisztérium,” http://www.fvm.hu. 85 Special Accession Program for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) Plan of Hungary 2000, Ministry of Agriculture and Regulation Development, p. 62. 86 Personal interview conducted by author with Somogyi Dora in September 2002, Budapest.

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Amy H. Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact... industries will seek to identify specific developments and establish general patterns in their prices, production, and exports as Hungary continues to negotiate with the EU. It should be noted that when applicable, only the higher CAP prices are applied to the figures referenced. Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #1: Apple As with most agricultural sectors, the apple industry witnessed a sharp decline in the volume of production from the characteristic 1.2 million tons of the 1980s to less than 400,000 tons by the end of the 1990s. Despite this setback, apple production still contributes to nearly 60% of the total national fruit production, and apple harvesting accounts for more than 40% of the land used for farming. With already more than two-thirds of the yields going into industrial processing, an accession would further damage a suffering sector. An EU membership would further setback production to as low as 200,000 tons due to insufficient commodity stock, and more importantly, quality prescriptions that are currently too strict for Hungarian apple farmers to satisfy.87 Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #2: Cereal According to Marosine Roszika, a professor at Szent István University, the development of prices, production, and exports of cereal, maize, and wheat is complicated, but at the same time, evidence of an industry that has much to gain from an EU membership. The real prices of cereal would decrease slightly, although the CAP and the benefits of compensatory payments would artificially increase cereal prices through the

year 2007. Prices are expected to stagnate after that point. However, with the introduction of higher CAP prices, Hungarian cereal production will increase from ten million tons to eighteen million tons, and exports figures will escalate from the present two million tons to ten million tons (without any external assistance, only seven million tons). Export expansion is expected to stagnate after 2007 due to the recovery of the animal husbandry and the increasing fodder consumption. Consequently, it can be stated that the impact of the CAP on the Hungarian cereal production and exports can be beneficial on a short term qualitative basis. Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #3: Wheat and Maize As the CAP regulation does not specify the different types of wheat, maize will be dealt in the same category with wheat. Without an EU membership, the real price of wheat would slightly decrease to 15,000 HUF/ton; with an EU accession, however, the prices are expected to increase to 20,000 HUF/ton by 2007. Maize prices are expected to move in conjunction with wheat prices. As for production figures, both wheat and maize have much to gain with external subsidies. Marosine predicated that without the CAP, overall wheat production would increase from the current four million tons to six million tons; maize production, from five million tons to six million tons. However, with an accession, wheat and maize production would each top seven million tons from their respective four million tons and five million tons. Marosine cautioned, however, that there would be some negative consequences incurred with the CAP. If production control were to be ever imposed on Hungarian wheat and maize

87 Érdész Mária, “Situation of Apple Production, Possibilities of Development in the Preparation for EU Accession,” Studies in Agricultural Economics, 1999, Agrárgazdasági Kutató és Informatikai Intézet, pg 81-88.

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Student Conference 2003 production, the numbers would be inevitably much lower as domestic producers would be forced to compensate their output financially. Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #4: Beef The beef industry is perhaps the most interesting food sector to forecast with regards to prices, production, and exports. Beef prices are expected to double over the next few years with an accession into the EU; such a development would exponentially increase beef production. Consequently, beef exports would increase dynamically from the present 1800 tons to over 60,000 tons in 2010.88

Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #6: Eggs Despite the dismal outlook for the pork and poultry sectors, Arik pointed to the egg industry as a good example of a beneficiary should Hungary successfully negotiate EU membership. Without an accession, the prices of eggs would decrease to 120,000 HUF/ton, and this negative trend would continue even beyond 2007. However, with a membership, prices would explode to as high as 160,000 HUF/ton in 2007, followed by an expected drop. Arik was not able to provide production and export figures for further analysis. Microeconomic Impact Case

Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #7: Vegetable Oil

Study #5: Pork and Poultry

Vegetable oil prices are perhaps the only statistics that are not expected to change significantly regardless of Hungary’s application to the EU. However, production and export figures are expected to suffer drastically with an accession despite minimal changes in the price. Mészaros Andras, a consultant for Vénusz, outlined the two extremes in this particular industry. Without a membership, vegetable oil production can be expected to increase gradually from half a million ton to 1.5 million tons by 2010. In addition with this surplus, export figures could potentially grow from the present 132,000 tons to over 600,000 tons by 2010. However, with a membership the scenario is extremely pessimistic. Production would not only stagnate but eventually decrease due to import competition, and consequently, domestic shortages will cause a negative trend in exports beyond 2007.

Although the detailed fate of the pork and poultry industries vary slightly, their current struggles against a strengthening beef market warrants similar concerns from those involved in both sectors. With external subsidies, pork prices are expected to escalate although the production numbers are predicted to drop to half of current levels by 2007. Poultry production are expected to decrease significantly well past 2007, causing a shortage to meet domestic demands; consequently, it will be inevitable to avoid importing such food products from the EU. This phenomenon facing the pork and poultry industries is due to the mathematical fact that the EU supports beef production at a much higher level.89

88 In a personal interview conducted by the author with Újvarosi László in December 2002, the Kecskemét cattle rancher noted that even with an EU membership, milk production is not expected to increase due to low cattle stock; consequently, milk export would not prove conducive. 89 In a personal interview conducted by the author in November 2002, Arik István of Herchihus Kft noted the additional factor that maize export would continue to remain more profitable than pork export hurts the pig farmers.

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Amy H. Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact... Microeconomic Impact Case

Study #8: Sugar The fate of Hungary’s sugar industry is perhaps one of the biggest unknowns at the current negotiation status. Magyar Zoltan, a contact representative for Magyar Cukor, presented several key figures in an effort to describe the delicate balance between this sector and the EU. Although the real price of sugar is expected to increase from the current 70,000 HUF/ton to 100,000 HUF/ton by 2007 with an accession, the fate of production is more difficult to determine. Magyar admitted that although the quantitative output would increase from its present 437,000 tons regardless, the production would rise to 520,000 tons without an accession or 700,000 tons with an accession. With domestic sugar consumption expected to double as a result of a higher national gross domestic product per capita, sugar export trends will also increase to 135,000 tons in 2007. The biggest problem pertaining to this industry is whether the Hungarian sugar sector would be able to secure new markets successfully in a market that is already saturated. Having illustrated the specific developments and the general microeconomic trend of an accession on several industries, the question to examine now is the exact macroeconomic impact on a macroeconomic level with regards to when and with whom Hungary enters the EU. It is definitely not an easy feat to predict the impact of accession on agriculture, considering neither the timing nor the political terms have been established definitely. The two aspects of timing and terms are strongly linked. Based on an outline drafted by Kiss Judit and further remodeled by Somogyi Dora, an attempt to identify three possible scenarios and their exact effect on the

Hungarian agriculture will follow–a full first wave by 2004, a partial first wave by 2004, and an accession after 2004. Macroeconomic Impact Scenario Study #1: Accession of the Full First Wave by 2004 This scenario not only presumes that the negotiations for accession, the ratification process, and the referenda on accession will all be satisfactorily completed by May 2004, but more importantly that the EU will have enlarged to include the 5+1 countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Cyprus). The probability of this scenario is rather unlikely due to the EU’s own current lagging internal conflicts with regard to the restructuring of the institutional system and of the agricultural policy, the infancy of the Euro, and the WTO negotiations. Differences in migration policy, agricultural supports, and regional parochial disputes make further assessments difficult to conduct. Agriculture would still be the biggest loser in an early accession even if the aforementioned problems could somehow magically be solved by 2004. Under this scenario the EU would be willing to integrate the agriculture of all six candidate countries, including Poland, which has a 25% agriculture population, if one, the predicted costs do not exceed the 2000-2006 budget and two, the organization’s own agricultural position is not compromised. Consequently, Hungary and the other first wave candidate countries would have to settle for lower compensatory payments, lower quotas, and less favorable reference years. All this would translate to production and growth far below expected potential, and in the subsequent years, Hungary and the other acceding

90 Personal interview conducted by author with Somogyi Dora, September 2002, Budapest.

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Student Conference 2003 countries would continue to remain in an unfavorable, disadvantageous position. Under this scenario preliminary estimates argue that Hungary would be denied of 31.2 billion in agricultural supports.90 Macroeconomic Impact Scenario

Study #2: Accession of a Partial First Wave by 2004 By accepting only the smaller first wave countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Cyprus), the EU would ease its financial burden and the public fears. This policy would also pose less threat to the internal cohesion of the EU, as only the more developed and prepared countries would gain accession. The weakened credibility of the organization would be strengthened and popular support for enlargement would increase. However, the exclusion of Poland, a politically and geographically critical candidate, would produce new tensions in the EU, in Poland, and in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet under this circumstance, the EU would be expected to be more generous in its agricultural supports compared to the first scenario. Higher quotas would be provided, reference years more favorable to the candidates would be accepted, and compensatory payments could potentially be granted. Under such scenario, the impact of agricultural accession on production, exports, incomes, budget, and modernization would be more compelling than the first scenario. The Hungarian Institution of Agricultural Economics and Information investigated the impact of an early accession. According to the modular findings, early accession would have a positive effect on producer prices, agricultural incomes, and agricultural

exports. The degree of price, income and exports growth, however, would depend on whether Hungary received compensatory payments. Hungarian agricultural producer prices could increase as much as 11.5% in 2003 than in 2002, and the income of Hungarian agricultural producers would rise by as much as 20.3%. If all goes well, agricultural producers would react positively to the price increases. Hungarian agricultural production would increase as a result of price increases and the introduction of compensatory payments and other premiums. Membership in the EU would have a negative impact on animal husbandry, with the exception of the beef sector, which is highly in demand even under the stringent CAP. Concerning the impact of accession on agricultural trade, the value of Hungarian agricultural exports would estimate to approximately 34 billion, with agricultural imports to approximately 32 billion. This would provide an agricultural trade surplus of 32 billion.91 Macroeconomic Impact Scenario

Study #3: Accession after 2004 Considering the EU has neither a definite enlargement strategy nor a detailed accession timetable, the policy to pursue is perhaps stalling. The EU is also further driven in this direction by the unresolved internal problems and the public fears of enlargement. The organization hopes to settle parochial disputes, strengthen internal cohesion, deepen integration, and allow Hungary and the other candidate countries to become more prepared and developed with the time it gains. According to this accession scenario, Hungary and the other candidate countries

91 Kiss Judit, “Az EU Kôzôs agrárpolitikájának 1999. Évi reformja és hatása a magyar mezôgazdaságra,” Budapest, Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2000, page 6.

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Amy H. Liu: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Impact... would encounter a different agrarian system. It is highly possible that the CAP will adopt a “more market and less support” policy due to external pressures from the United States and the WTO and for internal reasons, such as problems of competition, the budget, environmental degradation, and oversupply. These factors will significantly erode the conditions and the benefits that are currently being negotiated. The impact of accession on Hungarian agricultural production, exports, and incomes would consequently decrease quantitatively, although greater emphasis would be placed on rural development and environmental protection. If accession were to occur after 2004, there are furthermore two possible developments for Hungarian agriculture. According to the optimistic variants, the governments in power in Hungary will recognize the economic and social importance of agriculture, increase efforts to place agriculture on an export-oriented development policy, and strengthen production by increasing producer prices and encouraging investment. These efforts could solve the production, profitability, competitiveness, financial, and employment crises in Hungarian agriculture, increase agricultural production, livestock and agricultural exports, and modernize the industry overall. The consequent strengthened agriculture would then increase the national bargaining power, and hence, the Hungarian government can demand for higher quotas, negotiate for more favorable reference years, and seek for additional concessions with fewer compromises. One main question that remains is whether Hungarian agriculture can develop

maturely and expand into new markets beneficially without EU financial support and/or an accession into the organization. A second unknown variable is the direction in which the CAP will change in the meantime and how previously assumed concessions might change.92 According to the more pessimistic variant, the Hungarian government will fail to solve the agricultural problems with the country’s own resources. This would translate to a deepening crisis where production stagnates or declines, farmers’ incomes sink further, capital shortages endanger modernization and development, exports stagnate or decline while imports increase, the technical level and competitiveness of the national agriculture weakens, social problems intensify, and rural impoverishment continues to grow exponentially. Under such conditions, the Hungarian agriculture would depend on the EU agricultural financial supports even more; it is uncertain though by this point whether the country’s bargaining power will be too weak to obtain any benefits from Brussels. Although this scenario seems miserable, at the same time, the EU would most certainly perceive Hungarian agriculture in such a disadvantageous position as less threatening. Irrespective of this possibility, the mounting internal social problems would still be a deterrent.93

Conclusion It would obviously stand in Hungary’s favor to enter the EU when the organization is willing to provide more concession and to require few reciprocal concessions. If the new member states are chosen for their lev-

92 Kiss Judit, “Az EU Kôzôs agrárpolitikájának 1999. Évi reformja és hatása a magyar mezôgazdaságra,” Budapest, Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2000, page 7. 93 Kiss Judit, “Az EU Kôzôs agrárpolitikájának 1999. Évi reformja és hatása a magyar mezôgazdaságra,” Budapest, Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2000, page 7.

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el of preparedness and development, Hungary would stand a good chance of being one of the leaders. However, the question is whether a postponement of enlargement would slow the pace of preparation. It has already been established that the option of early entry with a second phase of agricultural integration in later years is not suitable. The various accession scenarios that have been detailed previously all predict a different fate for Hungarian agriculture. With an early accession, Hungary would enjoy EU resources in development and modernization. However, concurrently, it is uncertain whether with a weak agricultural component Hungary would be able to negotiate advantageously on quotas, reference years, and compensation payments. It was a never-questioned assumption that the negotiations between Hungary and the EU on the agricultural front would be con-

troversial. This paper sought to question the hypothesis that Brussels would still gain more than its counterpart from the trade liberalization agreements. It is evident from a macroeconomic perspective that Hungary has much to gain from either an early or late accession. What is has to lose, however, is on a microeconomic level. As seen from the case studies, many sectors will face intense competition, albeit domestically or abroad. This is where the EU holds the upper hand over Hungary with regard to the amount of financial assistance it is willing to allocate; naturally Budapest and Brussels do not see agree on the necessary figure. With the Hungarian national referendum just a couple weeks away, it will be interesting to see how this discrepancy in agricultural negotiations will affect the popular citizen’s vote.

Bibliography Érdész Mária, “Situation of Apple Production, Possibilities of Development in the Preparation for EU Accession,” Studies in Agricultural Economics, 1999, Agrárgazdasági Kutató és Informatikai Intézet, pg 81-88.

“Földmûvelésügyi és Vidékfejlesztési Minisztérium,” http://www.fvm.hu.

Kiss Judit, “Az EU Közös agrárpolitikájának 1999. Évi reformja és hatása a magyar mezôgazdaságra,” Budapest, Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2000.

Special Accession Program for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) Plan of Hungary 2000.

Statistical Handbook of Agriculture and the Food Industry, Budapest, Central Statistics Office, 1989-1999.

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The logical structure of relativity theory Jesse Alama .................................................................................. At-Large jessealama@yahoo.com

Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Reáltonda utca 13–15 H-1053Budapest Advisers: Hajnal Andréka and István Németi

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W

e discuss our Fulbright work in Budapest on applying the techniques and the spirit of modern mathematical logic to relativity theory, and lessons learned from having lived and studied in Hungary.

1. Introduction My Fulbright project rests on the hypothesis that the theory of relativity may be profitably investigated using the techniques of modern mathematical logic. The theory of relativity is regarded as one of the fundamental contributions to human thought; the theoretical and empirical implications of this theory have shaped the physical, mathematical, and philosophical views of the world in which we live. It is worthwhile, therefore, to investigate the foundations of relativity in more detail. On what assumptions does relativity rest, what are the reasons behind its predictions, and how do relativistic

hypothesis figure in relativistic arguments? With the help of my advisors, for the past eight months I have investigated relativity as a formal mathematical theory and have applied the tools of mathematical logic to it. As a result I have learned much about relativity, mathematics in general, and logic in particular. In this paper, I discuss the theories that I have studied and the problems that I have considered. I begin by discussing the character of modern logic and its role in my project. I then give an example of an elementary relativity theory and then discuss some of its properties. Finally, I talk about my 71


Student Conference 2003 current work, and conclude with some personal remarks on what I have gained from my studies in Hungary.

2. The spirit of modern logic Before discussing the results of my investigations, it is worthwhile to study the logical background that underlies the endeavor.

2.1. The origin of logic Logic is reasoning about reasoning; it studies why some arguments are valid while others are not, what constitutes sound deduction, and how the truth of a statement relates to the truth of others. Classical logic was focused on such arguments as “Every Greek is mortal, Socrates is a Greek, therefore Socrates is mortal�. The classification of these inferences was completed long ago (by Aristotle), and for a long time logic was regarded as a branch of rhetoric and philosophy. As the discipline matured, though, logic became a branch of mathematics. Modern logic offers precise definitions for the concepts it treats and it insists upon rigorous proof as the means of persuasion. Although mathematical style pervades the logic of today and can both clarify and obscure formal investigations, the object of modern logic is still human reasoning. Modern logic formalizes the notions of theory, validity, and proof, promoting them from fluid intuitions to mathematical concepts. Indeed, mathematical logic provides a definition for the concept of definition!

2.2. Logicization To specify a logical theory, we must choose a formal language and use it to express the basic assumptions we wish to make about a chosen domain of discourse. Once the theory has been specified, a number of 72

interesting questions may be treated. We may ask, for example, which statements are provable, whether our theory is consistent, and the extent to which the truth of one statement depends upon the truth of another. To help answer such questions, the tools of mathematical logic may be employed: mathematicians have discovered powerful theorems that give conditions on when formulas are provable, when a theory is complete (all true formulas of our domain are provable in the theory) or incomplete (some true formulas must be unprovable), and whether we may mechanically deduce in a finite number of steps whether any given statement is true. After capturing the basic assumptions of our domain, we investigate the formal theory we have obtained. We may discover, for example, that some statement which we would expect to be consequences of our formal theory are, in fact, not provable. Conversely, we may find proofs for some statements which we expect to be false. In the course of our investigations we may also find that the approach that underlies our choice of assumptions ought to be changed entirely. In each of these situations we modify of the axioms; we reconceive the basic truths of our chosen domain. The result is a new formal theory, and by repeating this process we obtain a hierarchy of formal theories, each expressing its own point of view on our subject.

2.3. Prospects of logicization for relativity There does not appear to be any a priori restriction on the domains of discourse to which the logical method can give insight. Indeed, logic has been applied to economics, linguistics, biology, and many others. The goal of my research is to study the extent to which the logical method may be successfully applied to relativity theory. The language of


Jesse Alama: Tht Logical Structure of Relativity Theory relativity theory is quite simple: it talks only about light, observers, events, and a handful of a few other concepts. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that relativity may be formalized and that the resulting formal theory is manageable. That is, we may hope that formal theory of relativity will be rich enough to admit interesting theorems, but not too rich to make those theorems impossible to discover and to prove. I am pleased to report that these expectations have been borne out and that the formalization of relativity theory has been successful so far.

1. [Observers] and [photons] are [bodies]. 2. With respect to each [observer], the [trace] of each [body] is a [line]. 3. Each [observer] [observes] itself [at rest]. 4. Each [slow line] is the [trace] of an [observer] with respect to some [observer]. 5. Each [fast line] is the [trace] of a [photon] with respect to some [observer]. 6. All [observers] [observe] the same set of [events]. 7. Each [observer] [observes] the [trace] of each [photon] as a [fast line].

3. A special relativity theory

Axiom 1 is straightforward: it puts under the common heading (body) two classes of objects that we wish to consider: observer and photon.

III.1. Basic axioms For the first few months of my project, I studied the various relativity theories that my advisors have proposed. In this section, I discuss a particular formal 3 theory, called BASAX (for ”BASic AXioms”), which is supposed to capture some assumptions of special relativity. The design of a theory of relativity in general, and BASAX in particular, begins with a study of the language employed in relativity. Nouns such as observer, and photon, and verbs such as observe, are isolated. Then, using these terms, assumptions such as ”nothing travels faster than light” and ”no observer is special” are formalized and regarded as axioms. The nouns of BASAX are trace, observer, body, photon, line, and event. We shall need only one verb, observe, and three adjectives, at rest, fast, and slow. Intuitively, observers observe events, which are made up of bodies, and traces, which are the paths that bodies mark out in time. Fast lines are the traces of photons (which play a distinguished role in relativity), and slow lines are the traces of things that move slower than light. In English, the axioms of BASAX assert:

Axiom 2 is somewhat ad hoc: it implies that bodies move at a uniform velocity, that is, they do not accelerate. This assumption simplifies dealing with the theory. Later, we will drop this axiom and allow for accelerating observers, but with an added cost of making the theory mathematically more complex. Axiom 3 is called the Galileian principle of relativity. It states that an observer can, without committing any impropriety, regard himself at rest and all others as in motion with respect to him. Axiom 4 may be regarded as a license for performing thought experiments. When we are investigating some phenomenon geometrically, axiom 4 guarantees that each slow line that we draw will be the trace of some body. Axiom 5 is similar; it says that each fast line will represent some photon. Axiom 6 asserts that the speed of light is the same for all observers, an assumption that plays a special role in relativity theory. Like 73


Student Conference 2003 axiom 2, this axiom is somewhat restrictive. Indeed, it is not entirely true: the velocity of light in water is not the same as the velocity of light in a vacuum. By adopting this axiom, we were strict ourselves to situations in which light moves through a uniform medium.

3.2. Elementary consequences The six axioms of BASAX constitute a simple theory of relativity. As we shall see in the next section, even though there are only a handful of assumptions, many interesting results follow from them. One such result states that no observer can travel at the speed of light. In other words, photons are distinguished. This result squares with what has been predicted in the past by physicists, but it is interesting to note that our result has been obtained in a different manner. Instead of appealing to an equation, our result has been derived purely logically. Moreover, the concepts of mass and energy play no role in our axioms, but the usual proof of this result does make use of these concepts. Put another way, we can say that it is already true in relativistic kinematics that no observer can travel at the speed of light; we do not need relativistic mechanics (which makes use of mass and energy) to infer this. Another interesting result gives the condition on which an observer can travel faster than light. It turns out that in threedimensional space, like the space in which we live, faster-than-light travel cannot occur, although it is possible under special conditions.1 Like the previous result, this theorem makes no use of the 1It turns out that if the dimension of space is assumed to be one, that is, if bodies travel along a straight line, then faster-than-light travel is possible. 5 concept of mass, which is involved in the usual arguments excluding the possibility of faster-than-light travel. 74

Finally, there is a famous prediction of special relativity which is a consequence of the basic axioms. It turns out that the concept of simultaneity cannot be independent of observers; it is possible that what is simultaneous for one observer is not simultaneous to another. My own work in the autumn was a study of the axioms which give rise to this “relativity of simultaneity� and a related phenomenon in which observers can disagree about the order in which two events occurred.

3.3. Modifying the theory The logical study of relativity theory does not end with the specification and investigation of a single theory like BASAX. In order to understand more fully what relativistic assumptions imply what relativistic predictions, other, competing theories are proposed. The basic axioms have been weakened, strengthened, abandoned, each time yielding a new theory that, in a sense, has its own point of view. In their seven years of work on this project, my advisors have proposed more than four dozen special relativity theories. The result has been a penetrating investigation of relativity by studying the consequences of making small changes to the axioms.

4. Generalization and outlook 4.1. From special to general relativity So far, we have focused only on special relativity theory. In special relativity, a central hypothesis is that no acceleration takes place. This assumption was captured in axiom 2 of BASAX, and it arises in one form or another in each of the special relativity theories that my advisors have proposed.


Jesse Alama: Tht Logical Structure of Relativity Theory Even though it has practical benefits of simplifying calculations, we may regard the assumption that bodies do not accelerate as an ad hoc device, and we should modify this assumption if we want to make more accurate models of our experience in which bodies move at non-uniform velocities. Einstein thought this way, too, and proposed a way to get rid of it; the result is called general relativity theory. The special principle of relativity says that if two observers move in straight lines with respect to each other, then they are the same from a physical point of view; the laws of physics according to one will be essentially the same as for the other. The general principle of relativity is a straightforward generalization of the special principle. The general principle says that the laws of physics will be essentially the same for all observers no matter what their relative motion may be. Rather than trying to modify the hypothesis that no acceleration takes place, Einstein’s solution was to simply drop it. Because it makes fewer assumptions about the relative motion of observers, a broader range of possibilities arise when we move from special to general relativity. For example, one of the axioms of BASAX postulated that the traces of bodies, the paths which bodies make in time, are straight lines. This hypothesis is dropped in general relativity theory, and the traces of bodies may now have quite diverse shapes. In logical terms, this means that the class of models of general relativity theories are larger and more diverse than models of special relativity theory. Mathematically, general relativity theory is more difficult to address; indeed, the language of advanced mathematics is used just to state many of the definitions and describe even the most elementary models. Despite the complications, there is some hope that the logical method which was applied so

successfully before may give some insight into general relativity. Indeed, this is the hope that lies behind my current research on acceleration.

4.2. Accelerating from slower to faster than light Is it possible to accelerate from slower to faster than light? We saw earlier that BASAX implies that an observer can never travel at the speed of light, so, in particular, it is impossible to travel from slower than light to faster than light because at some point the observer must travel exactly at the speed of light. Despite these signs pointing toward the impossibility of the desired acceleration, the statement of the problem does make sense from a kinematic point of view, and we may ask what axioms we must modify in order to allow the possibility of accelerating so much that one can pass a photon. My advisors and I, together with a couple other students, are currently working on this problem. The answer remains unknown, although there are signs that, in fact, it is possible to pass a photon under reasonable, natural relativistic hypotheses.

5. Other activities and lessons learned In addition to my work on special relativity theory, I have been involved in a number of other activities in Budapest that I would like to share. In October, I attended a logic conference in Linz, Austria, at which I met a number of mathematicians and informed them of my Fulbright work in Hungary. In November, I gave a talk at a conference in honor of the 60th birthday of one of my advisors, István Németi. The audience consisted of mathematicians and logicians who talked out how István’s work had 75


influenced their own. My contribution to the conference was to give an introduction to my advisor’s work, which remains largely unknown outside of Hungary. My talk was successful and wellattended, the audience asked a number of interesting and intelligent questions, and I met many Hungarian mathematicians. At István’s conference I was introduced to the mathematician Mikl´os Ferenczi. Mikl´os has written a large introduction to logic for engineers, and I am assisting him with the translation of his work from Hungarian to English. This term I am also taking two classes through the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (BSM) program. Two years ago, in the spring of 2001, I was a student in the BSM program while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, and it was my first introduction to Hungary. Indeed, I met my advisors while I was studying mathematics here in 2001, and first had the idea of coming back to Hungary to work with them. This term, I am taking Topics in Geometry and Differential Geometry. Both of these classes are related to my work because they focus on geometrical methods used in relativity. Through the same program, I organized a problem-solving seminar. My hope was to propose problems from a famous Hungarian problem book, Problems and Theorems in Analysis, by the Hungarian mathematicians György Pólya and Gábor Szegô. This book (and the works of György Pólya in general) has influenced my mathematical development; my goal was to teach in Hungary some of the methods of Pólya and Szegô. Unfortunately, the seminar was not well-attended, although there were a References [1] Einsten, Albert. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. [2] Andéka, Hajnal, Madarász, Judit, and Németi, István. “On the logical structure of relativity theories”. Available at http://www.renyi.hu/pub/algebraic-logic/Contents.html

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few interested students. Quite recently, a new contact has been made with András Simon of the Alfréd Rényi Institute. András and I may work on problems in logic together.

6 Conclusion My work has, on the whole, been successful, but it has had its ups and downs. I have learned a number of lessons that I would like to share. First, this has been the first major research project in which I have been involved. I have been given a great deal of freedom to work as I please, and I have gone through a number of times when I have wandered around not quite knowing what to do next. I am grateful for having had this opportunity, because I believe that by facing the struggle of keeping myself engaged in my work I will be a better researcher in the future. Second, the relation between me and my advisors has evolved. In the beginnings of the project, I viewed them as a source for structure. It became clear later on that my advisors did not play this role, and that I was more independent that I had imagined. After an initial orientation period, it saw that it was up to me to propose my own problems. Again, I am grateful for having had an opportunity to struggle with this independence, because I feel that I am a more independent person for having gone through it. Finally, living in Hungary has been a powerful maturing force. I believe that I have grown up considerably by living in Budapest, and I am grateful for the opportunity that the Fulbright Commission has given to me to study here.


Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University Richard D. Moore

.................................................................................. At-Large seement@yahoo.com

Debrecen University Kassai utca 26, 4028 Debrecen Adviser: Dr. Tibor Glant ieas@tigris.klte.hu

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T

his paper is merely a description of my experiences as a teaching assistant at Debrecen University. I hope that it can serve as a guideline or useful reference for other future teaching assistants in Hungary. I wanted to try and accurately describe the courses I teach as well as the techniques that I have used. The first section details what I specifically have tried to accomplish as a teaching assistant. The second section explains which techniques have worked and which have failed followed by some brief explanations. The last section consists of a few very general observations that I have made during the course of the year about the university and students. Also, I conducted an extremely general survey with some random students to help emphasize my observations.

1. What have i tried to accomplish as a teaching Assistant at Debrecen Univiversity? I am currently a teaching assistant in the English language department at Debrecen University. To be completely honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect and only had a faint idea about how I was going to assist the Debrecen

language department and specifically what the department expected from me. I met with my supervisor, Kiss Judit, two days before the school year started and she informed me that I was responsible for teaching four language courses primarily to first year students. However, one of the classes was designated for “Kiegeszito,� or students who already 77


Student Conference 2003 have a degree and are upgrading it. A majority of these “Kiegeszito” students are currently English teachers in primary and secondary schools throughout Hungary. Each of my classes is one-hour and forty minutes long, once per week. Kiss Judit instructed me that my first task was to write a course description that would appear in the University’s course catalog that students would use during the registration process. I was given absolute flexibility on what curriculum to use for the courses. Also, I was told to submit a syllabus as soon as possible outlining each week’s topic, as well as a list of the course materials from which I would be teaching. Again, the course description, syllabus, and course materials were all at my discretion. Kiss Judit did give me some advice on how to prepare the core curriculum for my classes by saying that the students already have grammar, writing, and vocabulary courses, and it would be beneficial for a native speaker to “tie it all together.” I immediately asked if I could see a sample of a previous language course description by either a former Fulbrighter or native speaker, but the librarian was unable to find a copy or be of any assistance. I think the problem was due to the fact that school was just starting, and things weren’t up and running quite yet. I didn’t have time to follow up because the academic year started three days after I arrived. I decided to design my courses to resemble a prior college speech class, a Toastmasters’ session, as well as setting aside time for grammar and vocabulary review through simple warm-up exercises. I decided that the primary focus of the class should revolve around students being given the opportunity and forum to speak as much as possible about a wide ranging variety of topics. I also chose to implement listening exercises that would challenge the students to be able to 78

distinguish a native American accent rather than a British one to which they were accustomed. My course description read, “The class is designed to offer students an opportunity to improve their language skills through oral-aural (listening and speaking), creative writing assignments, and challenging vocabulary and grammar exercises.” The main goal of the class was to speak and be understood by a native English speaker and to understand what was spoken. I wanted to ease my students into public speaking by starting out with comfortable topics that didn’t require a certain position or answer in order to gradually progress towards more difficult and challenging position speeches and debates. I wanted to take the students out of their normal comfort zone by setting strict guidelines on exactly how the speeches were to be presented. I designated a specific time limit for each speech ranging in the beginning from two minutes, to the final speech of four minutes. I didn’t allow the students to use any notes, with the exception of the debate-style speech. I also designated an “Ah, um and uh” counter to help students realize the amount of verbal pauses they make during a short two-minute speech. This helped achieve another specific aim of the course, which was to get students speaking in a fluid and relaxed manner. In addition, every speech had to be given standing in front of the entire class. There were no exceptions. I deliberately put heavy emphasis on the importance of class participation and urged students to earn points by constructively criticizing their fellow student’s grammar, sentence structure and word usage. During students’ speeches, I did my best to make as many notes as possible in order to pick out grammatical errors, and problems with sentence structure and word usage. At the end of each speech, I first let fellow students have a chance to constructively criti-


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University cize their peer’s speech. I then went over, in detail, all the mistakes that I found with it. Here are a few introductory speeches that I assigned: If you had the opportunity to host a dinner party and you could invite three guests from either the past, present, or even future, who would you choose and why? If you had the opportunity to go back in time and change one decision that you made, which one would it be and why? A second goal of my course was to test the student’s aural abilities through a number of different exercises. In the beginning, I found that a majority of my students had a difficult time understanding my Southern Californian accent. I think this was partially due to the fact that a majority of the students here were taught by British teachers, or their primary school Hungarian teachers picked up the accent, because they were taught by British teachers. I chose material from current Newsweek and Time periodicals that I thought would interest the students. I soon realized that the vocabulary was extremely difficult for the students so I picked out the words beforehand that I thought would be too difficult, defined them and then went over them with the class before I would read the articles. Depending on the length of the article, I would ask the students to write a two- paragraph summary about what they thought was the main idea of the article. I would read the article twice, then give the students roughly fifteen minutes to produce a summary. I also felt it was important for the students to hear how American English is spoken on the streets and among people their own age. I wanted to I pick out three movies that could provide enough material to enable us to have serious class discussions and debates. I selected American History X, Higher Learning, and Bowling for Columbine. The movies were shown without English subtitles and the students were expected to

take notes to help them prepare for the speech I assigned at the end of each movie. I told my students they should be able to understand a minimum of 70% of what was spoken. When I felt that the dialog or vocabulary became a little too hard, I would rewind a particular scene and explain. I encouraged students to ask me to stop the movie at any point if they didn’t understand something, but that rarely happened. A third goal of my course was to introduce new vocabulary, phrases/idioms, proverbs and slang that are specific to American English and widely used. I was able to locate several books in the library, as well as numerous sources on the internet. I tried to give the students a chance to familiarize themselves with the relevant lexical items and to integrate them through various kinds of exercises into their active vocabulary. They were given extra points if they could accurately use these words and phrases in future speeches. A portion of the final exams will also test the students’ knowledge on these items. One of my best resources came from the Regional English Language Office in Budapest. I had the opportunity to meet Damon Anderson, an English Language Officer, and he gave me an extremely useful book titled, Effective Techniques for English Conversation Groups. I used this book for virtually every class I taught during the first semester. The book gave me ideas for conversational elements, specific dialogues, speeches, debate topics, commonly used proverbs, small-group discussions and improvisations. Throughout the semester, I spent about two class sessions on each of the above- mentioned topics when a speech or listening exercise wasn’t assigned for that particular day. I spent extra class time on improvisational speeches, which I remembered from my days in Toastmasters. This really helped students to be creative, think 79


Student Conference 2003 on the spot, search for vocabulary words and, overall, helped prepare them extemporaneously. I noted that improvisational speeches and discussions really challenged my students to think on their feet. I found that most Hungarian students do not like extemporaneous exercises. This was yet another way to challenge them to leave their comfort zone of learning, which generally involves zero or little class involvement or requires them to be proactive. I took the opportunity to explain the concept of “thinking outside of the box,” which led me to try a heuristic learning approach that would allow students to encounter information and derive their own conclusions. I would read some controversial statements or spark a debate by giving the students “hot topics” to research and have them prepare a position speech to defend in front of the class. I would allow the students to use notes because I stressed the importance of these particular speeches and wanted the students to be able to prepare and form sound arguments. I sometimes assigned people to give pro and con statements about topics that they necessarily didn’t believe in, such as the death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, and drug legalization. The language department also assigned me to a team with four other colleagues to help design the first ever EYE (English Yardstick Exam) that would be administered to all freshman students at the end of this year. I was asked to be on the committee for the sample speaking and reading tasks. The University decided to implement this test because the level of the students’ command of English has dramatically dropped over the past few years. If students fail, they are put on a probationary period for one year. For the reading section of the test, I was simply asked to go to a recording studio and record my voice as the proctor of the exam. For the 80

speaking section, I have met about four times, for a few hours, with two other colleagues in the department, to go over ideas and topics that could be used for the test. We had to come up with tasks that would fit each individual phase of the speaking section. Please refer to Attachment A for examples. Finally, I also placed heavy emphasis on my office hours to try and encourage students to come in and talk about problems they were having in my class, other classes, in school, or even personal problems they might be having. After every class, I told my students that my door was always open for any “help” they might need. Some of the freshman students asked me if I would be willing to hold additional classes to help them prepare for the EYE exam at the end of the year. I’m currently trying to form two study groups that can meet for a few hours a week at a local coffee shop.

2. Which teaching techniques have worked and been successful and which have failed? Why have they worked and why did they fail? One of my most difficult challenges in teaching a language course was preparing assignments and subject matter that could reach the entire class. During my first semester, I quickly found out that there was a large gap between the student’s abilities. Roughly half of the students I considered to be at an “advanced level,” while the other half was at a “beginner level,” at best. I realized that the majority of the work load and assignments were challenging enough for the advanced students, but much too difficult for the beginners. These gaps became extremely obvious when the students presented their speeches. By assigning speeches every other class session, it really allowed the


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University students to practice speaking and as a group learn from individual mistakes. Although many students weren’t too happy about giving speeches in front of the class, towards the last few class periods, almost all of my first semester students told me how valuable they thought this opportunity was. Speaking was the core curriculum of my course. In contrast, this is where I encountered my first real dilemma in the classroom, the concept of volunteering. I completely expected the students to be shy and hesitant for their first few speeches and to be unwilling to volunteer to go first. I had no idea how difficult it would be to get ANY of my students to volunteer for ANYTHING. Usually, students in any country do not like to volunteer for additional assignments or tasks that they don’t necessarily have to do. However, I couldn’t understand why students would not volunteer to do their speeches, despite the fact that they all knew at one point during the lesson they would have to do it for a grade. I took it as a personal challenge not to have to call out individual names each and every time a speech was due. I wanted the students to be professionals and to decide among themselves who would be the first to go and so forth. I soon realized that in every class we would sit in silence for about ten minutes until I would give up and call a random name from the list. Not one student was willing to volunteer to go first or second, or third for that matter. I tried numerous tactics to try and motivate or convince my students to be proactive and take control of the situation. Many American students have the notion that by going first they can get it out of the way and relax the rest of the class period. This concept is alien to Hungarian students. I then decided that when a speech was due, I would multiply the length of the speech by the number of the students and add an additional two-minutes for com-

ments and constructive criticism. Therefore, if there were fifteen students in my class and the assigned speech was supposed to be two minutes long, I would allot sixty minutes of class time to finish all the speeches. I would start my watch and tell the students that they had sixty minutes to present their speeches to me. I wouldn’t call on anyone and would simply say that once sixty minutes has passed we would stop and move on to the next assignment. Those students who didn’t finish their speeches failed and I didn’t allow them to make it up during my office hours. Inevitably, each and every time they would sit in silence and stare at each other waiting for a fellow student to volunteer, thereby wasting their allotted time. When the time elapsed, I always had to fail three or four students. It was so absurd to me that students who actually prepared for the speech would fail it simply because they didn’t want to volunteer. At first, I thought maybe they were too shy and really had a genuine fear about speaking in public. But, if I called on them individually, they would do it and generally deliver excellent speeches. This bothered me tremendously during my first semester and continues to be a problem this semester. Another problem that I found was that the students who were struggling wouldn’t have the courage to stop me when they were unclear about something or come to me after class to let me know that they were falling behind. I constantly asked the students during and after each lesson if they understood or needed further explanation on a particular speech, lecture or assignment. Each and every time, all of the students reluctantly said “No.” It was because of this reluctance that I decided to challenge the students who I thought were struggling and simply too embarrassed to speak up. I soon realized that as a group the students would all say they understood a particular 81


Student Conference 2003 lesson, but when called on individually they said, “I don’t understand.” This fear or embarrassment became a very big problem in all of my courses. When we would cover material, I couldn’t tell who understood and who didn’t, unless I randomly called on somebody and asked him/her directly. I found this to be a sharp contradiction to a collegiate classroom in America. From my own experience, students at my university (which roughly is the same size in undergraduate students) would never hesitate to stop the professor to comment or ask a clarifying question. If a professor at my university lectured for an entire class period and then opened it up for a questions and answers, I can’t recall a time when not a single student commented or asked a question. Professors encouraged their students to participate and be proactive. They would state, “If one student has a question, then often times many students in the class have that same question” or, “There are NO stupid questions.” I tried to relay this same concept to my classroom, as well, but to no avail. Students never asked me questions, challenged me, or spoke up when they didn’t understand something. As I mentioned before, the classroom environment was a one-way dialog without any random discussion or interaction between teacher and student. I could not figure out why Hungarian students did not interact with each other let alone their professors. Classroom participation was a concept that I couldn’t get across. I constantly reminded them that classroom participation made up roughly 25% of their final grade. When I asked one of my colleagues for help and advice for solving these problems, Dr. Csontos Pal informed me that they are a direct result of the Prussian system of education. He explained that in this system students were not encouraged to be individuals, but rather members of a group. 82

You didn’t receive any special privileges for standing out or taking initiative. Also, under communist rule everybody was supposed to be equal; so you didn’t want to stand out. This mentality seemed to be the answer for a lot of my struggles during the first semester. I realized that students with strong language skills were ashamed to stand out and contribute ideas to class discussions, just as students with weak language skills would rather not understand than to ask for clarification or help. Dr. Csontos also went on to say that rewards were never given to individuals, only to groups. “Uttoro” teachers conditioned their students to behave this way. I thought to myself that this can’t be, it’s the year 2003. Surely these young students don’t still harbor this destructive mentality. Most of my students are between the ages of 18-22 which would mean they were subject to this style of education for only a few years from Kindergarten on to first grade. However, Dr. Csonots also said that there are still teachers who don’t want students to speak up or behave in a certain way. I then drew an immediate link from my most problematic class with respect to this mentality, the “Kiegeszito” students who are upgrading their degrees. The majority of them are between the ages of 25 and 40, teaching in primary and secondary schools in Hungary. Ironically, a majority of these students turned out to be “beginner level” students, which is a bit frightening, because they are currently teaching English! This behavior that Dr. Csontos mentioned was extremely obvious in these particular classes. I had to literally threaten students to participate in classroom discussions, stand up during their speeches, and, of course, volunteer to give them. I remarked after the first day in my journal about how angry they looked during class and how many times they asked me, “Do we have to speak?” I found that many of


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University them were too embarrassed to speak or didn’t want to stand out and be heard. I asked on a daily basis why they attended this class if they didn’t want to practice speaking and improve. I didn’t get many responses, and the students who did respond said, “Because we have no choice.” Case in point came when a few “Kiegeszito” students had to mix in with one of my freshman classes due to scheduling conflicts. It was painfully obvious that a majority of the freshman students had a much better command of the language than they did. I noticed that they often missed the days they had to give speeches and refused to willingly participate in classroom discussions to earn points. They would often ask to make up their speeches during my office hours. I even had one “Kiegeszito” student tell me that she thought some of the freshman students were “arrogant” for volunteering and always commenting during discussions. I thought a majority of these above mentioned problems were partially caused by the gap between the individual skills of the students. I constantly rearranged topics and assignments so students with weaker language skills wouldn’t feel so lost. Again, this was all assumption on my part because my students would never tell me if an assignment was too difficult or too easy. It was very hard to find a line that challenged the advanced students but not lose the beginners. After the first semester, I decided that I needed to make some drastic changes in my classroom in order to make my classes more effective. Immediately, I went to the language department and made a request never to mix the “Kiegeszito” students with the freshman students. I was informed that some of the “Kiegeszito” students would have to mix during the second semester due to scheduling conflicts. I then asked if I could create two “Advanced Language” courses

with prerequisites and keep three normal language courses. I was given the green light by the administration and immediately wrote a new advanced course description for the school’s second semester course catalog. Please see attachments. So far, splitting the classes up has really helped tackle some of the problems I had during the first semester. I’m still facing the same challenges in my three regular courses but have noticed dramatic improvement in the two advanced courses. In my advanced classes, students are more willing to volunteer, participate in classroom discussions, and interact with me during lessons by making comments, asking questions, and raising new points.

3. My observations about the University and the students I can make a pretty good comparison between Debrecen University and my old college, the University of Redlands. Presently, they are roughly two-hundred freshman students at Debrecen, which is about the same size as my university. One of the things that I noticed from the beginning and have mentioned earlier was the striking difference of the relationships between students and the faculty. When I was a freshman, I had an advisor I could turn to for advice on classes, school related matters, or even personal problems. If I didn’t feel comfortable talking to a professor, I could turn to residential life organizations to seek specific counseling for any number of problems. Also, most professors went out of their way to make students feel comfortable. Therefore, it wasn’t uncommon to have coffee with a professor or even be invited to his/her house for dinner. The university went out of its way to set up social events where students

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Student Conference 2003 could interact with professors on a personal level which often times carried over into the classroom and created an extremely comfortable and positive learning environment. I had the opportunity to show the film “Higher Learning” to four of my classes. Each student made specific remarks about the relationship between professor and student depicted in the movie. It wasn’t unusual for me to see a professor stepping outside of his primary role to council students who felt the need to confide the problems they encountered outside collegiate classroom. In this particular instance, a student had problems fitting into campus life and adjusting to the college atmosphere. I think at one point or another during our college years, a majority of American students have turned to specific professors for guidance on school, life, and future career paths. There are certain fundamental aspects of university life that are missing here at Debrecen. Excluding sports teams, fraternities, and sororities, there are no signs of any student organizations, clubs, or forums for student discussion. I also found it hard to understand how students could take up to seventeen classes per semester. On average, my students take thirteen classes each semester. Numerous students told me that they just don’t have time for my class and have to prioritize there schedule in order of importance and difficulty. I strongly feel that this is one of the reasons a few of my students give very little effort at all in my classes. Another drastic difference between my former university and Debrecen, is that the education is free for Hungarians and some

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students even make money by going to school. I strongly feel this is the “root” of the problems that occur in classrooms throughout the university. Why don’t students interact more with professors, voice opinions, speak up when they aren’t clear? Why aren’t more students proactive about their college education, and why is the university implementing a year-end test to weed out poor students? I think there are certain benefits to having free education and having to pay for your education. Assuming some sort of responsibility, whether it be financial or something else, forces the students to engage willfully, to get the most out of their time, and ultimately to learn. Most students that I see in going through the motions and can be pushed through the system or fall through the cracks without making progress. I can only speak for myself and tell you that I took full advantage of my academic career, always sought out help, challenged ideas or asked questions during lectures if I didn’t understand something. Most students were very proactive and conscientious about their grades because it was their money and their time. I feel that since I had to pay for my college education, I took full advantage of the opportunity and made sure I learned as much as I could. I wanted to test these ideas, so I decided to pass out a brief survey to try and find answers to some of my questions about university life here in Debrecen. I passed the survey out to two of my classes, one advanced and one regular. I listed the questions below and have inserted the answers with an “*” under each corresponding question.


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University

Questionnaire Male/Female: 11 females 2 male Year: 10 freshman 2 sophomore 1 “Kiegeszito” How many courses are you currently taking? 18 courses: 1 17 courses: 1 13 courses: 2 10 courses: 3 7 courses: 4 4 courses: 2 1) Is there a specific person you can turn to for advice on which classes to take, problems with current classes, problems with teachers, or personal problems you are having at school (housing, roommate problems, stress, etc.)? If so, what is his/her position? "!Turn to a friend who is older and wiser. "!Only to upper-year students "!My cousin who is a second year student "!No specific person "!Somebody from the HOK "!One of my friends who is a 5th year student "!No "!Yes, I can turn to a seminar teacher "!A friend "!Nobody that I can think of besides fellow students "!I don’t know the person’s position "!Other students only "!No one specific person

2) Are you aware of a career office you can go to for job opportunities or study abroad possibilities? "!To my knowledge a place exists; I just don’t know where it is. "!I am, but I don’t know how it works. "!Yes, I am. There once was a lecture about going abroad and studying (Fulbright). "!Yes, the HOK Office. "!Yes, there are many places. "!No. "!Yes, there was a lecture once about it from Fulbright. "!No. "!Yes, but I don’t know where it is. "!No, I don’t recall anything like this. "!Yes, but I don’t know how it works. "!Yes its called HOK, but I never went there. "!No, I would have to ask somebody else. 3) How would you define your relationship with your college professors? Is it strictly professional? "!Strictly professional, and I couldn’t imagine it otherwise. "!I don’t have the courage to talk to a professor. "!Professional, the teachers but a huge distance between themselves and the students. "!Professional only, the older teachers are not kind at all. "!Professional, but If I had a problem I can go to a teacher. They are kind. "!It’s strictly professional. I don’t have any contact with them outside the classroom. "!Most of them it’s strictly professional. "!Strictly professional. "!Strictly professional. 85


Student Conference 2003 "!The older teachers are very mean, so, yes, it’s professional. "!Yes, it’s only professional I couldn’t imagine it any other way. "!Professional. "!Only professional. 4) Would you feel comfortable approaching your professors with questions about school related subjects, such as project ideas or other class assignments? "!Yes. "!Not in all cases, but mostly yes. "!I would turn to other students. We get information booklets for all other questions. "!Yes, I have tried that and it works. "!Yes, after a few semesters. "!If there weren’t any other possibilities. "!I would ask them for help. "!No. "!Yes, but only these. "!No, I would rather talk to other students. Most professors don’t have time for this. "!Yes, I think they are willing to help about school stuff. "!Yes, they are willing to discuss there assignments. "!No, I don’t feel comfortable approaching teachers about anything. 5) Would you feel comfortable approaching your professors about personal problems you may be having at school or at home? "!No, I wouldn’t. "!Yes, but I found that most of the professors are not interested in private matters. "!No, unfortunately not, I could never do that . 86

"!No! "!No, I never thought to . "!No, I would never ever do that!!! "!No, it’s not their responsibility. "!No. "!Absolutely not. "!No, that’s not their job. "!No way! "!I would never do that. "!I never thought about. I wouldn’t have the courage to something like that. 6) Who would you turn to for questions you may have about courses to take during your third year or for simple advice on academic matters? "!Older students and a few professors. "!I would turn to other students. We get information booklets for all other questions. "!My cousin or Ildiko Banka who is a teacher here. "!The woman at the Office of the English Department (she isn’t helpful at all though). "!Favorite teachers and other students. "!The teachers that I have a good relationship with. "!I would turn to other students. "!Upper students. "!To assistant instructors. "!Upper students. "!Only my nice teachers. "!Other students. "!I would go to the office for help and ask somebody there but usually they are not very friendly and are too busy. "!Other wiser students.


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University 7) Do you feel that the University values you as a student? "!I don’t know. "!I feel that I’m a number in the administration book. "!No, I am only a number. "!Yes, kind of. "!Yes, but I don’t like the women in the office, they don’t help and want you to leave as soon as possible. "!Yes, because they get money from the state by having me as a student. "!Yes, I do. "!Yes. "!No, I’m only a number here I think. "!Yes, because I pay so they value me more than others. "!Yes, the university values me I think. "!Yes, because they get money from the state for me. "!No, I’m simply a number in the book. 8) From your personal observations, why do you think students don’t stop and questions when they don’t understand something? "!Everybody is too embarrassed to admit they don’t know something. "!Shy or embarrassed and they fear your comments after they speak. "!They don’t want to seem stupid or slow the class. "!The pressure of the majority! "!They are afraid to seem stupid in front of the other students. "!People are shamed not to know something. "!They prefer to stay silent and they aren’t interested in such things. "!They are ashamed. "!They are ashamed and embarrassed. "!They don’t want to stand out. "!They don’t want other people to

know that they don’t know something. "!People don’t want you to know that they don’t understand because you might be upset. "!It’s to embarrassing! 9) Finally, if you had to pay for your college education, assuming that you had the means to do so, would you still attend? Would you be more proactive in class? Would this change your study habits? "!I already pay. "!I’m not proactive, but if I had to pay, I would be. of course. "!I would be the same, I think. "!I would prepare more for my exams. "!No, I wouldn’t change anything. "!I would concentrate much harder. "!I would take it more seriously. "!People who pay work harder than I do. "!I would study more. "!I would be more proactive and study harder. "!My school already pays for me so I wouldn’t change. "!I would try much harder I think so I don’t have to repeat and pay again.

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2002-2003 Academic Year Course Title: Language Class Instructor: Richard D. Moore seement@yahoo.com Monday 10:00-12:00 @ Kassai room 17 Monday 2:00-3:40 @ Kassai room 33 Monday 4:00-5:40 @ Az Egyetem room P/1 Tuesday 8:00-10:00 office hours @ Kassai room 27

games, pair-work, and group presentations. The first 15 minutes of each class will be designated for grammar and vocabulary review. While the course is basically a practicum in conversational American English, the students must speak and be understood, as well as listen and understand what is spoken. The most important thing is that students learn to speak and comprehend spoken English in a relaxed and fluid manner. Students should see the course as something practical and fun, challenging, yet entertaining, and most of rewarding. Assessment will be based on regular attendance, active participation in all sessions, and individual or group presentations.

Wednesday 12:00-1:40 @ Kassai room 17 Wednesday 2:00-3:40 @ Kassai room 37 Thursday 10:00-11:00 Kassai room 33 Thursday 11:00-2:00 office hours @ Kassai room 27

Requirements: Students are expected to attend on a regular basis, give presentations, and participate in regular class discussions and activities.

Course Description and Goals: This course is a practicum in American English Conversation and students must come to class prepared to talk with a native speaker in English. The class is designed to offer students an opportunity to improve their language skills through aural-oral (listening and speaking), creative writing assignments, and challenging vocabulary and grammar exercises. The majority of the course will focus on the aural-oral aspect and will involve interactive hot topic discussions, film reviews and interpretations, role-playing 88

2002-2003 Academic Year Course Title: Advanced Language Class Instructor: Richard D. Moore seement@yahoo.com Tuesday 8:00-10:00 office hours @ Kassai room 27 Wednesday 12:00-1:40 Kassai room 37 Wednesday 2:00-3:40 Kassai room 17 Thursday 8:00-10:00 office hours @ Kassai room 27

Requirements: Students must have previously completed an English language/conversational course preferably with a native American speaker or already possess a superior command of the English


Richard D. Moore: Teaching Assistant at Debrecen University language. Students will be expected to attend class on a regular basis, give individual oral presentations, be able to listen and comprehend advanced texts read by a native speaker, and actively participate in regular class discussions and activities.

Course Description and Goals: This course is an advanced practicum in American English Conversation and students must be prepared to talk with a native speaker about a wide variety of current topics. The majority of the course will focus on listening and speaking activities and assignments. The aim of this course is to get students to start speaking like a native American by focusing on word usage, vocabulary, proverbs, idioms, specific phrases and slang. While the course is basically a practicum in conversational American English, the students must be able to speak and be understood, as well as listen and understand what is spoken. The goal is for students to learn to speak and comprehend American English in a relaxed and fluid manner. Assessment will be based on regular attendance, active participation in all sessions, and individual or group presentations.

2002-2003 Academic Year Course Title: Language Class Instructor: Richard D. Moore Monday 10:00-12:00 @ Kassai room 17 Monday 2:00-4:00 @ P/1 Tuesday 8:00-10:00 @ Kassia room 37 Tuesday 12:00-2:00 @ Kassai room 17

Course Materials and Books: Effective Techniques for English Conversational Groups-Julia M. Dobson A Brief Guide to Academic WritingCsolle Anita and Kormos Judit Documentary films, CNN, BBC Grammar in Plain English-Harriet Diamond and Phyllis Dutwin AP U.S. Government and Politics-Apex Learning Guide by Kaplan Advanced Communication Games-Jill Hadfield Eight Simulations for upper-intermediate and more advanced students of English-Leo Jones Five-Minute Activities-Penny Ur and Andrew Wright 101 Word Games-George P. McCallum GMAT-Graduate Management Admission Test/English Exam-Barron’s For and Against an Oral Practice Book for Advanced Students of English-L.G. Alexander Time, Newsweek, and similar Magazines

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PROGRAM FULBRIGHT STUDENT CONFERENCE Wednesday, April 14, 2004

SESSION ONE CHAIR: MR. CESAR D. BELTRAN PAO at the Embassy of the United States, Budapest; Member of the Hungarian – American Fulbright Board

10:00-10:10 Greetings 10:10 - 10:30 … Mr. David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre: A Narrative and Dramatic Account of a City, its Stages, and an Interloping Writer 10:30 -10:50 Mr. Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems in Extremal Combinatorics 10:50 -11:10 Mr. Dallas Long: Unlocking Hungary’s Libraries: a Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College

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11:10 -11:30 Ms. Erika Sólyom : A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities in Hungarian Urban Discourse 11:30 – 11:50 Mr. Karl Brown: Stalinization and its Discontents: Crime, “Deviance,” and Subcultures in Hungary, 1948-1956 COFFEE BREAK

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SESSION TWO CHAIR:

DR. HUBA BRĂœCKNER Executive Director, Fulbright Commission

12:10 - 12:30 Mr. William J. Eichmann: Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Carpathian Basin and the Spread of Agriculture in Europe 12:30 - 12:50 Ms. Mary Taylor: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Historical and Institutional Precedents of the Hungarian Dance-House Movement 12:50 - 13:10 Mr. David Eger: Internationalizing Software and Other Projects: A Day in the Life of an Open Source Developer

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13:10 – 13:30 Ms. Angela Bennett: Instructing and Advising: the Dual Role of a Teaching Assistant in Budapest 13:30 – 13:50 Dr. Terrence Curry: Community Design: A Service/Learning Partnership

(Dr. Curry came to Hungary to teach architecture students at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His presentation is not included in this volume).

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Ninteeenth and Twentieth Century Historical and Institutional Precedents of

the Hungarian Dance-House Movement Mary Taylor

.................................................................................. CUNY Graduate Center loditaylor@mindspring.com

The Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and The Hungarian Heritage House Advisers: Mr. Ferenc Sebo˝ and Ms. Ágnes Fülemile

..................................................................................

This paper seeks to lay out a broad history of the latest wave of folk revival in Hungary, the Tanchaz (Dance-house) Movement. In order to do so, It will examine the engagement with folk forms by the (mostly urban) elite and the academy in connection with nationbuilding/nationalism in 19th and 20th century Hungary; the rise of specific institutions and practices connected with Hungarian folk culture and their continuity or discontinuity over time; the sudden territorial and population shift that would leave a legacy of ethnographic and folkloristic material covering a territory much larger than the truncated Hungarian state that emerged in 1920 from the treaty of Trianon; and the specific conditions preceding the tanchaz movement and in which it arose. Focusing on the Bouquet of Pearls Movement of the 1930’s and 1940’s as an institution connected to folklorism and nationmaking, the paper reveals both continutities and discontinuities with theTanchaz Movement that would aries in the 1970’s. After a brief survey of the emergence of Tanchaz, the paper ends with suggestions for further research.

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Introduction This paper in progress seeks to explore a broad history of the latest wave of folk revival in Hungary, the Tanchaz (Dancehouse) Movement. In order to do so, It will examine the engagement with folk forms and traditions by the elite and the academy in connection with nation-building in 19th and 20th century Hungary; the rise of specific institutions and practices connected with Hungarian folk culture and their continuity or discontinuity over time; the sudden territorial and population shift that would leave a legacy of ethnographic and folkloristic material covering a territory much larger than the truncated Hungarian state that emerged in 1920 after the treaty of Trianon; and the specific conditions preceding the Tanchaz movement and in which it arose. Focusing on its precedents and emergence, this paper will not discuss the later institutionalization of the Tanchaz Movement or its present status. It will, however, suggest directions of research that promise to provide further historical depth.

Nation-state making By the time of the 1848 revolution, Hungary had been a Christian state for over 800 years, having established what we might call a multiethnic society. Not only were there small numbers of non Hungarians living in the Carpathian basin at the time of conquest, colonization of the region was actively promoted by the Magyars, who invited foreign experts for development, and offered nobility status to those who were willing to settle in the border areas. From the time of Ottoman occupation of the central part of the country in 1541, throughout the Habsburg occupation beginning in 1690, the territory of historic Hungary would be divided in various politico-beurocratic configurations. It was not until 1867, after a period of 96

martial law following the 1848 revolution, that Hungary would once again gain governance of the territory of historic Hungary . As the historical processes that had brought about the nation state system and the dominance of a capitalist mode of production took off in Western Europe, the Hungarian nobility embraced the language and idea of the independent nation state and formulated resistance to the Hapsburg Empire by stressing their distinguishing national characteristics. Essential to the transformation to the nation-state was a shift of the understanding of nation from the nobility (those with rights) to include ‘the people of Hungary’. Tamas Hofer has pointed out that only in Eastern Europe did the study of peasant culture arise almost exclusively for the use of inhabitants as part of national cultural history. Essential to national awakening, he argues, are the institutions of national culture. The decades leading up to the 1848 war of independence, marked by efforts at national reform and Romanticism, would witness the establishment of National Museum, the Hungarian Academy of Science, the National Theater, and the establishment of Hungarian as the official language. The concept of an ethnic Magyar, Hungarian language speaking nation-state did not easily allow for multiethnic/multilingual notions of the polity, causing tension with non Magyar populations-especially with the Romanians of Transylvania, and with Croatia (a separate kingdom which had come under the Hungarian crown in the 11th century). This internal tension would help to seal the victory of the Hapsburgs in 1848. The borrowing by the nobility from “the people” to build a unique national tradition through the adaptation of folk forms would lead to the elevation of the csardas to the national dance. The so-called csardas, a


Mary Taylor: The Hungarian Dance-House Movement composed piece borrowing from folk motifs, and popularized by Bela Weckheim and Mark Rozsavolgyi, would, by the mid 1840’s, become de rigueur at balls such as those organized by the Protection Association. At these dances expressing Hungarian national independence, the use of the Hungarian language and the sporting of ‘national dress’ (which meant either clothing in national style or, clothing made of locally produced textiles) were also encouraged. (Nemes, 813). These cultural politics would continue after the failed revolution, with the founding of the Liszt Academy of Music, and the opening of the Great Market Hall. Increasingly, but especially from the 1880’s on, we see national reform expressed in Hungary’s participation in industrial fairs-the discovery and display of items considered uniquely Hungarian, and their production for the market. The 1885 national cottage industry exhibition would feature ‘lifelike peasant rooms’, and in 1896, ethnic villages were “displayed”, along with inhabitants in City Park at the celebration of the Hungary’s millennium. Instructive is the metamorphosis of Matyo embroidery into merchandise. From the turn of century on, the National Cottage Industry Association (Orszagos Haziipari Szovetseg) worked to propagate and popularize Matyo embroidery –which would appear among Hungarian items at the Turin world’s fair of 1911 (Fugedi, 14). On that same year, archduchess Isabella the ‘chief patroness of cottage industrial art’ would organize a ‘matyo wedding’ at the Isabella ball during carnival season ‘to popularize handicrafts’. As part of this process, the local intelligentsia placed orders with peasant women, providing lucrative employment. They would soon be followed by merchants. (Fugedi). This balance of interests nurturing this occupation with folk forms

spanning interests as broad as nation-building, economic development, and private business, would be well integrated in the Gyongyos Bokreta (Bouquet of Pearls) Movement of the 1930’s and 1940’s, to which we will turn shortly.

Ethnographic Collection, Technology, and the living memory of historic Hungary Tamas Hofer, citing debates between ethnographers and symbol creators, has pointed out that in Eastern Europe the ethnographic sciences produced material on which national symbols could be based. Ethnographic collection would precede the foundation of a separate field of ethnography. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1830 “to serve national development and the interests of economic reform”(Pallas lexicon). Beginning in 1832, the academy undertook the collection and publications of folksongs “with the intention of 1) scientific research and preservation and 2) to serve the formation of a national taste” (Sarosi, 188). While the Ethnographic Museum was founded in 1872 as the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum, and 1896 would see the formation of Hungarian Ethnographic Society, the first department of Ethnography would not be formed until 1934, at Pozmany University. To grasp Ferenc Sebo’s claim that “the club movements of the 1970’s emerged against a background of 150,000 collected and transcribed tunes, with much research and practical experience”(Sebo, 1998, 37), we must turn to the history of the ethnographic collection of music. The collections of Bela Vikar, the first in Europe to record folk music with the use of a phonograph, date as far back as1895. The composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly

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Student Conference 2004 would begin their collections in 1905 and 1906, respectively. The Hungary that they documented using new technologies applied with methodological rigor was historic Hungary, a roughly thousand-year-old politicalterritorial entity that would be dismantled a few years later with the treaty of Trianon. Thus the wealth of material left to academic and folkloristic posterity thanks to the use of revolutionary recording technology and methodological rigor would contradict the new definition of Hungary- designed and reinforced by the Great Powers and happily accepted by the neighboring states from 1920 on. The content and availability of these ethnographic collections would have effects on the features of the Tanchaz movement. With funding provided by Ministry of Culture on the condition that it accessible to public, a phonogram collection was established by Bela Vikar at the Department of Ethnography of the National Museum. From 1936-44, under auspices of The Academy of Sciences, and later, the Museum of Ethnography, a large number of recordings of folk music were made in the studios of Hungarian Radio under direction of Bela Bartok, Oszkar Dincser, Zoltan Kodaly, and Gyula Orutay, (Kelemen, 51). In 1936: under Bartok’s direction, 4 experimental records were produced based on recordings made by Vilmos Seemayer. Each record (of which only fifty were produced) was accompanied by transcriptions of the music, lyrics, and background on collectors and performers, as well as photographs (Sebo, 2001,112). These transcriptions had been made by playing records at a slow speed to provide information not revealed by simply playing the music-Together these materials “provided listeners with an important guide, one that would enable them both to understand an all but forgotten world of music and make it a part of themselves”(Sebo, 2001, 112). 98

Later, under Ortutay’s direction, with guidance of Bartok, Kodaly and Laszlo Lajtha, 107 records would be released by the Patria record company as the Patria series. While these were not accompanied by the type of documentation that had accompanied the earlier Bartok project, others would be produced in this manner by the Folk Music Research group of the Academy of Sciences formed under Kodaly in 1953. It was this wealth of documentation that awaited the revivalists of the 70’s, helping them to, in the words of Sebo “figure out the basic techniques behind this unique and ancient playing style”(Sebo, 2001). The emergence of tanchaz, then, and the forms it would take, must be understood in a context where this material was available, not only in living form in certain isolated peasant communities, but also stored according to a methodology aimed at the salvage of disappearing forms and their playback in the future; accompanied by technical instructions for the reconstruction of this vanished form. Finally, all this was paired with a commitment to public availability. In 1920, the treaty of Trianon would place two thirds of the territory of historic Hungary outside of the borders of the new nation state. While this created a political body that more closely resembled a monoethnic nation-state, it would also created a huge Hungarian ethnic minority in neighboring states, and an influx of refugees from these regions to Hungary in the 1920’s. The monoethnicity of the state would be further honed after WWII when, under the direction of the Allied Great Powers, population transfers would take place between the states of the region (see Balogh). Yet, by this time, folklorists and the developing discipline of ethnography had already amassed a collection of artifacts, films, musical recordings, and studies reflecting the folk cultures of


Mary Taylor: The Hungarian Dance-House Movement greater Hungary. Living Hungarians inside and outside the new borders were left with a national identity and territorial relations that did not match the new borders, and the ethnographic sciences, the suppliers of national symbols were left in a Hungary quite different in territory and population than that which they had documented. The fact that pre-Trianon Hungary had been recorded using powerful new recording devices and techniques is extremely important in understanding the content of the folk revivals to come. The role of ethnographic collection and its origins in historic Hungary are apparent in the Gyongyos Bokreta Movement, to which we now turn.

Bouquet of Pearls: Folklore, or Folklorism? The activities of the Gyongyos Bokreta (Bouquet of Pearls) movement spanned the years between 1931 and 1944. The Gyongyos Bokreta was the project of Bela Paulini-a newspaper journalist (with degrees in engineering and fine arts) who had earlier experimented with theater productions set to the folk tunes collected by Zoltan Kodaly. Through the formation of the Bokretas League, Paulini brought together a number of resources to bring provincial folk dancers from all over historic Hungary to the stage in Budapest each year on Saint Steven’s Day, itself newly elevated to a national holiday (Palfi, 120). The St. Steven’s day celebrations in Budapest had won the support of the city council with the promise of tourism. While Paulini’s stated intent was to preserve folk styles intact, arguing that “We should leave the village art for the village, on the one hand to be sensible, and on the other hand for reasons of purity” (Palfi, 131. my

translation), in fact, he was involved with reworking and embellishing dance material and costumes. The success of the movement can be contributed to a conflux of forces. In addition to the Budapest city council, The Gyongyos Bokreta’s sponsorship base included The Ministry of Defense (when concerning Transylvania and the regions of northern and southern Hungary forfeited at Trianon), and other forms of state and municipal subsidy; including the Ministry of Culture and the Municipal Tourism Bureau). This sponsorship base allowed Paulini to pay his performers and produce a journal, the Bokretasok Lapja. By 1934, the Gyongyos Bokreta had been given the exclusive rights to organize a folk group by the Ministry of Religion and Culture (Palfy, 122). In the words of Imre Romsics “In order to hinder those outside the association, a meeting was held at the Ministry of culture in June, 1934, where they agreed to prevent by law any activities of folk art outside the Association”(Romsics, 24). The Gyongyos Bokreta also had an active relationship with ethnography-being both championed and policed by ethnographers. Istvan Gyorffy- the first to teach the discipline on the university level, claimed to have suggested the idea to Paulini (Palfi, 120). By 1936, however, the Gyongyos Bokreta’s working over of the material for the stage had come to the attention of Ministry of Religion and Culture, which then placed the it under the ethnographic authority of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society (Palfi, 125). Assigned to oversee the “authenticity of dances and costumes”, ethnographers inspected dances and costumes, checking them against the ethnographic record, as well as conducting new research for this end. Yet, without any real authority for enforcement, their conclusions had little to no effect on the performance materials (Palfi, 126). 99


Student Conference 2004 While the League would exist until 1947, it would flounder from the time of Paulini’s suicide upon Soviet occupation. The Gyongyos Bokreta would have lasting effects on folk culture and folklorism in at least two important ways: First, dance researcher s have asserted that there is no question that the Gyongyos Bokreta had effects on the preservation of folk dance. Gyorgy Martin asserts that “wherever the Gyongyos Bokreta planted its feet, the interest in tradition remained alive for a good period of time”(Martin, 108, my translation). Second, others have asserted that it was the Gyongyos Bokreta that “awakened the different youth organizations (especially the scouts), and contributed to the complex practices of the stage performance of Hungarian dances and customs found today (Pesovar, 3).

Táncház The late 1960’s and early 1970’s witnessed a wave of youth movement across the world. In Europe and North America, the late 60’s and early 70’s were marked by a general phenomenon of folk revival stemming from what we might call the urbanization process. Owe Ronstrom, examining this general phenomenon of folk revival in Europe in the late 60’s and 70’s, suggests a number of preconditions, including rapid growth of population after WWII, and the rapid expansion of world economy in the 1950’s -leading to migration into cities. The first generation after this consisted of large numbers of people with no experience of the countryside, no experience of war, and less insecurity about the future (Ronstrom, 39). While people’s lives were radically different from those of their grandparents, Ronstrom argues, before they were ‘abandoned’, these lifestyles were “well documented and trans-

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formed into cultural heritage by museums”(39). In the 60’s with the economy expanding even further, college students flooded the cities, with money less of a problem; it was harder for the state to retain centralized control. Youth acquired incomes over which they had control, were well-educated, and they had extra leisure time too. These resources would be used to be rebellious against the older generation. The music scene, according to Ronstrom, was not limited to folk, but to interesting new sounds, and focus was on process, not product. There was a mvement away from big grand performances, flags, and parades, and towards amateur ethnographic research, and the development of ‘alternative lifestyles’. In 1970’s Hungary, the Tanchaz Movement emerged in the context of a number youth movements and projects concerning the performance and preservation of folk forms, occupying various positions vis a vis the ‘liberalizing’ Hungarian state. Among those in the first, the Beat Movement is the most significant. Initial participants of the Beat Movement, influenced by the music and lifestyle of the Beatles, the Beat writers and rock and roll youth culture had had their first taste of publicity in the state run Ki, Mit Tud competitions. Among those in the second category belongs the state run Repulj Pava (Fly Peacock) radio competitions, which would be the first public venue for some of the tanchaz musicians. What kind of relationship does this reveal between the state and youth movements? Revealed is a process in which youths would respond to the “manufactured’ programs of socialist planning, or perhaps simply the discontents of urban life, in creative ways, with the materials and in the contexts available to them, producing the beat movement, and later, the tanchaz. In the words of Ferenc Sebo, “The


Mary Taylor: The Hungarian Dance-House Movement experience of authentic folk music and dance in the city as compared to the hackneyed labour movement songs and the stage repertory was revelatory for musicians and the public alike”(Sebo, 1998, 36). Yet the resources and contexts available to youth movements in most cases were provided by the state. Not only would key participants in both movements emerge from state run competitions, but state run culture houses would be key locations for movement activities. In addition, In the case of the Tanchaz, resources were requested from the state in the form of courses for folk music and dance instructors and the establishment of summer camp. We do know that both the Beat movement, and later the Tanchaz movement would be studied by the Institute of Public Culture, upon which recommendations would be made about their sponsorship. Yet it would be unwise to regard either Beat Movement or the Tanchaz as top down state projects, or of strongholds of the Party. The founders of the tanchaz movement can be divided very broadly into two categories; dancers and musicians. The dancers involved with the organization of the first tanchaz activities were members of competing amateur dance troupes. Their generation represented a movement away from the artificial choreography that had dominated the amateur dance troupes and the State Folkdance Ensemble in the preceding decades. Responding to an interest by members of the troupes to come together in a casual social context rather than only under competitive circumstances, Ferenc Novak (Bihari Egyuttes) and Sandor Timar(Bartok Egyuttes) would organize the first Budapest tanchaz. Their search for authentic folk forms to replace the dominant choreographed repertoires had led them to Gyorgy Martin, who encouraged them to organize a

social event based on the the Transylvanian tanchaz. The musicians involved in the organization of the first tanchaz events, and invited to play at the first tanchaz in Budapest, Bela Halmos and Ferenc Sebo, were both students of architecture at the technical university, where they had met playing in the symphony . Both had been influenced by the environment brought about by the Beat Movement, and were experimenting with ‘new’ musical forms. Halmos had made a name for himself accompanying folk songs on guitar in a Repulj Pava competition, while Sebo had been experimenting with singing Hungarian verse with guitar accompaniment. Together, seeking ‘new’ musical sources’ they too had turned to Martin for access to the recorded legacy of Hungarian folk music. The social form and name of the tanchaz were borrowed from the folk traditions of a town in Transylvania called Szek. The prominence of Szek in the Tanchaz was partly the result of the existence of previous ethnographic material collected by academics. Yet, perhaps more important is that Gyorgy Martin -the prominent dance researcher responsible for introducing the youths - himself was involved in researching the dance of Szek. Martin would encourage them to find not just musical, but culturoaesthetic influences in the dance culture of Szek, suggesting that they adopt the social form of the Tanchaz. No small fact either was the relatively high living standards in Hungary at the time, which provided opportunities for Eastern bloc tourism, including the possibility to travel to Transylvania to experience “living folk culture”. As a result of historical conditions, and partly in response to ethnic repression, ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania had preserved folk traditions that had long since passed within

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Student Conference 2004 the borders of Hungary. Thus began the trips by tanchaz participants to see Transylvania -‘relatively unchanged’, but increasingly endangered by the urbanization in general, and especially by the nation making politics of the Romanian state. One of these traditions was the tanchaz, the event that inspired the name and form of the youth movement in Hungary. This institution was widespread throughout the region but had many different names. The word Tanchaz referred to both the place, the peasant house where it was held, as well as the dance event itself. What made this dance event distinct was that, unlike most other opportunities to dance that were attached to occasions such as weddings, funerals., the tanchaz was an event where dance was at the forefront and was limited to unmarried youths(Halmos,12). Organized by eligible bachelors, the tanchaz served the purpose of dancing together with and becoming acquainted with eligible girls, encouraging courtship and locally appropriate sociability. In Budapest, what had begun as a closed party for members of dance troupes grew within a short period into a mass phenomenon, multiplying to the provincial cities as fast as new competent folk bands could emerge. Key to its success was the decision of Timar and the musicians to open events to the public and to provide dance instruction. Critics feared that the movement was inspired by nationalism. Fans, however, claimed that it reflected a continuation of the tradition of Bartok and Kodaly- and thus of the serious research of folk forms and their integration into modern life.

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This paper in progress has attempted to outline some of the historical processes and institutions which preceded the Tanchaz movement of the 1970’s. As this paper reflects mainly the periods leading up to the emergence of this urban folk revival, it does not reflect much of the rich literature existing on the movement. Without summarizing what has already been written, I here suggest directions for further research. An investigation of the occupation with folklore by the scouts groups of the 1940’s (especially the cserkesz) and the formation of the amateur folkdance ensembles (mostly connected with unions)in the 1950’s would be fruitful. Absolutely necessary for an understanding of both youth movements and folk revival during the socialist period is an investigation of the Muvelodesi Intezet (or Institute of Public Culture) and the biographies and activities of key actors in that institution (Ivan Vitanyi, for example). A close look at the focus of the socialist state on youth is also called for, especially as regards KISZ (the young socialists) and the network of culture houses. A look into what Verdery has referred to as ‘the overproduction of intellectuals” would be interesting to apply to this generation, perhaps especially as it might apply to amateur activities and the much celebrated ‘second economy’ Finally, an investigation into the relationship between participation in folk revival and professional activity in the ethnographic sciences in individual biographies would be enlightening.


Mary Taylor: The Hungarian Dance-House Movement Works Cited Balogh, Sandor 1990. Population Removal and Population Exchange in Hungary after WW2 . In Ferenc Glatz, ed. Ethnicity and Society in Hungary. Budapest: Comite National des Historiens Hongrois. Fugedi, Marta 2000. The Discovery of Matyo Folk Art. Hungarian Heritage, Vol I 9-18. Halmos Bela 1994. The History of the Tanchaz Movement. In Varpu Luukola and Hannu Saha, eds. Explorations in Finnish and Hungarian Folk Music and Dance Research volume I. Kaustinan, Finland: The Folk Music Institute Hofer Tamas 1989. Paraszti Hagyomanyokbol Nemzeti Szimbolmok. Janus 6 59-74. Kelemen, Laszlo 2000. The Final Hour Folk Music Project. Hung Heritage vol I 50-52. Martin, Gyorgy 1980. Nephagyomany, Neptanc (interview). Tiszataj XXXIV 1 107-112. Nemes, Robert 2001.The Politics of the Dance Floor: Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth Century Hungary . Slavic Review, 60(4). Palfi Csaba 1970. A Gyongyosbokrete Tortenete. Tanctudomanyi Tanulmanyok 1969-1970. Dienes and Maacz, eds. Budapest: A Magyar Tancmuveszek Szovetsege Tudomanyos Tagozata Pesovar, Erno 2003. Hagyomany es Korszeruseg. in Hagyomany es Korszeruseg; A Magyar Allami Nepi Egyuttes 50 Eves. Budapest:Hagyomanyok Haza Romsics, Imre 2001. The Folk Art of Kalocsa. Hungarian Heritage Vol II 7-30. Ronstro:m, Owe 1998 ECTC Bulletin #4 39-42 Budapest: European Center for Traditional Culture Sarosi, Balint 1993. Hungary and Romania. in Helen Myers, ed. Ethnomusicology; Historical and Regional Studies. London: Norton and Co. Sebo, Ferenc 2001. Review of “patria�. Hungarian Heritage vol II 111-114. Sebo Ferenc 1998 The Revival Movements and the Dancehouse in Hungary. ECTC Bulletin #4 34-38. Budapest:European Center for Traditional Culture.

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Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre: A Narrative and Dramatic Account of a City, its Stages, and an Interloping Writer

David Frederic Chapman

.................................................................................. The University of North Carolina Department of Dramatic Art Chapel Hill, N.C., 27599 http://www.unc.edu david.chapman@alumni.unc.edu

The Vígszínház Pannonia u. 1, 1136 Hungary http://www.vigszinhaz.hu Adviser: László Marton

..................................................................................

What makes Budapest a city particularly ripe for theatrical expression? And what makes theatre in this city essentially “Budapestian”? And how have I, a writer, a performer, an observer, and an avowed non-scholar, attempted to process my countless impressions into a narrative/dramatic structure? Good questions, all. As a means of mental organization, I have developed four “senses” to connect Budapest to its theatre, four guidelines around which my informal but detailed study has concentrated. By filtering my impressions through these senses, I have gained a deep understanding of both city and stage. Furthermore, I have understood how I can structure a dramatic text that I hope illuminates the complete Budapest experience from a personal perspective. The four senses are: a sense of culture, a sense of practicality, a sense of struggle, and a sense of historical irony. What follows is a narrative and dramatic account, a “reader’s guide”, to my last seven months, and a short selection from the still-in-development Things to See and Do.

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Student Conference 2004 Contents: Prologue: Cabaret and Identity Crises Part Nulla: Why Budapest? Why Theatre? (Includes two movements) Part One: Cultural Exposure Part Two: The Metro Repertory Interval Part Three: Non-Stop Virág Part Four: Too Much History Here, the intersection of the timeless moment Is England and nowhere. Never and always. TS ELIOT, LITTLE GIDDING

Introduction Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre: A Narrative and Dramatic Account of a City, its Stages, and an Interloping Writer Prologue: Cabaret and Identity Crises Recently, I met a Hungarian actress after a Hungarian-language cabaret performance at the Merlin Theatre, the most prominent international venue in Budapest. She asked me why I could speak a little Hungarian, and I answered that I was a guest student at the Film and Drama Academy (my shorthand answer). “Why???” she asked, exasperated, as though she is daily meeting Americans who have made this same mistake. “It’s crap here. I went abroad to study, to Vienna and then to London. Don’t get your degree here, just vacation for a year and then go back to United States.” She then returned to the stage to sing a Liza Minelli medley in barely-accented English. I would say that I am 106

thankful this interchange came well into my grant, long after it could have sparked a crisis of confidence, but sadly this sentiment (although not so virulently) has been expressed by many theatre people since I came to Budapest in August. It is possible that my Hungarian Liza suffers from the same “grass-is-greener” syndrome experienced by those in any field, in any country. It is also possible though, that her attitude itself is integral to exactly what I have come to study. Part of the psyche of the theatre community here is its own shaky self-confidence, which manifests in both the work and the structure of the theatre system. The cabaret singer did not break me. I continue to believe, naïve or hopeful though it may be, that Budapest theatre has something valuable to teach me. My task, when I arrived in Hungary, was two-fold. My first goal was to become a member of the theatre community here, to make a contribution wherever I could, and to actively observe every influence, trend, commonality and tension that this scene might contain. My second goal was to convert those influences and stories, as well as the broader personal experience of living in such a dynamic place into a piece of theatre. Theatre is my medium, and Budapest, past and present, is my material. Or at least, that is the equation with which I began. I should put forward the caveat that few of the “facts” presented in this paper can be documented, cited, or checked, except possibly through hypnosis of the author. These are impressions; however, they come from a prolonged and intimate contact with the subject. If you were to walk for miles around the city and sit for hours in its theatres, you would certainly emerge with your own impressions, different from mine. I can offer no apologies for this – theatre is an art form which constantly struggles between being a


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre form of individual expression and a communally-shared experience, and throughout the writing of this paper I have struggled in a similar way. I cannot prescribe your experience, and I do not intend to. I can only report on my own. I am a writer, not a scholar, and I make no pretense otherwise.

Part Nulla: Why Budapest, Why Theatre After that lofty introduction, what follows now is a more useful two-movement introduction. (I know: get on with it, already.) First, understanding how the infrastructure of the theatre system works here is both necessary to follow the paper and an interesting topic on its own. Second, I will outline the method of the madness around which I have organized my analysis. Good luck to me.

The First Movement of Part Nulla: How It All Works Here Budapest theatre has, on one hand, a very long tradition, while at the same time it is undergoing major reinvention. The theatre system is organized around two concepts more or less unknown in the United States: the ensemble and the repertory. The latter term refers to the current offering of plays produced by a theatre. Instead of performing one play for several months (the “en suite” system used by most U.S. theatres), Budapest theatres play their entire repertory simultaneously, giving a different performance almost every night. To illustrate, a Broadway theatre doing Hamlet will do Hamlet eight times a week until ticket sales drop or another production moves in, perhaps several weeks or several months after its opening. After Hamlet finally closes, the set is typically destroyed and the theatre will not consider performing Hamlet again until a brand new production with a new audience in mind comes along. A Budapest theatre doing Ham-

let will only perform it a few times each month, storing the set in between performances and keeping the show on offer indefinitely, as long as ticket sales stay decent. In between its Hamlet performances, the theatre will perform other plays from its repertory. A typical U.S. theatre would play five or six productions a season, one at a time; a typical Budapest theatre might play ten or fifteen productions over a season, in rotation. This repertory system offers both advantages and disadvantages. It precludes, as a local dramaturg explained to me, both major successes and major failures. If a show is getting rusty, no one really notices so long as it only plays three times a month. On the flipside, an audience member may recommend a show that she saw several years ago, and her friend might easily find it still on that theatre’s repertory. Some shows, such as The Attic at the Vígszínház, which has been running for more than five years, draw the same audience members again and again. They return to relive their first experience seeing the show. New casts are occasionally brought in (several shows outlive their original actors) but the shows are almost never redirected or redesigned after opening night. The other pillar of the theatre system is the use of ensembles (or “acting companies”), which do exist in the U.S., but typically not so rigidly as is found here. The majority of actors in Budapest are members of a particular theatre, their artistic home for that season. They can request permission to play guest performances elsewhere, but their home theatre “owns” them, similar to the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s. Most unbelievably to their American counterparts, a theatre’s actors receive a base monthly paycheck, just for being members of the company. They then receive additional money for each night they perform and each day they rehearse. Although more 107


Student Conference 2004 young actors prefer to be freelance artists (the arrangement almost all American actors have), some older ones have been with the same theatre since graduating from the academy thirty or forty years ago. The two systems – ensemble and repertory – serve each other. Because of the complex repertory scheduling, actors have little say in where they perform on which night. An actor may perform in five productions at “his” theatre, and give two guest performances elsewhere. His schedule is determined months in advance in a meeting of the theatres’ artistic secretaries, who hammer out the monthly schedule in accordance with a mutually understood hierarchy among the theatres. Because of these systems, being an actor is potentially secure and viable profession. It can almost be like a tenured professorship. (This system also greatly affects the systems of casting and actor training, which I do not have space to elaborate on in this paper. Suffice it to say, whereas in America the actor’s life is unstructured, here in Hungary it is more formalized, and individual advancement is far more difficult to generate.) Security is an outcome of the third major factor in Budapest theatre, the public funding system. After the theatres were nationalized by the Communists at the end of the 1940s, artistic directors became cultural state employees. In 1989, after four decades of well-funded, and, as time went on, less strictly censored theatre, shifting immediately to a market-driven theatre would have been unacceptable. Theatres today continue to enjoy extremely high public funding (by American standards), which allows them to keep ticket prices low and worry less about quality and competition. This has served well some of the larger theatres, who can rely on their reputations, and has made the situation extremely difficult for fringe or alternative companies. One famous case is that of the Krétákör (Chalk Circle) Theatre, 108

who, despite selling 99% of their tickets and receiving dozens of Hungarian and international awards, receive more funds from abroad than from the Hungarian government. While this public patronage of the arts is admirable, funding will decrease before theatres and audiences consent to higher tickets prices and private donations, and this makes the current situation untenable. The only Budapest theatre that has succeeded with the American model, more or less, is the Madách Theatre, considered Budapest’s “most commercial.” The Madách performed the Hungarian premiere of the Phantom of the Opera nearly en suite (200 performances a season) and charged the equivalent of about $50, the priciest theatre ticket in town and still only a fourth of what a Broadway show could cost. So the scene is set. In Budapest, we have “mainstream” actors with secure jobs performing in 100-year-old theatres for tickets under $7. We have avant-garde fringe companies performing in classrooms and clubs for higher prices because they receive less of the publicly-funded pie. We have a wide variety of shows on offer, from Shakespeare and Chekhov to classic Hungarian tales (often re-written or re-envisioned) to contemporary German, Russian, British, and American playwrights. There is a never-ending search for new Hungarian writers, but unfortunately many theatres must settle for Hungarian translations of popular international fare. The best component of the theatre scene here is the variety of what is on offer. When you include opera, operetta, musicals, puppet theatre, children’s theatre, contemporary and classical dance and touring companies from abroad, the broader theatre scene expands from wide to massive. The cabaret singer at the Merlin might call it all “crap,” but even she would have to agree it comes in an impressive number of forms every season.


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre

The Second Movement of Part Nulla: Four Budapest Senses Now that the infrastructure of Budapest theatre has been explained, I can attempt to explain the admittedly bizarre system around which I have organized my thoughts. But first, another anecdote. A very popular fringe company here, Béla Pintér and Company, is known for combining pop culture and Hungarian history and folklore in dark, comedic, and musical performances. One of their trademark shows is Parasztopera (lit., Peasant Opera, but with the English title The Cowboy), a folk-opera-fable set in rural Hungary. The final line goes something like, “Oh Lord! It would have been better for me not to have been born at all than to have been born a Hungarian!” How “Hungarian” indeed! Pintér ended his dark comedy (which also contained an dream-like American cowboy with a massive fake phallus and a rendition of John Denver’s famous song about West Virginia, its lyrics adjusted to, “Take me home, country roads/to the place I belong/Transylvania!”), with such an unexpectedly nihilistic sentiment! Somehow, sitting in an “fringe” theatre on the top floor of the technical university, a dusty black box in the upper reaches of an ornate palace, this juxtaposition of joy and sorrow seemed completely appropriate. When I first saw it, I recalled a quote from István Bart’s cultural dictionary of Hungary, “Sírva vigad a magyar,” which translates to “the Hungarian makes merry by crying.” It seemed obvious at first: pessimism is the second thing that the guide books discuss concerning the Hungarian character, topped only by paprika. This is usually followed by the statistic about the Hungarian suicide rate (highest in Europe, apparently, after its language cousin, Finland.) However, I decided to look closer. I asked myself, What makes Parasztopera (or anything) “Hungarian”? Is it simply short hand for “something which took place

in Hungary”? Could the same event have occurred in the Czech Republic? I think not. What happens here happens specifically here. I believe this is true because of the uniquely symbiotic relationship between Budapest and its theatre system – a relationship as idiosyncratic as the city itself. But how can this help me as a writer? How do you write a place? Using as my source material both the dozens of performances I have seen in Budapest – including all of the categories I mentioned above, from “experimental” theatre to good old traditional Neil Simon – as well as the countless encounters I have had with the city and its inhabitants, I have focused in on four themes, which in my view, define both Budapest and the theatre culture it fosters. These themes, or “senses”, have proved useful to me as an observer of theatre, a temporary citizen of Budapest, and a dramatist. The four senses are a sense of cultural awareness, a sense of practicality, a sense of struggle, and a sense of historical irony. Of course, these senses are more like magnetic poles then rigid boundaries, guidelines around which things (whatever these “things” may be) tend to orient themselves. They overlap, they shift in and out of one another, and they sometimes contradict each other. However, after some study and metaphorical acrobatics, these categories represent four distinct windows through which we can understand what happens on the stage, what happens on the street, and how they are inextricably connected. They have proved very useful as a writer. Instead of describing all four, which would take too long and is also a little boring, I will explain two of these senses, cultural awareness and practicality, and just when my deconstructionist tendencies become overwhelming, we will read some dialogues to cover the other bases. 109


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Part One (Finally!): Cultural Exposure My first impression of Budapest when I arrived was a sense of the significance of culture. One major reason why theatre is inseparably bound to Budapest, and vice versa, is an overarching awareness of culture shared by Hungarians. It manifests for Budapesters in the cityscape itself: you are never far from a marker memorializing a noted composer, author, or poet. It also appears on stage in an almost self-reflected devotion to Hungarian “classics” – those plays and writers they cannot seem to get enough of, for even the act of producing one is to take part in its undeniable significance. Culture in the City and in the Citizens You can take the tram from Mari Jaszai Square (named after the popular tragedienne around the turn-of-the-century) to Lujza Blaha Square (after the prima donna around the same time period, more noted for comedic and heroic roles). If you take the metro (changing trains under the would-be site of the Budapest National Theatre, now a parking lot) to the Great Market Hall, you will find yourself near Ferenc Molnár Street (named for the most famous dramatist to come out of Hungary). These three points make a triangle that includes almost all of downtown Pest. It is true that the revolutionaries loom largely in the Hungarian brain (Lajos Kossuth Square is the site of Parliament and Szechényi Bridge connects the center of Pest – the Science Academy, in fact – with the foot of Castle Hill). The Hapsburgs still (or rather, once again) give Budapest its skeletal frame (Teresa, Joseph, Elizabeth, and Francis on the larger Ring Road and the Vienna-bound Danube cuts through the center). But the soul of Budapest, where you can buy a sandwich, where you can purchase flowers or sunglass110

es any time, day or night, surely this is in Mari Jaszai or Blaha Lujza Squares. Every Hungarian – even those not involved in theatre – seems to know who these figures are. It is always difficult and dangerous to try to equate cultural figures within different communities (ie, So-and-so is our Robert Redford, etc.), but I think it is sort of a Hungarian parlor game. Unfortunately, the comparison only works one-way. So-and-so might be their Robert Redford, but Robert Redford is not our so-and-so, because most of us would have no idea even who our so-and-sos are, let alone theirs. There are about twenty Budapest streets, parks, and squares named after the revolutionary poet Sándor Petôfi, according to András Török’s critical guide to Budapest, not to mention a bridge, a museum, a radio station, and one of the “streets” inside the WestEnd Shopping Mall. (The fact that Petôfi’s name recognition outside of Hungary is about nil, sadly, does not stem this nomenclature-extravaganza. In terms of cultural exports, the Budapest city planners would do much better naming something Zsa Zsa Gabor Square, or at least Tony Curtis Park, but understandably and admirably there seems to be little interest in this. However, in St. Louis, Missouri, there is the Mark McGuire Highway but nothing named after Maya Angelou or Tennessee Williams, the baseball star’s fellow St. Louisans.) There is simply less of a sense of theatre (or other art forms) being “high art,” divorced from the “real work” of the city. Audiences are incredibly professionally diverse and full of the college students and twentysomethings typically absent from American theatres. Live theatre is here what a Hollywood movie might be at home. Perhaps this is because the city planners are brave or culturally informed enough to give cultural heroes their due in the cityscape itself.


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre Culture on Stage When you look at the repertory of any of the major Budapest theatres, in addition to the Chekhovs and the Shakespeares, you typically find at least a few Hungarian classics – either in drastically new versions (such as John the Valiant at the Pesti Színház, set in Nyugati Station) or completely traditional (such as the production of Imre Madách’s Tragedy of Man that opened the new National Theatre in 2002). Many theatres, in their various ways, try to be the torchbearers of classic Hungarian drama. It is true that these plays are performed for their inherent worth, because the stories are good and Hungarian and illustrate some aspect of the Hungarian, and human, psyche, as Death of a Salesman does for Americans. But furthermore, they are done because they are classics. They are done because people crave the experience of hearing the words of Sándor Petôfi or Ferenc Molnár. Because of the repertory system here, which keeps some plays in rotation for several decades, even seeing a premiere of a new version of John the Valiant has the potential to be a historically significant experience. On the other hand, even if this production flops after four performances, it still becomes part of the canon of John the Valiant productions, a new chapter in a book that began a hundred and fifty years ago with its first publication. This is true even when a theatre breaks from the traditional way in which a play is performed. Part of the excitement, I think, about the Krétákör production of Ferenc Molár’s Liliom is the director’s handling of classic material in an avant-garde, expressionistic, and yet totally lucid way. The “classicness” of it becomes and remains part of the experience. When a popular actor plays a famous role on one of Budapest’s major stages, the confluence of person, place, and thing itself

becomes a cultural institution – the kind of thing people tell their grandchildren they saw many years ago. The Connection Between the Two The theatre tradition is part of the act of seeing theatre in Budapest. We see plays and we live among them. I do not know exactly how, but the cultural education here seems to be impressively rich. School groups attend all kinds of theatre, including some challenging pieces, from a very young age. Recently I saw a puppet-and-live-theatre version of Don Quixote at the Budapest Bábszínház (Puppet Theatre). I would estimate the average audience age was 10. From the first moment (when a female actor, dressed as a man, opens a locker decorated with swimsuit-clad women, makes excited noises about them, and takes a swig from a flask) to the last, the performance was totally inappropriate for kids. It contained explicit visual references to, among other things, prostitution, alcoholism, September 11th, the Holocaust (including a video sequence that juxtaposed Hitler’s moustache and an erotic dancer’s thong underwear), and so on. The kids loved it. The teachers seemed a little shaken, but no one walked out. When I later asked the dramaturg why they allow kids to see these obviously adult productions (and furthermore, why they play them on Thursday afternoons at 2pm, when it seems likely and reasonable that school groups might attend) she shrugged her shoulders. “We tell them, but they come anyway.” Does this fall into the category of pop-sociology maxims under the heading “Europeansmature-faster,” akin to how French teens apparently never drive drunk because they begin drinking much younger and therefore know how to exercise responsibility? Or is this exposure to challenging theatre simply

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Student Conference 2004 part of the process of bringing up citizens who inherently understand art’s role in society, the good, the bad, and the occasionally offensive? I believe the latter. The cultural significance of theatre (as other art forms) as an important output of “Hungarianness” is taught at an early age. By taking your 10year-old to see a disturbing play, you invariably convey the message that art is more than pretty pictures, and culture sometimes may bring temporary unease but is still necessary to society and identity. It seems especially true in this isolated culture, bordered on every side by a nation that can subscribe to some greater linguistic/cultural grouping (for instance, the Slavs, the Germans, or even the Romans). If the Hungarians forget Lujza Blaha, they seem to know, no one else will remember her.

Part Two: The Metro Repertory Practicality in the City Discussing practicality in a city where even the natives complain of the mind-numbing bureaucracy (mostly concerning the post office and the telephone service) might seem odd. However, the one area in which the notion of Hungarian practicality is most obvious is public transport. (Practicality, as I am using it, differs from efficiency. Practicality simply refers to a system’s ability to accomplish a task; efficiency involves finding the best way to do so.) The transport system provides both a valuable individual service (getting from point A to point B being, of course, the primary function of a transportation system) and, I think, an irreplaceable social service. Because of parking and traffic, driving a car seems impracticable for even some more wealthy Budapesters. The result is a great moving melting pot on the blue line every morning and every afternoon. In addition to the commuters themselves, you

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find hundreds participating in the “cottage industries” thriving in, on, around, or under the big stations. Moszkva Square in Buda is an entire mini-economy. The kind of WalMart one-stop efficiency does not exist, but the people themselves seem to get things done in a no-nonsense way – they just do not balk at buying ladies underwear and gyros side-by-side on their way to work. There is also a wonderful practicality surrounding the wide variety of transport options available. I cannot imagine too many cities feature three metro lines, dozens of bus lines (including a special Castle Bus), a tram network, and a trolley system, and a suburban light rail, not to mention the night buses, the funicular, and two novelties: a children’s railway and a cog-wheel railway. (It also includes an occasional Phantom Tram, which can occasionally be seen rumbling along the Large Boulevard at 3am on a Wednesday – long after it was supposed to be shut down for the night – with no explanation. There are passengers on the Phantom Tram, but it doesn’t seem to stop at any stops. I think it might be a shadow service exclusively for spies and nightclub bouncers.) Almost all of it is integrated into the same ticket scheme – your month pass permits you to ride the system almost in its entirety. Budapest is not a massive city – inevitably there is some overlap. Do commuters find the mode of transport most suited to their mood? Or do they ride the routes where they are less likely to be stopped by evil kontrollers? The Number 2 tram and the Number 15 bus run parallel just two blocks away from each other between Mari Jaszai Square and Fôvám Square. The bus weaves through some imposing buildings, including some connected to the Hungarian military. The tram rides along the picturesque riverbank, making two stops in front


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre of Parliament and offering unbeatable views of the Danube, the castle district, and Gellért hill. Why would you ever take the bus? Perhaps it is to avoid tourists like my father, who rode the Number Two from terminus to terminus (even down to southern Pest, near the National Theatre, where there is admittedly less to see) four or five times during his visit. Practical but inefficient. Practicality in Theatre The system I discussed above of ensembles and repertories is the essence of practicality (not, the distinction must again be made, efficiency). The public funding allows for practicality without cutting too many costs. The Vígszínház, for instance, can have dozens of complicated stage sets in storage at once without worrying about renting space. The theatre actually owns several covered courtyards and basements in its neighborhood. It also has the manpower to have one complete set up for a rehearsal that ends at three o’clock and an entirely different set up for a performance at seven. There is a similar practical inefficiency surrounding the internal leadership structure of the theatre companies. Rather than, as in the typical American system, having the theatre’s leadership shared between two people (one on the artistic side and one on the executive side), the Hungarian theatres (perhaps remembering their negative experience of another Dual Monarchy) are led by one person, usually a theatre director crudely recast as a businessman. During the years nationalized theatres, this made indirect government control of theatres simpler; today it serves to protect the status quo (referred to euphemistically as “the tradition”) of a given company and (sometimes) the career of the director himself. This top-down leadership system helps “things get done,” but sometimes bruises egos or sacrifices artistry along the way.

Another manifestation of practicality in the theatre can be found by looking at the theatre community as a whole. More so than, in my experience, New York City, America’s largest and most important theatre community, in which there is a deep schism between Broadway (commercial) and Downtown (artistically relevant) theatre, Budapest theatre is all of a kind. Artists from the fringe sometimes direct at the major theatres (Sándor Zsótér and Béla Pintér, two of the most prominent “fringe” directors in Budapest, have directed this season at the Vígszínház and the National Theatre, respectively), and the same is true in the other direction (the studio theatre of the Madách – Budapest’s most “Broadway” company – is becoming an independent art theatre named after István Örkény). All of this on offer for a large, but still finite, audience requires a fluidity of thinking for both producer and consumer. The system of artistic secretaries determining schedules for both actors and theatres is the practical solution for this need for fluidity. Becoming an actor in Hungary is a relatively straightforward process: you basically need to get accepted into the Drama Academy, and be fortunate enough to be a star student in a class with an influential teacher (you will have the same one for all four years) and after you graduate he will invite you into his company. (By the way, the use of “he” is not gender shorthand. Every acting faculty member is male, and all but two artistic directors in Hungary are men.) Once you are in a company, in theory, your employment is secure until you retire or die. The notion of actors starving to death while waiting tables and auditioning thirty times a week – so common in America – is foreign here. The Connection Between the Two Here in Budapest, you can utilize the overlapping and over-complete transport system 113


Student Conference 2004 to attend a practical but inefficient theatre. (The ironic exception is the out-of-the-way National Theatre. You can take the Number Two tram on your way to the theatre, but occasionally a production ends after the tram stops running. Good luck getting home from its industrial war zone southern Pest location.) Getting things done is highly valued, but, in keeping with what I’ve heard obliquely referred to as “the previous system of government,” as long as people are working all day, productivity is perhaps less of a concern. As I heard said in the Czech Republic, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In Hungary, though, they expend huge amounts of energy of on the pretending. To again connect this to public transportation, imagine how much more money the city could make if they employed a system of gates in the metro (like in the London tube) that required a valid ticket before entering. The spotchecking system employs more people, but draws in less revenue. Similarly, switching to an “en suite” theatre system, with theatres producing one play at a time, would sacrifice some of the impressive variety on offer, but would almost certainly improve the quality of each individual performance.

Interval The next two parts are excerpts from the still-in-development Things to See and Do. The basic story involves Ben and Julia who move to Budapest after their college graduation. Julia was born in Budapest and moved to the States when she was ten. Ben is a selfdescribed “American mutt.” Over the course of their time in Hungary, Ben connects to Hungary in a way he never expected to and Julia is no longer able to. They each have

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various encounters – with other American interlopers, with figures from Julia’s family’s past, and, in Ben’s case, with Árpád, the Magyar conqueror from the ninth century A.D.

Part Three: Non-Stop Virág (Night. Julia is in bed, and Ben enters and sits beside her.) Ben: Wake up. Julia: Why? Ben: Wake up, something happened. Julia: What happened? Ben: I got you flowers again. Julia (still half-asleep): From where? Ben: From the same non-stop virág bolt. The one I went to last week. (pause.) Julia: I don’t want any flowers. What’s that smell? Ben: Something happened, and I have to tell you about it. But first you have to take the flowers. Wake up. Julia (sits up, looks at him): Is this something stupid? Ben: It’s nothing stupid. Julia: What. (takes the flowers). Ben: Ok. I got mugged. Julia: What? Ben: I got mugged. It’s ok. Julia: Where? Ben: In the train station. Julia: Why were you there? Ben: I was buying flowers. Julia: Why were you there? It’s fucking dangerous. Ben: I know. I just got mugged. Julia: What happened. Ben: A guy came up to me, and his eyes were going everywhere, and his jacket was tucked into his sweatpants, which I


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre guess is a sure sign of something being up– Julia: Ben, Ben, please don’t give me your psychological assessment. Just tell me what happened. Ben: Well, he came up to me, and no one else was around, except some sleeping bums, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and kind of led me to the wall– Julia (under her breath): Oh, my god. Ben: –and it was sort of hypnotizing, and I knew I should have just bolted but I couldn’t. And then I could see around the corner a little bit, I could see one of the other bums, a woman, was sitting up on a yellow mattress and was staring straight at us, and she made some kind of song or noise or something, and then the guy took out a knife, like a bowie knife, with grooves and a red handle, and it was really dirty and rusty, and he had one hand on my shoulder, and now his eyes were focused right on mine, they weren’t rolling around. And he spoke in German to me. Which I thought was strange. He said geld, which I knew was money, and I just took out my wallet and gave it to him. He took the money out and put it in his pocket and then took all the receipts and shit out of the wallet and dropped them and the wallet on the floor. And then he took my jacket sleeve and sawed a little hole into it. See? And then he pushed me away. I mean, he was a homeless guy. I saw him go back to the woman and get back on the mattress under the blanket. And they both just laid back down and stopped moving. Julia: So you didn’t just go up to him and just take the cash back?

Ben: No. Julia: You just left? Ben: I stood there for a while. My arms were all dirty from where he touched me. He smelled really bad. I was kind of shaking. I almost threw up. Then I remembered that I had a pocket full of change, and so I bought you the flowers. Which is what I had come to do anyway. I love that store. And then I came home. Julia: So he’s still there. Ben: I guess so. Julia: So he just came up to you and freaked you out, and you gave him your cash. Go back! Ben: Did I mention the knife? Look at my jacket. Like I’m going to go wake him up and ask for it back. Julia: No, um, you did the right thing. Ben: What would you have done? I couldn’t think. Julia: I just don’t see how he could just walk up to you and take your money like that. Ben: I thought he was going to kill me. I really did. I was vibrating. Julia: Why were you down there? Ben: I thought I heard music. Julia: Why were you out in the first place? Ben: I wanted to check it out. See the flower store again. I didn’t think I was going to get mugged. Julia: Check what out? You don’t have to go down into the station to get to the flower store. Ben. Ok. I wanted to see the station at night. Julia: So you intended to go down there. Ben: Well, I intended to go, and then I got scared and turned around, and then I

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Student Conference 2004 thought I heard music, so I went down to check it out. Julia: And the guy came up to you. Ben: He was already walking in my direction when I came down the stairs. It was like he was waiting for me. It was weird. Julia: How much was in your wallet? Ben: About twenty dollars. Julia: Ok. Ben: Ok. Julia: Are you okay? Ben: Now that you’re done accusing me, which I knew would happen, I’m okay. Julia: Well, I’m sorry! But it’s just, it just . . . Ben! You ask for it! Ben: I don’t know what that means, so I guess I’ll ignore it. Julia: Fine. Do that. I don’t know what it means either. Just don’t go hanging out in the train stations at night. Ben: Or, go, and just don’t take anything valuable with me. Julia (mocking him): Hello? Did I mention the knife? Ben: Now I know, now I’ll be more careful. Violent crime here is really low. Julia: I can’t believe this! Learn the lesson, shithead. Ben: What’s the lesson? That this city is dangerous? That’s no lesson. I’m not going to hide in my room like there’s a curfew. Julia: Ok, do what you want. Go get cut up. Leave your wallet at home. Ben (dismissively): Go to hell. (starts to exit.) Julia (equally so): Thanks for the flowers. Ben (from off stage): Screw you.

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Part Four: Too Much History, Too Many Stories (A bus. Ben is looking in a book and up at the posted diagram of bus stops. Árpád, in a vest and tie, is seated on a seat behind him.) Árpád: Excuse me. (Ben hears, but ignores.) Árpád: Excuse me, young sir. What is it you are looking for? Ben (quickly): Oh, I know where I’m going. (Ben puts the book in his backpack, but keeps studying the diagram.) (pause.) Árpád:. Excuse me. Come here. Have you ever been to India? (pause.) Ben: No. Árpád: Cambodia? Ben: No. Árpád: Malaysia? Ben: No. Árpád: In these countries, people don’t help other people. Here in my country, we do. Ben: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to– Árpád: I have been to these countries. Ben: No, it’s just that I Árpád: In my country, it is different. Ben: I’ve been living here for three months. So I know. I was just wondering about the street sign. Árpád: (laughs) Why don’t you speak Hungarian if you are living here? Ben: Well, I do. A little. Árpád: (serious) Well, should I speak Eng-


David F. Chapman: Theatre in Budapest, Budapest in Theatre lish or Hungarian? Which do you prefer? Ben: Hungarian. If you speak slowly. And only use infinitive verbs. Árpád: Because I speak five languages. Ben: Really. Árpád: I speak Russian, Italian, German, French, and English. Ben: And Hungarian. Árpád (grandly): Of course! It is my country, it is my language. Where are you from? Ben: America. Árpád: I was serving in the American army for thirty years. (He mimes holding a machine gun with two hands and shooting a spray of bullets, while making a soft gun sound.) You understand? Ben: Not really. Árpád: I was Black Hat. Ben: Oh. Árpád: You know? Ben: Um, I’ve heard of it. Árpád: I kill people. Ben: Now? Árpád: I am very happy. My God, He may decide later on. I am looking at you, and you might be my grandson. I am seventy-three. Ben: (Trying). I’m happy too.

Árpád: You should be happy, you should enjoy your life, you should do what makes you happy. I had to kill many many people. Ben: I said, I am happy. Árpád: So when I try to help you, when I see you looking at sign and at map, I am not trying to offend you. Ben: Oh, I wasn’t offended. Árpád: I am not trying to call you stupid. Ben: It’s not a problem. Árpád: I have made a hard life, I have killed many people, and I am here in my country, in Hungary, and I am only trying to help. Ben: I appreciated it. I’m sorry if I upset you. I’m happy. You’re happy. (He holds out his hand. Árpád takes it and doesn’t shake it in a business way, but holds it and pumps it up and down to accentuate his words.) Árpád: I was here during revolution. Then I killed many people. (He lets go of Ben’s hand and repeats machine gun gesture.) You could be my grandson. Ben: I could. Árpád: And I am happy, young sir. Ben: I’m glad you’re happy. (Sound: the bus-stop arpeggio.)

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Bibliography I have drawn, indirectly or directly, from dozens of sources while writing this play and this paper. Some of the most provocative have been un-citable, such as billboards, graffiti, free advertising postcards, Metro announcers, overheard conversations, and dreams. In terms of traditional sources, the following have been particularly useful:

Bart, István. Hungary and the Hungarians: The Keywords. Judith Sollosy, trans. Budapest: Corvina Books, 2002.

Fábri, Péter, ed. A Shabby Paradise: Contemporary Hungarian Theatre. Budapest: The International Theatre Institute, forthcoming (May 2004).

Lendvai, Paul. The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat. Ann Major, trans. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.

McDowell, Bart. “Hungary: Changing Homeland of a Tough, Romantic People.” National Geographic, Vol. 139, No. 4. Washington, D.C., The National Geographic Society, April 1971.

Rimmer, Dave, ed. Time Out: Budapest. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Török, András. Budapest: A Critical Guide. Budapest: Corvina Books, 2001.

Wasserstein, Bernard. The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

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A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities In Hungarian Urban Discourse

Erika SĂłlyom ........................................................................................ New York University Department of Linguistics 719Broadway, 4th floor New York, NY, 10003 United States of America www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu Adviser: Prof. RenĂŠeBlake es335@nyu.edu

Hungarian Academy of Sciences Linguistics Institute 1399 Budapest Pf. 701/518 Hungary www.nytud.hu Adviser: Prof. MiklĂłs Kontra

........................................................................................ The collapse of communism left its mark in the fragmented pieces of the Berlin Wall. It opened borders and introduced market economies. It restructured societies, even those unprepared for change. So it is no surprise that languages spoken by the people would be forever altered. As a sociolinguist, concerned with the study of language in its social context, I propose to examine an ongoing linguistic change related to issues of formality that has been taking place in Hungary since 1989. Traditionally, notions of linguistic formality are closely connected to issues of solidarity, politeness, respect, status and hierarchies of all sorts including gender, age, social status

and the like. Specifically, my study focuses on the linguistic shift in the complex marking of formality and informality in Hungarian, using a sociolinguistic analysis couched in a framework that considers both politics and economy. My research is predicated on the notion that during the former regime of communism the public discourse required rigid expression of the formal hierarchies. However, since the early 1990s, with the advent of a more westernized economic structure, there appears to have been a shift from formal language use to a more informal discourse in the public sphere. Common or familiar discourse is winning significant popularity. I 119


Student Conference 2004 hypothesize that this linguistic transformation is closely linked with globalization as well as the ongoing democratic changes taking place in Hungarian society. Influenced by Cameron’s (2000) work on the effects of globalization on the linguistic marketplace as well as the notion of ‘synthetic personalization’ (where genres of talk traditionally associated with the private domain have increasingly been appropriated to the public sphere) introduced by Fairclough (1989), I couple the linguistic transformations observed at the levels of formality among individuals with general trends of globalization. The sociolinguistic analysis offered will be couched in a political economy framework, as outlined by Gal (1987, 1989) and Irvine (1989). Using this framework, the linguistic interactions of local populations in Budapest are located within a larger political and economic structures of the Eastern European region, as well as in the global market. Thus, the key concepts within a Hungarian context (but in a comparative framework) addressed in my paper are (i) globalization and the marketplace (ii) political economy and language (iii) post-communist East-Europe, democratization and linguistic change in progress (iv) honorifics, kinship terminologies and pronominal addressing (v) in/directness (vi) language attitudes and (vii) language ideologies.

Present paper is a work in progress for my doctoral dissertation. It is a preliminary qualitative study, based on a dozen of sociolinguistics interviews conducted in Budapest, Hungary during 2001 and 2002 as well as the results of participant observation at a work setting, conducted in 2003 and 2004. Based on my interviews conducted insofar, my Budapest informants tend to attribute the observed ongoing linguistic change to a possible interplay of causes such as “Americanization,” “new/fast culture,” “globalization,” “disappearing former political hierarchies,” “open borders” and “the widespread use of those foreign languages (such as English),” where formalities are expressed less rigidly. It is important to note, however, that although the effects and general tendencies of globalization are without question noticeable both on societal and linguistic levels, counter currents of anti120

global tones are present and there is still a definite thread of local traditional values and reminiscence of styles of the former years and they may have an influential effect on language as well. The simultaneous embracing and rejecting of the global influence is an interesting paradox and I hope that after the next phase of my research, which will include a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses as well as attitude tests, I will be able to shed some light on the how the global and the local interact, both in society and language.

Introduction Globalization is an international, intercultural and interlingual phenomenon, but not a recent one. The process of “the crystallization of the entire world as a single place” (Robertson, 1987: 23) has taken various forms throughout history. Yet, a considerable amount of attention and emphasis is given to globalization these days. One reason for this may be that the level of communication technology has reached hitherto unknown height and speed. Today, the various processes of globalization are more accelerated and occur on multiple levels, connecting far-away geographical territories. Rapid change is the staple of the twenty-first century. Not only are economies traveling faster but also languages and language ideologies are rapidly following suit as well. The economies and languages of Eastern Europe are no exception. During the past decade, the countries separated by the Iron Curtain from Western Europe became members of a reconfigured global economy. From behind their closed societies with insular walls a new scenario emerged: the local languages in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union had a gradual, but significant encounter with a rapidly spreading global English. As Krouglov (1996: 89) noted, “rarely has the pres-


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities ent-day sociolinguist had the opportunity to observe such a linguistic upheaval as that which is now occurring in Eastern Europe.” The collapse of communism not only left its mark in the fragmented pieces of the Berlin Wall but also opened borders and introduced market economies. With the collapse came restructured societies, even those unprepared for the change. So it is no surprise that languages spoken by the people in these regions would be forever altered. A handful of linguistic studies have investigated situations around the world where political and socio-economic changes were accompanied by linguistic ones. In my dissertation research, I attempt to look at the sociolinguistic landscape in Hungary, since the country went though significant political shift during the past decade, marked by 1989, the official year of the change of the regime. For my work, Krouglov’s (1996) study in Russia and the Ukraine and Zhang’s (2001) research in China are of particular relevance due to their similar political histories (i.e. the unifying thread of the legacy of former communism and the subsequent change of the regime to a more open market economy) that connect these regions to my own country, Hungary. As a sociolinguist, concerned with the study of language in its social context, in my dissertation, I propose to examine a synchronic linguistic behavior regarding formality and informality. I plan to conduct sociolinguistic research in order to find out whether there is any observable linguistic shift, and if formal language use is gradually being replaced with informal discourse. More specifically, I will look at those public settings in Budapest, where I can observe interactions between company employees (i.e. customer service providers) and their clients (i.e. customers). Within the Hungarian context, I will build

on the study of Angelusz and Tardos (1995), who pointed out that in terms of formality, address forms and greetings are not only reflections of dyadic relationships in society but they are also influenced by the actual ’political constellation’ of a region. As Angelusz and Tardos (Ibid.) noted already in the second half of the 1980s, in Hungary, there was a ’change of climate’ when the monolithic political culture slowly started dissolving. They suggested 1987 to be an important dividing line and referred to this date as the ’already past – not yet here’ formula. Angelusz and Tardos (1995: 40) also noted that the “actual socio-historical constellation was reflected in the general features of personal relations [since] the shift of the components of the societal relations began to be reflected in the address forms. Influenced by Cameron’s (2000) work on the effects of globalization on the linguistic marketplace as well as the notion of Fairclough’s (1989) ‘synthetic personalization’ (where genres of talk traditionally associated with the private domain have increasingly been appropriated to the public sphere), I couple the linguistic transformations observed at the levels of formality among individuals with general trends of democracy and globalization. The sociolinguistic analysis offered will be couched in a political economy framework, as outlined by Gal (1987, 1989) and Irvine (1989). Using this framework, the linguistic interactions of local populations in Budapest will be located within a larger political and economic structures of the Eastern European region, as well as in the global market.

Research Overview As I am very interested in sociopolitical and consequently linguistic changes in societies, in the summer of 2001, I returned to Budapest to conduct preliminary surveys 121


Student Conference 2004 regarding native Budapestians’ intuitions and thoughts about linguistic change in the city. Arriving in Budapest at Ferihegy Airport, I headed towards the passport control booth. A young border guard officer wearing a uniform greeted me and posed the following questions: Erika, hogy utaztál? (‘How was your-SING-INF trip/flight?) and Meddig maradsz Magyarországon? (‘How long are you-SING-INF staying in Hungary?’). The situation, without a question, was highly marked for formality due to the official setting, the gender difference, the hierarchy, and the lack of familiarity between the speakers. Yet, to my great surprise, I was greeted informally by my first name and both questions were given in the familiar form. On the road between the airport and the city center, I received further messages from the billboards: pleasant faces advertising various products looked at me from above, shouting informal messages all over in the air. Upon my arrival, after switching on the TV, more informal pronouns touched my ears, especially coming from the commercial channels. My own personal observation coupled with the small sample of the preliminary surveys and the accompanying brief qualitative analysis limit generalizations about all the aspects of this linguistic change. I am, therefore, eager to find out more about the Hungarian case since the relevant academic literature I consulted indicated that this kind of linguistic shift from formality towards informality is well known in many places in the world where political changes - especially that of democratization - occurred in the society. In/Formality and Metalinguistic Remarks All the examples from the literature highlight not only the fact that the shift occurs on the palette of formality but one can see that the spectrum embraces many different corners and languages of the world. The formalinformal distinction has inspired many linguists but non-

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linguists interested in the topic can have striking metalinguistic comments about it as well. For example, one of the informants from my preliminary surveys, had an interesting story to share concerning the formal-informal distinction and the length of young boys’ pants. The analogy may be surprising but consider the following the passage:

ES

And you told me an interesting story about how things used to be in the old days… INF8 Yes, the story was about my father […]. He was born in 1904 in Szatmár, Hungary, but this event happened in Pest [...] At that time it happened that when they were in fourth grade, their teacher used informal forms with them. Of course, they were all boys and they all wore short pants and when they switched to middle school level, i.e. fifth grade in September, [...] all the boys showed up wearing long pants and the very same teacher, who had used informal forms with them in June, started using formal forms with the kids. This was the rite de passage, well a liminal experience, that they had now become adults – as if they were having a bar mitzvah. [...] Well, [this liminal experience] has different forms in each culture and here this was it: going from informal to formal forms. It seems to me that since the change of the regime of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hungarians have gone through their own societal rite of passage. However, the direction is just the opposite this time: people are leaving their formal forms and long pants behind and, exchanging them for more informal forms and short pants. The question arises: Why such a trade? What is the hurry? Can it be the trick of fast approaching, fastfood capitalism? For more money, we get fewer goods? Including shorter pants…


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities I believe that the question is no longer about the length of our pants. It is more a question of the style – with a hint of globalization: rigid, tight, formal wear is out and baggy, comfortable, one-size-fits-all, informal pants are in. They are all over the place: we wear them in New York, in Barcelona or in the streets of Warsaw or Budapest. If our pants lost their tightness and rigidity, I pose the following question: What happened to the rigid system of formality in our language?

In/Formality: Historical Background and Linguistic Variation The marking of in/formality in language has been a significant area of sociolinguistics since the 1960s, beginning with the seminal work of Brown and Gilman (1972 [1960]). Since then, many other linguists have conducted research on the address forms of various languages, including Slobin (1963), Brown and Ford (1964 [1961]), EvansPritchard (1964 [1948]), Slobin et. al. (1968), Geertz (1972 [1960]), Ervin-Tripp (1972 [1969]), Friedrich (1972), Bates and Benigni (1975), Jonz (1975), Hollos (1975), Paulston (1975, 1984), Lambert and Tucker (1976), Nakhimovsky (1976), Kiefer (1977, 1980), Moles (1978), Mitchell (1979), Hill and Hill (1980), Fang and Heng (1983), Scotton and Zhu (1983), Kempf (1985), Bíró and Huszár (1985), Tolcsvai Nagy (1985), Errington (1985), Keshavarz (1988), Sólyom (1994), Terestyéni (1995), Angelusz and Tardos (1995), Krouglov (1996), Reményi (2001, 2002) and Zhang (2001). Traditionally, notions of linguistic formality are closely connected to issues of solidarity, politeness, respect, and hierarchies of all sorts, including gender, age, social status and the like (cf. Brown and Lewinson, 1978). Most research in the field of in/formality, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, concen-

trated on the system of pronominal address forms. This system has been referred to as T/V (in my dissertation TU-VU is used), following the initial letters of the Latin tu/vos and French tu/vous. Subsequent studies, however, emphasized that it is indeed important to have a closer look at linguistic variation since not only can there be differences within society or, subgroups in a given society, but one can also encounter individual variations as well.

Linguistic Shift from Formality Towards Informality Angelusz and Tardos (1995) conducted their research in a workplace setting. They used questionnaires for their study, looking at eight different forms of address (first name/nickname, uncle/aunt, family name, title/rank, comrade, name of job/occupation, colleague, sir/madam). The authors pointed out the connection between the changing address forms/greetings and the political happenings of the region. They observed that a basic tendency in the 1980s was the spreading of the use of informal first names and/or nicknames. Angelusz and Tardos distinguished between two structural dimensions of address forms in the second half of the 1980s: (i) formal versus informal forms (e.g. last names versus first names) and (ii) political party/movement style versus civic style (e.g. comrade’ versus sir’). They also noted that new changes occurred within the political-civic style dimension, i.e. the political/movement style had begun to decrease and the civic style began to arise, although its usage was restricted to relatively rare usage. Zhang (2001) described the changing economy and markets and their influence on language change of Chinese yuppies. She examined the use of four linguistic variables amongst the yuppies and compared the results to that of the use of the state profes123


Student Conference 2004 sionals. Zhang found the Beijing Mandarin variants are used much less by the yuppies compared to the state professionals. Moreover, the yuppies adopted full tone features from the varieties of non-Mainland Mandarin. According to Zhang (2001: 163), “the state professionals are engaged in the Mainland Standard Mandarin linguistic market in which spoken Standard Mandarin does not constitute a valuable forms of symbolic capital …” On the other hand, as Zhang (Ibid.) continues, the yuppies “participate in the newly merged Transnational Chinese linguistic market [where] a deterritorialized variety of Mandarin has become profit generating symbolic capital.” Krouglov (1996) wrote about the transformation of the system of nominal address forms (especially the use of ‘comrade’) in Russian and Ukrainian. According to Krouglov (1996: 90), “the replacement of one sociopolitical system by another led to a noticeable shift in the use of address forms” as change of nominal forms, similarly to the change of pronouns, tend to reflect social, political and economic changes in a given society. Krouglov (1996: 105) concluded that »revolutionary transformations in Eastern Europe led to a noticeable shift in address behavior […] At the same time these processes have had specific features in each particular country and, therefore, languages have been changing their systems in various ways. Such factors as political stability, the speed and level of reforms, the period of communist dominance, national character, and independence (even nominal) are having a significant impact on present-day changes.«

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Data Collection In my dissertation, I propose to examine synchronic linguistic behavior regarding formality and informality. I plan to conduct research in order to find out whether there is any observable linguistic shift, specifically to see if formal language use is gradually being replaced by informal discourse. My research is to be conducted in Budapest, where I have identified two companies (with a possible addition of a third one) in which to carry out my research. I believe that these work places will serve to highlight the varying degrees of in/formality used. My focus is how language is used in the public sphere, more particularly how the employees of these companies (i.e. ‘the service providers’) communicate with their customers (i.e. ‘the clients’). These work places differ in the degree to which their styles of conduct are connected to the old (more traditional) regime as opposed to the newer (more westernized/democratized) economies. My hypothesis is that I would find more formal language used with clients at a place where there exist residues of the former traditional socio-political structure and, less formality at a place where there are newer forms of democratic structure and ideology.

Sites of Study In order to get more accurate and consistent results, I have chosen companies characterized by similar profile and geographical location. These new companies are all travel agencies, which are ideal locations to observe employee-client interaction. The sites are all located in downtown Budapest and although their office design is quite different, the layout in all three offices is quite similar, providing ideal access to data collection for a fieldworker.


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities The structure as well as the ideology connected to the three fieldwork sites represent a continuum that is reflected in the pseudonyms I gave them: Old Travel, Transition Travel and New Travel. For my research, I will choose two primary field sites of study and one back-up company. Based on availability of and access to these agencies, I will pick two of them for comparison (Old Travel and Transition Travel or, Old Travel and New Travel or, Transition Travel and New Travel) in order to look at the variation in/formality is present in each particular environment.

Research Techniques One of the main shortcomings of the earlier researches was the use of one research technique exclusively, mainly that of questionnaires. Survey questionnaires might not specify all the criteria one needs for a comprehensive sociolinguistic research. I find it important to go beyond the exclusive use of questionnaires and in addition to them I plan to conduct in-depth sociolinguistic interviews as well as carry out ethnography in order to get better results. I will use Labov’s (1972) traditional sociolinguistic interview framework as a starting point. The topics I plan to explore will broadly fall into two categories: (i) non-linguistic (subject’s age, childhood, schooling, etc.) and (ii) linguistic (in/formal language use in Budapest, public discourse during different eras, people’s opinion about language change, etc.) My intention is to interview people from both sides, i.e. company employees as well as the customers they serve. In addition, I will interview randomly chosen locals in Budapest. The interviews provide important sociocultural data about the subjects and their community, which inform the researcher about external or

social constraints on language variation and change. At the same time, the sociolinguistic interviews will provide me with samples of the subjects’ informal language use and with information about their language attitudes and ideology. Another problem with many of the earlier studies on in/formality was that informants reported about their native intuition exclusively, which is quite controversial in sociolingusitics since self-reporting may not reflect the actual language usage of the speaker. In addition, questionnaires were many times distributed to speakers of a language outside of their native environment, usually to immigrants or foreign students, residing in the United States. My research strictly focuses on urban Budapest speech and my informants will be exclusively Budapest inhabitants. This is important because I will be concentrating on a population that is in its local environment. Thus, contextualizing the speakers and their speech as it is happening will be given importance. Similarly to Paulston (1975, 1984), I will supplement and verify my interview and questionnaire results by ethnography, frequently used in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (cf. Milroy, 1987). I plan to spend at least three months at each companies and conduct participant observation, taking detailed notes at the sites. The follow-up segments after ethnography will be interviews and questionnaires. Thus, the methodology for my research will include a combination of well-tested techniques for eliciting sociolinguistic information, incorporating sociolinguistic interviews, participant observation as well as questionnaires. I firmly believe that the combination of these complimentary methods will enhance the validity of my analysis.

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Student Conference 2004 Social Variables

Linguistic Variables

In Hungarian, similarly to other languages where in/for-

In/formality can be expressed through various

mality is marked, age plays a crucial role in the conversa-

means in different languages: morphologically,

tions, thus one of the social variables I will look at is age.

lexically, syntactically using verbal and nominal

Based on my preliminary interviews and observations,

suffixes, employing different greetings or pronom-

middle age women have a rather negative attitude about

inal address forms, embracing particular styles,

the change, especially in those situations where they are

etc. Some languages use fewer linguistic devices

addressed with informal forms by younger people.

for the expression of degrees of formality (e.g.

In my research, in addition to age, I will also concen-

English), others employ a very complicated system

trate on the sex of the speakers, using the traditional bina-

(e.g. Javanese). Hungarian is among those lan-

ry category of female (F) and male (M) opposition.

guages that employ a rich system for the expres-

I have added a new social variable of familiarity (F) or, in other words, frequency of contact between the employ-

sion of formalities. In Hungarian, formality goes beyond the use of

ees and the customers. Based on informal conversations

pronouns. Even though pronouns are rudimentary

with the employees of one of the companies, I have been

parts of the Hungarian formality system, one must

suggested using 4-tier scale (zero to three), with the fol-

provide an analysis of an extended linguistic reper-

lowing distinctions:

toire. The linguistic variables I have chosen for my research include the following five lexical and

0 = UNKNOWN CLIENT, NEVER MET BEFORE 1 = SOMEWHAT FAMILIAR FACE; MET THE CUSTOMER ONCE OR TWICE

morpho-syntactic features: (i) greetings; (ii) pronominal address; (iii) nominal address; (iv) verbal marking and (v) nominal possessive marking.

2 = RECOGNIZABLE CLIENT; COMES TO THE OFFICE APPROXIMATELY ONCE A MONTH

(R) 3 = WEEKLY VISITS TO THE COMPANY; REGULAR CUSTOMER (W) I find it very crucial to add this social variable in order to get the important nuances of the actual situation. For example, a client may use T with the employee (although based on her/his age and sex, formal V would be expected). If I were to look at the familiarity variable, I may realize that the actual T-usage in the above situation is due to the fact that the client is a weekly customer, hence the informal tone. This way, I immediately avoid early generalizations and/or speculations such as the possible spreading of T-usage due to external factors. In my analysis, I will also code the company profile, having a three-way distinction between Old Travel (O), Transition Travel (T) and New Travel (N) as well as mark the social position/role of the informants, distinguishing between Service providers (S) and Clients(C). 126

Greetings

In Hungarian, similarly to present-day English, the difference between various degrees of formality can be expressed by greeting forms as well as address terms. Basic informal greetings include the following informal expressions: Szia! (‘Hi./Bye.’ SING), Sziasztok! (‘Hi./Bye.’ PLU), Szervusz! or Szerbusz! (‘Hello./Good-bye.’ SING), Szervusztok! or Szerbusztok! (Hello./Good-bye.’ PLU), Viszlát! (‘Bye.’ SING/PLU). Some of the basic formal greetings are: Csókolom! (‘Hello./Good-bye. SING) or Kezét/Kezit csókolom! (lit. I kiss your hand! SING), Viszontlátásra!/Viszlát! (Good-bye./Bye.’ SING/PLU), Jó reggelt (kívánok)! (‘Good morning.’ SING/PLU), Jó napot (kívánok)! (‘Hello./Good day./Good afternoon.’ SING/PLU), Jó estét (kívánok)! (‘Good evening.’ SING/PLU), Jó éjszakát (kívánok)! (‘Good night.’ SING/PLU). Note that Viszlát! (‘Bye.’) is the shortened


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities form for Viszontlátásra! (‘Good-bye.’) and can be used for both formal and informal farewell. Pronominal Address Present day Standard English has lost a distinction between expressing formality and informality in its pronoun system. As Table 1 shows, in Hungarian, the distinction between expressing formality and informality in the pronoun system still exists (cf. Sólyom and Rounds, 2002).

(Te) meddig maradsz Magyarországon? (‘How long are you-SING-INF staying in Hungary?’)

Table 1. Hungarian Pronouns

(Ti) meddig maradtok Magyarországon?

Singular First person

én

I

formal forms: Ön-Önök, Maga-Maguk95. Hungarian has a total of six lexical items that all correspond to you in English, indicating various degrees of formality as well as style and register. It should also be added that Hungarian is a pro-drop language, i.e. personal pronouns may be omitted (unless they are in focus position) as seen in the examples below96.

(‘How long are you-PL-INF staying in Hungary?’)

Plural mi

(Ön/Maga) meddig marad Magyarországon? (‘How long are YOU-SING-FORM staying in Hungary?’)

we

(Önök/Maguk) meddig maradnak Magyarországon? Second person te

you (familiar)

ti

you (familiar)

Third person

he, she

o˝k

they

Ön

YOU (more formal)94 Önök YOU (more

Maga

YOU (less formal)

formal) Maguk YOU (less formal)

While many languages employ second person plural pronouns for the expression of the formality such as vous in French (in contrast with the second person singular tu), Hungarian, similar to the Italian Lei or German Sie, uses third person pronouns as

(‘How long are YOU-PL-FORM staying in Hungary?’)

Note that overt pronouns are not seen as more formal than their pro-drop counterparts. In terms of verbal morphology, the verb has the same degree of variability as the pronoun, as seen in the above examples. In addition to the use of pronouns, two additional lexical items (singular tetszik and plural tetszenek ‘pleases someone’) can be inserted in Hungarian sentences to express a yet another type of formality, usually that of higher degree of respect (especially towards elder people) and used with Ön or Önök, respectively. Consider the above examples in a slightly altered fashion with the use of tetszik:

94 Note that whenever English glosses are provided, I will use capitalized forms of YOU to indicate formality that is otherwise not overtly marked in English. 95 Note that the degree of formality and respect is many times reflected in the orthography by the capital initial letters of these pronouns, although variation does occur in writing. 96 See for instance Ignács Romsics, Magyar Törtenéte a XX Szazádban [Hungary in the Twentieth Century] (Budapest: Corvina, 1999). The most thorough critiques of “totalitarianism” in Hungarian historiography to date are Michael Burawoy and János Lukács, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago: Chicago University press, 1995) and Mark Pittaway’s recent work, such as his “The Social Limits of State Control: Time, the Industrial Wage Relation and Social Identity in Stalinist Hungary, 1948-1953” (Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol.12, No.3, pp.271-301, September 1999) and “The Social Limits of State Control Revisited: Industrial Workers and Socialist Dictatorship in Hungary, 1948-1958” (conference paper for “Munkástörténet – munkásantropológia újabb eredményei” held at ELTE Tanárképzı Fıiskolai Kar, Budapest, 4-6 February 2002).

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(Ön) meddig tetszik maradni Magyarországon? (‘How long are YOU-SING-FORM/RESP staying in Hungary?’) (Önök) meddig tetszenek maradni Magyarországon? (‘How long are YOU-PL-FORM/RESP staying in Hungary?’)

Table 2. The indefinite verb conjugation of maradni ‘to stay’ Singular

Plural

First person

én

maradok

mi

maradunk

Second person

te

maradsz

ti

maradtok

Third person

o˝/Ön/Maga marad–-

Nominal Address Address terms include first names (Anna ‘Ann’), last names (Kovács ‘Smith’), titles (úr ‘Mr.’), ranks (fo˝nök ‘boss’), professional positions (kolléga ‘colleague’) or various combinations of these such as tanár úr (teacher + Mr.), professzor úr (Professor + Mr.), Kovács elvtárs (last name + comrade), Nagy úr (last name + Mr.), etc. A noteworthy phenomenon in Hungarian, that it is possible to combine an informal greeting with a formal nominal expression such as Szia, fo˝nök úr! (‘Hi, Mr. Boss.’) or a formal greeting with an informal address form as in Jó napot, Katika! (‘Good morning, Katie.’). Verbal Marking

In Hungarian, formality marking invokes sharp morphological and syntactic differences. Hungarian is a highly inflected language and displays a variety of inflectional and derivational affixes. In Hungarian, both the nominal declension as well as verbal conjugation are heavily affected by the choice of formal versus informal structures. The infinitive of Hungarian verbs ends in ni (as in maradni ‘to stay’). This -ni ending is attached to the verb stem. In Hungarian, the verb is marked for both number and person of the subject. The rich system of Hungarian agreement further exhibits two main sets of conjugation: indefinite and definite. The indefinite verbal conjugation of the verb maradni ‘to stay’ given in Table 2.

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o˝k/Önök/Maguk maradnak

As seen in Table 2, in Hungarian verbs conjugate by adding affixes to the root, which is identical with the third person singular form, i.e. it has a zero morpheme ending in the third person singular. It should be added, however, that since vowel harmony is a crucial part of Hungarian phonology, the affixes come in front and back, rounded and unrounded variants, following the harmony rules as in Table 3. Table 3. Affixes of present tense indefinite verbal paradigm Back

Front

Front

Rounded Unrounded Rounded

Singular First person

én

-ok

-ek

-ök

Second person te

-sz

-sz

-sz

Third person o˝/Ön/Maga

–-

–-

–-

-unk

-ünk

-ünk

-tok

-tek

-tök

-nek

-nek

Plural First person

mi

Second person ti

Third person o˝k/Önök/Maguk-nak

Because the system of inflectional affixes is so rich in Hungarian, there is no need to for the subject (which many times is the pronoun itself) to be overtly present. Moreover, it is possible to express the person number agreement, including the


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities degree of formality, with one-word sentences as it can be seen in the following examples: (9) Maradsz? (‘Are you-SING-INF staying?’) (10) Maradtok?(‘Are you-PL-INF staying?’) (11) Marad? (‘Are YOU-SING-FORM staying?’) (12) Maradnak? (‘Are YOU-PL-FORM staying?’)

The morpho-syntactic considerations related to the expression of formality concern another set of paradigm in Hungarian, that of the definite conjugation as shown in Table 4. Table 4. The definite verb conjugation of kérni ‘to ask for, would like, want’ Singular First person

Second person

Third person

Table 5. Affixes of present tense definite verbal paradigm

Singular First person én Second person te Third person o˝/Ön/Maga

Back

Front

Rounded

Unrounded Rounded

-om

-em

-öm

-od

-ed

-öd

-ja

-i

-i

-jük

-jük

-itek

-itek

-ik

-ik

Plural First person mi -juk Second person ti -játok Third person o˝k/Önök/Maguk -ják

Front

Plural

én

kérem

mi

kérjük

te

kéred

ti

kéritek

o˝/Ön/Maga

kéri

o˝k/Önök/Maguk

kérik

The definite conjugation is used if the sentence contains a definite direct object. As in the indefinite verb conjugation, affixes come in front and back, rounded and unrounded, as shown in Table 5.

Again, due to the highly inflective nature of the Hungarian language, pronouns often are dropped and context makes it clear how many and which person is talked about and what type of formality is expressed by a given utterance. Consider the following examples: (13) Kéred az újságot? (‘Do you-SING-INF want the newspaper?’) (14) Kéritek az újságot? (‘Do you-PL-INF want the newspaper?’) (15) Kéri az újságot? (‘Do YOU-SING-FORM want the newspaper?’) (16) Kérik az újságot? (‘Do YOU-PL-FORM want the newspaper?’)

As with the present tense, Hungarian has both definite and indefinite conjugation for the past tense. Consider the following sample sentences that incorporate the past tense of the verb utazni ‘to travel’ and exhibit various forms of formality: 129


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(17) (Te) hogy utaztál? (‘How was your-SINGINF trip/flight?) (18) (Ti) hogy utaztatok? (‘How was your-PLINF trip/flight?) (19) (Ön) hogy utazott? (‘How was YOURSING-FORM trip/flight?) (20) (Önök) hogy utaztak? (‘How was YOURPL-FORM trip/flight?)

(21) Milyen volt az útja? (‘How was YOURSING-FORM trip?’) (22) Milyen volt az utad? (‘How was your-SINGINF trip?’) I believe that the five social variables (age, sex, familiarity, company profile, social role) and the five linguistic variables (i.e. greetings, pronominal address, nominal address, verbal marking, nominal possessive marking) I have chosen for my research

Nominal Possessive Marking In addition to the complex relationship between formality and the verbal repertoire, the nominal paradigm is also affected by the choice of formal versus informal modes of speech. In my research, I will concentrate the on the nominal possessive marking as my last linguistic variable. Consider the following nouns with possessive endings in Table 7. Table 7. Possesive endings of nouns definite possessive

possessed

article

pronoun noun endings

my

(a(z)

(én) -m

our

(a)

(te)

his/her/its

(a(z)

(o˝/Ön/Maga)

Singular -d -ja/-je Plural our

(a)

(mi) -nk

your

(a)

(ti)

(a(z)

(o˝/Önök/Maguk)

-tok/-

tek/tök their

-juk/-jük

Examples of possessive constructions that contain the (possessed) noun út ‘trip, road’ with contrasting formality and informality are given in Examples (21) and (22). Note that the (possessor) pronouns may be omitted from the sentences. 130

will provide a solid base for a comprehensive analysis of in/formality in Hungarian.

Preliminary Findings Up until today, I conducted a dozen sociolinguistics interviews and spoke more informally with many other Budapest natives (of different ages and sexes) in order to test the validity of my native speaker intuition. The main purpose of my preliminary investigation was to find answers to the following questions: (i) Are other native Budapest speakers also aware of the change in progress I seem to have been noticing? (ii) If so, how long have they been noticing the change? (iii) What exactly have they been noticing? (iv) What do they think the reasons may be for this change? (v) What attitudes do they have concerning the change? (vi) Do they have any predictions for the future as for the disappearance of formal forms in Hungarian? The results of these pilot interviews are of these interviews are presented below in the form of a brief qualitative summary. As for the recent changes in the Hungarian language concerning the use of different degrees of familiarity, all of my informants were cognizant of the shift from formal to informal language use. Budapest locals have been noticing this shift in many instances of their daily public life. Most of them referred to the past five to ten years, some mentioned


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities that the shift had started back in the mid or late 1980s. Consider the following responses: INF1 […] What I noticed…I personally like using formal VU forms but no one lets me do this. So, many times I met older ladies and men and people in general who, well, after a few minutes of conversation told me that they would rather switch to informal TU forms. So, what I’ve been noticing is that this [linguistic system] is transforming. Or, people don’t like to use the formal VU forms. INF2 Well, we live in Budapest, I have rare experiences with the situation in the countryside. In Budapest, everybody uses informal forms, it doesn’t really matter whether you go to the grocery store or to the drugstore or to teach your classes. I use informal forms myself, I use these informal forms reciprocally with everyone who uses informal forms with me. INF4 In my opinion, much more people use informal forms. ES In your opinion, since when has it been the case in Budapest? INF4 Based on my situation, I can say that I have been increasingly noticing this [change] during the past 10 years. Moreover, I even make mistake with formal forms. So, I start using the formal forms with a person and after a while [in the conversation], I cannot use the formal forms any more. Or, I just make a mistake and simply switch into informal TU with them. […]

Based on my interviews conducted thus far, my Budapest informants tend to attribute the observed this linguistic shift to a possible interplay of various causes, most of them related to one aspect of the

effects of general tendencies of globalization. Consider six (i-iv) of the most frequently referred causes for the ongoing linguistic change: “AMERICANIZATION /WESTERNIZATION” ES

And what do you think the reason is for this change? According to you why this change has been going on? INF2 Maybe we’re getting Americanized?? INF9 Well, on the one hand, the message of using informal forms as a natural thing is pouring out on us from television and various other media. Well…surely, there is a bunch of American movies and foreign films, where informal forms are used right from the very start and everyone is on informal terms with everyone else, so this seems very natural…

(ii)

“FAST FOOD CULTURE”

INF5 As with many other things, what comes to my mind is simplification, i.e. people try to simplify everything, relationships, food, fast, they try to make everything less complicated… ES Earlier you mentioned that this way is more comfortable. INF5 Yes, more comfortable.

(iii)

“YOUTH CULTURE, POWER OF YOUNG PEOPLE”

INF1 ES INF1 ES INF1

But I think this is age… Is it related to age? Yes, it has to do with age. In what respect? Well, young people try to be buddybuddies and I am sure this is the American or English/British style, i.e. it is very informal, friendly… ES What do you mean by young people? Which age group do you refer to? INF1 Well, people in their 20s, 30s.

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[...] What do you think the causes are for the shift towards informal language use in recent years in Hungary? INF8 Well, looking at the west, everything, the youth, the power of young people, youth culture, I think it is due to everything.

(iv)

“LACKING MANNERS/EDUCATION”

INF9 Sociological, societal [reasons]…a certain degree of lacking culture the television…In the television…Well, the best example is when…the interviewer addresses the interviewee using informal forms. This, this…well should I say that I am just about to faint [whenever I hear this]. ES You said that the reasons could be sociological, cultural…What else did you mention? INF9 Edu…well, educational… ES Education… INF9 Lack of education. INF7 […] But the other reason is that the country has become quite rude, lacking manners. ES What do you mean that ‘the country has become quite rude, lacking manners’? INF7 Well, I don’t know…that people’s sense of morals has become immature. ES So, then you think that according to you, using formal versus informal forms is related to someone’s morals and cultural intelligence? INF7 Well, I think it has a lot to do with good manners and the consequence of the lack or vacuum of good manners may be the very extent to which the informal usage is spreading.

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(v)

“DISAPPEARING FORMER POLITICAL HIERARCHIES, DEMOCRATIZATION PROCESS, EGALITARIANISM” INF3 I think, I hope that one of the reasons is the development of democracy, i.e. practically the decrease of authoritarianism, and thus having a freer, more liberal mode of communication. I hope this is the only reason. But there is a simplifying nature to it as well, i.e. there is not as much difference as there should be between people based on knowledge or quality of life and that is why everything merges.

(vi)

“THE WIDESPREAD USE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES WHERE FORMALITIES ARE EXPRESSED LESS RIGIDLY”

ES

And based on your opinion, do you have anything else to add as to what other reasons might be there that informal usage is spreading so? INF6 Well, one of the contributing factors may be that more and more people speak other languages. For example, more and more people speak English and it is a bit more accepted these days that well. English does not have these expressions of formality and people would like to look like them [i.e. English speakers] and they want to import this usage from the West. INF4 And since I spend a lot of time with people whose mother tongue is Hebrew or people who speak English and, in neither of these languages is there a differentiation in the use of formal VU and informal TU characteristic... In my opinion, those Hungarian people who use foreign languages frequently where


Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities there is no TU-VU distinction, they don’t like to use formal forms in Hungarian either. […]

informal language use. Although I am yet to conduct attitude tests in the form of questionnaires, it appears from my interviews that people have strong reactions to this change. While the

(vii)

“CHANGING POLITICS/ECONOMY, EMERGENCE OF PRIVATE SECTOR”

younger generation is more neutral, older people,

INF3 Well, it has many reasons. One is that the business sphere, the private business shpere is different from the state sector. In the state business sphere there was a time when this [i.e. using TU] was not permissable. The employee could not use reciprocal TU with the customer. These days there is no such condition, everything is quite spontaneous. […]

the preliminary interviews and the accompanying

Conclusion I believe the use of in/formality is at a crossroad in present-day Hungarian urban discourse, in the speech of Budapest natives in particular. In my dissertation research, I plan to look at several synchronic aspects of a possible language shift. I hope that my study will add to our understanding of linguistic change. The results of the preliminary interviewees (both with customers and service providers) seems to support my original hypothesis, i.e. with the advent of a more westernized economic structure, in the post-1989 Budapest public discourse, there appears to have been a shift from formal to a more

especially women, find this shift rude, irritating and unacceptable. Of course, the small sample of qualitative analysis limits generalizations about all the aspects of this linguistic change.

On the other hand, however, my ethnography does not seem to support my original hypothesis insofar. The qualitative analysis of my participant observation of the past months do not point into a new direction, where common or familiar discourse is winning popularity. This poses an intreguing contradiction for my research. In sum, this linguistic transformation from formal to informal discourse may be closely linked with globalization as well as the ongoing democratic changes taking place in Hungarian society. Although the effects and general tendencies of globalization are without question noticeable both on societal and linguistic levels, countercurrents of antiglobal tones are also present and there is still a definite thread of local traditional values and reminiscence of styles of the former years. They may have an influential effect on language as well. The simultaneous embracing and rejecting of the global influence is an interesting paradox and I hope that in my dissertation, I will also be able to shed light on the how the global and the local interact, both in society and language.

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Student Conference 2004 References Angelusz, Róbert and Róbert Tardos. 1995. Megszólítások egy átalakuló világban. [Greeting forms in a changing world.] Jel-Kép, 3-4: 39-52. Bates, Elizabeth and Laura Benigni. 1975. Rules for address in Italy: a sociological survey. Language in Society, 4(3): 271-88. Bíró, Ágnes and Ágnes Huszár. 1985. Te, Maga, Ön. [Informal ‘you’, Formal ‘you.’] In Nyelvi Divatok, Bíró, Ágnes and Gábor Tolcsvai Nagy (eds.), 31-39. Budapest: Gondolat. Brown, Roger and Ford, Marguerite. 1964 [1961]. Address in American English. In Language in Culture and Society, Hymes, Dell, 234-44. New York: Harper and Row. Brown, Roger and Gilman, Albert. 1972 [1960]. The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. In Communication in Face to Face Interaction, Laver, J. and S. Hutcheson (eds.), 103-127. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brown, Roger and Levinson, Stephen. 1978. Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena. In Questions and Politeness, Goody, Esther (ed.), 56-310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Deborah. 2000. Good to Talk? Living and Working in a Communication Culture. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chrystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Errington, J. Joseph. 1985. On the Nature of the Sociolinguistic Sign: Describing the Javanese Speech Levels. In Semiotic Mediation, Parementier, R. and E. Mertz (eds.), 287-308. Orlando: Academic Press. Ervin-Tripp, Susan. 1972 [1969]. Sociolinguistics. In Sociolinguistics, Pride, John and Holmes, Janet, 225-40. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Evans-Pritchard, E. 1964 [1948]. In Language in Culture and Society, Hymes, Dell, 221-7. New York: Harper and Row. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman. Fang, H. Q. and Heng, J. H. 1983. Social changes and changing address norms in China. Language and Society, 12(4): 495-508. Fasold, Ralph. 1990. Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Friedrich, Paul. 1972. Social Context and Semantic Feature: the Russian Pronominal Usage. In Directions in Sociolinguistics, Gumperz, John, 270-300. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gal, Susan. 1989. Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 18: 345-67. ________. 1987. Codeswitching and consciousness in the European periphery. American Ethnologist, 14 (4): 637-653. Geertz, Clifford. 1972 [1960]. Linguistic Etiquette. In Sociolinguistics, Pride, John and Holmes, Janet, 167-79. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Head, Brian. 1978. Respect Degrees in Pronominal Reference. In Universals of Human Language, Greenberg, Joseph (ed.), 151211. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hill, Jane H.. and Kenneth C. Hill. 1980. Mixed grammar, purist grammar, and language attitudes in modern Nahuatl. Language in Society, 9: 321-48. Hollos, Marida. 1975. Comprehension and Use of Social Rules in Pronoun Selection by Hungarian Children. In Child Discourse, Ervin-Tripp, S. and C. Mitchell-Kernan (eds.), 211-223. New York: Academic Press. Irvine, Judith. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16 (2): 248-267. Jonz, John. 1975. Situated address in the United States Marine Corps. Anthropological Linguistics, 17(2): 68-77. Kempf, Renate. 1985. Pronouns and terms of address in Neues Deutschland. Language in Society, 14(2): 223-38. Keshavarz, Mohammad H. 1988. Forms of address in post-revolutionary Iranian Persian. Language in Society, 17: 565-76. Kiefer, Ferenc. 1980. Greetings as language games. Journal of Pragmatics, 4: 147-55. ___________. 1977. How to Greet and Address People in Hungarian. In Dialectology and Sociolinguistics. Essays in Honor of Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt, Elert, C-Ch. et al. (eds.), 63-70. Umeå: University of Umeå Press.

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Erika Sólyom: A Sociolinguistic Study of Shifting Formalities Krouglov, Alexandr. 1996. Transformation of nominal address form systems in Russian and Ukrainian. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 122: 89-106. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ____________. 1972. Sociolinguistic Pattern. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Lambert, Wallace E. 1972. A Social Psychology of Bilingualism. In Sociolinguistics, Pride, John and J. Holmes, Janet (eds.), 336-349. New York, NY: Penguin. Lambert, Wallace and Tucker, G. Richard. 1976. Tu, vous, usted: A Social-Psychological Study of Address Patterns. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Milroy, James. 1991. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley. 1985. Observing and Analysing Natural Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, Stephen. 1979. Address and decision-making in modern Swedish. Anthropological Linguistics, 21(2): 61-9. Moles, Jerry. 1978. The influence of differential ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ upon predictability of behavior: a Peruvian example. Anthropological Linguistics, 20(1): 38-51. Nakhimovsky, A. D. 1976. Social distribution of forms of address in contemporary Russian. International Review of Slavic Linguistics, 1(1): 79-118. Paulston, Christina Bratt. 1984. Pronouns of Address in Swedish: Social Class Semantics and a Changing System.” In Language in Use. Readings in Sociolinguistics, Baugh, John and Joel Sherzer (eds.), 268-291. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ___________________. 1975. Language and social class: pronouns of address in Swedish. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics (29), Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Reményi, Andrea Ágnes. 2000. Language use and hierarchy: a dyadic analysis of address in workplace groups. Review of Sociology 7, 1: 49-65. ____________________. 2000 (in press). Nyelvhasználat és Hierarchia: Munkahelyi Csoportok Megszólítási Rendszerének Szociolingvisztikai Vizsgálata [Language Use and Hierarchy: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Address in Workplace Groups]. Budapest: Új Mandátum. Robertson, Roland. 1985. Globalization theory and civilization analysis. Comparative Civilizations Review 17, 20-30. Romaine, Suzanne. 1994. Language in Society. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scotton, Carol M. and Wanjin, Zhu. 1983. Tóngzhi’ in China: language change and its conversational consequences. Language in Society, 12(4): 477-94. Slobin, Dan I. 1963. Some aspects of the use of pronouns of address in Yiddish. Word, 19: 193-202. Slobin, Dan I. and Stephen Miller and Lyman Porter. 1968. Forms of address and social relations in a business organization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(3): 289-93. Sólyom, Erika and Rounds, Carol H. 2002. Colloquial Hungarian. London: Routledge. Sólyom, Erika. 1994. “Pure abuse versus poetical archaism: The vicissitude of pronominal addressing”. The Odd Yearbook, 93-111. Budapest: ELTE Press. Terestyéni, Tamás. 1994. Styles of knowledge and greeting habits in Hungarian. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 111: 47-55. Tolcsvai Nagy, Gábor. 1983. Hogyan köszönjek? – Hogyan szólítsam? [How should I greet them? – What should I call them?] In Nyelvi Divatok, Bíró, Ágnes and Gábor Tolcsvai Nagy (eds.), 13-23. Budapest: Gondolat. Zhang, Qing. 2000. Changing Economy, Changing Markets: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese Yuppies. Stanford University: Doctoral Dissertation.

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Unlocking Hungary’s Libraries:

a Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College Dallas Long

.................................................................................. University of Illinois 501 E. Daniel St Champaign, IL 61920 duinn@yahoo.com

Berzsenyi Dániel College Károly Gáspár tér 4 9700 Szombathely Adviser: Dr. Mihály Pálvölgyi

..................................................................................

As Hungary moves to join the European Union, librarians are noting the need to share the nation’s library collections with non-Hungarian speakers. Currently, Hungary’s digital libraries largely reflect the nation’s heritage as one of the most homogenous European nations and are not easily useable without knowledge of the language. Hungarian is a small language, spoken by about 15 million people worldwide, and the need for disseminating Hungarian knowledge into global knowledge is an important step for integration into the EU. This paper is a case study of Berzsenyi Daniel College’s creation of a digital library for its LIS Department. It discusses the technical and socio-cultural challenges presented by the need for English and German language finding aids and the difficulties encountered with building search queries against multi-cultural language platforms. In close cooperation with the European Studies Department, the digital library will also open resources produced by Hungary’s neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe to Hungarians.

I. Introduction The presentation at the BOBCATSSS conference in Riga, Latvia in January 2004 analyzed the major types of Hungarian library web resources. This presentation gives you a case study of the

Department of Library and Information Science at Berzsenyi College, Szombathely. The LIS faculty, students and librarians’ cooperation to creating web 137


Student Conference 2004 resources is emphasized in the Hungarian and international contexts. Problems to be solved are raised, including one of the most pressing: “How to bridge the digital gap between the Eastern and Western part of Europe,” and some initiatives and ideas towards its solution are raised. Project examples by the LIS Department staff and students are briefly presented and detailed as contributions.

6. Drawing the conclusions of the work done already and discussing further perspectives

This multi-lingual digital library project is a product of a team-work, and its aim is to clarify a very important „European” issue: multilingual aspects of digital contents and services provision in Hungary, with special emphasis on Berzsenyi College. We had the chance to include Dallas Long, Fulbright scholar spending one year in Szombathely into this research and development project, to integrate global, and American experiences, and to be able to contrast the Hungarian and American state of the art of creating digital libraries. The major methods applied at the project include the following

II. Analysis of the recent changes in Hungarian digital

1. Study of the theoretical and methodological sources on digital library development. 2. Analysis of the recent changes in Hungarian digital contents developments, which is a very complex phenomenon 3. Surveying the actual developments and challenges Hungarian LIS schools are facing 4. Analysis of the LIS schools websites and e-content services, including ours, according to a set of criteria developed for that purpose, including the multi-lingual aspects of e-contents and services 5. Identifying problems and strategies, including identifying the actual and/or potential partners of LIS schools 138

We have identified the recent changes in Hungarian digital contents development through staff and student research, and the following can be formulated:

contents developments, which is a very complex phenomenon One year ago at the BOBCATSSS Symposium at Torun we gave account of the major techniques and methods of knowledge representation on the Hungarian segment of the Internet. What has happened in Hungary for the last year, influencing the issue of our presentation, creating digital contents and digital libraries? The role of Hungarian libraries is growing in digital contents development /at all levels, including the national, regional, and local/ "! The electronic/digital/virtual libraries: the Hungarian Electronic Library, the Neumann-House etc. are refining and diversifying their services/ "!There is an obvious development of OPACs and databases through new versions and retrieval tools "!Hungarian search services and subject directories are equipped with more linguistic tools than before "!the number and quality of portals and subject gateways is growing "! and the same relates to web guides, Startlap.hu etc.


Dallas Long: A Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College The major characteristics are as follows: the number of digital documents is growing, there are more quality digital contents generated, digital representation of cultural heritage is going in – although not as fast as one wanted to – there are more and more diverse tools to search in digital documents, and finally there are more and more trained Internet users because of information user education courses .

III. Major problems of digital contents development in libraries Acknowleding the results, we have to point to some major problems identified: It can be said that the process of the convergence of library, information and communication science has been accelerated ever faster, and libraries are now considered as one of the major digital contents providers in Hungary. The ongoing integration of Hungary into the European Union has been the major catalyst of new developments for at least ten years. Major EU and Hungarian projects helped libraries and LIS departments in updating their infrastructure, and developing digital contents and services. Euro-info points were opened at major public libraries. (A special issue published at Tudományos és Mûszaki Tájékoztatás /Scientific and Technical Information/ gives a deep insight into these new developments.) However, an even more intensive development is required. Acknowledging that libraries are basic institutions of the information society, their strategic factors frame the program of the EU, but these functions and tasks can only be carried out by highly qualified professional librarians.

The role of libraries has grown in the complex environment for information/knowledge management development A number of conferences has been organised, showing the international, national, and regional roles of libraries in information / knowledge society /British Hungarian, Berzsenyi College. The concept of information society is widely accepted, and serves as starting point for strategy and action as formulated in the latest version of the national information strategy issued in November 2003. The National Development Plan for 2004-2006, with the fifth general goal to create the proconditions of the knowledge based society and that of client-oriented public government /National Development Plan, 2002/ are a major leading guideline for library development, too. www.euforium.hu The Library of Berzsenyi College in regional information supply January 29th 2004. január 26. Strategic development plans should reflect the growing international, national and regional roles of libraries in digital contents provison. Key papers of the conference /interlibrary cooperation in digital information environment/. Or: the library of the future with new technolgoies: METALIB, DIGITOOL, SFX/. The digital collections of the lbirary of regional importance, electronic library and informatin servi ces, European Documentation Centre Theses Suppported by teh Ministry of culture, and The National Cultural Foundation.

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What about last year’s tendencies:

IV. Analysis of the LIS schools websites and e-

The number of digital documents and services created by libraries and LIS schools in Hungarian language is growing. The awareness of quality development is improving. there is more emphasis on structuring and making available Internet resources, in supporting users to apply Internet tools and resources efficiently. the quantity and quality of online, digital learning resources is not yet satisfying the growing need of lifelong and academic professional study multi-language digital information resources are more and more available to Hungarian users of the Internet, but far from being satisfactory. the quantity and quality of representing Hungary, Hungarian institutions on the Internet in foreign languages is not yet satisfactory.

content services /including ours/ according to a set of criteria developed for that purpose, including the multi-lingual aspects of e-contents and services

although the scope of digital /virtual services is growing buti t is still rather narrow the libraries roles in national, regional, local information society strategies are not yet adequate, although a breakthrough is going on finally, what is really depressing, the foreign language versions of websites are either lacking or being unsatisfactory for a country joining the EU on May the first

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In addition to different kinds of libraries and other service and contents providers, we have the situtation of the LIS schools. Based on literature searches as well as meetings, the following can be generalized "! most of them are sensitive enough to information policy, strategy, innovation and knowledge management "!many of them have an integrated approach of training/education, research and development as well as life long professional learning efforts "!some of them are seeaking for alternative ways of training and education, by developing and offering diversified learning contents "! In fact, all the PEST (political, economic, social and technological) factors are in favour of developing digital contents and services in Hungary "! To go on with the general characteristics of Hungarian LIS Departments, there is an fact that astonished our Fulbright Scholar, namely the fact that in Hungary there are 12 LIS Departments – twelve! "!In the best LIS Departments there is an integrated approach to LIS training and education at the three major levels: BA, MA, PhD levels "!all Hungarian LIS departments are concerned by the challenges of the Bologna process, by need to join the European learning space "!their websites and e-contents are very different in terms of quality and quantity


Dallas Long: A Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College 3.d.LIS departments established up to 1990 Hungary is a relatively small country, while Hungarian is spoken by about 15 million people globally. Despite the relatively small size of the country, there are 12 LIS Departments at the moment serving the training and education of librarians and other information professionals. The number of LIS students total to about 4000 at the moment, among them about 2000 are full-time students. The LIS programme can be considered as one the largest BA and MA programmes in Hungary /its ranked in the fourth place in social sciences and humanistic studies, just after Hungarian language and literature, History, English and German. It is very important that the student population has adequate access to information and learning resources on the Web. In addition we have to serve the lifelong professional learning needs of the practising librarians – who according to a legal order issued in 2000 – should be involved in 6-year continuing professional education cycles. / Pálvölgyi, Murányi, Frank, 2001/. Their number totals to about 8000. The two sets are a bit overlapped, as about half of the librarians are involved in BA or MA programmes in the country. Let’s have a quick look at the list of Hungarian LIS departments broken down into two tables, those established before 1990, and after Out of the 12 departments we are focusing on evaluating the web sites, e-contents, and services by the LIS departments at Eötvös Loránd University DLIS /in the middle of the country/ Debrecen University /in the east/ Szeged University /in the south/ Eger Eszterházy Károly College /in the

north/, and last but not least at Szombathely Berzsenyi College /in Western Pannonia/ The map shows the geographical positions of the 5 LIS schools analysed First of all we have to refer to criteria, and subcriteria we used in evaluating the websites of the above mentioned LIS schools: 1. Users categories with 3 subcategories/ 2. Subject and contents of websites with various subcategories 3. Information on institutional aspects, staff and students with 6 subcategories 4. Searching and communication tools with 7 subcategories 5. Multilingual versions of contents, which is becoming more and more crucial nowadays 6. The links and relations /institutional, local, regiional, national, international etc. With 6 categories/ 7. and finally we also considered other criteria /4 categories, like design, special features … etc./ Let’s go now, and have at least some first impression of all the websites of the 5 selected LIS departments: The number one is the LIS Department of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. It was established as the first LIS school in 1949 "!it is a primary institution of LIS training and education "!it runs a doctoral school in library science leading to "!PhD degree "!and it has renewed its internet presence recently like this In black background you can see the words Philosophical science, library science and information technology On the left, you can select the start kit, 141


Student Conference 2004 latest and actual news and developments, a forum and the site map You can get information on the: History of the department On the present situtation of the department Staff research interests and publications Information on the educational programme Projects run by the department Students homepages Admission requirements As well as an English – German glossary If you click on any of them, the information is broken down, e.g. by clicking ont he admission requirements, you are given specific information for admission to full-time basic studies, or MA extension studies for those already having a BA degree. Please learn that the new English version of the website is being developed.

The Department of Computer Graphics and Library and Information Science in Debrecen, int he Eastern part of the country was established in 1991 "!is the primary institution of LIS training and "!education as well as research in the east of Hungary In addition to its website in Hungarian language, it has an English version too, including Contents Some General information The major Research And Subject fields Information on Department staff As well links and data to Professional relations The Department of Library Science at

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Szeged University /formerly József Attila University/ established its College level programme in 1989, which was followed by introducing University level education om 1996. The Department in close cooperation with professional librarians in Szeged and region is the primary LIS institute in Southern Hungary, with a lot of focus and expertise in e-contents development and digitisation The contents of the website are in Hungarian, with sections in History of the department, staff pages, various training forms, curriculum information, department publications, students theses, as well as databases created by department staff. There is brief French version of the site, which includes information on the history and general description of the department. This department has an excellent human touch and atmosphere as you can see from the picture. It should be mentioned that most staff are part-time, heavily infoved in digital and virtual library services, they are running könyvtárkapu, which means library gate, and includes useful information for librarians. It should be mentioned that the University Library website has an excellent English language version too. Eszterházy College is in Eger, Northern Hungary. Eger is famous for its wine, but also for its intensively developing programme in LIS. College level education started in 1999 "!they have developed a lot of competence in distance education as well as multimedia development and application "! The website is very rich in all categories, including many subcategories, but only Hungarian language Finally we have the LIS Department at Berzsenyi College, int he Western part of Hungary


Dallas Long: A Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College "!the College level education started in 1973 "!this Department is the primary LIS workshop in Western Hungary , with a lot of focus on international, national and regional projects in e-content development It has both Hungarian and English language versions, the Hungarian much more detailled, than the English Info, courses, people /staff/, students, services and projects sections can be selected that are usually broken into 3-to 5 subcategories, e.g. the e-publications section within the services section includes a number of staff publication

Identifying problems and strategies ont he example of Berzsenyi college LIS department The digital contents development has been intensified due this multilingual digital library projects focusing ont he following: "! Making students theses available on the Internet "!Making e-textbooks available on the Internet "!Contributing to multilingual skills development of "!Hungarian librarians /terminology, Special English course/ "! Making guides to Hungarian web resources available for "! English and German etc. speakers /staff+students cooperation/ "!and last but not least preparing guides to web resources of neighbouring countries /e.g. Slovenia etc./ Based on the detailed analyses of the websites of LIS schools we have to analyse the major problems of digital contents development, "! evaluate and update the criteria for digital

contents evaluation "!set the strategy to solve the problems "!with special focus ont he issue of multilingual contents and services The major problems, that probably you, too could identify through this presentation are digital contents for e- learning are not yet adeuqate "!representation of Hungarian digital contents in foreign languages is unsatisfactory, "! except to some examples, the networking, harmonization and cooperation issues are not adequate either It is very important now to have a systematic look at the development and ‌. Analyse the need for digital contents in LIS training /full-time, part-time/ and CPE/ Adapt criteria for for systematic development Consider and represent new contents, structures and curricula Consider and create alternatives of traditional university education, including e-learning, work out its didactics, methods and learning materials Consider the international/multilingual issues, and work out foreign language versions to facilitate international cooperation Transform the academic learning environments "!It is very important to a have a much more coherent development strategy for e-contents developments "!To closely cooperative with libraries and other e-content providers "!Build a coherent network of electronic /digital/ virtual services at national level "!and last but not least much more focus on EU- and global cooperation 143


Student Conference 2004 "!The conditions for strategic development are good, We have "! A National Information Society Strategy 2003 "! A National Development Plan for 20042006 "!and there are a number of European Union and government sponsored digital contents development projects offered "! It is important to return to the problem of multilingualism at the end of this presentation, it is important to emphasise that "! Hungarian digital contents should be accessible to not Hungarian speakers as well through at least English language version sor summaries "! This is true vice versa, Hungarian LIS websites should contain much more knowledge acessible in foreign languages for "!the working knowledge of foreign languages of Hungarian librarians, LIS staff and students should be considerably improved "!in order to cope with the problem, we have to pay much more attention to cultural and terminology aspects of developing and using digital library services LIS schools have to rely much more on their traditional and new partner sin econtents development, including "! Libraries, as OPAC and database etc. providers "!Electronic/digital/virtual libraries "!Search services and subject directories "!Portals and subject gateways "!Web guide and web directory providers "! Professional bodies/organisations to facilitate and coordinate digital contents development /they are at the same time potential workplaces of future graduates/ Finally it is very important to have close contacts to government bodies, and

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professional institutions, organisations, including the following: Library Department of the Ministry of Culture Hungarian Library Institute : http://www.ki.oszk.hu/ Association of Hungarian Librarians: http://www.mke.hu/ Alliance of Libraries and Information Institutes : http://www.vein.hu/library/iksz/eng/ Hungarian Association of Content Industry: http://www.matisz.hu/ Library Department of the Ministry of Culture Hungarian Library Institute : http://www.ki.oszk.hu/ Association of Hungarian Librarians: http://www.mke.hu/ Alliance of Libraries and Information Institutes : http://www.vein.hu/library/iksz/eng/ Hungarian Association of Content Industry: http://www.matisz.hu/

LIS students’ contributions to creating web resources LIS curricula include references to knowledge organisation and knowledge management, knowledge exploration, irrespective whether knowledge is carried in electronic or printed ways, or by experts. At the time of writing, the digital library is still in development. The students examined the digital libraries of the University of Illinois, the University of North Carolina, and the “American Memory� digital library of the Library of Congress. With the help of our American colleague, the students compared the searching capabilities, organisation of the collections, mission, and the usability of the digital libraries by their intended user groups. (It is important to note that the


Dallas Long: A Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College American digital libraries include links to joblines for graduating students and career and job-finding advice. Perhaps Hungarian library programmes should offer similar links online as well.) For a broader understanding of the cultural and linguistic issues that could compound a multi-lingual digital library, the students examined also the digital collections of the National Library of New Zealand. The integration of English and Maori searching capabilities was of special interest because of the eventual integration of English and German into our digital library. The students were able to discern from these exercises an efficient structure and “look and feel” for the digital library that they will help to create. One of the most essential requirements of the digital library is its accessibility for users who are not Hungarian speakers. Currently, the majority of information produced by Hungarian schools of library and information science is available only in the Hungarian language. Very few people outside of Hungary speak Hungarian, and the language is admittedly very difficult to master for people who are not native speakers. This is a detriment to Hungary’s future role as a fully functioning member of the European Union and to its potential cooperation and collaboration with European libraries and researchers. Hungarian is a small language, with approximately 15 million speakers worldwide. The compulsory study of Russian under the years of Soviet administration has arguably caused a backlash against the serious study and use of foreign languages in Hungary, and some Hungarians perceive the use of other languages as an erosion of Hungarian culture and identity. Thus the majority of

Hungarians do not have a working knowledge of a second language. It is imperative that for Hungary to accept its responsibilities as a member of the European Union, it must provide accessibility to its documents in languages that are easily understood by nonHungarian users. The digital library of the LIS department shall reflect this new role as a European Union digital library. This shall be achieved by the searchability of the library in three languages: Hungarian, English, and German. English is the accepted language of business and administration for the European Union, so of course it makes sense to publish the digital library in the English language. As a helpful benefit, Berzsenyi Daniel College has a native English speaker on staff at the LIS department as a visiting Fulbright librarian. German is also an important language, as it is the most widely spoken second language in the central Transdanubia region where Berzsenyi Daniel College is located. The college, and the LIS department in particular, has had significant ties with Austrian higher education institutions. There is, however, a difficulty encountered when designing a digital library with multicultural and multilingual users in mind. Culture influences the terminology of a user, and the concepts embedded in the digital library may be conceived or described very differently based on the user’s language and social factors. The mother tongue of a user impacts his conceptual view of the world. The language shapes the way in which a user searches and retrieves information. Essentially, language defines how users live and think.

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Student Conference 2004 To account for this problem and create effective search systems for the digital library, standardized metadata with supportive thesauri should be applied. The use of a multilingual thesaurus is also required, so concepts and words can be accurately matched together in Hungarian, English, and German. It is yet undecided what kind of thesaurus will be used to describe the materials stored in the digital library collection to reflect effective searching in these three languages.

To conlude our presentation, the following should be emphasized: there should be much more intensive involvement in the National Information Strategy and the National Development Plan; there should be much closer cooperation with other LIS-schools, libraries and other e-content providers; more efforts as regards joining the European learning space ; and last but not least – paying much more attention to multilingual e-contents and services on the verge of joining the European Union.

Conclusions and pespectives

The modernization of Hungarian higher education is going on, fitting into the European Academic Space, there is a lot of change in contents and structures. It is very important now that Hungarian LIS education /BA, MA, PhD/ be preserved. There should be more joint projects with EU partner schools and organisations in the field of knowledge society development, especially life-long learning facilitation, eEurope projects.

We have overviewed the digital resources of Hungarian LIS Departments, and their contribution to the overall digital contents development in Hungary. One could see that there is a lot of work. Lot of East-West cooperation put into the efforts. Underlining research in digital pedagogy has started in Hungary, focusing on didactic, and application issues of Internet, multimedia and related digital learning and information resources.

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Dallas Long: A Case for a Digital Library at Berzsenyi College Source List: Borgmann, Christine L. (2000) From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Borgmann, Christine L. (1997.) Multi-media, multi-cultural, multi-lingual digital libraries: how do we exchange data in 400 languages? D-Lib Magazine, June 1997. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june97/06borgman.html

Caidi, N. (2003). “Cooperation in Context: Library Developments in Central and Eastern Europe.” Libri, 53(2): 103-117.

Caidi, N. & Komlodi, A. (2003). “Cross-Cultural Considerations In Digital Library Research” D-Lib Magazine, 9(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july03/07inbrief.html - KOMLODI

Covey, Denise Troll. (2002.) Usage and Usability Assessment: Library Practices and Concerns. Council on Library and Information Resources.

Ess, Charles, ed. (2001.) Culture, Technology, Communication: Towards an Intercultural Global Village. New York: SUNY Press.

Werner, Stephan. (1997.) Beyond the beginning: the global digital library. Coalition for Networked Information. http://www.cni.org/regconfs/1997/ukoln-content/repor~19.html#46

Tószegi,Zsuzsanna and Kora, András: How can the Nobel Prize in Literature affect the life of a digital library? Paper presented to the conference: “Internet Librarian International 2003”, Birmingham, March 26 2003 http://www.neumann-haz.hu/ppt-k/ili_konf_ea_eng_final.doc

Annex Library & Information Science program partners in Hungary Budapest ELTE Informatikai és Könyvtártudományi Intézet, Könyvtártudományi Tanszékének http://harleqin.elte.hu/_kvm/01map_oktatok.html

Debrecen Debreceni Egyetem: www.klte.hu Ezen belül: Matematikai és Informatikai Tanszéken www.math.klte.hu belül: Ezen belül: Komputergrafikai és Informatikai Tanszék honlapja: www.inf.unideb.hu/grafika/main_h.html

Szeged József Attila Tudományegyetem /Szegedi tudományegyetem www.u-szeged.hu Könyvtár tanszék: www.bibl.u-szeged.hu/muvtort/kvtt.html

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Baja Eötvös József Fôiskola honlapja: www.ejf.hu /„Könyvtár tanszék”/: http://www.ejf.hu/pf/pf_szakok.htm#muvszerv_info

Eger Eszterházy Károly Fôiskola Médiainformatika Intézet, Informatika Tanszék http://www.ektf.hu/mediainf/inf/index.html Eszterházy Károly Fôiskola Központi Könyvtár http://www.ektf.hu/konyvt/index.html

Jászberény Szent István Egyetem, Jászberényi Fôiskolai Kar, Közmûvelôdési és Felnôttképzési Intézet - Informatikus könyvtáros képzés http://www.jtkf.hu/honlap/int_kozmuv/

Debrecen Kölcsey Ferenc Református Tanítóképzô Fôiskola http://www.kfrtkf.hu/EGYSEG/IN/SZAKOK/kom-inf-kt.html http://www.kfrtkf.hu/index3.html

Nyíregyháza Nyíregyházi Fôiskola weblapja: www.nyf.hu Ezen belül a Matematika és Informatika Intézetben kell keresni a könyvtártudományi tanszék honlapját: www.nyf.hu/karok/ttfk/matematika/#konyvtar

Szeged Juhász Gyula Tanárképzô Fôiskola: www.jgytf.u-szeged.hu Könyvtártudományi Tanszék: www.jgytf.u-szeged.hu/tanszek/ktud/index.html

Szombathely Berzsenyi Dániel Fôiskola, Könyvtár- s Információtudományi Tanszék http://kit2.bdtf.hu

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Stalinization and its Discontents:

Subcultures and Opposition in Hungary, 1948-1956 Karl Brown .................................................................................. University of Texas at Austin Department of History University Station B7000 Austin, Texas 78712-0220 USA http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/ brownkarl@yahoo.com

Central European University Department of History Nádor utca 9 1051 Budapest Hungary http://www.ceu.hu Adviser: Dr. István Rév

..................................................................................

In the 1950s, Hungary was a state of iron and steel ruled by terror. The Rákosi regime utilized a combination of oppression, censorship, and surveillance in order to maintain its stranglehold on the Hungarian populace. Open political opposition was impossible. However, the state’s power was also limited in a number of significant aspects, especially in the countryside. Policemen and party secretaries were often attacked; collectivization in the Soviet model was problematic and to a large degree unsuccessful. . In both the cities and the countryside, buying and selling products and labor on the black market–often even while at one’s regular day job–was a means of both evading the state’s economic control and using state materials for private profit. Even in the cities, where the state’s power was significantly stronger, zoot-suited hooligans (jampecek), roamed the streets. They dominated the suburbs of Budapest and, via lurid portrayals of their exploits in the press, theater, and film, the popular imagination as well. Jazz, that debased product of American imperialism, was prevalent and popular despite its banned status; listening and dancing to jazz was a means of maintaining contact with Western culture, defying the state, and individual expression. Although none of these strategies of everyday life provided the opportunity for direct political opposition, they illumine the range of independent activity and agency possible for Hungarians throughout this period.

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I. Introduction Immediately upon attaining power in 1949, Mátyás Rákosi and his cohort embarked on an ambitious program to reinvent Hungary as the ideal socialist state–“a country of iron and steel.” They promised Hungarians equality in both society and law and peace and prosperity for all. After the devastation wrought by World War II, Budapest and the other major cities were practically depopulated. Hungarians made their way by the hundreds of thousands into the cities to begin new lives as urban workers as peasants, benefiting from the breakup of large estates, set about renewing their newly-acquired farms and gardens. The new regime failed miserably to live up to its promises. Hungarians were forced to work long hours for unlivable wages; housing was scarce and overcrowded; collectivization was carried out in an arbitrary and unfair manner; advancement in the party and society were nearly impossible. The regime tried to control every element of Hungarian life; but Hungarians adopted a number of tactics to elude, avoid, or outright ignore the state’s diktat.

To date the historiography on communist Hungary has been dominated by the totalitarian paradigm. In essence, this school of thought holds that all political, social and cultural activity and organization were firmly subordinated to the state’s political control.97 The 1956 revolution–which necessarily occupies center stage in any discussion of 1950s Hungary–has therefore been explained as primarily a function of destalinization under Imre Nagy’s new course of 1953-55: rebellious students, the party leadership’s intransigence and the “Writer’s Revolt” are commonly cited as the primary causes of the revolution.98 These elements of the revolution are indeed important. However, the net effect of the overemphasis on these groups has been to relegate normal Hungarians to anonymity, and to rob them of agency.99 To the extent that the Hungarian masses have found themselves the object of historical inquiry, they have for the most part been objectified as a quirky but predictable deus ex societas, adroitly springing forth when called upon by unruly intelligentsia and retreating just as swiftly into the wings as the revolution is crushed by Soviet armor.

97 See for instance Tamás Aczél, editor, Ten years after: a commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution] (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966), Ferenc Fehér and Ágnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited: The Message of a Revolution - a Quarter of a Century After (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), Ferenc Albert Váli. Rift and Revolt in Hungary: Nationalism Versus Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press - London: Oxford University Press, 1961. The best and most recent overview of the 1956 revolution is György Litván, editor, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (New York: Longman, 1996). 98 For a long time, Paul Kecskemeti’s The Unexpected Revolution: Social Forces In the Hungarian Uprising (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961) and Bill Lomax’s Hungary 1956 (London: Allison and Busby, 1976) were practically the only exceptions to this rule of thumb. 99 Michel de Certeau, Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 40, xiv. Ibid., p. xv. 100 The “Evaluation Items Master File” at the Open Society Archives/Archives of Radio Free Europe consists of reports written by Radio Free Europe staff members and based on recent émigrés and in-country sources from late 1951 until early 1971. They provide a remarkable and kaleidoscopic account of contemporary Hungarian life “from the ground up” as it were. The Items provided content and context for programming and broadcasting choices and served as a bellwether of RFE’s success in reaching the inhabitants of the satellite nations. In the early 1970s Senator William J. Fulbright spearheaded a U.S. government inquiry into Radio Free Europe’s praxis and CIA funding; panicking, RFE staffers destroyed the original Items master files along with numerous other documents. Incomplete box files (archived as fond HU-300-40-4), arranged thematically, were all that remained until these 70 microfilm rolls—shot in 1957 and covering the years 1951 to 1956—were recently unearthed. The staff of the Open Society Archives is currently engaged in the process of building an index to the microfilm record—see http://www.osa.ceu.hu/ for more information. I owe this background on the fascinating history of the RFE Items to Pavol Salomon, the OSA supervisory archivist.

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Karl Brown: Subcultures and Opposition in Hungary, 1948-1956 When observed through the prism of everyday life, however, the totalitarian thesis becomes untenable. As Michel de Certeau notes, subjects of oppressive systems have at their disposal a broad range of tactics– “clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong,’ an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter’s tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries”– drawn from the practices of everyday life. “These ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of social reproduction.” Thus, for the historian, “The goal is … to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline.’”100 For the historian of early-communist Hungary, this task is drastically simplified by the rich documentary evidence provided by the Radio Free Europe archives.101 It is apparent that Hungarians never meekly toed the party line. In the countryside, “black” (illegal) harvesting, cheating on quotas, and other subversions were rampant; overbearing party functionaries who tried too hard to enforce the state’s decisions were beaten–sometimes even killed. In the cities, workers adopted a number of tactics in their battle to control the shopfloor; when pushed too far, they took to the streets in riots and demonstrations against the regime. Black

marketeering was rampant; jazz, that debased product of western imperialism, was popular in both the cities and the countryside; and youthful disenchantment with the regime coalesced around the colorful figure of the jampec, or “hooligan.” By redefining “opposition” to include the innumerable tactics of everyday life seized upon by ordinary people trying to cope with extraordinary times, a very different picture of Rákosi’s Hungary emerges.

II. A Country of Iron, Steel, and Oppression Stalinist industrialization and collectivization in the years 1948 to 1956 wrought drastic changes on the Budapest cityscape. The Soviet model was transplanted to Hungary wholesale even as the country rebuilt after the devastation caused by the Second World War. The First Five-Year Plan (1950-54) called for increasing industrial output by 204 percent; this was raised to a staggering 380 percent at the 1951 party congress. This project of breakneck industrialization resulted in nothing less than the conversion of a primarily rural and agricultural country into an urban and industrial one.102 All major enterprises were nationalized in March of 1948, after which fully 84% of all workers were employed by the state; nationalization

The Hungarian Items were recorded in a hodgepodge of Hungarian, English, and German. All translations from Hungarian and German are my own except where noted. On Radio Free Europe, see Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2000) and Michael Nelson, War of The Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (London: Brassey’s, 1997). For a case study on Hungarian reception, see Mark Pittaway, “The Education of Dissent: The Reception of the Voice of Free Hungary, 1951-1956,” Cold War History, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp 97-116, October 2003. 101 During the period 1949-1953, the percentage of population involved in agriculture fell from 55% to 44% even as the percentage involved in industry rose from 20% to 28%. Ignacs Romsics, Magyar Törtenéte a XX Szazádban, pp. 290-91. 102 Ivan T. Berend, Evolution of the Hungarian Economy 1848-1998, Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 2000), pp. 283, 285.

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Student Conference 2004 was further expanded in December of 1949 to include all enterprises employing more than ten people. According to official statistics, industrial output grew by 20% annually during this period.103 Although the success of this pell-mell industrialization is a matter of some debate, its demographic impact was undeniable. (See Chart 1.) Families packed up and moved to the cities in droves. 150,000 peasants left the countryside for the city in the period 19491953; over 300,000 artisans and small craftsmen and 75,000 ex-military, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs were likewise forcibly channeled into the new urban proletariat. The number of women in the workforce doubled, reaching 371,000 by 1953.104 The bulk of these transients found themselves in Budapest, which swelled in size to become the third largest city in the Soviet Bloc. They settled primarily in the working-class suburbs of Ujpest and Angyalföld in the north, Kôbanya in the southeast, and Csepel and its surrounding districts.105 Both this burgeoning urban working class and the peasantry in the surrounding countryside lived a hard life. Despite the forcible resettlement of 100,000 bourgeois souls in the countryside, housing availability in Budapest lagged far behind demand. 650,000 new apartments would have been required to address this shortfall, but only

14,000 were built every year; moreover, according to a 1954 survey fully 1/5 of the available housing was structurally dangerous or in need of total renewal.106 Real wages fell by 22 percent between 1949 and 1953; grocery rationing was reintroduced from 1951 to 1953.107 Driven off the farm and out of smaller industrial schemes into huge factories, the new urbanites had to deal with underpaid jobs, unrealistic norms, recurrent shortages of substandard food, and utility outages. Those that remained in the countryside were subject to a succession of collectivization drives, an unrealistic quota system, and the threat of being labeled a “kulak” and therefore subject to imprisonment or property loss. In all, Hungarians in both city and countryside were forced into a radically new mode of labor and existence. They were kept there with state terror and surveillance. Between 1948 and 1956 the hated Államvédelmi Osztály (ÁVO), or Office of State Security, initiated 1,017, 698 cases against “enemies of the people,” “wreckers,” and so forth; penalties were imposed in 571, 270 of them. 30,000 were imprisoned, and another 30-40,000 interned under circumstances of varying duress. 70,000 richer peasants in the countryside were branded “kulaks” and suffered egregious taxation and other Stalinist excesses. State oppression affected one in three families altogether.108

103 Ibid, p. 285. 104 See Imre Bencze and Erszébet Tajti, Budapest: An Industrial-Geographical Approach, (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1972), p. 135. 105 Ignác Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), pp.280-81. 106 Litván, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, pp. 20, 22. 107 Romsics, p. 293. The ÁVO later changed its name to Államvédelmi Hatóság, but the nickname “Ávo” for its members stuck. See also Open Society Archives/Radio Free Europe Evaluation Items Master File (hereafter OSA/RFE Items), Item 9814/53 (roll 29), for a firsthand account of the conditions in the ÁVH prison in Fô street. 108 These terms translate to “people’s educator” and “[person responsible for] peace,” respectively. See OSA/RFE Item 13489/52 (roll 15) and OSA/RFE Item 10057/53 (roll 29) on recruiting police informers, OSA/RFE Item 1659/52 (roll 7) for surveillance tactics in hotels, and OSA/RFE Item 12954/52 (roll 15) on the system of agents and informers. See OSA/RFE Item 13494/52 (roll 15), on the népnevelôk system, and OSA/RFE Item 13589/52 (roll 15) on békefelelôsôk. 109 On sabotage, see OSA/RFE Item 6442/51 (roll 3), OSA/RFE Item 6692/51 (roll 15), and OSA/RFE Item 13285/51 (roll 6); on strikes and demonstrations, OSA/RFE Item 7249/51 (roll 3), OSA/RFE Item 13/52, (misdated 1951) (roll 6), and OSA/RFE Items 204/52 and 205/52 (both roll 6).

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Karl Brown: Subcultures and Opposition in Hungary, 1948-1956 Hungarians were bribed, cajoled, or threatened into acting as informers; nepnevelo˝k and békefelelo˝sök could knock on the door at any time inquiring into a family’s finances or personal life.109 Hungarians had much to protest long before 1956, but it seemed that their opportunities for evading the state’s authoritative gaze were so limited as to be inconsequential.

3. Unusual and Everyday Resistance Indeed, the Rákosi police state allowed Hungarians no real opportunity to politically organize against the state. However, at times “passive resistance” snowballed into riots, strikes, and demonstrations–and the social and cultural spheres were another matter entirely. As the political arena was hopeless, Hungarians shifted their activity to these latter realms, responding to the statist strategies of surveillance and control with the tactics of everyday life. Despite their alleged status as the backbone of communist power, industrial workers proved to be some of the most unmanageable subjects of the state. Sabotage was common, and 1950 and 1951 saw significant strike activity in the industrial suburbs of Csepel and Kispest.110 In 1954, miners at Varpalota went on strike for rubber boots, norm reductions, and safety regulations; their demands were met.111 At times strikes became violent, such as the 23 December 1951 riot at the Ikarusz bus factory in which 8 were killed and 120 wounded after the

ÁVO intervened. Mass actions also occurred outside the workplace, as workers beat up the members of disciplinary courts, set upon groups of ÁVO men in restaurants, and participated in other incidences of outright defiance.112 Communist power was much weaker in the countryside. Due to widespread and unrelenting resistance to collectivization, in the early 1950s less than one fifth of the country’s arable land was collectivized.113 Riots and demonstrations in the countryside were a regular occurrence.114 Most of the time, however, peasants opted for traditional, effective, and less dangerous means of resistance. Caught between unrealistic expectations from Budapest on the one hand and recalcitrant peasants on the other, most party representatives in the countryside opted for the path of least resistance by falsifying reports and turning a blind eye to the peasants’ evasive tactics. As Istvan Rev states, »Those [party functionaries] who really cooperated with the peasantry had the best chances. They allowed the peasants to sell their cows on the black market and reported the sudden loss of animals in the village; helped the peasants falsify their birth certificates so that the population suddenly grew old, and those above 65 years of age could qualify for quota reductions; shut their eyes when the peasants organized pseudocooperatives; tolerated the division of land on paper among family members; contributed

110 OSA/RFE Items 2911/54 (roll 36). 111 On the Tököl disciplinary court brawl, see OSA/RFE Item 1779/52 (roll 7); on the ÁVH restaurant fight, see OSA/RFE Item 10065/51 (roll 4). 112 Charles Gati, “From Liberation to Revolution, 1945-1956,” in A History of Hungary, Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák, Tibor Frank, editors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 373. 113 See, for instance, OSA/RFE Item 6849/51 (roll 3), OSA/RFE Item 679/52 (roll 6), OSA/RFE Item 3658/52 (roll 8), and OSA/RFE 12693/53 (roll 32). 114 Istvan Rev, “The Advantages of Being Atomized,” Dissent, Summer 1987, p. 339. For examples of copacetic party officials in the countryside, see OSA/RFE Item 7578/54 (roll 42),

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Student Conference 2004 to hiding animals in the woods or grain under the ground. . . . For the members of the apparatus to survive, the survival methods of the producers were indispensable.«115 Overzealous party members were sometimes waylaid and beaten by groups of peasants, as happened to Lajos Nagy on the night of 28 August 1951 in the village of Bánréve.116 Even the rural party elite were not invulnerable to the peasants’ wrath, as evinced by the 17 October 1951 murder of the leader of a collective farm near Nyiregiháza.117 Despite their socially- and economicallydisadvantaged position, women also actively opposed the regime at times.118 Constituting a significant percentage of the workforce–as much as 70% of some enterprises–they participated in these riots and strikes as well. As the market was their only sanctioned gathering space outside the home under the patriarchal system, it was also the site of numerous demonstrations and riots–for instance, at the Csepel Közert store in November and again in December of 1951.119 Although women were often the ones saddled with the unwanted responsibilities of nepnevelo˝ and békefelelo˝s; they would subvert these roles by falsifying reports on a regular basis.120

This sort of subterfuge and a simple refusal to play by the rules–tactics of noncompliance, rather than outright defiance–was likewise the rule in many industries. In many factories, the shortage of skilled labor allowed trained workers the necessary leeway to stage slowdowns, negotiate norms, and if necessary switch jobs.121 Construction workers in Budapest were able to browbeat their foremen into crediting them with extra hours worked.122 Absenteeism at the Csepel Ironworks reached 688 workers per day in September 1950 and 1674 per day in February 1951; by early 1952, seven to nine percent of the workforce failed to show up on any given day.123 Called upon to do extra labor on a Sunday in 1951, a group of women simply refused en masse to show up.124 In January 1956, an analysis by U.S. government intelligence contractors from Georgetown University found that “Passive resistance is perhaps more common in Hungary that [sic] in any other European satellite.”125 Perhaps the most widespread means of manipulating the shortcomings of the system to one’s advantage was the black market. The control economy was notoriously inefficient: basic necessities, much less luxury items were in short supply throughout the period, and the state’s “campaigns” to raise

115 OSA/RFE Item 7668/51 (roll 3). A similar incident takes place in Vönök in early 1953—see OSA/RFE Item 5049/53 (roll 23). 116 OSA/RFE Item 675/52 (roll 6). Also, Rev recounts the following story: “In 1954 in a small country town the peasants put a delivery officer’s eyes out, cut off his nose and ears, and broke his head.” Rev, “Advantages,” p. 342. 117 The best analysis to date on gender and socialism in Hungary is Joanna Goven, The Gendered Foundations of Hungarian Socialism: State, Society, and the Anti-politics of Anti-feminism 1948-1990 (unpublished dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1993. 118 OSA/RFE Item 11239/51 (roll 2) and OSA/RFE Item 13405/51 (roll 6). 119 OSA/RFE Item 13494/52 (roll 15), OSA/RFE Item 13589/52 (roll 15). 120 Mark Pittaway, “Social Limits,” p. 3. See also OSA/RFE Item 13302/51 (roll 6). 121 OSA/RFE Item 8040 (roll 43). 122 Lászlo Varga, Budapest: A History from its Beginnings to 1998 (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1997), pp.201-202. 123 OSA/RFE Item 4109/51 (roll 2). 124 “Document No. 8. Study Prepared For U.S. Army Intelligence, ‘Hungary: resistance Activities and potentials,’” Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne and János M. Rainer, editors, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: CEU, 2002), p. 89. 125 Rev, “Advantages,” pp. 339-340.

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Karl Brown: Subcultures and Opposition in Hungary, 1948-1956 production of any given commodity would inevitably lead to shortages in other productive fields.126 In a system widely perceived as unjust, blackmarketeering and smuggling lost much of their prior opprobrium. Interviewed in 1955, one informant stated that »Today, smuggling is not identical with moral turpitude and is regarded by society as almost a good deed. … Every regime persecutes the smugglers; in the past the population agreed with the law and consequently condemned them. The present regime also persecutes the smugglers but the population sympathizes with the things the regime persecutes, and is an enemy of all that the regime demands.«127 Peasants and citydwellers alike were firmly enmeshed in an illicit economic web: an entire second economy of contraband goods and services. A brisk trade ensued in not only food, clothing, and other necessities but also coffee, jewelry, alcohol, and Western novels and jazz LPs. Albeit born out of scarcity and desperation, black marketeering could be a remarkably profitable enterprise for bold entrepeneurs. The most precocious informant in the RFE archives was one “Janos,” from Ajak. Ostensibly a butcher, he supplemented his meager income by illegally buying calves from farmers outside the village proper for 150-300 forints, slaughtering them, and selling the meat for 12 to 16 forints per kilo. Not satisfied with his illegal meat income, Janos branched out into firewood: via the son of a

local forestry official, he acquired between 15 and 18 tons of wood in a few weeks in 1954. After paying his supplier 500 forints and his uncle 150 forint for transporting the wood, Janos still made 200 forints profit on every 1.5 ton load. He was eventually reported to the police and had to flee; however, having earned 3000-4000 forints per month from his illegal activities (roughly three times the wage of a skilled worker), her was able to bankroll his 7 December 1954 escape to the west with relative ease/128 As the state was uniformly disliked and viewed as illegitimate, stealing from it was a natural response. Workers would regularly appropriate materials, tools, and time from their day jobs in order to make much better money on the side. Building contractors would steal parts and equipment from their jobs, and even work on private projects when they were allegedly at work. Women who rented looms from cooperatives would use them to make socks (from black market materials) they would then sell for ten times what they made on the socks they produced for the state. One engineer, dismissed from his job in 1948 for his Social Democrat tendencies, made a neat profit from 1950 to 1952 by building transformers. He obtained all the necessary materials on the black market (from workers who had stolen them from the factories they worked at), hired other skilled workers to assemble all but the final product, and always kept 20-30,000 forint in reserve for bribing state officials.129 It seems likely that many of those who aspired to jobs in the state and party apparatus did so not

126 OSA/RFE Item 4785/55, English translation (roll 54). 127 Unlike many of these anonymous sources, his interviewer provided an extensive character sketch: “Suubsource [Janos] is the th type of a buccaneer in the 20 century version, not without some knightly traits. . . . The Robin Hood of AJAK is not too good an observer where money is not involved. But he is clever and quick-tongued, frank in his answers and makes no bones about what he thinks.” OSA/RFE 1370/55 (roll 50); see also OSA/RFE Item 2743/55 (roll 52) on meat and OSA/RFE Item 3534/55 (roll 53) on firewood. 128 OSA/RFE Item 8111/53 (roll 27). 129 See OSA/RFE Item 5604/53 (roll 24), for Gyôr, and OSA/RFE Item 12231/53 (roll 31), for Hegyeshalom.

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Student Conference 2004 out of conviction, but a desire for increased opportunities to skim profits. Perhaps the only thing better than cheating the state was making money off the Russians. Soviet soldiers traveling from occupied Austria through Gyôr were eager to convert goods into cash, which they could smuggle back into the USSR. Black marketeers could buy cocoa from them for 100 to 150 forint per kilo, and resell it at 200 to 220 forint; nylon stockings, bought at 100 to 120 forint, resold at 180 to 200 forint. Western watches, the commodity of choice for black marketers, could be had for 100 forint and then resold for 400-500 forint. Similar exchanges took place at Hegyeshalom and elsewhere along the railway line to the USSR and in Budapest and other major cities.130 Finally, as part of the communists’ scheme to rebuild Hungary in their own image was predicated on the symbolic refashioning of the built world, 131 so were the symbols of the new regime targets of subversion and inversion. Statues and other monumental sculptures celebrating the stalinist regime were regularly defaced.132 Almost as soon as

the Stalin statue was erected in 1951, it required a 24-hour ÁVH guard to combat this almost inherent tendency towards vandalism and symbolic warfare.133 Despite the difficulties of printing texts without state sanction, anonymously-circulated pamphlets–publicizing the labor camps, advocating sabotage, urging the dissolution of the collective farms–cropped up intermittently throughout this period.134 Wearing their religious sentiments on their chests, if not their sleeves, many Hungarians chose to wear crosses even though it was obviously coded “subversive” by the state; some Hungarian Jews, drawing on the oppressive symbolism of Word War II, wore yellow stars to signify the Rákosi regime’s retrogression to Nazi praxis during the deportations of the summer of 1951.135 However, these are largely atomized and localized incidents and practices. Although disenchantment with the regime obviously constitutes a “structure of feeling,”136 none of these divergent impulses are indicative of a subculture proper. For this we must look to hooliganism and jazz.

130 See Reuben Fowkes, “The Role of Monumental Architecture in the Construction of Soviet Space in Stalinist Hungary,” in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, editors, Socialist Spaces: Sites of everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford: Berg, 2002). 131 OSA/RFE Item 6753/51 (roll 3). 132 On the posting of the ÁVH guards, see OSA/RFE Item 13411/51 (roll 6). One contemporaneous joke about the Stalin statue tells the story of a dumb kulak asking the ÁVH guard why constant surveillance is necessary. The ÁVH guard replies that his presence there is necessary to prevent the statue being defaced. The peasant asks who would do such a thing, to which the guard replies, “Well, me for one, if I wasn’t on duty.” OSA/RFE Item 13401/52 (roll 15). 133 OSA/RFE Item 6971/51 (roll 3), , OSA/RFE Item 9842/53 (roll 29). 134 On crosses, see OSA/RFE Item 5658/51 (roll 2); on Stars of David, see OSA/RFE Item 1738/51 (roll 1). 135 I borrow this nebulous term from Raymond Williams to denote “the generative border country between the lived and the fully articulated as a structured social experience in solution.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 136 “Az egykori Budapest-i “vagányok” ma mint jampecek ismertek. ...Szük nadrágot, kockás kabátot és tarka, diszitett nyakkendôt viselnek. …A kávéházakból es kulturhelyiségekbôl kitiltottak ôket, mivel csak nyugati táncokat, samba-t, boogie-woogie-t táncolnak.” Vagány was the term used to denote, in the words of one RFE researcher, the “old-time periphery scum;” jampec means approximately “spiv” or “dude.” After about 1959 they are referred to as huligan, which is most likely borrowed from English via Russian. OSA/RFE Item 12594/52 (roll 14). For the origins of the term and social phenomenon in late tsarist Russia, see Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); for the Soviet adaptation of “hooliganism,” see Anne Gorsuch, “’Smashing Chairs at the Local Club:’ Discipline, Disorder, and Soviet Youth,” http://depts.washington.edu/reecas/nwscholars/gorsuch.pdf.

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4. Hooligans and all that Jazz »The one-time vagányok are now known as jampecek. …They wear tight trousers, checkered coats, and colorfully-decorated neckties. …The coffeehouses and dancehalls have banished them, who only dance the western dances–the samba, the boogiewoogie.«137 The jampecek, or hooligans–sporting zoot suits, “three-story” (platform) shoes, and other garish items of western apparel–made their appearance in the streets on Budapest and other major cities in the early 1950s.138 They called each other by odd-sounding nicknames like “Kiri” and “Guca;” they spoke their own language, an odd mishmash of criminal slang and parodic riffs on communist culture in which the police were “wooden coats,” Budapest was “the big village,” Jászai Mari square was “ÁVÓ Mária” Square, and so forth.139 These unruly youths roamed the streets in gangs: they assaulted women, beat up policemen, and generally ran amok. Some even carried pistols.140 Perhaps worst of all, they danced Western dances to American jazz.

Although banned since 1949, jazz was quite popular in Hungary. Theoretically, one was subject to fines or even imprisonment if caught playing, listening to, or especially dancing to jazz–but these regulations were regularly flaunted. Numerous reports from both native Hungarians and travelers suggest that anyone who went out in Budapest looking for jazz could find it at espressos and dancehalls like the Pipacs, Moskva, or Budapest.141 Farther out in the suburbs, there were bars like the Vince-Vendeglô, where according to one boastful informant “even Americans could learn a thing or two about dancing,” and the police stayed away for fear of being beaten by the rough crowd.142 In the small village of Fertôszentmiklos, firemen danced only to jazz at their annual ball.143 In one of the small towns near the Oroszlany mines, jazz was unavailable only because the musicians didn’t know any American dance tunes.144 During the week or other times it might be inconvenient to hear live jazz, there were always Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and the BBC, and a host of other stations–and by the mid1950s, radios were no longer in short supply.145 Like all Western–and especially

137 On zoot suits and “harom emeletes cipô” [literally, ‘three-story shoes’], see OSA/RFE HU 300-40-4, Item 6797/56 (5 July 1956), box 7, folder 142.01. 138 The first two terms are fakabát and nagyfalu in Hungarian. The last example is a darkly-humorous pun based on the location of the ÁVO headquarters at Jászai Mari square: once taken there, one would be forced to “sing”—thus “Ávo [Ave] Maria.” For a remarkable dictionary of jampec slang, see the appendix to OSA/RFE HU 300-40-4, Item 2619/55 (4 April 1955), box 7, folder 142.01; on nicknames, see OSA/RFE HU 300-40-4, Item 8491/56 (5 September 1956), box 4, folder 131.4. 139 For an incident involving a jampec with a firearm, see OSA/RFE Item 12594/52 (roll 14). 140 For reports on jazz in Budapest, see OSA/RFE Item 3308/51 (roll 2), Item 166/52 (roll 6), Item 6733/52 (roll 10), Item 10343/52 (roll 13), Item 11951/52 (roll 14), Item 7544/53 (roll 26), Item 9166/53 (9 September 1953), OSA/RFE HU-30040-4, Item 1380/56 (8 February 1956), box 24, folder 875, OSA/RFE Item 1769/55 (roll 50). 141 “Az amerikaiak pedig elmehetnének ide figurákat tanulni.” OSA/RFE Item 710/55 (1 February 1955), box 4, folder 131.4. 142 OSA/RFE Item 1896/53 (roll 19). 143 “…itt csak a polkat, foxtrottot es tangot lehet járni. A Swing természetesen tilos, bár az ilyenmire nem nagyon adnak a bányasfiatalok, csak az az egy baj, hogy a zenészek nem ismerik a nyugati tancszámokat. [“Here it is only possible to dance to polka, foxtrot, or tango. Swing is of course forbidden, but the young miners don’t care about that—the only problem is that the musicians don’t know any Western dance numbers.”] OSA/RFE 5741/52 (roll 10). 144 Note that in 1949 there were only 162,000 radio licenses in Hungary, but 957,000 in 1959 (Népszabadság 12 May 1960). Anecdotal evidence from the village of Vamosgyork suggests that a quarter of its 2000 inhabitants had radios even as early as 1953 (OSA/RFE Item 10200/53 (roll 29)).

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Student Conference 2004 American–culture, jazz was perceived as a threat to the socialist project.146 But however subversive its influence, jazz was only in bars and on the airwaves; the hooligans were in the streets themselves. The jampecek gatecrashed the public consciousness. The newspapers first decry their presence in summer 1952 and continue to do so periodically into the early 1960s.147 The police introduced a number of strict measures in an attempt to control the hooligans: cracking down on Budapest dancehall bands, packing cafés and bars with informants, and jamming Radio Free Europe and other foreign stations.148 In more than one instance, plainclothes Ávos beat up a student for dancing “American style.”149 One dancehall, the Vasas in Pestszenterzsébet (a working-class district), banned zoot suits in March of 1956–by this time “jampi tanc” [jampec dance] had entered the slang lexicon as well.150 Jampecek found their way into the popular imagination not only in the press but also on stage and even in film, as the archetypal Rabelaisian bad guy “Swing Toni” the 1951 movie Life is Beautiful When You Sing.151

5. Conclusion It is difficult to read the truth between these lines. Radio Free Europe’s overly optimistic assessment–“It can however be assumed that many “jampec”-s are corageous [sic] “die-hard”-youngsters who dare defy the Communists even risking the inevitable consequences which may go from a thorough beating up to jail”–is probably as mistaken as the socialist press, which invariably portrayed them as rapists and murderers.152 Most of them were probably just kids out looking for a good time–but in utter contempt of the bland, orthodox amusements offered by the state. By doing so, hooligans and jazz-lovers created an alternate social and cultural sphere. This constituted a distinct subculture at the very height of stalinist rule. Nothing could be farther from the totalitarian paradigm. Not as dramatically, but more effectively in terms of concretely bettering their economic positions, workers and peasants engaged in a number of practices frowned upon by the state. Hooligans, the jazz subculture, and the other innumerable practices of dissent and

145 Western movies were fantastically more popular than Soviet ones, western dress styles were the height of cultural self-presentation of wealth, schoolchildren traded western literature on the sly—there is enough data on the attraction to Western culture, and the regime’s attempts to quash it, to justify a dissertation in and of itself. The most fascinating example I’ve found so far is an “orthodox” Hungarian Tarzan novel published in early 1953. This attempt to piggyback on the longtime success of the hirsute Western hero was unsuccessful: Hungarian readers did not care for the ending, in which Tarzan realized that he could only be happy in the USSR and moves there to live. See OSA/RFE Item 11083/53 (roll 30). On the subversive effects of jazz in socialist systems, see S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 146 Albeit doubtless also active beforehand, hooligans were first discussed in the press in late summer 1952. See Szabad Ifjság {Free Youth] 3 August 1952, Esti Budapest [Budapest at Night] 11 August 1952, Szabad Ifjuság 4 September 1952, and Szabad Ifjuság 11 September 1952 for examples. See OSA/RFE Background Reports, Hungary, “The Hooligan Problem in Hungary” (24 February 1961) Microfilm 37, for a rundown of post-1956 hooliganism. 147 For a remarkable dictionary of jampec slang, see the appendix to OSA/RFE HU 300-40-4, Item 2619/55 (4 April 1955), box 7, folder 142.01. 148 OSA /RFE Item 5565/51 (roll 2), OSA/RFE Item 6782/51 (roll 3), and Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom, pp.214-218. 149 OSA/RFE Item 7041/51 (roll 3). 150 OSA/RFE Item 12594/52 (roll 14). 151 On Life is Beautiful When You Sing (1951) see J. Hoberman, The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1999).

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Karl Brown: Subcultures and Opposition in Hungary, 1948-1956 resistance outlined above suggest the relative inability of the communist regime to dominate society. At all levels of society–male and female, urban and rural, old and young–resistance to stalinist rule was the rule and not the exception. Power and agency in stalinist Hungary was not a one-way street: Hungarians invented or adapted a new means of opposition for practically every new regulation or attempt at control by the nascent socialist state, and

even created their own subcultures in the interstices of the oppressive state structure. In light of this new evidence, we must interpret 1956 not as an anomaly in an otherwise strictly-controlled and repressive environment, but as the logical culmination of years of subversive opposition. Chart 1: Number of Industrial Workers in Budapest, 1939-58153

152 See evaluation comments in OSA/RFE Item 12594/52 (roll 14). 153 Ibid., pp 26-27. Note that 100,000 denizens of Budapest fled in November 1956. See Appendix I for data.

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Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Carpathian Basin and the Spread of Agriculture in Europe

By William J. Eichmann .................................................................................. University of Wisconsin, Madison wjeichmann@freemail.hu

Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1014, Úri u. 49, Budapest Advisers: Dr. Eszter Bánffy and Dr. Róbert Kertész

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S

eminal research in the 1970’s resulted in the recognition that events in Transdanubia (western Hungary) during the 6th millennium B.C. were pivotal to the spread of agriculture to north central Europe. Two perspectives have figured prominently in the debate: 1) agriculture was directly spread by migrating agricultural populations; and 2) agriculture spread through the adoption of agricultural practices by indigenous huntergatherer populations. In Hungary the spread of agriculture has primarily been approached from the perspective of the first farmers (Neolithic). Limited archaeological evidence from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers during the Early Holocene (~10,000-6,000 B.C.) in the Carpathian Basin has made it difficult to consider their role in the entire process. It is argued that the complex process of agricultural spread may be more comprehensible if research is specifically directed toward identifying long term evolutionary trends in Mesolithic hunter-gatherer society. This paper provides a summary of extant evidence from the Mesolithic and Neolithic in Hungary, with an emphasis on Transdanubia, and presents some of the preliminary results of recent research on the Mesolithic.

Introduction The prehistoric spread of agriculture was the impetus for one of the most significant reorganizations of human society. In the middle 7th millennium

B.C. the first agricultural societies (Neolithic) in Europe appeared in Greece, and by the early 4th millennium B.C. nearly the entire European 161


Student Conference 2004 continent was more or less dependent on the by-products of domestic animals and plants. The Neolithic is often associated with the first ceramics and a more sedentary life in villages. Within the past quarter century the Carpathian Basin, and Transdanubia in particular, has been identified as one of the more important regions for understanding the Neolithization of Europe. Archaeology, as a discipline, developed in Europe during the mid to late 19th century (Trigger 1989). This long research tradition has produced an unprecedented volume of data for examining the spread of agriculture in Europe. V. Gordan Childe, an influential early discussant, characterized the spread of agriculture as a revolutionary event in which Neolithic societies demographically invigorated by a more efficient productive economy spread rapidly across the European continent from an initial foothold in Southeastern Europe (Childe 1929). He considered that most important innovations of cultural import, and especially agriculture, derived from South West Asia or the Orient and were transmitted throughout Europe along the Danube corridor. Childe, an open Marxist, presented views that were at the time quite novel and contradictory to researchers who, often with strong nationalist sentiments, advocated local origins for agriculture in Europe. Subsequent research has convincingly demonstrated that, as Childe had originally proposed, the earliest center of agricultural origins relevant to Europe was indeed located in South West Asia (BarYosef and Meadow 1995; Harris 1996). The basic route of agricultural expansion in Europe was theoretically established from South West Asia, across the Anatolian Penninsula, up the Balkan Peninsula, through the Carpathian Basin, and progressing northwards unto the North European Plain.

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Two basic mechanisms have been enlisted to explain the spread of agriculture: 1.) Migration – spread of agricultural societies through movement of agriculturalists; 2.) Diffusion – indigenous hunter-gatherers adopt items, ideas and practices associated with agricultural society (domestic plants and animals, pottery, etc.). Migration and Diffusion represent the ends of a variagated spectrum of mechanisms, recently summarized by Zvelebil (2000), including folk migration, demic diffusion, elite dominance, community infiltration, leapfrog colonization, exchange in frontier zones, and regional exchange. Apart from the slipperiness in defining and distinguishing between huntergatherers and farmers during transitional stages (e.g. see Gronenborn 2003: 86; Smith 2001), it certainly the case that agriculture spread through a variety of mechanisms with different underlying causes at different times and places. Determining which mechanism dominated in particular situations hinges upon the extent to which we can recognize continuity or discontinuity amongst different categories of archaeological evidence. In order to address the issue of continuity we must incorporate a substantial understanding of long-term trends in the cultural evolution of the different peoples involved in the process. In the case of the Transdanubia this would include both early agriculturalists, the Early Neolithic Starçevo culture and Middle Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK), in addition to the indigenous Late Mesolithic hunter-gather population. An informed examination of the transition to agriculture in the Carpathian Basin should consider both the long-term evolutionary trajectories of Mesolithic huntergatherers of indigenous origin and Neolithic agriculturalists of indeterminate indigenous or exogenous origins. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions (see Kertész 1996b,


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers 2002), there is almost no robust evidence bespeaking the existence of Mesolithic populations in Hungary. Strong evidence garnered from genetics of modern European populations (Richards 2003; Richards, et al. 2000) and palaeobotony (Schweizer 2001; Sümegi 2004) suggest that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were present and partook in the neolithization of the Carpathian Basin and Central Europe. However, minimal direct archaeological evidence for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers has often prevented discussion from moving beyond hypothetical statements (e.g. Chapman 1985). This paper examines the significance of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to the spread of agriculture in the Transdanubian region of Hungary and Europe in general. The following themes are high lighted: 1) the historical context and current status of Mesolithic research in Europe and Hungary, with an emphasis on Transdanubia; 2) background to the origins and spread of Early Neolithic societies in Europe; 3) a more specific treatment of our current understanding of Early Neolithic societies in the Carpathian Basin, again emphasizing Transdanubia, and their role in the transmission of agriculture to North Central Europe; 4) possible directions for future research into Mesolithic hunter-gatherer research in Hungary; and 5.) preliminary results from research on the Hungarian Mesolithic by Róbert Kertész, Tibor Marton, Eszter Bánffy, and myself. I argue that Mesolithic participants in the neolithization of the Carpathian Basin have been underrepresented for a variety of historical reasons and insufficient research. The situation can best be rectified through research aimed at revision of poorly investigated sites of possible Mesolithic origin in conjunction with prospecting for new sites.

Mesolithic Hunter-gatherers and Their Dynamic Environment The beginning of the Mesolithic period, or Middle Stone Age, is roughly coeval with the shift from Glacial (Pleistocene) to nonGlacial (Holocene) climate in Europe, occurring at roughly 10,000 cal. B.C., or 10,000 uncal. B.P. Changes in Climate had significant impacts on European flora and fauna (Roberts 1989), as well as the humans depending on these resources (Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979). The climatic and vegetation changes that are associated with Pleistocene-Holocene boundary have been well documented throughout Europe and Hungary (e.g. Sümegi, Krolopp, et al. 2002); although the environmental changes associated with the Holocene began earlier in Hungary than the traditionally assigned date of 10,000 B.C. Unlike many regions in Europe, the volume of archaeological evidence for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in southeastern Europe, and Carpathian Basin in particular, is conspicuously minimal during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Understanding the manner in which hunter-gatherers adapted to dynamic climatic and environmental change is critical to understanding the spread of agriculture. Traditionally, the long term evolutionary tendencies of southeastern European Neolithic societies are presented in pain staking detail. In Hungary Mesolithic hunter-gatherers are generally only mentioned when the two worlds collide, and even then their behaviors and their very existance have remained primarily within the hypothetical realm. Research exploring the question of why agriculture may or may not have struck hunter-gatherers as an attractive subsistence strategy has been explored in other parts of Europe and has significantly improved the 163


Student Conference 2004 character of discussions on the spread of agriculture (e.g. see Zvelebil and RowleyConwy 1984). The goal of such research has been to move beyond a flat characterization of hunter-gatherers toward a temporally and spatially textured picture of the ubiquitous Mesolithic substrate upon which agricultural practices were transposed. Thus the spread of agriculture in the Carpathian Basin can best be understood through the incorporation of evidence bearing on the long-term evolutionary trajectory of huntergatherer society from the Late Pleistocene into the Early Holocene. The current evidence for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Carpathain Basin is minimal and patchily distributed, but some of the initial pieces of information can be put in place. In the following paragraphs I will present the climatic and environmental changes in the Carpathian Basin at the PleistoceneHolocene boundary and summarize our current understanding of Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Carpathian Basin and adjacent regions. The shift from hunting Pleistocene large bodied herd mammals, abundantly present at predictable locations, to more dispersed Holocene faunal species found in smaller herds or as isolated individuals probably required that hunter-gatherers adopt new searching and hunting strategies. This topic has received a significant amount of attention in theoretical debates regarding the relationship between the environmental changes impacting resource distribution and the evolution of hunter-gatherer food-getting strategies; particularly with regard to mobility (Fitzhugh and Habu 2002). For example, Fisher has recently argued that search strategies in relation to the different attributes of resource distributions should be incorporated into modeling hunter-gatherer behavior during this period of climatic 164

change (Fisher 2002). In response to changes in resource distribution Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were confronted with two basic choices: 1) extensification through increased mobility in order to exploit a greater area, or 2) intensification on particular resources within a smaller area. Low level oscillation between strategies and mixing of strategies probably prevailed during different times and conditions, and understanding the character of these oscillations is significant to understanding longer-term trends in hunter-gatherer cultural evolution. Additionally, it is likely that different components of the Late Pleistocene huntergatherer social and technological world were modified or differentially emphasized during the Early Holocene. The Mesolithic has been generally associated with technologies in which locally procured stone was fashioned into geometric microliths or small blades that were inserted into slotted bone or wood to form composite tools (e.g. see Bรกrta 1985; Bรกrta 1990). The bow and arrow, in usage since the Late Pleistocene, was probably one of the most important components in Mesolithic hunting strategies (Bergman 1993), and it is possible that domestic dogs were also used in the pursuit of game. An increased usage of passive hunting strategies (e.g. trapping, nets, etc.) and reliance on aquatic resources have been postulated as two of the most important ways in which European hunter-gatherers managed to reduce increasing costs of high mobility and squeeze more from a smaller territory (Binford 1990, 2001; Holliday 1998). The utilization of storable resources or processing of foods to increase their shelf life presents another manner in which hunter-gatherers may have reduced mobility (Testart 1982). The intensive debate over huntergatherer adaptation to novel Holocene environments is significant to investigations of


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers the much later transition to agriculture, because it is during this period that we may begin to recognize general patterns in how, when and where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers chose to exploit different resources. The tactics that these hunter-gatherers relied upon was probably highly variegated. However, understanding the underlying general patterns of will go a long way toward conceptualizing the various types of interactions, which may have developed several thousand years later when the first domesticated animals and plants reached the Carpathian Basin. During the period after the Late Glacial Maximum, 22-20,000 uncal. B.P. (B.P dates measured from 1950), Europe witnessed rising temperatures interrupted by several shorter, cooler periods (Würm 3, Dryas III). Between 19,000 and 17,000 uncal. B.P. the evidence for human occupation of the central Carpathian Basin is represented by permutations of the Late Paleolithic Gravettian technocomplex and the Ságvárian culture. Most Gravettian sites are located in northern Hungary, a particular dense cluster is located in the Danube bend region near the confluence of the Danube and Ipoly Rivers, but significant sites have also been investigated in Transdanubia and the Jászság region. It has often been the case that such sites were identified in buried soils within eroded loess resulting from modern disturbances. The sites that have been investigated are generally associated with hunting of reindeer, horse, bison, or other large tundra/steppe mammals (see Dobosi 1989, 2001; Dobosi and Kövecses-Varga 1991; Gábori 1956a, 1964; Vörös 1989, 1991, 1993). Evidence for structures/shelters and clear spatial patterning of activity areas has been recognized at such sites, among others, as Ságvár (Gábori and Gábori 1959) and Jászfelsôszentgyörgy-Szúnyogos (Dobosi

2001). It is important to note that relative to the totality of Late Paleolithic hunter-gatherer activity these sites probably represent only a small portion of activities aimed at the exploitation of seasonally available resources. Such sites are archaeologically more visible as a result of intensive occupation and/or repeated returns to the site. Archaeological evidence for hunter-gatherers in the central Carpathian Basin sharply decreases after this period. Between 15,000 and 11,000 uncal. B.P. the continued retreat of the Alpine and North European glacial ice sheets opened up previously uninhabitable territories into which hunter-gatherers associated with the Magdalenian technocomplex expanded from east to west across the north central European Plain (Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979: 4651). There is limited evidence from the Rózsás-Hegy site near Miskolc suggesting the penetration of certain Magdalenian elements into northern Hungary during the Late Pleistocene (Lengyel 2004; Ringer 1991). A greater influence during the time was the Epigravettian (Tardigravettian) techno-complex occupying the Mediterranean coast from the Spanish Levant to the Adriatic coast, and possibly the central Balkans. The regional variants of the Epigravettian are poorly understood and probably consist of numerous as yet unrecognized cultural units (Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979: 47). During this time period the central Carpathian Basin witnessed numerous changes in flora and fauna as a result of changing climatic conditions. Based on data from pollen cores, loess profiles, and malacology, Sümegi et al. (2002) report that beginning around 15,000 uncal. B.P. portions of Hungary formerly dominated by steppe vegetation began to yield to closed taiga vegetation (Pinus, Picea, and Larix). Associated with these vegetation changes 165


Student Conference 2004 were significant changes in fauna: large herd animals of the steppe began to be replaced by animals found in warmer closed forest environments such as beaver, red deer, roe, deer, wild pig, and aurochs (e.g. see Bökönyi 1972). It is likely that technological elements from the Gravettian technocomplex, including the Ságvárian culture, contributed to the development of subsequent Epigravettian in the Carpathian Basin. The overall lack of evidence has lead some researchers to suggest that hunter-gatherers migrated northwards followed the shift in large steppe herd animals (Simán 1990: 19), leaving the central Carpathian Basin largely depopulated until the Neolithic (Gábori 1981, 1984; Szathmáry 1988). The depopulation scenario is not tenable in light of past and recent research, and it is certain that some huntergatherer groups remained. The huntergatherer groups that stayed in the Carpathian Basin, like hunter-gatherers throughout Europe, undoubtedly altered their food-getting strategies in response to the changing environment. The general lack of archaeological evidence from this time period in Hungary may be partially attributable to the burial of sites by wind-blown loess, although the discovery of sites from earlier periods, equally susceptible to burial by loess suggests that the problem may be more complex. A second reason for the lack of evidence from this period is probably also the result of insufficient research directed at locating such sites. After 12,000 uncal. B.P. increasing temperature and precipitation in Hungary accelerated the transition from closed taiga to boreal forest (Krolopp and Sümegi 1995; Sümegi 1996; Willis, et al. 1997; Willis, et al. 1995), which was accompanied by a continual increase in proportion of deciduous trees. By 10,000 uncal. B.P. (~10,000 cal. B.C.) further climatic warming had led to 166

the expansion of deciduous forests (lime, oak, elm, hazel) throughout most of Hungary (Sümegi, Krolopp, et al. 2002). Sümegi et al. (Sümegi, Krolopp, et al. 2002: 19) and Sümegi et al. (Sümegi, Kertész, et al. 2002) have emphasized that the differential impact of climatic patterns (Atlantic in Transdanubia, Continental on the Alföld, and subMediterranean in southern Transdanubia), coupled with the effects of soil and geographical conditions, produced a mosaic of vegetation regimes. Mast producing plants such as hazelnut were a readily exploitable and storable plant resource and may have had a significant role in the overall diet. Although, no plant remains have been recovered from archaeological sites in the Carpathian Basin during this period, pollen corings suggest that by the Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers may have actively been manipulating of forests in order to encourage the growth of hazel. The dominant terrestrial faunal species during this period were the beaver, red deer, roe, deer, wild pig, and aurochs. These animals are generally more dispersed throughout the landscape and to a certain extent less predictable in their location. If we turn our attention to the archaeological evidence from Hungary during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, the only sites that have significantly investigated are Szôdliget-Vác (Gábori 1956b, 1968), on the left bank in the Danube Bend, and Szekszárd-Palánk (Vértes 1962). Bökönyi’s and Berinkey’s analyses of the faunal material from Szekszárd-Palánk reveals the presence of aurochs, red deer, beaver, and fish (Vértes 1962: 197-198). The exploitation of aurochs, red deer, and aquatic resources demonstrates the hunter-gather adaptability to a changing environment. Additionally, Szôdliget-Vác provided evidence for a small (2.4 x 2.2 m) rectangular stone lined structure associated


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers with external hearths (Gábori 1968: plates 12). Both sites have lithic assemblages that are quite similar with end scrapers, backed blades and segments present. Likewise both sites seem to exhibit general trends toward microlithization (for general discussion see Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979), a trend which may be indicative of the adoption of composite projectile technologies. Based on these similarities it may be possible to extend the radiocarbon date from Szekszárd-Palánk of 10,350 ± 500 B.P. to Szôdliget-Vác. Gábori considered the Szôdliget-Vác site to be assignable to the Late Epigravettian or Early Mesolithic (Gábori 1956a: 181), while Kertész interprets the site as Early Mesolithic. In light of the similar lithic assemblages and single radiocarbon date, it is likely that both sites are assignable to the Late Epigravettian techno-complex; probably reflecting a transitional period from the Late Epigravettian to the Early Mesolithic: if such a period is sharply distinguishable at this time. The sites of Jászberény-NevadaTanya near the Tarna River (Kertész personal communication, Kertész 1996b), as well as, Kunpeszér-Felsôpeszéri út-Homokbánya (Horváth 1983b, 1985b, c; Horváth and Tóth 1984a, b) and Kunadacs-Köztemetô (Horváth 1983a, 1985a) may be datable to the same period (see Kertész 2002). Perhaps the most significant conclusion regarding hunter-gatherers at the PleistoceneHolocene boundary is the simple fact that they were present in the Hungary and demonstrate a general trend toward adaptation to new environmental conditions. Until the early 1990’s the evidence for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Hungary was primarily limited to poorly investigated, surface collections with minimal information regarding the context from which the finds had originated (Kertész 1991: 29 and 41). Many sites claimed to be Mesolithic, for

example Pamuk among many others, were based on collections comprised of gunflints or completely non-diagnostic lithic debitage (Marton 2003). In numerous cases museum collections cannot be associated with specific locations and contexts, such as the Gyôr collection (Gallus 1942) or the collection from Vöröstó. Two probable Mesolithic harpoons recovered as isolated finds during peat cutting from the Sárrét in Transdanubia (Makkay 1970: 14; Marosi 1935, 1936a, b; Nemeskéri 1948) have recently been dated to the Holocene based on geological stratigraphy by Sümegi (2003b: 379); although, in the future these should be subjected to direct radiocarbon dating. In other cases, such as Mencshely-Murvagödrök (Mészáros 1948), subsequent investigations have revealed that the sites are probably assignable to the Neolithic (Biró 1992). Other sites such as Kaposhomok, where convincing Mesolithic stone tools had been privately collected in the 1950`s, have only been marginally investigated by professional archaeologists (Marton 2003; Pusztai 1957). Recent reinvestigations of the Kaposhomok collection indicate that it demonstrates affinities with Western Technocomplexes (Beuronian, Sauveterrian), and that the raw materials used to produce the chipped stone tools originated from both sources in the Bakony to the north and Mecsek Mountains to the south (Marton 2003: 41-42). Like previously mentioned sites, the specific location of the Kaposhomok site and the geological and archaeological context of the finds remain dubious. Until such collections can be clearly associated with specific sites, with known geological and archaeological contexts, their Mesolithic status will remain uncertain A second research impediment can be attributed to the fact that prior to the 1990’s there were real questions as to the characteristic features of stone tools which could be 167


Student Conference 2004 associated with the Mesolithic. Vértes held that large bifacial tools were indicative of the “Rough” or “Danubian” Mesolithic in Hungary which coexisted with a little known microlithic Mesolithic (Vértes 1965): a position reinforced by other researchers (e.g. Rozsnyói 1963). Strong criticism of the “Danubian” Mesolithic paradigm were initially put forth by Kozl/owski in 1973, in which he argued that the association of large bifacial tools with the Mesolithic was untenable in light of the fact that the Mesolithic was throughout Europe associated with microlithic technologies (Kozlowski 1973). Nevertheless, in a catalog of Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites in Hungary, Dobosi almost exclusively discusses the “Rough” Mesolithic (Dobosi 1975). It was not until the late 1980’s that the “Danubian” Mesolithic concept was put to rest when the artifacts were solidly reassigned to Middle and Late Paleolithic industries (Kordos and Ringer 1991; Ringer 1982, 1983, 1990, 2000, 2001; Ringer and Adams 2000; Ringer, et al. 1995; Simán 1978, 1979, 1984, 1986, 1991; Simán and Csorba 1993; Svoboda and Simán 1989). Hungary effectively remained terra incognita in terms of the Mesolithic until surveys and excavations conducted by Róbert Kertész in the Jászság region of north central Hungary during the late 1980’s and 1990’s. An often underestimated effect of the pre-1990 situation was a complete lack of popularizing publications produced for the general public presenting the types of archaeological materials associatable with the Mesolithic: The serendipitous discovery of Mesolithic sites was unlikely to occur in such an environment. Before discussing the Mesolithic sites from the Jászság region, it will be beneficial to review the broader character of evidence from the Carpathian Basin. J. K. Kozl/owski’s and S. K. Kozl/owski’s syntheses of evidence 168

from Mesolithic sites in the Carpathian Basin and adjacent regions formed the foundation for predictive hypotheses regarding the character of stone tools, which could conceivably be associated with the Hungarian Mesolithic (Kozlowski 1982a, b, 1989; Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979; Kozlowski 1975, 1980, 1984, 1985, 2001). The general scheme used by J. K. Kozl/owski and S. K. Kozl/owski for identifying and labeling lithic industries recognizes broad technocomplexes with shared general attributes and lower order culture groups or industries of more localizable distribution. There are basically two technocomplexes, most recently discussed by S. K. Kozl/owski (2001), relevant to the Carpathian Basin Mesolithic: the Western Technocomplex and the Late Epigravettian (also referred to as Tardigravettian) [see Maps in Kozl/owski and Kozl/owski 1979]. During the Early Mesolithic, roughly 108,000 uncal. B.P., the Western Technocomplex is best known from sites associated with the Beuronian-Coincy industry north of the Alps and the Sauveterrian industry located south of the Alps and along the Mediterranean. Both industries are defined by general associations between lithic tool types and specific types of geometric microliths. Trapeze microliths are present in the later variants of both the Sauveterrian and Beuronian. During the Late Mesolithic Castelnovian industry, the successor to the Sauveterrian, trapezes become more widely dispersed and spread from the south to north. The Epigravettian technocomplex, as treated by S. K. Kozl/owski (2001), is allegedly distributed throughout the Balkans and central Carpathian Basin, including Transdanubia and the Alföld. The Late Epigravettian, equivalent to the Early Mesolithic, lasted from 10,000 uncal. B.P. to roughly 8,000 uncal. B.P., while the Latest Epigravettian, equivalent to the Late


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers Mesolithic, lasted from 8,000 uncal. B.P. to 7,000 uncal. B.P (Kozlowski 2001). The quality of the evidence with which they have used to generate the Epigravettian is highly variable, and dependent upon both the research traditions of different countries and the geomorphological conditions affecting site detection. Epigravettian is used to describe this industry in order to emphasize continuity with the precedent Gravettian industry. To a large extent the perception of technological homogeneity is rooted in S. K. Kozl/owski’s perception that PleistoceneHolocene environmental change was less extreme in southeastern Europe, a point contradicted by both Sümegi et al. (2002) and Kertész (2002). S. K. Kozl/owski’s considers that due to lack of evidence there is probably little internal cohesion to the Epigravettian technocomplex and future research may lead to its redefinition (Kozlowski 2001: 268-269). The identification of technocomplexes and the subsidiary culture groups has progressed almost exclusively along the lines of typological classification with little emphasis on the various aspects of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer behavior and site function, which undoubtedly played a significant role in structuring the character of each lithic assemblage. It is entirely possible that some of the more poorly reported sites may represent a palimpsest of activities from different time periods, or that particular tool types may be differentially present at sites geared toward different activities. Few sites in the Carpathian Basin have been successfully radiocarbon dated, and the assignment of late or early Mesolithic is primarily based on the previously discussed lithic typologies, which are significantly more robust in regards to the Western Technocomplexes (Beuronian, Sauveterrian, Castelnovian). The following is a list of

known Mesolithic sites or site concentrations significant to understanding similar sites in Hungary [see Map Kertész 2002: 282-283]. "! In the portion of Romania within the Carpathian Basin there are three known Mesolithic sites: 1) Ciumes¸ti II – located near the Romanian-Hungarian boarder (Paunescu 1964, 1970); 2) Cremenea – located in Transylvania (Nicolaescu-Plopsor and Pop 1959); and 3) Glîma – located in Transylvania. "! A concentration of exceptionally rich Mesolithic sites has been excavated on both the Romanian and Serbian banks of the Danube in Iron Gates region (Radovanovic 1996). "! Two Mesolithic sites are known from northern Serbia: Peres, near Hajdukovo, and Bac˘ka Palanka, on the left bank of the Danube (Brukner 1966). "! There are no known Mesolithic sites from the Slavonian portion of Croatia or from eastern Slovenia. "!Leitner (1984) has provided a summary of eighteen Mesolithic sites from Austria, some of which have never been published, which have been assigned, primarily based on the presence of geometric microliths, with varying degrees of certainty to the Mesolithic. He notes that Austrian research into the Mesolithic has confronted similar problems as research in Hungary: sites lacking stratigraphical context, often mixed with assemblages from later cultures, and chronological relations only possible through general typological comparison with better known sites from surrounding regions (Germany, Switzerland, and Italy). Nevertheless the more eastern Mesolithic sites in Austria are worthy of mention as potential analogs for Mesolithic sites in Hungarian Transdanubia. In

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Student Conference 2004 South East Austria the cave sites of Tropfsteinhöhle des Schloßberges bei Griffen located along the Mur/Mura River in Kärnten and Zigeunerhöhle im Hausberg von Gratkorn near the Drau/Drava river in Steiermark. A cluster of five open air sites is located between the Danube and Czech boarder in Niederösterreich: Mühlfeld bei Horn, Horn-Galgenberg (Gulder 1953; Weiser 1980), Kamegg im Kamptal (Berg and Gulder 1956), Burgschleinitz bei Eggenburg (Gulder 1953; Leitner 1980), and an outlier site located near Vienna, Bisamberg bei Wein (Gulder 1953; Kmoch 1966). Five unpublished and undated possible open air Mesolithic sites are also known from Eastern Austria in Burgenland: Neusiedl am See, Jois, Breitenbrunn, Föllik bei Großhöflein, and Pöttelsdorf. From amongst all these sites, the Early Mesolithic sites of Kamegg and LimbergMühlberg, as well as, the Late Mesolithic site of Bisamberg stand out. "!A group of five Mesolithic sites is known from southeastern Czech Republic: Smolín (Valoch 1963, 1978, 1985), Pr˘ibice (Valoch 1975), Dolní Ve˘stonice (Klíma 1953), S˘akvice (Klíma 1953), and Mikulc˘ice (Klíma 1970). "!In western Slovakia, Bárta has investigated the Early Mesolithic sites of Mostová (Bárta 1960) and Tomásikovo (Bárta 1955), as well as, the Late Mesolithic sites of Sered I (Bárta 1957) and Dolná Streda (Bárta 1965). These sites are restricted to a rather small region west of the lower Vág River. Evidence for Mesolithic occupants in eastern Slovakia is limited to the probable Early Mesolithic site of Barca I (Bárta 1980a, b; Pros˘ek 1959) and Ruz˘ín-Medvedia Cave (Bárta 1985, 1990). "! Numerous Mesolithic sites are known from both the portion of the Ukraine lying within the Carpathian Basin and the 170

drainages of the Prut and Dniester Rivers (Matskevoî 1987, 1991). The disproportionate number of Mesolithic sites located in the Ukraine, relative to surrounding countries, is almost certainly the direct product of more intensive research efforts. "!The site of Odmut cave (Kozlowski, et al. 1994) in Montenegro is one of the only stratified cave deposits containing a stratified Mesolithic sequence in the Balkans. Beginning in the late 1980’s and 1990’s Kertész, in collaboration with local collector Gy. Kerékgyártó, began to sytematically survey the Jászság region of the northern Hungarian Alföld along the Tarna and Zagyva Rivers (Kertész 1991). In the course of this work numerous sites with characteristic Mesolithic geometric microliths were identified along abandoned channels and oxbows of the of the Early Holocene (Boreal Period) Tarna and Zagyva Rivers (Kertész 1996b: 13). In many cases these sites lacked pottery or the pottery present originated from a period in which chipped stone tools were not utilized. Further survey work and subsequent excavations lead to the further investigation and publications of the sites of Jászberény I (Kertész 1991, 1996b), Jászberény II (Kertész 1993), Jászberény IV (Kertész 1995, 1996c), and Jásztelek I (Kertész 1994, 1996b). The area of surface lithic scatters vary from 12-17 m to 40-50 m in diameter, and the rarer, larger sites may be comprised of multiple smaller concentrations (Kertész 1996b: 19; 2002: 288). Kertész goes on to report that difference in site size may reflect differences in the duration of stay, and that at the larger sites it is possible to recognize different activity areas. Significantly, a circular dwelling structure (diameter = 5 m) with a subterranean floor and centrally located hearth was excavated at the Jásztelek


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers site: post holes indicate that the hut was constructed from large leaning poles (teepee form) to which roofing material (i.e. reeds) was probably affixed (Kertész 1996b:19-22). As suggested by the location of sites on river floodplains, faunal remains from aquatic animals are present, but in addition faunal remains from terrestrial animals attest to the exploitation of species located both in riparian corridors and interfluvial steppe environs (Kertész 2002: 289). As of yet no plant remains have been recovered from the Jászság sites, but this is probably the result of poor preservation conditions, as recent analyses of pollen cores suggest that huntergatherers may have been intentionally manipulating the woodlands to increase hazelnut production (Sümegi 2004). All the Jászság Mesolithic sites are dominated by lithic raw materials locally attainable from the Mátra Mountains located 20-30 km to the north; suggesting seasonal movement between highland and lowland environments. On the basis of lithic materials recovered in the course of surface collections at Jászberény II and IV, as well as, excavations at Jásztelek I and Jászberény I, Kertész (Kertész 1996a; 1996b) divided the Jászság Mesolithic into two phases: 1) the Early Mesolithic, Boreal, Jászberény I phase based on stratigraphic observations during the course of excavations; and 2) the Late Mesolithic, Early Atlantic, Jásztelek I phase known from surface collections at the respective site. In contrast to J. K. Kozl/owski and S. K. Kozl/owski (Kozlowski and Kozlowski 1979), Kertész argues that the Jászság Mesolithic lithic industry, or North Hungarian Plain Mesolithic Group (NHPM), shows links with the preceding Late Pleistocene Epigravettian and signifi-

cantly incorporates elements of the Western Technocomplex (Beuronian, Sauveterrian), but does not demonstrate links with the Balkan Epigravettian/Tardigravettian (Kertész 1996b: 23-25). He goes on to state that the strongest analogies for the NHPM are the Western Technocomplex influenced Mesolithic sites, including the Tisza Valley Mesolithic Group (Barca I, Ciumes¸ti II) (for definition see Bárta 1972, 1973, 1980a, b), the northern Carpathian Basin perimeter (Kamegg, Limberg-Mühlberg, Mostová, Tamás˘ikovo, Smolín, Pr˘ibice, Dolní Ve˘stonice, Mikulc˘ice, Bisamberg bei Wien, and Sered I). The results of this work suggest that the cultural landscape of the Early Holocene Carpathian Basin was significantly more diverse than initially suspected. Sites created by mobile hunter-gatherers are often archaeologically less visible than those created by farmers living in villages. Archaeological visibility is an invalid proxy for evaluating the contributions of the respective groups to the second phase of Neolithic expansion. Increasing evidence has accrued which convincingly indicates that hunter-gatherer populations were present in the Carpathian basin and probably interacted with the first farmers. Sustained research efforts in the Jászság region have proven that Mesolithic sites exist, but as yet undiscovered sites in western Hungary are still awaiting similar treatment. The Jászság region stands in stark contrast to Transdanubian Hungary; an important staging ground for the spread of agricultural communities to the rest of North Central Europe. Transdanubia’s role, as the secondary node for the prehistoric transmission of agriculture to North Central Europe, demands that increased effort be devoted to the scrutiny of possible Mesolithic evidence.

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The Spread of Agriculture: South West Asia to South East Europe The agricultural center of origin most significant to the European Neolithic is the “Fertile Crescent” located in South West Asia; an area encompassing the Levantine corridor (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria) and southern foothills of the Taurus Mountains (Syria and Turkey) and Zagros Mountains (Iraq and Iran). This region was initially singled out as a region in which early agriculture may have developed based upon the regional distribution of the wild progenitors of early domestic animals and plants (Harris 1990; Vavilov 1926). Human actions ultimately leading to the domestication many of plant species are likely to have begun some time during the late Pleistocene (pre-10,000 cal. B.C.). The ability to track the first steps in the process of domestication is hampered by the fact that morphological change in the animals themselves, and other materially salient aspects of human-animal relations, are both preceded by a period of unknown duration. It appears that groups inhabiting different regions with in the Fertile Crescent and Taurus Mountains in Anatolia were responsible for domesticating different animal and plant species during the early Holocene between 10,000 and 7,000 cal. B.C. These species were later melded into the classic “Neolithic Package” during the later Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB) and early Pottery Neolithic (PN) sometime during the late 8th and early 7th millennium B.C. (Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995). This “Neolithic Package” included the following domesticated plants: emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn wheat (Triticum monoccoccum), bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), six-row barley (Hordeum vulgare), lentils (Lens culinaris), peas (Pisum sativum), and bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia).

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These plants were later complemented by the following domestic animal species: sheep, goat, cattle, and pig. Dogs were also present, but were domesticated much earlier, and hence were already distributed throughout both Europe and South West Asia. Agriculture was almost certainly transmitted to Greece from the Anatolian Peninsula; although the specific route, or routes, out of western Turkey is the topic of current debates (Özdogan 1989, 2000; Schubert 1999; Thissen 2000a, b). Based on her evaluation of radiocarbon dates from Early Neolithic sites in Greece, Perlès (2001: 98110) suggests that the Early Neolithic began on the southern Greek mainland around 6,500 cal. B.C. and lasted until about 5,900 cal. B.C. The debate over the existence of an earlier Greek Pre-Pottery Neolithic phase aside, Early Neolithic societies in Greece utilized both pottery and the major elements of the suite of domestic plants and animals (Perlès 2001). The Greek Early Neolithic subsistence economy, as described by Perlès (2001: 152-172), displays some of the general patterns that are manifest throughout the Balkan Early Neolithic societies. Emmer and einkorn wheat tend to be the most common domestic plants recovered from sites, although this type of information is heavily dependent upon the types of recovery techniques used. The bones of sheep and goat, animals adapted to more arid conditions, are almost always numerically dominant, but cattle probably provided more meat. Certain aspects of the material culture tend to be widely shared such as the basic ceramic forms, figurines and idols, as well as the chaff tempered fabric used in their production. Between the late 7th millennium and early 6th millennium cal. B.C. an approximately 500,000km2 portion of southeastern Europe were settled by the first agricultural soci-


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers eties. Radiocarbon dates from a number of Early Neolithic sites (Whittle, et al. 2002) indicate that agricultural societies spread rapidly northward through the Balkans, probably following a number of different routes, and reached the Carpathian Basin by the early 6th millennium cal. B.C. (Hertelendi, et al. 1995; Hertelendi, et al. 1998; Horváth and Hertelendi 1994; Whittle, et al. 2002). Within the Carpathian Basin the following three culture groups have been distinguished: Starc˘evo (Hungarian Transdanubia, eastern Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia), Körös (Hungarian Alföld and northern Serbia) Cris¸ (Transylvania in Romania).

Early Neolithic in the Carpathian Basin: Starcˇevo-Körös-Cris¸ Cultures The Balkan Early Neolithic as manifest in the Carpathian Basin has been separated into three regional groups: Starcˇevo, Körös, and Cris¸ [see Map Kalicz et al. 1998: 153]. Each is endowed with its own peculiarities but the three groups are also often referred to in hyphenated form (Starcˇevo-KörösCris¸), reflecting their underlying relatedness with in the broader Balkan Early Neolithic sphere. From the start it is important to emphasize that boundaries between these groups are generally not sharp, and they are best envisioned as fuzzy boundaries. The Cris¸ culture is distributed parts of Walachia and Transylvania in Romania (Lazarovici 1969, 1979) and probably also extreme northeastern Hungary, as evidenced at the Méhtelek-Nádas site. I will not discuss the Cris¸ culture in this paper. The Körös culture is distributed throughout the southern Alföld in Hungary, the Banat in Romania, and the extreme northern portion of Serbia (Vojvodina). The Körös culture has been and continues to be the topic of intensive

research, and I will briefly summarize some its more salient, and generally agreed upon, aspects before discussing the Starcˇevo culture, which is often presented in juxtaposition to the Körös culture. However, Kalicz notes that the integration of the full range of archaeological evidence, not only ceramics, indicates a greater degree of variability within the Starcˇevo culture than between the Starcˇevo and Körös cultures (Kalicz 1988: 88), and it is important to keep this heterogeneity in mind. The currently accepted distribution of Starcˇevo culture sites includes Serbia, Western Bosnia-Herzegovina, eastern Croatia (Slavonia), and southwestern Hungary (Transdanubia). Research in the early 20th century failed to associate the Körös culture with the Balkan Early Neolithic. It was only through the efforts of Kutzián (1944; 1947) that the Körös culture was correctly assigned to the Balkan Early Neolithic. Kutzian recognized a strong similarity in the artifacts recovered from Körös culture sites on the southern Alföld of East Hungary and Early Neolithic sites in Greece (Kutzián 1944, 1947). Since then it has been recognized that Körös sites are also distributed in the Danube-Tisza interfluvial region (Bognár-Kutzián 1977). From the outset it must be stated that many Körös sites have been excavated since the 1950’s, but few of these excavations were large scale and even fewer have been fully published, rendering much of the available information impressionistic in character. Despite these deficiencies it is possible to make some general statements regarding the overall settlement patterns, internal settlement structure, subsistence economy, and ceramics. Körös sites are found at densities far surpassing that documented for either Cris¸ or Starcˇevo. In his summary of archaeological surveys (MTA IV 1-Szeghalom and MTA IV 173


Student Conference 2004 2- Szarvas) conducted in the central area of Körös distribution Makkay (1982: 114) reported that 304 sites were recorded in a 2012km2 area, for an astounding average density of 6.61 sites/km2. The most characteristic Körös culture sites are linear sites, up to 1 km in length, with dense surface scatters of ceramic and burnt daub, stretched out on slightly elevated levees along active and abandoned river courses (Kalicz and Makkay 1977; Kosse 1979; Sherratt 1997a, b; Whittle 1996). This view of Körös settlements located in a relatively homogeneous environment structured primarily by the location of waterways has been recently challenged in a paper by Sümegi (2003a) in which he argues for significantly more heterogeneous soil and vegetation conditions. He argues for two types of Körös sites distinguishable on the basis of their environmental associations: 1) sites “…situated on Holocene alluvia, right at the active riverbeds.”, and 2) sites “…‘normally’ found on the natural levees that developed toward the end of the Pleistocene and are covered with infusion and sometimes aeoleian loess constituting the morphologically highest points of the plain depression areas, and as a consequence, free of the influences of floods” (Sümegi 2003a: 53, 56). Sümegi further suggests that these different environmental associations were probably associated with fundamentally different subsistence economies; with the first, less well investigated, site type associated with the exploitation of wild terrestrial and aquatic resources and the second site type focused on production of domestic plant cultivation and animal husbandry. The recognition of Balkan Early Neolithic Starcˇevo sites in western Hungary coeval with Körös culture sites occurred significantly later and the full distributional extent of the Starcˇevo culture only became well 174

defined in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s [see Map sequence: Dimitrijevic´ 1969: 41; Kalicz and Makkay 1972: 82; Kozl/owski and Kozl/owski 1979: 69; Kalicz 1990: 116; Virág and Kalicz 2001: 266]. The earliest synthesis of the Starcˇevo culture in monograph form was presented by Arandjelovic´ and D. Garasˇanin (1954). The steps that would lead to the recognition of Starcˇevo sites in western Hungary were initiated in the 1960’s when Yugoslavian archaeologists began to identify Starcˇevo sites located further to the north and west than had previously been known (Dimitrijevic 1966, 1969, 1971, 1978, 1979). These new Starcˇevo sites were located throughout Slavonia (northeastern and central Croatia between Drava and Sava Rivers) with the northern boundary established along the Drava River (Dimitrijevic 1969: 41). The northern boundary along the Drava did not remain reality for long. Through investigation of museum collections, survey work, and excavations in the 1970’s Kalicz and Makkay were able to establish that the Starcˇevo culture was also present north of the Drava River in southwestern Hungary. At first they recognized Starcˇevo elements, which they initially termed the “Medina type”, from museum collections originating from the sites of Medina and Harc-Nyanyapuszta, both located in Tolna county (Kalicz and Makkay 1972a, b, 1975a). Subsequent excavations at Lánycsók in Baranya County (Ecsedy 1978; Kalicz 1978, 1980, 1983) and Becsehely in Zala County (Kalicz 1980, 1983) provided unequivocal contextual evidence for the Starcˇevo culture in Trandanubia. Kalicz notes that these excavations were significant not only in the materials recovered, but also due to their spatial separation, which suggested that Starcˇevo sites could be found throughout southern Transdanubia. From the 1970’s onward there has been a


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers steady increase in the number of Starcˇevo sites recognized in both southwestern Hungary and Slavonia. In her 1992 monograph on the Starcˇevo culture of Slavonia, Minichreiter catalogs a total of nineteen investigated Starcˇevo sites throughout Slavonia; although more are known to exist (Minichreiter 1992). In 1988 Kalicz reports ten known Starcˇevo sites from western Hungary (Kalicz 1988, 1990), by 1993 fifteen certain and two questionable Starcˇevo sites were known (Kalicz 1993), and subsequently one additional site has been added (Virág and Kalicz 2001). The presently recognized northern extent of the Starcˇevo culture has been established south of a line running from Szekszárd, on the Danube, northwest along the Kapos and Koppány Rivers to the southern shore of Lake Balaton, proceeding north to encompass the Gellénháza site before turning south. Undoubtedly many new Starcˇevo sites are awaiting discovery in Transdanubia. For example, the sites and ceramics presented in the erroneously identified Neolithic “Tapolca Group” (Törôcsik 1991) contain many Starcˇevo artifacts from sites in the vicinity of the Koppány and Kapos Rivers, which have been incorrectly associated with the early Transdanubian LBK (Bánffy personal communication). There are also hints of Starcˇevo sites on the northern shore of Lake Balaton (Bánffy personal communication). Even with the addition of these new sites it is likely that the settlement density will remain an order of magnitude less than the Körös culture, a situation mentioned by Kalicz (1988; 1990; 1993: 87). An examination of Hungarian Starcˇevo site location, settlement density, site size, and occupation intensity reveals that their settlement density appears to be lower, the sites tend to be smaller and less intensely occuppied than the more densely distributed Körös sites to the east (Kalicz 1988, 1990)

and to a certain degree the Starcˇevo sites in Slavonia. The significant geographic differences, especially in terms of relief, between Transdanubia and the Alföld preclude a direct comparison between Körös and Starcˇevo site location; although, as Kalicz et al. remark, “…the living water environment was as important here [Transdanubia] as on the Alföld” (Kalicz, et al. 1998: 152). It may prove more insightful to direct our attention toward comparisons which can be drawn between the geographically similar regions in Hungary and Slavonia. There are few apparent differences between the location of Slavonian and Hungarian Starcˇevo sites. Minichreiter notes that Slavonian Starcˇevo sites are generally located on “…elevated terraces along major rivers, - on low sunny hills which descend towards valleys with watercourses, [and] – gently elevated terrain in plains along small streams” (Minichreiter 1992: 70). The geographical location of Starcˇevo sites in Hungary is comparable to those in Slavonia; specifically, the Hungarian sites are associated with terraces along the Danube River, Drava River, and Lake Balaton and related wetland areas, as well as, smaller rivers and streams draining into these three larger bodies of water (Kalicz 1988). Waterways almost certainly provided both rich resource environments, as well as, easy routes for movement for people exchanging raw materials and information. In contrast with site location is possible to recognize changes in settlement density, site size, and settlement intensity northwards from Slavonian into Hungarian Transdanubia (Kalicz 1988, 1990). There are more Starcˇevo sites known from Slavonia, and especially south central Slavonia (Kalicz, et al. 1998: 153 - Fig. 2 ). Three large Starcˇevo sites have been investigated in Slavonia (Pepelane, Vinkovci, and Zadubravlje), some 175


Student Conference 2004 quite near to the Drava River (Pepelane) (Minichreiter 1992: 11-36, 64-70), but most Slavonian sites are smaller than 1 ha. No large sites are known from Hungary and all sites are smaller than 1 ha (Kalicz 1988, 1990; 1993: 87). Kalicz questioned whether the apparent difference in Starcˇevo settlement density and size, relative to Körös culture sites, resulted from an overall smaller population or from a shorter duration of presence in the region (Kalicz 1988, 1990). The intensity of occupation at individual sites is related to both the nature of on-site activities and the effects of settlement mobility (Whittle 2001). Whittle argues that more attention should be paid to the potential mobility of Early Neolithic (Körös) and Middle Neolithic (LBK) societies. He suggests six types of mobility within a broader settlement mobility spectrum: 1) residential or circulating mobility, 2) embedded or tethered mobility, 3) logistical or radiating mobility, 4) short-term sedentism, 5) shortterm sedentism with embedded and/or logistical, and 6) embedded sedentism (Whittle 2001: 450-451). In regards to the Lánycsók site Kalicz remarks that far fewer ceramic sherds were recovered than would be expected from a similar sized Körös excavation (Kalicz 1978: 143). There is currently no evidence refuting the interpretation of Hungarian Starcˇevo sites as locations where a limited range of special activities were repeatedly executed for short periods or time. The internal structure of Starcˇevo sites in western Hungary is poorly understood. The sites are generally characterized by a series of variously sized (1-6 m dia.), round or amorphously shaped pits, and occasionally associated with small kilns (e.g. Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget). To date, no structure has been excavated at a Starcˇevo site in Hungary that could plausibly have functioned as a dwelling structure (Kalicz 1988; Kalicz, et al. 176

2002: 19-20). Horváth (1989: 85-86) has provided a synthesis of dwelling structures recovered from a number of Körös culture sites – Kotacpart-Vata Tanya (Banner 1943), Nosza-Gyöngypart (Brukner 1974; Garasˇanin 1959), Ludasˇ-Budzˇak (Szekeres 1967), Tiszajenô (Selmeczi 1969), SzajolFelsôföld (Raczky 1982) , Szolnok-Szanda (Kalicz and Raczky 1981; Raczky 1982) and a house model from Röszke-Ludvár (Trogmayer 1966) – and he concludes that “…the characteristic Early Neolithic house type of the Tisza region was a single-room rectangular structure with gable roof and wattle and daub or reed walls.” [see reconstruction in Lenneis 2000: 388] Indirect evidence for houses, perhaps similar to those observed at Körös culture sites, has been recovered in the form of burnt daube and pit arrangements from both Gellénháza-Városrét (Simon 1996) and Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget (Kalicz, et al. 2002: 19-20). Kalicz notes that the layout of pits suggests that surface structures may have been present at Vörs. An entirely alternative interpretation of Starcˇevo structures, dominant in the interpretation of Croatian sites, considers that the numerous excavated pits are the remains of subsurface houses (Minichreiter 1992: 70) [see reconstruction in Minichreiter 1992: 30]. The association of northern Starcˇevo sites with pit house architecture may be amenable to theories attempting to stress Mesolithic roots, but there are neither parallels for such architecture in the Mesolithic of Transdanubia (largely due to absence of evidence), nor in the Early Transdanubian LBK with the exception of an enigmatic pit dwelling identified at the Bicske I site, located west of Budapest (Makkay 1978). The situation regarding Starcˇevo houses may be similar to the state of research regarding Alföld LBK (AVK) houses in eastern Hungary in the early 1990’s. Up to this


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers time, for lack of any better evidence, references were made Alföld LBK pit houses (Kurucz 1989: 20-25). The Alföld LBK pit house theory was rendered less plausible after extensive excavations by Dombóroczki (1997; 2001; 2003), at the site of Füzesabony-Gubakút, revealed Early Alföld LBK long houses similar to those known throughout the LBK North Central European distribution. At this site large pits found parallel to the long houses were reinterpreted as possible clay extraction pits incidental to house construction. In Transdanubia similar long houses, with parallel pits, are known in the Early Transdanubian LBK from the site of Balatonszárszó (Oross and Marton personal communication). With regard to the Starcˇevo culture, an interesting case in point may be the Croatian site of Zadubravlje, where post molds are interpreted as pilings for elevated food storage units, while larger pits, some containing kilns are interpreted as dwellings (Minichreiter 1992: 29-36, 69-70). The interpretation of the post molds as remnants of some type of surface structure would be more in line with the type of architecture seen in the Early Middle Neolithic. It is probably only a matter of time before excavations in Hungary or Croatia produce a more convincing evidence for Starcˇevo dwellings. Alternatively, it may come to pass that a diversity of non-standardized domestic architecture may typify the northern manifestation of the Starcˇevo culture. It remains impossible to speculate on the internal social organization of Starcˇevo site inhabitants as reflected in domestic architecture. Given complete absence of information on Mesolithic structures it is also impossible to gauge the likelihood of the survival of such traditions within the Starcˇevo group. Four human burials have been excavated at Starcˇevo sites in Hungary. Two burials were

found at Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget (Kalicz, et al. 2002). Kalicz et al. (2002: 16) report that initial excavations by Aradi in 1990 resulted in the exposure of a burial in contracted position with no grave goods. Further details of this burial have not been published, but a radiocarbon date from the burial falls between 5,550 and 5,200 cal. B.C. (Kalicz, et al. 2002). The second burial, a young female, from Vörs was associated with clam shells, a pottery vessel, and a grinding stone. Two burials, a child and female, were excavated at the Lánycsók site (Zoffmann 1978). The Hungarian Starcˇevo burials appear to fall within the context of general Starcˇevo burial practices (Lekovic 1985, 1995), which are characterized by a diversity of non standardized customs with few to no grave goods. It is not possible to discern any clear differences in social status based on burial patterns. Analysis of skeletal materials suggests a fairly heterogeneous population probably reflecting both nonlocal and indigenous elements (Zoffmann 1999, 2001). Our understanding of Starcˇevo subsistence practices from Hungarian sites is minimal. Systematic flotation was not enlisted, or results have not been reported, and the only evidence regarding domestic plant usage comes from cereal impressions resulting from chaff tempering of ceramics at Lánycsók (Kalicz 1990: 125), and other sites, and carbonized grains in a possible Starcˇevo alter fragment recovered as a stray surface find from the site of Kéthely (Füzes 1990: 161162). The lack of information makes it impossible to make any definitive statements regarding the specific pattern of domesticated plant management or utilization. However, as Kalicz (1988: 114-115) notes, it would not be unusual to find similar early cultigens to those found on other Early Balkan Neolithic sites; domesticated plants such as: 177


Student Conference 2004 emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn wheat (Triticum monoccoccum), bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), six-row barley (Hordeum vulgare), lentils (Lens culinaris), and peas (Pisum sativum). The evidence for domestic animal husbandry is only slightly more robust than the previously presented evidence for domestic plants. Lánycsók is the only Hungarian site from which the faunal assemblage (total NISP = 1067, total MNI = 118) has been analyzed and reported (Kalicz 1988: kép 2; 1990:164). The full suite of domestic animals is present (% total NISP = 95.5, % total MNI = 86.44): cattle, sheep-goat, pig, and dog. The following wild animals are present (% total NISP = 4.5, % total MNI = 13.56): aurochs, red deer, roe deer, and wild boar. The typical pattern observed at other Balkan Early Neolithic sites is repeated at Lánycsók: 1) significantly greater proportion of bones from domestic animals relative to wild animals; 2) sheep-goat NISP (Number of Identifiable Specimens) is greater than any other domestic animal, with cattle second and pig a distant third; and 3) cattle contributes more consumable meat by weight calculated from MNI (Minimum Number of Individuals). On the other hand, Kalicz points out that the contribution of wild animal meat, and especially aurochs, to the overall diet at Lánycsók was 62.68 % by weight. Based on this extremely limited information it is possible to state that either Starcˇevo immigrants brought with them, or the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were able to gain access to the entire suite of domesticated animals. Future research should aim to improve the quality and quantity of information available on Starcˇevo subsistence practices in Hungary: Without this information it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to examine the process of neolithization. If we turn our attention briefly toward the 178

better documented Körös culture faunal material: The numerical dominance of sheep and goat bones at Early Neolithic Körös sites in the Carpathian Basin has lead Bökönyi (1974; 1989) to point to a Greek and ultimately South West Asian origin for the entire agricultural package. He further suggests that this evidence supports the spread of agriculture through migration of agricultural populations. The antithesis of Bökönyi’s position has been recently postulated by Chapman (2003). Chapman attempts to identify the Mesolithic substratum, or in his terms “habitus,” in the Körös culture by comparing faunal assemblages from Körös sites with Greek Early Neolithic sites and the Jászság Mesolithic sites. Chapman considers the high percentage of wild species (12-40% total NISP; 25-62% total MNI) in three Körös site assemblages of significant size, “…to surely betoken a range of skills, ecological and ethological knowledge and dietary preferences Körös hunters and fishers derived from local specialists;…” (2003: 96). Chapman views the utilization of wild animals as some type of gauge of Mesolithic-ness. Ultimately, this is based on the assumption that Early Neolithic groups were somehow incapable of adapting to new situations without the help of Mesolithic “super hunters.” It is equally insightful to consider the significance of utilization of wild species by Early Neolithic cultures in a broader temporal context, as opposed to the purely spatial context enlisted by Chapman. Kalicz et al. (1998: 152), draw attention to Bökönyi’s (Bökönyi 1992: 197-201, 233-239) observations that exploitation of wild animals was greater in the Late Neolithic than the Early Neolithic, and Kalicz et al. propose that the utilization of wild animals by Körös groups was nothing more than taking advantage of a rich environment. It is difficult to come down in


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers favor of either interpretation; however, it is fairly clear that utilization of wild resources provides no clear evidence for Mesolithic ancestry. The analyses of the lithic raw materials and chipped stone tools at Hungarian Starcˇevo sites provides information about both the types of long distance relationships of the inhabitants with sources regions and the nature of on-site activities. Starcˇevo sites in Hungary from which the lithic assemblages have been analyzed and published are Gellénháza-Városrét (Biró 2002: 135-141; Biró and Simon 2003) and Vörs-Máriaassszonysziget (Kalicz, et al. 1998: 164-168, 178181). The lithic assemblage from the sites Becsehely I exists but is unpublished according to Biró (2002: 134-135). There is no information available from Lánycsók or any of the other Starcˇevo sites. The site of Gellénháza-Városrét had multiple chronological horizons with a total lithic assemblage of 1414 pieces, and Biró and Simon (2003) note that roughly half of the total assemblage can be securely assigned to the Starcˇevo culture. In their analysis of the Gellénháza-Városrét they reached the following conclusions (Biró and Simon 2003: 122-125): 1) microlithic and flake based stone industry; 2) assemblage dominated by raw materials (Szentgál radiolarite, Úrkut-Eplény radiolarite, Hárskút radiolarite, etc.) attainable from the Bakony Mountains north of Lake Balaton; 3) high ratio of flakes and chips in conjunction with numerous exhausted cores suggests that inhabitants produced chipped stone tools on-site; 4) flakes and chips dominate the overall assemblage with tools produced on both flakes and blades; and 5) retouched tools recorded also include points, borers, burins, wedges, end scrapers, trapezes and segments. The smaller (n=126) lithic assemblage from the Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget site

(Kalicz, et al. 1998: 164-168, 178-181) presents a fairly similar picture to that of Gellénháza-Városrét site. Like the GellénházaVárosrét assemblage, Vörs-Máriaasszonysziget is dominated by raw materials from the Bakony Mountains with primarily flakes and chips with blades present in lower numbers. The high proportion of retouched tools and overall low number of cores, as a proportion of the overall assemblage, suggest that the inhabitants either processed the materials off-site, or acquired the materials in processed form through trade. In this sense the Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget differs from the Gellénháza-Városrét site where a more direct connection with the same raw material sources is implicated. The tool kit is described as “fairly varied” and the following items are mentioned amongst the inventory of retouched tools: end scrapers, segments, burins, but no “classical trapezes.” There is no mention of the microburin technique, recognized at Mesolithic sites in north central Hungary (Kertész 1996b, 2001, 2002), at either Gellénháza-Városrét or VörsMáriaasszony-sziget; although, the presence of (micro)burins may be suggestive of this technique. Inhabitants from both sites were able to gain access, either directly or through exchange, to raw materials found in the Bakony Mountains where there are no known Starcˇevo sites. To this I would only add that based on the illustrations in their article I am skeptical as to whether the artifacts classified as segments are technologically comparable to similarly labeled Mesolithic artifacts. Discussions of continuity between the Transdanubian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the Starcˇevo culture have often been based on comparison of Starcˇevo lithic assemblages with poorly investigated or hypothetical “Mesolithic” sites. There are two implicit underlying assumptions which 179


Student Conference 2004 can be recognized in these discussions. First, Biró (in Kalicz, et al. 1998: 164) considers that lithic industries are more conservative over long periods of time, which is a tenable hypothesis, but such hypotheses reveal little about Mesolithic lithic assemblages unless continuity is accepted as predetermined. Second, the “Mesolithic Master’s of Stone Hypothesis” is based the notion that if Mesolithic sites are known primarily from lithic assemblages, then it follows that those Early Neolithic sites rich in stone tools and stone tool types implicate technological continuity in lithic industries between the two industries. It is possible to recognize some aspects of the “Mesolithic Master’s of Stone Hypothesis” in the following statement: “…the morphologically more varied [Early Neolithic] tool kit can be considered the legacy of hunter-gatherer societies.” (Biró 2002: 129). For example, if we consider the possible effects of settlement mobility (Whittle 2001) and consider lithic tool diversity as an index of activity diversity, then such sites may have witnessed a diversity of activities possibly carried out over an extended period of time. A diverse lithic tool kit has little bearing on hunter-gatherer roots. At the very least there is a need to consider a wider range of possible underlying causes for the structure of Neolithic lithic assemblages. The presence of a lithic industry, which is probably similar to an unknown Mesolithic lithic industry, does little more than suggest continuity, but reveals little about the actual process of neolithization. This is especially pertinent both in light of the fact that little information is available on the full range of sites which may be associated with the Neolithic (Early to Late) and that it is increasingly recognized that neolithization was a more protracted process than originally figured (Gronenborn

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2003). Lithic artifacts are often the most common, if not the only, type of material recovered from Mesolithic sites in the Carpathian Basin, and it is for this reason that a better understanding of the lithic assemblages from Starcˇevo sites will be quite important to understanding the relationship between these two groups. The dating of Starcˇevo sites in Hungary and Slavonia is almost entirely based on relative ceramic chronology. In his doctoral thesis on the Early Neolithic Starcˇevo culture in Transdanubia Kalicz (1988; 1990) modified Dimitrijevic´ ’s (1974) ceramic typology (from oldest to youngest: Monochrome, Linear A, Linear B-GirlandoidSpiraloid A, and Spiraloid B) to assign relative chronological position to the Hungarian Starcˇevo sites. According to Kalicz all the known Hungarian sites fall into either the Classic Starcˇevo phase (elements of Dimitrijevic´ ’s Linear B, Girlandoid, and Spiraloid A phases) or Late Starcˇevo (Dimitrijevic´ ’s Spiraloid B phase) (Kalicz 1988: 103-105). The following two sites have been assigned to the Classic Starcˇevo phase: Lánycsók and Medina (Kalicz 1988: 103-104). The following seven sites have been assigned to the Late Starcˇevo phase: Becsehely I, DombóvárKapos, Kaposvár-Deseda, and HarcNyanyapuszta all assigned by Kalicz (1988: 104); and later Gellénháza-Városrét (Simon 1996), Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget (Kalicz, et al. 1998), and Babarc (Bánffy 2001). Kalicz hypothesized that more sites would eventually be assignable to the Late Starcˇevo phase as a result of increasing population after initial adoption of agriculture or settlement by agricultural immigrants. More recently investigated sites, such as Gellénháza (Simon 1996, 2001), Vörs-Máriaasszonysziget (Kalicz, et al. 1998: 160-164), and Babarc (Bánffy 2001) have tended to con-


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers firm Kalicz’s original hypothesis and both sites have been assigned to the Late Starcˇevo (Spiraloid B phase). Significantly, the site of Babarc is located in close proximity to the ceramic typologically assigned Classic Starcˇevo Lánycsók site. The dating of sites in Slavonia using Dimitrijevic´ ’s chronology indicates that there are no sites from the oldest Monochrome phase. Sites assigned to the Linear A phase are found primarily in south central Slavonia near the Sava River (Zadubravlje, Bukovlje Podvinjsko, Slavonski Brod) with the exception of a single site located in northeastern Slavonia on the Danube River (Erdut). Sites assignable to Kalicz’s Classic Starcˇevo (Dimitrijevic´ ’s Linear B, Girlandoid, and Spiraloid A phases) are found throughout Slavonia. It is interesting to note that while sites assignable to Kalicz’s Late Starcˇevo (Dimitrijevic´ ’s Spiraloid B) are distributed throughout Slavonia, the furthest northwestern Starcˇevo site (Zˇdralovi) is assignable to this phase. Depending on the degree of confidence one places in Dimitrijevic´ ’s chronology it is possible to suggest the following steps in the expansion of the Starcˇevo culture in Transdanubia and Slavonia: 1) initial spread in of the Sava and Danube River valleys; 2) infilling of central Slavonia and northern Slavonia along the lower Drava, as well as, the more eastern regions in Hungarian Transdanubia close to the Danube; and 3) expansion of to the west in Slavonia and to the northwest in southern Hungarian Transdanubia. A detailed comparison of the Dimitrijevic´ relative ceramic chronology with radiocarbon dates from Starcˇevo sites throughout their distribution range is difficult given the paucity of radiocarbon dates from Starcˇevo sites in its northern distribution area of Hungary and Slavonia (Kalicz 1988: 107).

Two radiocarbon dates have been reported from two Starcˇevo sites in Hungary: Becsehely I and Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget. Becsehely I, assigned to the Late Starcˇevo by ceramic chronology, has produced a radiocarbon date of 5550-5290 cal. B.C. (2 sig.) (Kalicz 1988: 106-107; 1990: 92). From Vörs-Máriaasszony-sziget a single radiocarbon date, similar to the previous date, from the human burial without grave goods, unearthed by Aradi in 1990, has been reported. The single radiocarbon date from Becsehely I and Vörs show complete overlap with better dated early LBK site of BrunnWolfholz near Vienna. A compilation of the 27 radiocarbon dates from Brunn-Wolfholz indicate a date of occupation of 5700-5050 cal. B.C. (2 sig.) (Stadler 1995: 224). This information suggests, but far from confirms, that the neolithization of Transdanubia progressed northward at a rapid rate, without any major ecological barriers (contra Kertész and Sümegi 1999, 2001), or if such impediments were encountered they were rapidly overcome. On the other hand if the recognized site densities are considered indicative of actual site densities, then it is possible to posit that Early Neolithic groups encountered some type of diffuse environmental resistance, similar to the barrier described by Kertész and Sümegi, as they began to expand northwards through Slavonia and into Hungary. Many questions, pertaining to the temporal and spatial patterning of Neolithic spread, most notably in regard the Middle Neolithic LBK culture in Transdanubia, remain undiscussible in the absence of more radiocarbon dates from the Hungarian sites.

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Aftermath of Starcˇevo: the Linearbandkeramik Culture (LBK) The effects of the Starcˇevo culture were significant for not only Transdanubia, but also for the rest of north central Europe. During the middle 6th millennium B.C., roughly 5,500 B.C., the Starcˇevo culture was transformed throughout its entire distribution in Transdanubia and in its place the Transdanubian Linearbandkeramik (TLBK) (also referred to as Transdanubian Linear Pottery-TLP or Dunántúli Vonaldíszes Kerámia-DVK) culture developed. Within approximately 200 years LBK expanded into north central Europe occupying a 400,000 km2 region, from the Rhine River in the West to the Bug River in the East (Bogucki 2000; Gronenborn 1999, 2003). The earliest LBK is associated with distinctive incised pottery decorations on chaff or sand tempered pottery, large long houses (Lenneis 2000), and shifts in the subsistence economy from the emphasis of sheep and goats to cattle (Bogucki 1988). However, it is important to note that there remains significant discussion regarding the actual relationship between ceramic typologies and the radiocarbon chronology (Gronenborn 2003: 8081). The sites of Brunn-Wolfholz and Szentgyörgyvölgy-Pityerdomb, with possible transitional Starcˇevo-LBK ceramics, have figured prominently in these debates. The centrality of Transdanubia to this process did not become apparent until the middle 1970’s, and similar to the research leading to the recognition of the Early Neolithic Starcˇevo culture in Hungary, the research began outside of Hungary. The German archaeologist Quitta (1960) presented his synthesis of the earliest Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture in Germany. Seminal efforts to date LBK in north central Europe indicated that its initial appearance 182

was extraordinarily sudden, probably occurring in less than 200 years (Quitta and Kohl 1969). More recent radiocarbon research, often focusing on the intricacies of calibration and materials being dated, has generally tended to confirm earlier observations regarding the rate of expansion (Stäuble 1995; Whittle 1990). Early on Quitta (1964; 1971) suggested that early LBK sites would be found further to the south, but it was not until the independent and combined efforts of Kalicz and Makkay that undisputable early LBK sites were recognized and excavated. The first sites excavated were Medina (Kalicz and Makkay 1975b, 1976), Bicske I (Makkay 1975, 1978), and Becsehely II (Kalicz 1979). As a result of this research it became clear that the flash pan for early LBK expansion was localizable to the Transdanubian region in western Hungary. Subsequent research has added significantly to our understanding of both the Balkan Early Neolithic Starcˇevo culture and Middle Neolithic Linearbandkeramik, but by the mid 1970’s the underlying framework was in place for asking more serious questions pertaining to the mechanism of agricultural spread in this region. Since the 1970’s a number of significant early LBK sites have been investigated. The sites of Barcs (Kalicz 1993: Abb. 22-23; 1995: Abb.9-11) and SzentgyörgyvölgyPityerdomb (Bánffy 2000a, b, c) were excavated near the Drava and Mura Rivers in southwest Hungary. The site of Szentgyörgyvölgy-Pityerdomb is particularly important, because its ceramic assemblage demonstrates the mixing of decorative motifs from Late Starcˇevo and Early LBK and it may represent transitional phase between Late Starcˇevo and Early LBK (Bánffy 2000c). Although, Gronenborn (2003) notes that the radiocarbon dates may suggest a spatially and temporally highly complex process of


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers neolithization in Transdanubia. Portions of the recently excavated Balatonszárszó site, a massive site with many long houses on the southern shores of Lake Balaton, will most likely be assignable to the earliest LBK (Oross and Marton personal communication). On the left bank of the Danube River the site of Baja was investigated by Kalicz (Kalicz 1993: Abb. 24-26; 1994; 1995: Abb 12-14). In northern Transdanubia excavations were conducted at the sites of Budapest III-Aranyhegyi út. (Kalicz-Schreiber and Kalicz 1992) and Szigetszentmiklós (Virág 1992). Many of these sites are still in the process of analysis and it is hoped that complete reports will be reported in the near future. Kalicz and Kalicz-Schreiber (2001: 27) remark that the current number of known early LBK sites, assigned by ceramic typology, in Transdanubia is over ninety. Among the more significant recent work suggesting a role for Mesolithic huntergatherers in the LBK spread is Mateiciuvová’s research on raw material distribution during the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic (Mateiciucová 2001). She examined the lithic raw materials from a number of assemblages from Mesolithic sites in the Moravia (Czech Republic) with the lithic assemblages from a number of early LBK sites in the region (Mateiciuvová 2001) [see Map Mateiciuvová 2002: 184-185]. In particular she notes the low level presence (<1%) presence of Szentgál radiolarite, a distinct red radiolarite found in the Bakony Mountains north of Lake Balaton in Hungary (Biró and Dobosi 1991; Biró and Regenye 1991), at the Mesolithic sites of Smolín, Prˇibice, and possibly also Dolní Veˇstonice. In early LBK assemblages from the Austrian sites of Brunn II (see also Mateiciucová 2002) and Rosenburg I she notes an unusually high percentage (> 50%) of Szentgál radiolarite. Szentgál radiolarite is also present, but at lower levels

(< 10%), at the early LBK sites of Kladniky and the cemetery of Vedrovice. Gronenborn has also noted a similar widespread distribution of Szentgál radiolarite amongst early LBK assemblages in Central Europe (Gronenborn 1994, 1999). The early Neolithic LBK societies not only maintained with but also intensified connections with the Szentgál radiolarite sources in Transdanubia. The results of Gronenborn’s and Mateiciuvová’s are suggestive of the intensification of Mesolithic exchange networks during the early phases of LBK expansion. Unfortunately, the robustness of connections which can be drawn on the basis of lithic raw material economy between the insufficiently investigated Mesolithic Kaposhomok site and Starcˇevo and LBK sites in Transdanubia is limited to the observation that Szentgál radiolarite is present in the Kaposhomok assemblage (Marton 2003: 41). The processes which facilitated the LBK expansion undoubtedly included the Starcˇevo culture; there are simply too many similarities between the ceramic assemblages and other aspects of material culture to suggest otherwise. However, the extent to which the process was entirely the result of internalized Starcˇevo cultural development, excluding local Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations, remains an open question. The two greatest uncertainties regarding the neolithization of Transdanubia can be encapsulated in the following questions. First, what was the relationship between Mesolithic hunter-gatherers the Starcˇevo culture? Second, what role did Mesolithic hunter-gatherers play in the initial development and expansion of LBK? It is puzzling, and by no means easily dismissible, that so few Mesolithic sites have been identified incidental to archaeological fieldwork in Transdanubia. On the other hand, one need only consider that Early Neolithic Starcˇevo 183


Student Conference 2004 sites, which presumably more detectable in surface surveys than Mesolithic sites, were only recognized during the past quarter century as a result of concerted research efforts. The final section of this paper outlines the initial steps in the development of a sustained research investigating the Mesolithic inhabitants of Transdanubia prior to and during the spread of agriculture.

Research Directions for the Mesolithic of Hungary Over the course of my Fulbright fellowship to Hungary I have had the opportunity to directly confront the topic of the spread of agriculture in the Carpathian Basin. A significant amount of time and energy has been devoted to developing a thorough understanding of the research history, familiarity with the artifacts (stone tools, pottery, etc.), and long-term changes in Hungarian environment. In Transdanubia the Early Neolithic Starcˇevo culture and the Mesolithic in particular, stand out as areas in need of further development. Previous approaches to the spread of agriculture in Hungary have primarily confronted the process from the perspective of the earliest Neolithic societies. One of the principal causes for this one-sided approach is the minimal and insufficiently investigated archaeological evidence available from Holocene hunter-gatherer societies. In a general sense, current models positing a significant role for Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the spread of agriculture, or at the very least seeking to incorporate hunter-gatherers into the process, have stimulated thought on the complex process by which agricultural societies may have spread. However, narrowly focusing on the process by which agricultural societies spread without incorporating long-term trends in hunter-gatherer social evolution obfuscates an absolutely 184

pertinent issue: roughly 4000 years of Early Holocene prehistory in western Hungary has gone missing. Given the current information available it is difficult to conceptualize the spread of agricultural societies without first attempting to reconcile the gross imparities between agricultural and huntergatherer societies, reflecting more than anything the availability of evidence. The virtual lack of Mesolithic sites in Transdanubia, in juxtaposition with the significance of the region during the spread of agriculture, presents a rather drab picture of one of the more exciting moments in prehistory. I have been fortunate to have found several of likeminded Hungarian archaeologists (Dr. Eszter Bánffy, Dr. Róbert Kertész, and Tibor Marton), and we have embarked on a collaborative mission to add a little Mesolithic color and clarity to the picture of neolithization in Transdanubia. The principal question stimulating research on the Transdanubian Mesolithic has been: How can we explain an almost complete lack of evidence from the Mesolithic in western Hungary? In addressing this question several interrelated causes may be postulated: 1) high-mobility Holocene hunter-gatherers produced ephemeral sites difficult to detect; 2) Mesolithic sites have been eroded, buried, transgressed by rising water levels (e.g. Lake Balaton), or negatively impacted by other geological or anthropogenic processes; 3) previous survey work was insufficiently sensitive to detect Mesolithic sites. Thus the issue of the missing Mesolithic revolves around the site producing behavior of the hunter-gatherers themselves, the deposition and preservation conditions, and the manner in which archaeologists detect sites (for futher discussion see Banning 2002). Some initial impressions on the possible role of all three are in order. First, as outlined in earlier sections of this


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers paper, hunter-gatherers had to rapidly adapt to a changing environment during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Changes in resource distribution undoubtedly stimulated changes in the organization of seasonal settlement patterns. The extent to which Mesolithic hunter-gatherer behavior was centered on particular locations on the landscape directly impacts the degree to which archaeologists are able to recognize such sites. To a certain extent, locations occupied for extended periods of time, by large groups, or consistently revisited are more likely to be detected, but only if the material refuse left behind has been preserved. It is thus possible that sites occupied for shorter periods, but associated with activities producing easily preserved refuse, may also be more easily detected by archaeologists. Furthermore, the diagnostic attributes of the refuse produced at each site will impact its likelihood of detection. For example, an intensively occupied site with a significant amount of lithic waste, but no diagnostic geometric microliths, will probably not be recognized as a Mesolithic site. At this point we do not know whether Mesolithic huntergatherers in Transdanubia produced the type of intensive sites necessary for further archaeological investigation. However, both general models for hunter-gatherer settlement, often based on ethnographic examples, as well as, the archaeological evidence from preceding periods and adjacent regions suggest that such central sites existed during the Mesolithic for a variety of social and economic reasons. For example, the importance of aquatic resources and riparian corridors is attested by the evidence from the Late Pleistocene site of Szekszárd-Palánk (Sio River), the probable Mesolithic site of Kaposhomok (Kapos River), and the Jászság Mesolithic sites (Tarna and Zagyva River). In an effort to produce positive results river valleys or

other areas with the potential for rich aquatic resources are first on the list of places to explore. It is equally important to keep in mind the full spectrum of factors, other than resource distribution, which structured hunter-gatherer settlement patterns and behavior (Jochim 1976: 47-63; Wiessner 1982, 2002; Wobst 1974). Kelly states: We need to approach archaeology not with the goal of assigning a site or time period to a particular typological pigeonhole, but with the intention of reconstructing different cultural elements – diet, mobility, demography, land tenure, social organization- as best we can, then assemble them, like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. (Kelly 1995: 343) The usage of both archaeological and ethnographic analogies in the description of hunter-gather behavior should always be tempered with the notion that we seek to describe a situation for which no appropriate modern analogy may exist. Second, over the past 12,000 years geological processes resulting from natural and anthropogenic causes, or a combination of both, impact the ability to detect Mesolithic sites (e.g. see Waters 1992). Fortunately, the thick depositing of loess sediments at the end of the Pleistocene, which resulted in the burial of many Late Paleolithic sites, is less of a factor during the Early Holocene. The landscape has however remained far from stable. For example the shifting of river channels, low energy flood deposits, erosion of hillsides due to prehistoric logging, and modern farming practices all can erode, expose, or bury archaeological sites. The identification of stable surfaces through cooperation with geomorphologists will be an important component of a project aiming to find Mesolithic sites. Archaeological sur185


Student Conference 2004 vey design must account for modern land use practices affecting the exposure (e.g. plowing, quarrying, etc.) or coverage (e.g. forest, pasture, etc.) of land surfaces. Third, there has been no archaeological survey specifically directed toward the detection of Mesolithic sites in western Hungary. Archaeological surveys conducted during the last century in Hungary have focused almost exclusively on surfaces exposed by modern agricultural practices. This may work well in regions were most of the land is under the plow (e.g. Alföld), but in areas with variable exposure, such as Transdanubia, it may be more difficult to representatively sample the landscape. The results of larger surveys in Veszprém County (M.R.T.) and smaller surveys along the Kapos and Koppány rivers (Torma 1963) have turned up only sites from the Neolithic or later periods (all ceramic using). Unlike most later prehistoric periods in which the presence of ceramics greatly increases the odds of site detection, finding small Mesolithic geometric microliths is highly dependent upon the soil surface conditions. Namely, personal experience suggests that such sites are easily missed if plowed surfaces have not been deflated by precipitation or remain covered in vegetation. The window of opportunity for detecting Mesolithic sites may be narrowly assignable to short periods before planting in the spring and after harvest in the fall. Finally, the recognition of Mesolithic sites depends upon our ability to detect diagnostically Mesolithic artifacts; almost exclusively limited to lithics. Prior to Kertész’s work in the Jászság region in the 1990’s there was only a limited sense of the types of stone artifacts which might be associated with the Mesolithic Hungary, much less Transdanubia. The image of an ill-defined edifice lurking amongst more visible trappings of later 186

prehistoric remains is not prone to ease of recognition. It now seems relatively clear that Transdanubia, sandwiched between the influences of the Western Technocomplex (Beuronian, Sauveterrian) and the North Hungarian Plain Mesolithic, will be characterized to a certain extent by a similar mix of Epigravettian substrata with elements of the Western Technocomplex: a situation suggested by the Kaposhomok site (Marton 2003: 42). In the initial stages of archaeological field survey one of the central goals will be to locate isolated sites that are both free from materials associated with either Neolithic or Copper Age cultures and not sufficiently damaged by later cultural activities: not necessarily the easiest task given that narrow river valleys have witnessed intensive cultural activity during all subsequent time periods. A constant challenge will be dealing with geometric microlith types which are not temporally restricted to the Mesolithic and appear in later periods, such as trapezes and segments.

Preliminary Research Results The research that my Hungarian colleagues and I have been engaged in over the past year has focused on the following investigative arenas: 1) the reinvestigation of sites which have been claimed to be Mesolithic, but which have only marginally been investigated; and 2) prospective survey work aimed at locating potential sites, necessarily involving the cooperation of local amateur archaeologists. Both avenues of inquiry have required the examination of museum and private collections, as well as, the organization of field projects aimed at locating/relocating and documenting sites. First, we decided to focus on the Kapos River valley for two reasons: 1) location of the minimally investigated probable Mesolithic site of Kaposhomok (Marton


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers 2003; Pusztai 1957); and 2) a possible Mesolithic site near Regöly brought to Kertész’s attention in the early 1990’s by Mr. Viktor Cziráki. In the fall of 2003 we organized a small prospective archaeological survey with a number of university student volunteers from Miskolc. The purpose of our research was to investigate the sites near Regöly and Kaposhomok, as well as, to familiarize ourselves with the geography and look for new sites along the Kapos floodplain between Regöly and Kaposhomok. The results of the survey for new sites lead to the discovery of two new sites of interest: one south west of Belecska (Belecska-3) and a second north of Kurd (Kurd-2). Both sites were located along abandoned meanders of the Kapos River. Belecska-2 was deemed interesting on the basis of the recovery of a triangular geometric microlith; although, a scatter of ceramic sherds of uncertain age was located immediately adjacent to the lithic scatter. Kurd-2 was identified as a larger concentration of lithic artifacts with Bronze Age ceramics present on the extreme margin of the site. No diagnostic materials were recovered. Another significant result of this survey was the identification of areas of high potential that could not be immediately investigated, due to fresh plowing or vegetation coverage, but represent targets for the future. The site near Regöly (Regöly-2) had been collected by Mr. Cziráki for approximately 15 years, and he brought the site to Kertész’s attention, because the site had yielded numerous lithic artifacts with only a few ceramic sherds that could be clearly assigned to the Late Iron Age or Roman period. Survey of Regöly-2 was hampered by poor lighting conditions and weather, but Mr. Cziráki kindly provided us with his entire collection of materials from this site for further study. These materials are currently in the process of being examined, and prelimi-

nary observations on the collection suggest the following: 1) significant presence of Bakony Mountain radiolarites (e.g. Szentgál); 2) high proportion of flakes and blades which were either informally retouched or damaged during usage; 3) numerous “thumbnail” scrapers and trapezes, but no segments; and 4) presence of sickle gloss on a number of the artifacts, including a biface type associated with Copper Age assemblages. The overall character of the assemblage is one, with a few exceptions, that would fit well within what we suspect a Transdanubian Mesolithic assemblage may look like. The presence of sickle gloss on stone tools is often given as the cause for assigning an assemblage to the Neolithic or later periods; however, this practice ignores the fact that reeds and other grasses, which may also produce sickle gloss, were likely to have been intensively exploited by Mesolithic people for basketry, clothing, and shelter. The almost complete lack of ceramic material and total dominance of lithic items strongly suggests that the site was probably occupied by non-pottery using groups. As a result of these preliminary observations we returned to intensively survey the Regöly-2 site in early April of 2004. We were able to identify concentrations of lithics on the surface of the site, and it seems that the presence of ceramic from later stone tool using cultures is minimal to non-existent. We are planning small scale excavations in the fall of 2004 to determine if intact cultural layers are present below the plow zone, and also the nature of such cultural layers, if present. Immediately prior to the submission of this paper a second site was identified near Regöly that produced two diagnostically Mesolithic segments (backed retouch from alternating directions) and an interesting backed blade. The site of Kaposhomok was first identi187


Student Conference 2004 fied and collected by Mr. Antál Trombitás in the early 1950’s. In the middle 1950’s Mr. Trombitás brought the site to the attention of Rezsô Pusztai who apparently investigated the find location, but probably did not conduct excavations or other form of intensive investigations (Pusztai 1957). The artifacts were subsequently donated to the Rippl-Rónai Museum in Kaposvár. The site has since come to be accepted in the international literature as the only legitimate Mesolithic site in Transdanubia (e.g. Kozlowski 2001), but numerous questions remain regarding the context of the finds (Marton 2003: 42). According to the maps in Pusztai’s article (1957: 97), there are two sites from which the Kaposhomok collection originates. However, we encountered some difficulty in locating the site. The western most area indicated on the map was in a plowed field but we were unable locate any concentration of chipped stone artifacts. The eastern site on Pusztai’s map, apparently situated on a large sand dune next to an abandoned meander of the Kapos River, was covered in pasture. With help from the good citizens of Kaposhomok, we were able to locate Mr. Trombitás, now 74 years old and living in Kaposvár. Mr. Trombitás informed us that the western site was not the site from which the collection had originated, and the eastern site was the true location from which the Kaposhomok artifacts had been collected. He further stated that while he was serving in the army, László Vertés had selected several pieces from the original collection and accessioned them into the collections of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. Furthermore, Mr. Trombitás related that he had retained 61 of the chipped stone artifacts from the original collection: This may account for some of the discrepancies noted by Marton (2003: 39) regarding Pusztai’s mention of more than 188

100 artifacts, while only 49 artifacts catalogued and of which 34 were locatable in the Rippl-Rónai Museum. Mr. Trombitás has since lent us the remainder of his collection and has agreed to accompany us to the Kaposhomok site to help clarify the situation. We are planning to conduct small scale excavations at Kaposhomok during the summer of 2004 in the hopes of defining the actual site location and searching for undamaged cultural deposits. Finally, we our research program also includes the review of materials recovered from sites in countries adjacent to Hungary. The collection from Barca I in Slovakia is currently in the process of examination and the site of Nosza-Pörös near Hajdukova in northern Serbia. Nosza-Pörös was originally reported by Brukner as the Hajdukova site, and in the original article he suggest that the site may be Mesolithic (Brukner 1966). In his article Brukner also presented illustrations of six geometric microliths (segments and trapezes). Tibor Marton later encountered a publication from the Subotica museum, in which more suspicious geometric microliths were pictured. This March we visited the Subotica Museum, and with the gracious assistance of Ágnes Szekeres, were able to relocate and fully document this collection. Among the significant discoveries were two backed points which fit within the Late Epigravettian tradition: this is quite peculiar given that the collection also includes numerous trapezes (Castelnovian influences), which seem to indicate a later period of site occupation. Like many potential Mesolithic sites in southeastern Europe, this site comes from surface collections and its context is uncertain. This summer we plan to return to Subotica and attempt to relocate the Nosza-Pörös site.


Mr. William J. Eichmann. Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers

Conclusion Currently the question of how agriculture spread in the Carpathian basin is trumped by the question of who was involved. Certainly, it is not possible to avoid discussing questions of process until the moment when we have perfectly comprehended the different participants. Such moments of total comprehension do not exist in archaeology. The different ways in which researchers construe the processes of neolithization play an important role in directing inquiry into the identification of participants. Implicitly neglecting the question of the participants will unnecessarily limit our ability to develop a richer picture of the past. It has been my goal to draw attention to the limitations of archaeological information bearing on the different participants, and especially Mesolithic participants, in the neolithization of Transdanubia and Europe. The steps my Hungarian colleagues and I have initiated

are directed at establishing informational parity amongst the various participants in the process of neolithization. It is our hope that this research may substantially enrich the manner in which both researchers and the public understand this important prehistoric period.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the American and Hungarian Fulbright organization and for the opportunity to study in Hungary over this past year. My advisors in Hungary, Dr. Eszter Bánffy and Dr. Róbert Kertész, as well as, my colleague Tibor Marton have contributed immensely to the success of this research. Thanks are also in order for the long list of university students, researchers, and archaeology enthusiasts who have provided stimulating conversation partners, selflessly helped with the arduous fieldwork, or made access to museum collections reality.

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Turán-type Problems in Extremal Combinatorics

Adam Marcus ................................................................................ Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0160 http://www.math.gatech.edu/aco Email: adam@math.gatech.edu

Rényi Institute 1364 Budapest, Pf. 127 http://www.renyi.hu Advisor: Gábor Tardos

................................................................................ This paper discusses the research that was done between Gábor Tardos and the author during his stay at the Rényi Institute from September 2003 until May 2004. It presents two major Turán-type results in the field of extremal combinatorics, one in the theory of excluded matrices and the other in topological graph theory.

1. Introduction Extremal combinatorics has come into its own as a field of research quite recently due to its importance in finite optimization. It is hard to compare processes if one does not know the limitations involved in each, and so the study of these limitations has become crucial in fields such as Operations Research and Computer Science. This paper discusses a class of extremal problems known as Turán type problems, named for Pál Turán, which include problems that aim to maximize a certain valuable while avoiding a given illegal situation.

Section 2 considers a problem concerning the maximum number of 1 entries that can appear in a 0–1 matrix while still avoiding a fixed, smaller matrix. The applications of this problem are contained mostly in Computer Science, where the effectiveness of various search and sort algorithms depend on the number of times it is forced to deal with certain ordered configurations. Apart from this, the result solves one of the most interesting open problems in Enumerative Combinatorics, and so it is important in its own right. 203


Student Conference 2004 Section 3 studies a situation that arises in many industrial applications. It is often useful to place as many nodes and node-connections onto a region without producing a certain situation. For example, one might hope to squeeze as many interconnected transistors onto a circuit board without having any of the connections cross. Our problem takes a fixed number of nodes and asks how many connections can occur if we wish to avoid a self-intersecting cycle of length 4. This problem has numerous applications in optimization, especially in the decomposition of pseudocircles into pseudosegments (a process that cuts a web of interconnected paths into pieces which maintain a certain intersection property), which could easily be useful in problems concerning ground transportation (where the set of routes forms such a web of paths). Most importantly, though, each of the solutions we give uses new techniques in combinatorics which will hopefully solve more problems than the two which we will consider here, and so many of the applications have yet to be discovered.

2. A Problem in Excluded Matrices Extremal graph theory is a well studied field in combinatorial research, but only recently has this research been extended by imposing an order on the vertices. The order, in fact, makes the problem of finding subgraphs substantially harder and so far very few results have appeared in the literature. Zoltán Füredi and Péter Hajnal [4] first considered ordered bipartite graphs by using matrix representation and since then progress has been made by Tardos [10]. The first result presented in this paper is a joint work between Gábor Tardos and exam204

ines the extremal problem of how many 1 entries an nXn 0–1 matrix can have that avoids a certain fixed submatrix P. For any permutation matrix P we prove a linear bound, settling a conjecture of Füredi and Hajnal [4]. Due to the work of Martin Klazar [8], this also settles the conjecture of Stanley and Wilf on the number of n-permutations avoiding a fixed permutation and a related conjecture of Alon and Friedgut [1].

2.1 Introduction This paper settles three related conjectures on avoiding smaller patterns. To state the conjectures we define the term “avoiding” in several contexts. Definition 1. Let A and P be 0–1 matrices. We say that A contains the k X l matrix P=(pij) if there exists a k X l submatrix B=(bij) of A with bij=1 whenever pij =1. Otherwise we say that A avoids P. Notice that we can delete rows and columns of A to obtain the submatrix B but we cannot permute the remaining rows and columns. If A contains P we identify the entries of the matrix A corresponding to the entries bij of B with pij = 1 and say that these 1 entries of A represent P. Let [n] = {1, 2, . . . , n}. A permutation of [n] is called an n-permutation. We say that an npermutation a contains a k-permutation π if there exist integers 1 N x1 < x2 < . . . < xk Nn such that for 1 N i, j N k we have a (xi ) a < (xj ) if and only if π (i) < π ( j). Otherwise we say that a avoids π. The set of finite sequences (words) over [n] is denoted by [n]*. A sequence a = a1a2 . . . al [n]* contains the sequence b = b1b2 . . . bk W [m]* if there exist indices 1Nx1 < x2 <. . . < xkNl such that for 1 N i, j N k we have

Otherwise we say that a avoids b.


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems

a x i < a x j if and only if bi < bj . Note that these notions are intimately related. Clearly the word a(1)a(2) . . . a(n) will contain the word π(1)π(2) . . . π(k) if and only if the n-permutation a contains the kpermutation π, which happens if and only if the permutation matrix of a contains the permutation matrix of π. Definition 2. For a 0–1 matrix P let f(n, P) be the maximum number of 1 entries in an n X n 0–1 matrix avoiding P. For a permutation π let Sn(π) be the number of n-permutations avoiding π. A sequence a1a2 . . . an is considered k-sparse if i < j, ai = aj implies j - i M k. For a sequence b W [m]* and k Z m let lk(b, n) be the maximum length of a k-sparse word in [n] avoiding b. The main result of this paper is the following theorem proving the Füredi-Hajnal conjecture (originally posed in [4]). Theorem 1. For all permutation matrices P we have f(n, P) = O(n). By a result of Martin Klazar [8] (which we reproduce in Section 2.3) the above result proves the Stanley–Wilf conjecture (stated here as Corollary 2) and also the Alon–Friedgut conjecture (stated here as Corollary 3), which was originally posed in [1]. The Stanley–Wilf conjecture was formulated by Richard Stanley and Herbert Wilf around 1992 but it is hard to find an exact reference. An even earlier source is the PhD thesis of JulianWest [11] of 1990 where he asks about the growth rate of Sn(π). His question 3.4.3 is more specific; he asks if Sn(π) and Sn(π´) are asymptotically equal for k-permutations π and π´. Miklós Bóna [2]

showed that this conjecture was too strong, however, by finding 4-permutations π and π´ with Sn(π) and Sn(π´) displaying different growth rates. Nevertheless, it shows a direct interest in asymptotic enumerations of this kind. Corollary 2. For all permutations there exists a constant c = cπ such that Sn(π)N cn. Corollary 3. For a k-permutation a and word a = a(1) a(2) . . . a(k) we have lk(a, n) =O(n). Several special cases of the above conjectures have already been established. Bóna [3] proved the Stanley–Wilf conjecture for layered permutations π, that is, for permutations consisting of an arbitrary number of increasing blocks with each of elements of a block smaller than the elements of the previous block. Approximate versions of all conjectures were also established. Using another result of Klazar [5] on generalized Davenport-Schinzel sequences Alon and Friedgut [1] showed approximate versions of their own conjecture and the Stanley–Wilf conjecture where the linear and exponential bounds were replaced by O(ne(n)) and 2O(ne(n)), respectively, with an extremely slow growing function e related to the inverse Ackermann function. In Section 2.2 we give a surprisingly simple and straightforward proof of Theorem 1. For the reader’s convenience we reproduce Klazar’s argument on how this result implies the Stanley-Wilf conjecture in Section 2.3. In Section 2.4 we present a multidimensional extension of Theorem 1 in the form of hypergraphs.

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2.2 Proof of the Füredi-Hajnal conjecture Theorem 1 is proved by establishing a linear recursion for f (n, P) in Lemma 7, that in turn is based on three rather simple lemmas. We partition the matrix into blocks. This idea appears in several related papers, e.g. in [8], but we use larger blocks than were previously considered. Throughout these lemmas, we let P be a fixed kXk permutation matrix and A be an nXn matrix with f ( n, P) one entries which avoids P. We assume k2 divides n. We define to be the square submatrix Sij = {ai´j´ W A : i´ W [k2i+1, k2(i+1)], j´ W 2 [k2j+1, k2(j+1)]}. We let B = (bij) be an (n/k2) X (n/k2) 0–1 matrix with bij = 0 if all entries of Sij are zero. We say that a block is wide (respectively tall) if it contains 1 entries in at least k columns (respectively rows). Lemma 4. B avoids P. Proof. Assume not and consider the k 1–entries of B representing P. Choose an arbitrary 1–entry from the k corresponding blocks of A. They represent P, contradicting the fact that A avoids P. Lemma 5. Consider the set (column) of blocks The number of blocks 2 in Cj that are wide is less than k k k

( )

Proof. Assume not. By the pigeonhole principle, there exist k blocks in Cj that have a 1 in columns c1 < c2 < . . . < ck. Let Sd1j , . . . , Sdkj be these blocks with 1 N d1 < d2 < . . . < dk N n/k2. For each 1–entry prs, pick any 1–entry in column cs of Sdrj. These entries of A represent P, a contradiction. Lemma 6. Consider the set (row) of blocks Ri = {Sij : j = 1 . . . The number of blocks in Ri that are tall is 2 less than k k k

( )

206

Proof. The same proof applies as for Lemma 5. With these tools, the main lemma follows: Lemma 7. For a kX k permutation matrix P and n divisible by k2 we have

Proof. We consider three types of blocks: X 1 = { blocks that are wide }.

£

| X 1|

2 n k kk k2

( )

by Lemma 5.

X 2 = { blocks that are tall }. |X 2 |

£

2 n k kk k2

( )

by Lemma 6.

X 3 = {nonempty blocks that are neither wide nor tall }. |X 3 |

£ f(

n ,P) k2

by Lemma 4.

• X1 = { blocks that are wide }. This includes all of the nonempty blocks. We bound f (n, P ), the number of ones in A by summing estimates of the number of ones in these three categories of blocks. Any block contains at most k4 1–entries and a block of X3 contains at most (k - 1 )2 1–entries.

f (n, P )

£ 2k

| £ k |X 4

3

1|

+ k 4 |X 2 | + (k - 1) 2 |X 3 |

k2 n n + (k - 1) 2 f ,P k k2

( )

(

)

Solving the above linear recursion gives the following Theorem and also Theorem 1. We did not optimize for the constant factor here. Theorem 8. For a kXk permutation matrix P we have

f (n, P )

£ 2k

4

k2 n. k

( )


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems Proof. We proceed by induction on n. The base cases (when n N k2) are trivial. Now assume the hypothesis to be true for all n < n0 and consider the case n = n0.

f (n, P )

£ (k - 1)

2

[

2k 4

We let n´ be the largest integer less than or equal to n which is divisible by k2. Then by Lemma 7, we have:

£ f (n´, P ) + 2k n £ (k - 1) f ( kn ´, P ) 2

2

(kk ) kn´ ] + 2k (kk ) n´ + 2k n £ 2k 2

2

3

2

2

where the last inequality is true for all k Z 2.

2.3 Deduction of the Stanley-Wilf conjecture For the reader’s convenience (and to show the similarities of the two proofs) we sketch here Klazar’s argument [8] that the FürediHajnal conjecture implies the Stanley–Wilf conjecture. Definition 3. For a 0–1 matrix P let Tn(P) be the set of nXn matrices which avoid P. As we noted in Section 2.1, a permutation a avoids another permutation π if and only if the permutation matrix corresponding to a avoids the permutation matrix corresponding to π. Thus if P is the permutation matrix of the permutation π, then Tn(P) contains the permutation matrices of all npermutations avoiding π. In particular we have |Tn(p)|i Sn(π). Assuming the Füredi-Hajnal conjecture Klazar proves the following stronger statement, which in turn implies Corollary 2:

2

2

+ 2k 3

2

( kk ) n´ + 2k n

(k - 1) 2 + k + 1

2

(kk ) n £ 2k (kk ) n 2

4

2

Theorem 9. For any permutation matrix P, there exists a constant c depending on P such that |Tn(P)| N c n. Proof. Using f(n, P) = O(n) the statement of the theorem follows from the following simple recursion: |T2n(P)| N |Tn(P)|15f(n,P ). To prove the recursion we map T2n(P) to Tn(P) by partitioning any matrix A W T2n(P) into 2 by 2 blocks and replacing each allzero block by a 0–entry and all other blocks by 1–entries. As we saw in Lemma 4 the resulting n by n matrix B avoids P. Any matrix B W Tn(P) is the image of at most 15w matrices of T2n(P) under this mapping where w is the number of 1 entries in B. Here wN f (n, P) so the recursion and the Theorem follow. The reduction also provides a nice characterization in the theory of excluded matrices: Corollary 10. Let P be a 0–1 matrix. We have log(|Tn(P)|) = O(n) if and only if P has at most a single 1 entry in each row and column. Proof. The matrices in the characterization are the submatrices of permutation matrices. For these matrices log(|Tn(P)|) = O(n) fol-

207


Student Conference 2004 lows from Theorem 9. For other matrices P, Tn(P) contains all of the n X n permutation matrices (a total of n!), so log(|Tn(P)|) = Ω(n log n).

2.4 Multi-dimensional extension We define the term “avoiding” in one final context. Definition 4. We denote the set of d-uniform, d-partite hypergraphs H(V,E) with (ordered) partitions H1, . . . ,Hd each isomorphic to [n] as (n, d). Let H(V,E) W (n, d). For an edge e W E we define the projection function πt(e) = e \ Ht. We extend this definition so that πt(H) W (n, d - 1) is the hypergraph with vertex set V \Ht and edge set {πt(e) : e W E}. Similarly to the extended defj inition, we define πt (H) W (n, d - 1) to be the hypergraph with vertex set V - Ht and edge set {πt(e) : e W E, e P Ht = j}. We define H - Ht W (n, d - 1) to be the hypergraph with vertex set V´ = H \ Ht and edge set E´ = {e \ Ht : e W H}. For an edge f W E´, we define the function bt ( f ) = {e W E : e \ Ht = f }. In a way, bt( f ) is the set of preimages of the edge f.

Given a block partition of edges S we will construct the block hypergraph BS(VS,ES) W (n/m, d) such that (i1, . . . , id) W ES if and only if Si1...id is non-empty. We define the mapping : ES " S which maps the edge (i1, . . . , id) W ES to the block Si1...id .

208

We will call a hypergraph P W (n, d) a permutation hypergraph if every point is covered by exactly one edge. We will write P (k, d) U (k, d) to denote this subset and we define f(n, k, d) = maxPWP(k,d) f(n, P). For two hypergraphs A W (n, d) and B W (k, d), we say that A contains B if there exists a hypergraph A´ V A which is order isomorphic to B. Notice that we can delete vertices and edges of A to obtain A´ but we cannot permute the remaining vertices. If A contains B we identify the edges of A which are order isomorphic to B and say that these edges represent B. Note that these notions reduce to the original theorem for the case d = 2. It is also informative to note the similarity to the notions discussed by Klazar in [6] and [7]. Theorem 11. f(n, P) = O(nd-1) for all P W P (k, d).

2.5 Proof of the Theorem in Multidimensions Throughout these lemmas, let d > 2 and let P W P (k, d) be a fixed permutation hypergraph. Furthermore, we assume that n is a multiple of m = kd/d-1 and consider a hypergraph H(V,E) W (n, d) that has f(n, P) edges and that avoids P. We partition the edges into the following “blocks” :

We say that a block S is t-large if |S P Ht| i k. Lemma 12. BS avoids P. Proof. Assume not and let the edges b1, . . . , bk represent P in BS. For each bi, choose an


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems arbitrary edge from c(bi). They represent P, contradicting the fact that H avoids P. Lemma 13. Let q W [k] and p´ W P - Pq. Then P - Pq W P (k, d - 1) and bq(p´ ) is a single edge. Hence when one “squashes” P, the new hypergraph is a permutation hypergraph and each new edge is the contraction of exactly one edge in P. Lemma 14. Consider the set of blocks j T t = {Si1...id : it = j}. The number of blocks in this set which are t-large is less than m f (n /m, k, d - 1) ( k ) . Proof. Assume not. Then for each block S j in T t we have |S P Ht| M k and for any edge in S there are m choices for e P Ht . So by the pigeonhole principle, there exist a set of blocks U = {Ui : i W 1, . . . , f (n/m, k, d - 1)} and integers c1 < c2 < . . . < ck such that {c1, . . . , ck} V Ui P Ht for all Ui W U. Now consider the block hypergraph BU (VU ,EU ). For every block Ui , there is an

edge in EU , so |EU| M f (n/m, k, d - 1) and BU V πtj (BS) W (n/m, d - 1). Now let P´ = πt(P) W P (k, d - 1) (by Lemma 13). BU cannot avoid P´ since BU has more than f (n/m, k, d - 1) edges (and by Lemma 12), so let b1, . . . , bk be the edges in EU that represent the edges p´1, . . . , p´k W P´, respectively and define Si = c(bi) for i = 1, . . . , d. Then S1, . . . , Sk V U so {c1, . . . , ck} V Si P Ht for all i W 1, . . . , k. Also, if one chooses a single edge from each from each of these blocks, these edges represent P´ . So for each edge p´i W P´ , let pi = bt(p´i ) (a single point in P by Lemma 13) and let yi = pi P Pt. Finally, choose edges ei W Si so that ei P Ht = yi. Clearly the ei contain the same order as the pi in all of the partitions except the t-th partition, since S1, . . . , Sk were chosen in that manner. Furthermore, the t-th partition has the same order since the edges themselves were chosen from their respective blocks with that property. Hence the ei represent P in H, a contradiction. Lemma 15.

Proof. We consider d+1 types of blocks:

k X t = { blocks that are t-large } for t Π[d]. |X t |

£

n m

f ( mn , k, d - 1) (mk) by Lemma 14.

k X 0 = { blocks that are not t-large for any t }. |X 0 |

£

f ( mn , k, d) by Lemma 12.

This includes (with some overcounting) all of the nonempty blocks. We bound f (n, k, d), the number of edges in H by summing estimates of the number of edges in these three

categories of blocks. Any block contains at most md edges and a block of X0 contains at most (k - 1)d.

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Student Conference 2004

f (n, k, d) £ (k - 1) d |X 0 | + m d

d

S |X | £ (k - 1) f ( m , k, d) + dnm d

t

n

d -1

t=1

And since m d-1 = k d, the lemma follows. Finding a valid solution for the above linear recursion gives the following Theorem and also Theorem 11. We did not optimize for the constant factor here.

Theorem 16. f (n, k, d) N dd+1( mk ) dk3dnd-1. Proof. We proceed by induction on n and d.

f (n, k, d)

£ f (n ´, k, d) + dmn d - 1 £ (k

£ dn d - 1

[

(1 -

1 d d d 3d ) d p k + d d p d k 3d - 1 k

Acknowledgements We thank Martin Klazar and Miklós Bóna for the great help they provided in writing this paper. Among other things Martin Klazar showed us how our result gives the characterization stated in Corollary 10 and Miklós Bóna showed us the first written reference to the growth rate of Sn(π) in [11].

210

n n , k, d) + dpnk d f ( , k, d - 1) + dmn d - 1 m m

- 1) d mp d k 3d - 3 n d - 1 + dmn d - 1

[

d d+1 p d k 3d n d - 1 1 - 1/k + 1/k

where each inequality is true for d M 2.

( )

n m , k, d - 1) m k

The base cases in d (when d = 2) results from Theorem 11. The base cases in n (when n < k3) is trivial. Now assume the hypothesis to be true for all n < n0 and d < d0 and consider the case n = n0 , d = d0. We let n´ be the smallest integer less than or equal to n which is divisible m by m = kd/d-1 and write p = ( k ) . Then by Lemma 15, we have:

- 1) d f (

£ (k - 1)d dd+1 pd k 2d n d - 1 + d(d

f(

]£d

d+1

p d k 3d n d - 1

3. A Problem in Topological Graph Theory A topological graph is a graph without loops or multiple edges drawn in the plane (vertices correspond to distinct points, edges correspond to Jordan curves connecting the corresponding vertices). We assume no edge passes through a vertex other than its endpoint and every two edges have a finite number of common interior points and they properly cross at each (that is, there are no points of tangency). The problem we consider was derived from the following problem, which was first considered by Pinchasi and Radoiˇci´c in [9]:


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems Problem 1. How many edges can a topological graph of n vertices have such that no 4 edges form a self-intersecting cycle? They were able to reduce Problem 1 to a purely combinatorial problem regarding cyclically ordered sequences, and this is the problem that we consider.

3.1 Introduction In this paper we consider cyclically ordered sequences of distinct symbols from a finite alphabet. We say that two such sequences are intersection reverse if the common elements appear in reversed cyclic order in the two sequences. For a vertex v of a topological graph G let LG(v) be the list of its neighbors ordered cyclically according to (the initial segment of) the connecting edge. Pinchasi and Radoici´ ˇ c in [9] noticed the following simple fact: Fact 1. If the lists LG(u) and LG(v) are not intersection reverse for the distinct vertices u and v of the topological graph G then G contains a self-crossing cycle of length 4. Moreover, u and v are opposite vertices of a cycle of length 4 in G that has two edges that cross an odd number of times. Proof. One has to consider the drawings of the complete bipartite graph K2,3 with u and v on one side and three vertices a, b, and c on the other. If it is not intersection-free then the topological graph contains self-crossing C4. If it is intersection-free (or every pair of edges cross an even number of times), then L(u) and L(v) has a, b, and c in reverse cyclic order. Pinchasi and Radoiˇci´c used the above fact to bound the number of edges of a topological graph not containing a self-crossing C4. They showed that such a topological graph on n vertices has O(n8/5) edges. Following their footsteps we also use the above property

but improve their bound to O(n3/2 log n). This bound is tight apart from the logarithmic factor as one has (abstract) simple graphs on n vertices with Ω(n3/2) edges containing no C4 subgraph. In Section 3.2, we discuss the dierences between our proof and the one in [9] and discuss some of the notions that we will need. Section 3.3 presents a new argument that attempts to take a more visual approach to the problem. Our main technical result is the following, which comes as a result of Theorem 25: Theorem 17. Let us be given m cyclically ordered lists of d element subsets of a set of n symbols. If the lists are pairwise intersection reverse, then

In Section 3.4, we present a result that we did not use in the proof of the bound, but feel is an important observation and may prove useful in further research. All logs are taken to be binary.

3.2 Preliminaries Much of the proof follows the argument of [9]. We start with an overview of their techniques and comment on similarities and differences in the present proof. Pinchasi and Radoiˇcic´ break the cyclically ordered lists into linearly ordered blocks. They consider pairs of blocks from separate lists and pairs of symbols contained in both blocks. They distinguish same pairs and different pairs according the two symbols appearing in the same or in different order. They observe that any pair of symbols that appear in many intervals must produce almost as many same pairs as different pair. On the other hand the 211


Student Conference 2004 intersection reverse property forces that two cyclically ordered lists–unless most of their intersection is concentrated into a single block–contributes much more different than same pairs. Exceptional pairs of cyclically ordered lists are treated separately with techniques of extremal graph theory. They optimize in their choice for the length of the blocks. We follow almost the same path, but instead of optimizing for block length we consider many block lengths (an exponential sequence) simultaneously. For two intersection reverse lists no block length yields significantly more same pairs than different pairs and we will show that some block length actually gives many more different pairs than same pairs. Definition 5. We will always use the term sequence to denote a linearly ordered list of distinct symbols and cyclic sequence to denote a cyclically ordered list of distinct symbols. Clearly, if one breaks up a cyclic sequence into blocks, then the blocks are (linearly ordered) sequences. A simple case analysis shows that, given cyclic sequences u and v, there is at most one pair of blocks (Bu,Bv) which can contain same ordered pairs. u

Definition 6. We define R uv as follows: If u u has only a single block B, then Ruv = B. u Otherwise we define Ruv to be the unique block in u that has a same ordered pair as some block in v. If suv = 0, then we define u Ruv = ;0/. Now given t sequences, we can construct a t-partite graph G = » ti=1 A i with each partition Ai having one vertex for every eleth ment in the i sequence. We can then connect two vertices if and only if the elements represented by those vertices are the same. Furthermore, we give the edges a color. 212

Assume (a, a´ ) is an edge from partition Au to partition Av. We color (a, a´ ) red if a W Ruuv and a´ W Ruuv and blue otherwise. We will call the set of red edges from Au to Av r(u, v) and the total number of red edges R. The entire set of edges will be denoted E. Definition 7. We define the following quantities: " dred(u, v) = the number of pairs of red edges (a, a´ ), (b, b´ ) such that a precedes b in some block in u and b´ precedes a´ in some block in v. Also

" sred(u, v) = the number of pairs of red edges (a, a´ ), (b, b´ ) such that a precedes b in some block in u and a´ precedes b´ in some block in v. Also

" dblue(u, v) = the number of pairs of blue edges (a, a´ ), (b, b´ ) such that a precedes b in some block in u and b´ precedes a´ in some block in v. Also

This partitions the types of pairs of edges that can come between two blocks. Finally, we define D = Dred + Dblue and S = Sred. We would like to establish some results concerning the enumerations of various sets of edges. Lemma 18. Dred –Sred ≥ –R/2. v

u and B = R and let the Proof. Let Bu = Ruv v uv

set

of

red

edges

be

ordered

(r1, r2, . . . , rt) W Bu (where t = |r (u, v)|). Then the set of red edges must be ordered (rj , . . . , rt, r1, . . . , rj-1) W Bv for some j W [t]. Hence


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems

|r(u,v)| 2 .

red - sred M so duv uv

Summing over all pairs u ≠ v, we get that

as required. The following lemma is trivial, but we use it enough to make mentioning it worthwhile. Lemma 19. Assume by Jenson’s inequality.

Proof.

Hence

as required. Finally, we would like to have some informa-

tion about the total number of edges. Using the size of the alphabet, we can get a nice lower bound on |E|. Lemma 20. Assume d M . Then|E|M . Proof. Let ai be the number of times letter i appears in any word. Then n But di=1 ai is the total number of letters appearing, which we know to be md, so Lemma 19 implies that

Since d M

, the desired inequality stands.

3.3 The Procedure We define the following procedure: At step i = 0, each circular sequence will have one block (the endpoint can be chosen arbitrarily) so, by definition, all edges will be red. At step i > 0, we will divide each of the current blocks into two equal halves (each with size - ) and assign the edges the appropriate colors. Definition 8. We let Ri be the number of red edges at step i and let ∆i = Ri-1 - Ri. Since R0 = |E| and Rlog d = 0, we have that log d Yi=0 ∆i = |E|. We let Di be the value D at step i and similarly Si the value S at step i. Lemma 21. Proof. Let k = (the block size) and let bxy be the number of times x follows y in some block. Then

213


Student Conference 2004

Lemma 22. Proof. At round i, there are D i blue edges which were red edges in the previous round. Since they were red, they came from at most m2 pairs of blocks, so now they come from atmost 4m2 pairs of blocks. Let ∆i(u, v) be the number of edges from u to v that changed colors. Then

Proof. Let X = {i : ∆i i 8m2}. Then by Lemma 22, we have that We would like to show that a lot of edges

are counted by rounds which fall into the set Y P X. Using the fact that |Y \ X| N log n, we have But since so Lemma 19 gives us the required inequality. Lemma 23. Let d i |E| i and let we have that Then Hence So placing this into a final sum, we have

214


Adam Marcus: Turรกn-type Problems Lemma 24. we have the required inequality. Finally, we have the tools necessary to prove the promised theorem. We do not optimize for the constant here. Theorem 25. Then

Proof. By Cauchy-Schwarz, X

Proof. If is trivial, so assume not. Let We consider two cases:

Plugging in Lemma 23 and the fact that

, the result

Since for each

Di - Si. Using this fact and Lemma 21, we have

Again,

Otherwise

, so

and by Lemma 24, we have the inequality Now using Lemma 20, we get that m Ni 2. Since for each by Lemma 21. Hence in both cases, we have it makes sense to consider the sum and therefore When

215


Student Conference 2004 Now by Lemma 18,

Combining this with Lemma 23 gives the inequality

Thus either or |E| N 64m3/2d. Plugging in Lemma 20, the first inequality yields Since these two cases partition all possibilities, the theorem holds.

3.4 Additional Proof

here just in case it turns out to be useful in future investigations into this problem. Lemma 26. Let Bu be a block size k and let Tu be a set of circular sequences such that for all vWTu , |u P v|i 2|u|t where t < 1. Then dv2T u |v \ u| P 2|u|3-2t.

Here we present an additional observation concerning this problem. It give an upper bound for the number of red edges possible with respect to the block size. When the block size gets lower than √d, this estimate far exceeds the estimate used in the proof of Theorem 25 where we took Ri N |E|. For larger sized blocks, however, the bound is so bad that it is not worth using. We present it

Proof. Consider the bipartite graph G=AQB where A is the set of elements in u and B is the set of sequences in Tu Q u and where an edge (a, b) exists if and only if sequence a contains element b. We know that G can contain no K3,3, but since the vertex corresponding to u is adjacent to all of the vertices in A, we can say that G´ = A Q B´ where B´ = Tu can contain no K3,2. Hence, by counting edges,

so |E| N 2|u||Tu|2/3. But we know that |E| i 2|Tu||u|t, which implies that |Tu| N|u|3-3t. Plugging in this new inequality gives |E| = YvWTu |v P u| N 2|u|3-2t as required.

Lemma 27. Assume all sequences have a fixed block size of k, and let t < 1. Then R N 4m5/3d1/3k2/3.

216

Proof. Denote by ci the number of pairs (u, v) such that |Ruuv P v| = i. Then


Adam Marcus: Turán-type Problems where the second sum comes from Lemma 26. But , so the total is at most 2m2kt + 2mdk2-2t. Now, given k, choose t so that m2kt =2dmk2-2t. Then by the AM–GM equality, m2kt+m2kt+2mdk2-2t=3(2m5dk2)1/3, so R N 4m5/3d1/3k2/3 as required.

4. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the Fulbright Commision for making this research possible. This opportunity has changed his life in many ways and much of the credit should go to this program. He would also like to thank the Rényi Institute for allowing him to be a part of their community and to gain such invaluable experience. Lastly, he would like to thank Gábor Tardos, who was both an inspiration and a mentor for the entire year. None of these results could have happened without his thoughts and his time, both of which he gave without hesitation.

References [1] N. Alon and E. Friedgut, On the number of permutations avoiding a given pattern, J. Combin. Theory, Ser. A 89 (2000), 133–140. [2] M. Bóna, Exact and asymptotic enumeration of permutations with subsequence conditions, Ph.D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1997. [3] , The solution of a conjecture of Stanley and Wilf for all layered patterns, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 85 (1999), 96–104. [4] Z. Füredi and P. Hajnal, Davenport-Schinzel theory of matrices, Discrete Math. 103 (1992), 233–251. [5] M. Klazar, A general upper bound in extremal theory of sequences, Comment. Math. Univ. Carolin. 33 (1992), 737–746. [6] , Counting pattern-free set partitions I: A generalization of Stirling numbers of the second kind, Europ. J. Combin. 21 (2000), 367–378. [7] , Counting pattern-free set partitions II: Noncrossing and other hypergraphs, Electron. J. Combin. 7 (2000), no. R34, 25 pages. [8] , The Füredi–Hajnal conjecture implies the Stanley–Wilf conjecture, Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (D. Krob, A. A. Mikhalev, and A. V. Mikhalev, eds.), Springer, Berlin, 2000, pp. 250–255. [9] R. Pinchasi and R. Radoiˇci´c, On the number of edges in geometric graphs with no selfintersecting cycle of length 4, Towards a Theory of Geometric Graphs (Providence, RI) (J. Pach, ed.), Contemporary Mathematics, no. 342, AMS, 2004. [10] G. Tardos, On 0-1 matrices with several excluded submatrices, manuscript (2004), http://www.renyi.hu/˜tardos/papers.html. [11] J. West, Permutations with restricted subsequences and stack-sortable permutations, Ph.D. thesis, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1990.

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Getting Ready for Unicode:

A Day In The Life Of an Open Source Developer

David Eger ................................................................................ Georgia Institute Tech. eger@theboonies.us

Rényi Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Budapest, 1364. Pf. 127. Advisers: Ms. Andréka Hajnal Mr. István Németi

................................................................................

I came to Budapest with high hopes of using mathematics–universal algebra, lattice theory, and logic–to better handle software development. Many of the problems of software development aren’t really so hard, though. From getting software to “do the right thing” with internationalized text to getting software talk to hardware, most software issues are basically engineering problems: decipher an existing system and design a solution. I solve software problems in the context of the Open Source Community. The projects that excite me are ones that solve problems for people. Because Open Source Software is in large part a volunteer effort, there never seems to be much shortage of problems to solve. Today I will talk about one such problem: the transition to Unicode. But before I begin, I’ll try to explain a little bit about this community and why I get so much from my interactions with the people there. The Free and Open Source Software Community The Free and Open Source Software Community is rooted in the desire to help people. It has its roots as far back as the 1970s, when users of Digital computers decided to make a common library of programs they had written that anyone could check out and use. Com-

puters cost millions of dollars, and there was no such thing as shrink-wrapped software. IBM or Digital Equipment provided a machine and perhaps the basic operating system, and from there on you needed a team of expert programmers working full-time to get any good use out of your machine. Creating 219


Student Conference 2004 a common library helped everyone. Instead of having to rewrite all of the software inhouse, you could send $5 to the user’s library and receive a tape in the mail containing any program they had. For the researchers and teachers with access to the few computers in the world, this was a godsend. Of course, software is always troublesome. There are bugs. There are things that a program does that don’t quite fit your needs. With the Digital user’s library, you could make improvements on the software and then distribute your copy so others could benefit. At its most basic level, the Free Software community is based on this idea: that you can make software better and help your friends by giving it to them. But on another level, open source means empowering the community as a whole with open standards. For an example of a closed standard, let’s take Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is a good program: it makes it easy to write and format documents, and to check your spelling and grammar. However, Microsoft doesn’t publish the Word file format. This means that if David Chapman uses Microsoft Word, and he decides to send me a copy of a play he is writing, then I can’t read it. My options are something like these: I could try to save up enough forints to buy a copy of Word. I have several nice text editors and word processors on my system. I don’t really want to buy Word, I just want to read my friend’s play. I could ask David for a copy of Microsoft Word. They tell me that David is not supposed to give me a copy of Word. Something about copyright law? I could e-mail David and ask him to please, send me a copy in a published format (e.g., PDF, plain 7-bit ASCII or Unicode text, Rich Text Format, HTML, XHTML).

220

This is a pretty good option. If there is a published reference for a file format, then it’s not too difficult to find a program for my computer that can read it. And if no such program exists, I can write one. All of the above formats I can easily read on my computer. Nonetheless, David is a busy person, and it would really be best if his software just saved his documents in a standards-compliant format by default. I don’t like bothering David about technicalities of his computer. He writes plays: it’s literature that’s important to David, not technical issues. I could hope that a dozen open source developers reverse-engineer the new Word format every time Microsoft publishes a new version of Office, and then write good import filters for OpenOffice and AbiWord. Because so many people use Word, this actually happens. Nonetheless, this reverse-engineering is an errorprone and time-consuming task. It means making lots of guesses about what the data in a .DOC file actually means, because there is no published reference where you can look it up. So the conversion is always a bit rough. The standards that make up the Internet work only because they are open. Proprietary infrastructure is easy to create, but it only hinders communication. The core of the Internet is based on a long list of open standards that everyone can read and work from: IP, TCP, HTTP, XML, HTML, FTP, SSH, and SSL to name a few. These standards arose in an environment of intellectual freedom, openness, and co-operation. Ideas for how to make computer networks work were posted as “Request For Comments” in a community mostly composed of university researchers. Today, those who continue to develop the Internet stan-


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode dards interact in public organizations, among them the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Unicode Consortium. The Internet and open source have grown up together. The people writing the Internet protocols published their source code so everyone could benefit: so they could get comments on their ideas and implementation, and so everyone could have the software to connect their computers together. As the years went by, hardware vendor would attend conferences like Network InterOp where they would show off how well their equipment worked, even with the equipment of other vendors. The traditions of openness and community continue today in the Free and Open Source Software Community. Organizations like The Open Group and the IEEE POSIX committee serve as forums where standards can be ironed out and interoperability between systems improved. Users of GNU/Linux software154 worldwide have local Users’ Groups where they help newcomers solve issues they have with their software. Open Source developers from Perth to Brussells communicate over mailing lists to solve problems and develop new software. For me, Linux provides a powerful platform for software development and research. I always find interesting problems to solve. But more than that, I find a community that motivates me and makes the world seem smaller. I work with people all over the world: Benjamin Herrenschmidt in Australia, Geert Uytterhoeven in Belgium, and Michel Dänzer in Switzerland. Benjamin does a lot of work to make sure

Linux runs on my laptop, so I ask him what I can do. This Spring, that consisted of writing the acceleration functions of the radeonfb framebuffer driver. It was a fun project, and now my code is in the mainline Linux Kernel, used by all Linux users who use an ATI Radeon video card. Occasionally, Open Source Developers go to conferences where they can meet face-toface, have a beer, talk about new projects, and figure out what to work on next. Actually seeing thousands of members of the community all gathered in one place is an exciting experience. Everyone is friendly; people are excited about working together to make a future where everyone has a good base of software that lets them be creative and lets them share what they do with others. Now that I’ve given an overview of the community I work in, let’s look at a specific technical issue that affects everyone using a computer today: Unicode.

Getting Ready For Unicode My friend Michel Dänzer has a funnylooking character in his name. If you look at his email address, it’s spelled differently: michel@daenzer.net. Software has been slow to converge on a standard for non-English text, and especially so on UNIX155. It has been traditionally difficult to send email, read web pages, and share documents with accented characters. The Hungarian o (?) is exceptionally rare to find in electronic correspondence. In e-mail, most Americans will default to writing Hungarian with simple umlauts or without accents at all. To figure out why sending that ? is so difficult, we will first have to take a look at how text is encoded in computers.

154 GNU/Linux: a popular open source version of the UNIX operating system. There are many other versions of UNIX around today: AIX, HP-UX, NetBSD, and FreeBSD to name a few. 155 UNIX: A 30-year old Operating System, still alive and kicking. Why? Keep on Reading.

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Student Conference 2004 How Characters are Encoded in Computers Number of Bits 8 16 32

binary are the only real information that a computer understands?all graphics, documents, and music are internally represented as binary numbers. To encode text, designers of computer systems have traditinally placed one character in each byte. The mapping from the numeric value in a byte to the represented character is called the character set (charset) or code page in use. Almost all computers use some extension of the 7-bit ASCII character set (the main exception being EBCDIC-encoded text on IBM mainframes). ASCII reserves thirty-three of the 128 values (0x00-0x1F, 0x7F) for non-printing control characters and maps the rest of the values (0x20-0x7E) as follows:

Possible Values 0-255 0-65, 535 0-4, 294, 967, 295

Digital computers are constructed from millions of microscopic devices that are very good at remembering whether they are in one of two states: variously called off/on, low/high, or zero/one. The unit of information that signifies which of these two states the device is in is called a bit. Groups of eight bits are called bytes, and bytes are typically the smallest addressable unit of a computer’s memory. In a sense, strings of

The Printable 7-bit ASCII Character Set 0

0x2 0x3 0x4 0x5 0x6 0x7

1 ! 0 1 @ A P Q ` a p q

2 “ 2 B R b r

3 # 3 C S c s

4 $ 4 D T d t

5 % 5 E U e u

6 & 6 F V f v

ASCII contains the fifty-two latin characters, ten numerals, and assorted punctuation: in short, what you need for an English-language only shop. So what about Hungarian? Well, since there are eight bits in a byte, there are 128 values totally untouched by the ASCII standard: those bytes whose top bit is 1. Computer producers targetting locales needing just a few extra characters (not Chinese) typically have kept the simplicity of having one byte per character, and assigned the extra needed symbols?like the Hungarian ??to the range 0x80-0xFF. 222

7 ‘ 7 G W g w

8 ( 8 H X h x

9 ) 9 I Y i y

A * : J Z j z

B + ; K [ k {

C , < L \ l |

D = M ] m }

E . > N ^ n ~

F / ? O _ o

Problem solved, no? Computers running with one of these character sets work quite well. The IBM-made cash registers at your local SMATCH display Oké tejföl 249 Ft quite nicely. In fact, this solution was so popular that OEMs couldn’t design encodings fast enough; so we now have several eight-bit codings each for Russia, Central Europe, the United States, and Israel. So if you’re in central europe using Windows 95 to open a text file with directions to H?sök tér (sent to you by your friend, who used her computer’s default encoding, ISO Latin-2), the text dis-


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode

ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) 0

1 ¡ ° \ A ` Á Á Ñ à á @ ñ

xa xb xc xd xe xf

2 ¢

3 £

4 ¤ 2 3 ´ Â À Ä Ò Ó ≈ â ã ä ò ó o ˆ

5 ¥ ] Å Õ å õ

6 | ¶ Æ Ö æ ö

7 § • Ç X ç ÷

8 ¨ ¸ È

9 a © ª

b « û 1 » É Ê Ë Ù Ú ∆ é ê ë ù ú u ˆ

ø è ø

c ¬ 1 /4 Ì Ü ì ü

d 1

/2 Í Y´ í y´

e ® 3 /4 Î F î G

f ¯ ¿ Ï ß ï ÿÿ

standard and the HTTP and HTML standards. Nonetheless, even if everyone agrees to label all of their files with charset information, what happens when you want to write a document that uses both Cyrillic and Hungarian? To solve this problems, two standards bodies–The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the Unicode Porject–came together to create the Universal Character Set: ISO Standard 10646. ISO-10646 is defined as a 31-bit character set. The subset of ISO-10646 used for living languages is called the Basic Multilingual Plane and uses only the space from U+0000U+FFFF. This notation: U+XXXX is a reference to what the Unicode standard calls a

played on your screen will likely be H§s÷k tÚr (the rendering of said bytes with the Central European DOS codepage). With the default Linux console font, my (ISO Latin-1) address book entry for Rónyai Lajos at Lágymányosi u. 11. shows up as R≤nyai at Lßgymßnyosi u. 11. (codepage 437). What a mess! The worst part about this situation is that it is impossible to determine, simply from the data in a file which character set was used to encode it. To a computer, the file is just a rather long sequence of values each of which is between 0 and 255. One attempt to solve this problem would be to label every file with the character set used to make it. Such charset tags are a part of the MIME e-mail

ISO-8859-1 (Latin-2) 0 xa xb xc xd xe xf

4 LÚ ¤ l/ ´ Á Â Aù Ä N ´ N ÿ Ó Ô

5 L´ l L´ Ô

6 S´ s´ C´ Ö

7 § ÿ Ç x

á

â

a ù

ä

Í

n ÿ

ó

ô

ô

ö

° K

1 2 J ù ◊ þ

3

8 ¨ ¸

9

b T ∏ Ë

U û

a S¸ s Eþ Ú

ÿS

C ÿ

É

R ˇ cÿ

é

÷ rÿ

u °

sÿ

c

d

e

f

Z ´

I H ¯ Î

Û

z´ ý Eˇ Í Ü Y´

zú D ˇ ß

ë

eÿ

í

î

ú

û

ü

˙

I

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Windows 1252

codepoint: the numeric value associated with a certain unicode character. The number portion of such a reference is written in hexadecimal. In Unicode, the first 256 codepoints agree with the ISO Latin-1 charset, leaving the 7bit ASCII subset as-is U+0000-U+007F and leaving the 32 code positions U+0080U+009F specifically unassigned. Above that, you find for instance the Hungarian ? at U+0151, Cyrillic from U+0400-U+052F, Arabic from U+0600-06FF, general punctuation from U+2000-U+206F and Katakana from U+30A0-U+30FF Beyond being just a big character table, the Unicode Standard specifies levels of support wherein implementations are required to perform increasingly complex typesetting foo, as complicated scripts require compli-

KOI8-R

224

cated typesetting: compositional rendering is essential for languages like Thai which need nontrivial composition of diacritical marks, and contextual shaping is needed for the proper rendering of Indic and Arabic scripts. Making It Happen: Some Software Required Having a big, thick standard to bring the world together is a wonderful thing. Actually having the world come together, though, is a bit tougher. To make it happen, several stacks of software need to be written: a stack to translate peoples’ keystrokes to the proper unicode characters, another stack of software to handle the rendering of said text on a screen or printer, and enough glue to make sure people still can communicate with people who are still running yesterday’s software.


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode

Codepage 437 (OEM US)

To explain some of the issues that arise, I’ll need to digress a bit and talk about software development on Linux, a free and popular UNIX clone.

is little more than portable assembly language; but, due to its simplicity, flexibility, and marriage with UNIX, it still dominates much of today’s software development. Also in the vein of keeping it simple, fonts Where Have All the Computer on UNIX were implemented trivially as Scientists Gone? large bitmap tables. Using a bitmapped font The World of UNIX means the glyph for each character in the font is the same size, say eight by sixteen pixUnix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. els. This setup makes text rendering algo–Richard Gabriel, The Rise of “Worse is Better” rithms trivially simple to write. The letters on the screen form a grid, and it’s easy to In terms of Operating Systems, the UNIX refer to text by line and column. On UNIX, family is ancient, dating from 1969 at Bell users typically interact with the computer Labs. UNIX is a programming through a little window of text environment written by and for which runs a program emulating Part of an 8x16 developers who wanted to get a the terminals of early computing. Bitmap Font moderately powerful programA program called a “shell” runs ming environment with a minion top of the terminal emulator, mal amount of effort. In software continually asking the user to development one often finds that enter new commands. the last 20% takes 80% of the All of this seems horribly primeffort. The fathers of UNIX itive; rendering text well seems watched an attempt to create the last thing that this system is The Perfect Operating System™ built for. It is. Nonetheless, die a painful crib death, so they UNIX does make a very nice sysdecided to write instead a system tem for programming (more on that took 10% of the effort and this later). Further, because the yielded 50% of the value. To implementation is so trivial, it is begin with, they designed a proeasy to port it to a new machine; gramming language called C. C and because it is good enough, and 225


Student Conference 2004 because creating a fundaful information flow The UNIX Information mentally better system is architecture. This archiFlow Architecture so hard, it is still the tecture is embedded into favourite of academics the C programming lanand programmers today. guage: each program has a Nonetheless, the shortbyte stream for input comings of UNIX do get (stdin), a byte stream for stdin stdout to its users, so little-byoutput (stdout), and a byte little they improve it. The stream it can use to tell things that are interesting the user something unexstderr to computer scientists – pected has happened like designing packet(stderr). switched network protoThe beauty in this setup cols–usually get implereally comes out when an mented first on UNIX. The things that are experienced UNIX guru sits down to do interesting to most normal computer some text manipulation. Instead of writing a users–like high quality interactive typeset- long and complicated program in C, he ting, i.e., WYSIWYG editors–usually get types a few lines at his shell and suddenly has implemented first on other systems. the output he wants. He can do this in large part because the tools fit together so well: So why do software developers like UNIX so the output of one command (filter) can be much? In short, Doug McIlroy’s concept of “pipe”d directly into the input of the next pipes. (Almost) all of the files on UNIX are command. plain text, and (almost) all of the basic UNIX tools create or filter streams of text. When To show an example, you first need to know you put these together, you get a very power- what some of these UNIX tools do.

#

#

$

seq - output a sequence of (decimal) numbers sort - sort lines of text wc - word count; count the characters, words and lines of a file uniq - drop duplicated lines of text printf - print data according to a given format string grep - read a set of files and print out lines matching a given pattern awk - break up lines into pieces separated by whitespace tr - perform substitution of one set of characters for another throughout the text sed - perform simple editing tasks on text, such as, search and replace 2unicode - translate code point numbers to their UTF-8 encoded form (more on this later) iconv - convert text from one charset to another lynx - a text based web browser telnet - open a pipe with a remote machine

226


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode Let’s look at some examples of pipelines in use. Ildikó tells me that this paper ought to be between 20,000 and 40,000 characters. I would like to know how much more I ought to write, so I try the following command: $ wc day_in_the_life.html The “$” above is my shell’s prompt for a new command. day_in_the_life.html is the name of this file. I receive in return the following output: 710 4769 46212 46,212 characters seem a bit high. Then I realize: HTML has a lot of extra characters that are just formatting. So to get a better estimate, I ask lynx to convert the file to just text; and give its output to wc: $ lynx -dump day_in_the_life.html | wc 413 3298 21271 This is much closer to how far we are through the report. The vertical bar “|” is the special character that tells the shell to take the output of lynx and give it to wc. Let’s look now at a slightly longer example: figuring out how many different charsets are used for e-mail. For this, I will take a look in my INBOX and ask what character sets the e-mails I’ve received over the last few years have come encoded as: $ grep ”charset=” /var/spool/mail/eger | grep -v ”=3D” \ | tr ”[A-Z]; \t<>” ”[a-z]\n\n\n\n\n” \ | grep charset | tr -d “\”” | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 2 charset=iso-8859-15 2 charset=koi8-r 2 charset=unicode-1-1-utf-7 2 charset=windows-1251 6 charset=x-unknown 8 charset=iso-8859-2 46 charset=windows-1252 87 charset=utf-8 1362 charset=iso-8859-1 2194 charset=us-ascii

To get a better feel for how the above does its magic, take a look at Appendix B.

Technical Issues: Complications of Putting Unicode into Practice Several factors conspire to create difficulty in implementing Unicode. The first such difficulty is that UNIX pipes were so popular that many of the basic Internet protocols were based around the following concept: a UNIX user opens a pipe to the email or ftp or web server and starts typing a few commands to it, interactively. For example, to send an email (taken straight from RFC 822) a user would interact as follows: R: 220 BBN-UNIX.ARPA Simple Mail Transfer Service Ready S: HELO USC-ISIF.ARPA R: 250 BBN-UNIX.ARPA S: MAIL FROM:<Smith@USC-ISIF.ARPA> R: 250 OK S: RCPT TO:<Jones@BBN-UNIX.ARPA> R: 250 OK S: DATA R: 354 Start mail input; end with <CRLF>.<CRLF> S: Hey Ron, S: S: Are you free for lunch tuesday at MerriMac’s? S: S: -Joe S: . R: 250 OK S: QUIT R: 221 BBN-UNIX.ARPA Service closing transmission channel

The first thing to note is that the end of an email is indicated by a period on a line by itself. This means that the five byte sequence 0d 0a 2e 0d 0a is never allowed to occur in the body of an internet message. If you try to type the sequence <CRLF>.<CRLF> in most 227


Student Conference 2004 e-mail programs, the e-mail program will insert a space (ASCII 0x20) in front of the period. Further, since these protocols were designed so you could type into them directly, any local character set that didn’t match on the remote machine would appear differently; so all of the base protocol (for example the line FROM: <Smith@UCFISIF.ARPA>) have to be done in the character set that everyone agrees on: ASCII. This is one of the many reasons that Michel can only have michel@daenzer.net and not michel@dänzer.net as his e-mail address. The limitations of the Internet protocols aren’t, however, the biggest obstacles to putting Unicode into use on UNIX and the Internet, but it does reinforce that, with text you send over the Internet, either you will have to restrict your character set via some standard transformation (base64, uuencode, MIME extensions etc.) or be careful that the text you send doesn’t contain any of the byte sequences which would otherwise trip-up the software in use today. The UNIX World Decides UTF-8 is the Only Sane Way to Deal with a Multilingual World “UTF-8 just happens to be the only sane policy for encoding complex characters into a byte stream.” – Linus Torvalds, 16 Feb 2004 The biggest problem UNIX users have in transitioning to Unicode isn’t that it will break the Internet protocols (there have been tricks to send non-ASCII files over the Internet for years, though the proper way to do this “natively” is under debate). The

228

biggest problems are those centered around a number of invariants that UNIX users have always counted on: strings end with a zero-byte, a byte is a character, data is processed as a byte stream, and the amount of space a string will take on the screen is the same as the number of bytes it occupies in memory. The Windows community made the transition to Unicode with Windows NT and Windows 2000 by deciding that all characters would simply be sixteen-bit numbers corresponding to Unicode codepoints. This encoding of Unicode is called UCS2. On the one hand, most of the algorithms remain the same, though the basic data-type changes:

int strlen(char *s)

int strlen(wchar_t *s)

{

{ int i=0; while (*s++) { i++; } return i;

int i=0; while (*s++) { i++; } return i;

}

}

Old Code

New Code

On the other hand, if you send new strings through old code, everything breaks. Therefore, making this change to 16-bit characters requires a “flag-day” type transition: everyone with relevant software has to change all of their software at the same time, or else things stop working. Old windows programs all had to be replaced at once with new ones, or even the most trivial programs would fail miser-


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode ably. There’s also the issue that ASCII strings take up twice as much memory in the UCS2 encoding. Other popular Unicode encodings include UCS4 (four bytes per character) and UTF-8 (an encoding where characters take variable number of bytes to store). Unfortunately for the Windows developers, after they decided to go with UCS2, the Unicode standards bodies decided that Unicode would be larger than 16 bits to make room for historical scripts (Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian heiroglyphics, Aramaic, Old Persian, etc.), extended asian scripts, and artificially created alphabetic scripts like Shavian. Though not terribly important for most people, if Windows users ever want to name a file in Aramaic, they will have to wait for the Microsoft to have yet another flag day. The UNIX community decided not to use UCS2: everything down to the defintion of the C programming language and the con-

Unicode Codepoints

cept of a pipe assume that strings are zeroterminated sequences of bytes. Changing such a fundamental notion with the UNIX crowd isn’t politically feasible, and would come too with a technical cost: the byte-oriented nature of UNIX in large part shields it from endian issues. The political infeasibility derives from the fact that there is no central command structure to the UNIX world as there is for the Windows world. To bridge the technical and political gaps for the UNIX community, The Open Group called upon two of Bell Labs’ gurus–Ken Thompson and Rob Pike–to find a solution everyone could live with. What they came up with, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner, is now known as the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, detailed in Annex P of ISO-10646.

UTF-8 Encoded form

0x00000000 - 0x0000007F:

0xxxxxxx

0x00000080 - 0x000007FF:

110xxxxx 10xxxxxx

0x00000800 - 0x0000FFFF:

1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

0x00010000 - 0x001FFFFF:

11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

0x00200000 - 0x03FFFFFF:

111110xx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

0x04000000 - 0x7FFFFFFF:

1111110x 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

The UTF-8 Encoding of Unicode

The advantages of the UTF-8 are many: UTF-8 is backwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII UTF-8 is byte-stream oriented (no endian problems) The entire 31-bit Unicode Character Set can be encoded in UTF-8 Any 7-bit ASCII byte will appear in UTF-8 only as itself The C string library functions continue to “just work” on UTF-8 strings Resynchronizing a UTF-8 byte-stream is trivial

229


Student Conference 2004 The main disadvantage is that UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding: one codepoint may take between one and six bytes to encode, so programs that have to understand non-ASCII now have to constantly transform the byte stream to and from 16- or 32-bit Unicode. Nonetheless, old programs which look for the byte (ASCII 2F: ‘/’) won’t be confused by the presence of Kangxi Radicals (2F002FEF). Similarly, the end of e-mail marker 0d 0a 2e 0d 0a will only ever occur as itself in UTF-8 text.

Getting the World on the Same Page, One Step at a Time Of course, agreeing on the Unicode standard and upon an encoding of Unicode are just the first steps towards bringing the world together with internationalized text. Developers have to be convinced that using simple 8-bit encodings is no longer acceptable for a multilingual world; software has to be readied for the new standards, and documents have to be converted. Text editors have to be told what internal encoding to use

for text: that backspace means “delete the previous character,” not “erase the previous byte.” Web browsers have to be taught to identify charset tags in HTML and choose their fonts accordingly. All of this work means that there lots of places that anyone can help. I got motivated to help fix Unicode-related issues when I noticed that the new version of X156 made it easy to type non-ASCII characters: when I pressed AltGr-Shift-A, the letter ‘á’ appeared in my window. Assuming all was well, I changed the text in my documents and web pages with these accented characters and looked up the W3C standards to make sure my web pages would show up properly to other people. Soon, however, I noticed that my documents showed up differently under X then they did at the console. After much reading, I amassed the knowledge that I’ve just shared with you about character sets and Unicode, and determined that the ‘á’ I saw was unfortunately an ISO-8859-1 encoded ‘á’ and not the UTF-8 encoded ‘á’.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” ”http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”> <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”en” xml:lang=”en”> <head> <meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8” /> <meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us” /> <title>My Title Here</title> </head>

156 X/X Windows/X11/X11R6: This is the most common Graphical User Interface for UNIX

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David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode

These W3C XHTML headers to tell the world that your web page is encoded in UTF-8 To fix my mistake, I read the standards and wrote a program which you’ll find in Appendix C: utf8lint. utf8lint will process text files, ensuring that they are properly encoded in UTF-8, so when you share them with friends they will see what you intended and not gibberish.

While I was cleaning up my own files, I ran my filter on the Linux Kernel Sources: for if the most publicisized Open Source project isn’t keeping to UTF-8, who will be? What I found was text encoded mostly in 7-bit ASCII, but also portions in ISO Latin-1, EUC-JP, and ISO-2022-JP. Almost all of the nonASCII characters were accents on people’s names. Occasionally there were non-English comments (as the Japanese in the excerpt above), and a few instances were uses of the

linux/arch/v850/kernel/as85ep1.c : Software development isn’t just in English any more

degrees and micro symbols. After talking to the authors and determining the original character sets, I submitted four patches to bring the encodings of 276 files in line with UTF-8: clean-up takes place one file at a time.

one must choose an appropriate font: it’s unusual, for instance, for one font to cover both Japanese and Devanagari. Finally, one must have program adequate to render the script. For a Latin script, rendering ligatures is nice but not necessary: bitmapped fonts Now For... Actually Looking at the Text will do. This is not the case for scripts like After fixing your data formats, your pro- Arabic, which need more advanced rendergrams, and your data, there is still the non- ing algorithms. trivial issue of rendering multilingual text. Delving into the details of rendering mulThis takes several passes, the first to identify tilingual text is beyond the scope of this talk, and tag each of the scripts used (Hebrew, however. For more information you can Arabic, Latin, Japanese, Indic, look into the web sites of the etc.) and determine whether Pango Project at http://www. pango.org/ and SIL Internationeach of them is written right-toal at http://www.sil.org/. left or left-to-right. After that An Arabic Ligature 231


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Open Source Development, or Having an Itch and Scratching It The information above about Unicode and UTF-8 I tracked down and present here because I was scratching an itch: I wanted to be able to type Hungarian or French without resorting to TEX or similarly specialized tools. For the most part, Windows has had this supported for three years, and it’s a bit of

an embarrassment for the Linux community that support is still lagging. Nonetheless, the community is made better by each person doing his part: it’s a different model from paying a company to do the work for you. I find diving into technical details, and interacting with other developers quite fulfilling; and I hope the software I make is useful to the community as a whole.

References / Further Reading: The Internet Standards, developed by The Internet Engineering Taskforce. All the information you need to make the Internet work, including a RFC archive and contact information for many of the people who have made modern communication possible. Here is a small selection of the RFCs relevant to this talk RFC 1345: Character Mnemonics & Character Sets RFC 2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol RFC 2822: Internet Message Format RFC 2045: MIME (part one): Format of Internet Message Bodies Gabriel, Richard. The Rise of “Worse is Better”. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-isbetter.html Hall, Jon “maddog”. “Stories of the Early Days of Open Source: FOSDEM 2004 closing speech” Kuhn, Markus. The Unicode and UTF-8 FAQ. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html Pike, Rob. “UTF-8 History”. 30 April 2003. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8history.txt SIL International. Examples of Complex Rendering Thompson, Ken, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy. “The Creation of the UNIX Operating System” http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/ The Unicode Consortium. “The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0” Addison-Wesley, 2003. and http://www.unicode.org/

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David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode Appendix A: The Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane, and Some Sample Code Charts 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

00

Basic Latin

01

Latin Extended-A

02

Latin Extended-B

03

Combining Diacritics

04

Cyrillic

05

Cyrillic Sup.

06

Arabic

07

Syriac (Arabic Ext.)

08

(Avestan and Pahlavi)

09

Devanagari

Bengali

0A

Gurmukhi

Gujarati

0B

Oriya

Tamil

0C

Telugu

Kannada

0D

Malayalam

Sinhala

0E

Thai

Lao

0F

Tibetan

10

Myanmar

11

Hangul Jamo

12

Ethiopic

13

Ethiopic

14

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

15

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

16

Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

17

Tagalog

18

Mongolian

19

Limbu

A

B

C

D

E

F

Latin 1 Supplement Latin Extended-B IPA Extensions

Spacing Modifiers

Greek

Armenian

Hebrew ¿N’Ko?

Thaana ¿Mandaic?

(Tifinagh)

??? ???

¿Samaritan?

Georgian

Hanunóo

Buhid

Tagbanwa

(Eth.Ext.)

Cherokee

Ogham

Runic

Khmer (Cham) (Tai Lue)

Tai Le

1A

(Buginese)

1B

¿Balinese?

???

(Batak) ???

???

Viêt Thái?

1C (Meithei/Manipuri)

???

???

(Lepcha)

1D

Phonetic Extensions

1E

Latin Extended Additional

1F

Greek Extended

20

General Punctuation

21

Letterlike Symbols

22

Mathematical Symbols

23

Miscellaneous Technical

24

Control Pictures

25

Box Drawing

26

Miscellaneous Symbols

27

Dingbats

???

Khmer

(Lanna (Old Xishuangbanna Dai))

??? ???

???

¿Kayah Li? (Comb. Diacritics Sup.)

Subs/Supers Number Forms

OCR

Currency

Diac. Symbs.

Arrow

Enclosed Alphanumerics Blocks

Geometric Shapes MiscMathA

Arrows

233


Student Conference 2004 0

1

2

3

4

5

28

Braille Patterns

29

Supplemental Arrows-B

2A

Supplemental Mathematical Operators

2B

Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows

2C

(Glagolitic)

2D

(Georgian Sup.)

2E

(Supplemental Punctuation)

2F

Kangxi Radicals

30

CJK Syms. & Punct.

31

Bopomofo

32

Enclosed CJK Letters & Months

33

CJK Compatibility

34

CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A

..

CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A

4C

CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A

4D

CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A

4E

CJK Unified Ideographs

..

CJK Unified Ideographs

9F

CJK Unified Ideographs

A0

Yi

A1

Yi

A2

Yi

A3

Yi

A4

Yi

A5

¿Yi Extensions?

A6

¿Yi Extensions?

A7

(Pollard Phonetic)

A8

(Syloti Nagri)

A9

¿Chakma?

AA

(Varang Kshiti)

AB

¿Saurashtra?

AC

Hangul Syllables

..

Hangul Syllables

D6

Hangul Syllables

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

Misc. Mathematical Symbols-B

(Ol Chiki)

???

???

(Coptic)

???

???

(Ethiopic Extended)

(Old Hungarian) ???

???

CJK Radicals ¿Str.? IDC

Hiragana

Katakana

Hangul Compatibility Jamo

M

Ext.Bpmf.

??? ???

???

??? (Sorang Sng.)

Hangul Syllables Reserved for UTF-16

..

Reserved for UTF-16

DF

Reserved for UTF-16

E0

Private Use Zone

..

Private Use Zone

F8

Private Use Zone

F9

CJK Compatibility Ideographs

FA

CJK Compatibility Ideographs

???

???

Kk.

¿Yi Extensions?

???

¿Grantha? ¿Newari?

???

???

???

¿Javanese?

???

???

???

¿Siddham?

???

???

???

¿Pahawh Hmong?

(Phags-pa)

D7

???

(Yijing Hexagrams)

Yi Radicals

D8

234

6

???

???

???

???

???

???

???

???

???


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode 0

1

2

3

4

FB

Alphabetic Pres. Forms

FC

Arabic Presentation Forms A

FD

Arabic Presentation Forms A

FE Vars. FF

??? Half

CJKcomp

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

APF-A Small

Arabic Presentation Forms B Sp.

Halfwidth & Fullwidth Forms

Appendix B: Extracting Information From Your Inbox on UNIX As an example of the sort of power that UNIX’s pipeline abstraction gives to the user, let’s examine a script that reads and summarizes the character sets used in the email messages of my inbox. $ grep “charset=“ /var/spool/mail/eger | grep -v “=3D“ | tr “[A-Z]; \t<>“ “[a-z]\n\n\n\n\n“ \ | grep charset | tr -d “\““ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 2 charset=iso-8859-15 2 charset=koi8-r 2 charset=unicode-1-1-utf-7 2 charset=windows-1251 6 charset=x-unknown 8 charset=iso-8859-2 46 charset=windows-1252 87 charset=utf-8 1362 charset=iso-8859-1 2194 charset=us-ascii

My inbox is in the common UNIX mbox format: a big text file named /var/spool/mail/eger; mail messages are delivered by simply appending them to the end of this file. According to RFC 2046 (one of the documents that specify the workings of e-mail over the internet), the character set used for a MIME-compliant e-mail has to be specified in the Content-Type: message header, as in: Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Let’s take a snapshot of the output of the first command in our pipeline and see how the stream of text is transformed by each filter: grep “charset=” /var/spool/mail/eger Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

F

Arabic Presentation Forms A

Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=3Diso-8859-1“> charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“us-ascii“; format=flowed charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=3Diso-8859-1“> charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ <META content=3D“text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1“ = Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“us-ascii“; format=flowed Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“

grep -v “=3D” do a “reverse” grep - print all the lines that do not contain the string “=3D” Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“

235


Student Conference 2004 charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“us-ascii“; format=flowed charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“us-ascii“; format=flowed Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; charset=“iso-8859-1“

text/plain charset=“us-ascii“ format=flowed charset=“iso-8859-1“ content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“

tr “[A-Z]; \t<>” “[a-z]\n\n\n\n\n” translate the strings to lower case, and split lines at semicolons, spaces, tabs, and lessthan and greater-than symbols. content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii content-type: text/x-vcard charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii content-type: text/x-vcard charset=us-ascii

charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ content-type: text/plain charset=“us-ascii“ format=flowed content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii content-type: text/x-vcard charset=us-ascii

charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ content-type: text/plain charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ content-type:

236

charset=“iso-8859-1“

grep charset print only the lines containing the text “charset” charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“us-ascii“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“us-ascii“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“

grep charset print only the lines containing the text “charset“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“us-ascii“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“iso-8859-1“ charset=“us-ascii“ charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=“iso-8859-1“

tr -d “\”” delete all of the quotes (yes, the quoting methods of the UNIX shell get very strange) charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii

charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=iso-8859-1 sort charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=iso-8859-1 charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii charset=us-ascii uniq -c delete duplicate lines, but print how many of a line occurred 13 charset=iso-8859-1 12 charset=us-ascii sort -n sort the lines in increasing numeric order 13 charset=iso-8859-1 12 charset=us-ascii

237


Student Conference 2004 Appendix C: utf8lint.c

#define LONG_SEQ PRINT_DECODED

/* read and canonicalize a UTF-8 text file from stdin;

/* these arrays indexed by number of bytes in the UTF-8

* transformations made:

sequence*/

* + convert too-long encodings to proper UTF-8

static const u32 UTF8_ATLEAST[] = {

* + convert things that look like Latin-1 to UTF-8

0, 0,

* + give warnings about control characters * if there are problems, describe them to stderr;

0x00000080,

* write canonicalized form to stdout

0x00000800,

*

0x00010000,

* efficiency is not a concern in this code

0x00200000,

*/

0x04000000 };

#include <stdio.h> static const unsigned char UTF8_HIBITS[] =

#include <stdarg.h>

{ ‘\x00’, ‘\x00’,

typedef unsigned int u32;

‘\xC0’, ‘\xE0’,

#define MAX_PRINTED_ERRORS 20

‘\xF0’, void utf8log(int errors, FILE * fderr, const char * s, ...)

‘\xF8’,

{

‘\xFC’ }; va_list argp;

#if defined(QUELL_LOGGING) static int quelled = 0;

static inline unsigned char utf8hiword_datamask(short int

if( errors >= MAX_PRINTED_ERRORS && !quelled) {

nbytes) { return 0x7f & ((~(UTF8_HIBITS[nbytes]))>>1);

fprintf(fderr, “There are more errors silently“ “ being slogged through...\n“);

}

quelled = 1; }

static inline short int utf8len(u32 c)

if ( errors >= MAX_PRINTED_ERRORS ) return;

{ short int bytes;

#endif

for(bytes=6; bytes; bytes–)

va_start(argp, s);

if( c >= UTF8_ATLEAST[bytes] ) {

vfprintf(fderr, s, argp);

return bytes;

va_end(argp); }

}

return 1; } /* UTF-8 decoder action codes */ /* given the first byte of a UTF-8 sequence,

typedef enum {

* how long do we expect the sequence to be?

NOPROBLEM=0, DISCARD, /* discard all read bytes */

* 0 means an illegal character */

CONV_EACH,

static inline short int utf8encodedlen(char c)

/* for each read byte latin-1 => UTF-8 */

PRINT_DECODED

/* print value derived by attempted

{ short int bytes = 6;

decoding of the sequence */

char bytemask = UTF8_HIBITS[6];

} utf8error_t;

if ((c & ‘\xFE’) == ‘\xFE’ ) return 1; #define SHORT_SEQ CONV_EACH

/* Byte-Order Mark

*/ if ((c < 0xC0) && (c >= 0x80)) return 0; /* yikes! */

238


David Eger: Getting Ready for Unicode while ( (bytemask & c) != bytemask ) {

pos = 1;

bytes–;

error_type = NOPROBLEM;

bytemask <<= 1; }

#define ERROR_OUT(code) do { error_type = code; goto error_out; } while (0)

return bytes; }

if( c < 0x80 ) { /* good old 7-bit ASCII */

/* encode a unicode 32-bit value into a buffer large enough to *

if( c == ‘\n’ ) { lines++; chars = 0; }

contain the encoded value + a null byte

* to be safe, pass a 7-byte buffer

else if ( c < 0x20 && c != ‘\t’ && c != ‘\f’ && c != ‘\r’) {

*/

utf8log( 0, fderr, “Warning: control char-

void utf8encode(u32 c, char *buffer) {

acter 0x%02x at “

int bytes;

“line %d, position %d\n“, c, lines,

u32 hibits;

chars ); }

bytes = utf8len(c);

fputc(c, fdout);

hibits = UTF8_HIBITS[bytes];

chars++;

buffer[bytes] = 0;

continue;

while ( –bytes ) {

} else {

buffer[bytes] = 0x80 | (0x3F & c);

short int mblen;

c >>= 6;

non_ascii = 1;

}

read_buffer[0] = c;

buffer[0] = hibits | c;

/* decode a multibyte sequence */

}

if ( ( mblen = utf8encodedlen(c) ) == 0 ) { /* whoops... not a valid first char of a multibyte */

int utf8lint(FILE * fdin, FILE * fdout, FILE * fderr)

actual_char = c;

{

ERROR_OUT(SHORT_SEQ); char read_buffer[8];

} else {

char reencode_buffer[8];

actual_char = (utf8hiword_datamask(mblen) & c);

/* file-global variables */

while(pos < mblen) {

int lines=0, chars=0; /* error reporting counters */ int non_ascii=0; bytes? */ int errors=0;

c = getc(fdin);

/* have we seen non 7-bit ASCII

if ( c == EOF ) ERROR_OUT(SHORT_SEQ);

/* how many errors during translation?

if ( ( c & 0xC0) != 0x80 ) {

*/

ungetc( c, fdin ); ERROR_OUT(SHORT_SEQ); /* single character decoding variables */

}

u32 actual_char; /* what is the decoded 31-bit charac-

read_buffer[pos++] = c;

ter? */ short int pos;

actual_char = ((actual_char<<6) | ( /* how many characters of this multi-byte

c & 0x3F ));

seq have we read? */

} /* check to see if the encoding is smallest-pos-

int i, c;

sible */

utf8error_t error_type;

if ( actual_char < UTF8_ATLEAST[mblen] ) ERROR_OUT(LONG_SEQ);

while( (c=getc(fdin)) != EOF ) {

}

239


}

utf8log(errors, fderr, “\t(+ premature EOF)\n“);

if ( error_type == NOPROBLEM ) {

}

/* successful verification of a UTF-8 sequence, print it */

/* file summary information */ read_buffer[pos]=0;

if ( !errors )

fprintf(fdout, read_buffer); chars++;

utf8log(0, fderr, “Legitimate %s file\n“, non_ascii ? “UTF-8“ : “7-bit ASCII“);

continue;

else

}

utf8log(0, fderr, “Errors encountered during translation\n“);

error_out: /* error handling code */ errors++;

return errors;

utf8log(errors, fderr, “Invalid byte sequence:“);

}

for( i = 0; i < pos; i++ ) utf8log(errors, fderr, “ 0x%02x“,

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {

read_buffer[i]);

FILE *foo; FILE *fdin = stdin; switch(error_type) {

FILE *fdout = stdout;

case PRINT_DECODED:

FILE *fderr = stderr;

utf8log(errors, fderr, “ translating to U+%04x“, actual_char);

if (argc > 1) {

utf8encode(actual_char, reencode_buffer);

if ((foo = fopen(argv[1],“r“)) != NULL)

fprintf(fdout, reencode_buffer);

fdin = foo;

chars++; break;

else { fprintf(stderr, “error opening file %s, aborting...\n“, argv[1]); return -1; }

case CONV_EACH:

}

utf8log(errors, fderr, “ translating each byte (assuming ISO Latin-1)“);

if (argc > 2) {

for( i = 0; i < pos; i++ ) {

if ((foo = fopen(argv[2],“w“)) != NULL)

utf8encode(read_buffer[i], reen-

fdout = foo;

code_buffer);

else { fprintf(stderr, “error opening file %s, abortfprintf(fdout, reencode_buffer);

ing...\n“, argv[2]); return -1; }

chars++;

}

} break;

if (argc > 3) {

case DISCARD:

if ((foo = fopen(argv[3],“w“)) != NULL)

default:

fderr = foo;

utf8log(errors, fderr, “ discarding it all“); break;

else { fprintf(stderr, “error opening file %s, aborting...\n“, argv[3]); return -1; }

};

}

utf8log(errors, fderr, “ at line %d, char %d\n“, lines, chars);

return utf8lint(fdin, fdout, fderr); if ( c == EOF )

240

}


Instructing and Advising:

the Dual Role of a Teaching Assistant in Budapest Angela Bennett ................................................................................ Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL 60115 www.niu.edu angelabennett@mail.fulbrightweb.org

ELTE 1146 Budapest, Ajtósi Dürer sor19-21 www.elte.hu Advisers: Dr. Dorottya Holló, Ms. Éva Major

................................................................................

The role of a Fulbright teaching assistant is twofold, consisting of an educational advisor at the Fulbright Educational Advising Center, and a visiting instructor at ELTE within the Department of English Applied Linguistics and the Center for English Teacher Training.. Courses taught at ELTE include two Academic Skills writing courses, in addition to an exam preparation course to first year university students. Projects undertaken within the Educational Advising Center include the following: academic advisor and American resource person to students interested in studying in the US, weekly writing workshop leader, monthly TOEFL preparation workshop leader,International Education Week presenter, FEAC representative at college fair, and resource developer in securing book donation to ELTE and FEAC.

Introduction The Fulbright Teaching Assistantship grant consists of two main fields of responsibility. On a general level, these include educational advising at the Fulbright Educational Advising Center and teaching university English courses at

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem (ELTE). In this paper I will discuss in detail the projects and courses I have completed as the sole teaching assistant for the 2003/04 academic year in Budapest.

241


Student Conference 2004

Teaching Responsibilities at ELTE I hold a teaching assistantship in two departments at ELTE. These are the Department of English Applied Linguistics (DEAL) and the Center for English Teacher Training (CETT). I taught one course for each department for Fall semester 2003. Within the Department of English Applied Linguistics, I instructed an AN-104 Academic Skills course. The main objective of AN-104 is to refine first year students’ essay writing skills required for university courses. First, we discussed ways to approach a specific writing assignment. These include the process of brainstorming and listing, as well as creating clusters or branches of ideas. Then, the student must consider who the reader will be, or the concept of audience. Moving from the approach stage, I taught the components necessary for every paragraph: the paragraph topic and topic sentence, sentences in support of the topic, the concluding sentence, unity, cohesion, coherence, and punctuation. The focus of AN-104 is to provide information about the structure and content that should be included in different types of essay writing. The types of essays covered in this course are: descriptive, narrative, discursive, comparison and contrast, and most relevant to academic writing, the argumentative essay. I presented the necessary components for all essays: a title, thesis statement, introductory, supporting body and concluding paragraphs, transitions between paragraphs, and the organization of ideas. Then, as a class we analyzed essay examples from the five types of essays previously mentioned. Students were required then to compose essays of all five types. In addition, they reviewed their peer’s essays with a review checklist to guide them and they made necessary revisions and prepared several drafts 242

before submitting a final copy. Their final course grade depended on writing two takehome and one in-class essay, based on proper content and correct essay format, as well as actively participating in class whether analyzing essays, writing practice essays, or peer reviewing essays. Within the Center for English Teacher Training, I instructed an exam preparation course for first year students as they prepared to take the TOLC 1 exam required to continue their studies in the CETT department. This course met twice weekly to refine students’ English grammar, writing and listening skills necessary to pass the TOLC 1 exam. For Spring semester 2004, I am currently instructing the continuation of the Fall semester Department of English Applied Linguistics Academic Skills AN-108 course. While the fall semester AN-104 academic writing course focused on shorter written essay assignments, the goal of AN-108 takes academic writing one step further to include writing academic papers. I am teaching the many components involved in writing an academic research paper, both theoretical and empirical. Students are required to conduct library research on their topic, analyze and document sources according to the American Psychological Association (APA) and Modern Language Association (MLA) style of documentation, quote, summarize, and paraphrase written information, organize their notes and create a review of literature for their papers. The required theoretical paper topic can be approved by the students’ content course teacher, relevant to their content course whether that be literature or linguistics. The theoretical paper must contain the following requirements: title, introductory paragraph, literature review with analysis, discussion, conclusion and works cited in MLA style.


Angela Bennett: The Dual Role of a Teaching Assistant in Budapest The second required research paper is the empirical research paper. Students select their own topic of interest. The main difference with the empirical paper is that students must conduct field research, usually involving questionnaires to distribute to approximately 20 participants. Thus, students create a title, introduction and literature review relevant to their topic in addition to making a questionnaire for their own field research purposes. Once their field research is collected, they must analyze the data and draw conclusions. If the data is quantitative, students total the figures and produce charts or graphs to illustrate their results. If the collected data is qualitative, students must identify trends and patterns to explain their results. Thus, the structure of the empirical research paper is the following: title, introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references in APA style. In addition, students must prepare a presentation of their empirical research to the class using a poster, handouts or overhead projector. Finally, as a last requirement for their course grade, students will compose an in-class argumentative academic essay. Following the tradition of the Fall semester academic skills course, students have the opportunity to peer review one another’s work and prepare several revision drafts before submitting the final copy for a grade. This course more than doubled its enrollment from the Fall Academic Skills course from five students in the Fall to 13 students this Spring. Finally, I hold weekly office hours for my courses to allow students to ask any questions or concerns on a one-to-one basis. Additionally, I attend periodic meetings required of faculty for both departments.

Activities at the Fulbright Educational Advising Center The remaining half of the Teaching Assistantship grant includes several different responsibilities under the Fulbright Educational Advising Center (FEAC) umbrella. The main function of the teaching assistant is to provide approximately 12 hours of educational advising per week, offering direct experience and information about the United States educational system as the American resource person. Students who visit FEAC are mostly Hungarian, but also we have some students visit from neighboring countries who are interested in studying abroad. As the American resource person, I can provide information about specific colleges and universities, as well as academic programs and their requirements in the US. Many students who visit the center have questions concerning the required admissions tests for their program. At FEAC, we provide bulletins for these tests and offer assistance regarding the registration procedure. We also allow students to utilize our resources when preparing for these exams by either checking out test preparation books and/or practicing exams in the computer practice room prior to taking the actual test. Finally, as an educational advisor I am able to offer information concerning scholarships to fund one’s education, including information about the Fulbright award. As the Fulbright Teaching Assistant, I lead two regularly scheduled workshops. The writing workshop meets weekly for one hour and is open to any interested person who needs assistance with the required writing portions of an academic application. This includes information about letters of inquiry, application essays, research proposals, recommendation letters, CVs, and requests for financial aid and scholarships. In addition, I also provide information to job seekers 243


Student Conference 2004 regarding cover letters and resumes. Finally, some participants have questions about the essay section of required admissions tests which I address by suggesting strategies for essay writing in timed conditions. I also encourage students preparing for exams to practice writing essays under similar timed test conditions and submit them for my review. The TOEFL test-taking strategy workshop meets one Saturday per month for three hours and requires pre-registration by participants. In this workshop, I present the four sections of the TOEFL exam: listening, structure, reading and writing, and discuss specific strategies designed for each section of the computer adaptive test. I also explain the registration procedure in detail and the scoring process. Following my presentation, workshop participants have the opportunity to practice taking a TOEFL exam on the computer using the TOEFL Sampler software. Additionally, participants may write an essay on a prompted topic within the allowed 30 minute time period. I then score the essays based on the ETS TOEFL scoring criteria for participants to collect. The demand for the TOEFL workshop has steadily increased from the onset of the workshop in the Fall to the need to add an extra unscheduled workshop, which again was at capacity. In conjunction with International Education Week in November 2003, I presented two talks both days of the conference in Budapest at the Professor’s House at ELTE, and at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Piliscsaba. My presentation topics were “The U.S. Higher Education System“ and “Finding the Appropriate Institution for You.” In the afternoon sessions, I also led a seminar entitled “Effective Resume and Essay Writing.” The purpose of this conference was to dedicate a full day to provide all 244

the necessary information for students wishing to study in the U.S. Attendance was good at both conference locations, and participants were active in asking questions. In September 2003, I traveled with a colleague from the Fulbright Educational Advising Center to represent FEAC at the University of Debrecen Fall College Fair. There, we supplied fair participants with brochures and bulletins about studying in the US, admissions tests, and scholarship information. I answered students’ inquiries about the U.S. educational system, different colleges and universities, and programs offered in the U.S. In keeping with the supplemental project I proposed in my Fulbright application, I contacted and secured a book donation by Third World Books, an American organization that collects and sends educational book donations to countries in need. Currently, one shipment of four has arrived in Budapest. Of these 53 books, the majority are works or diaries by Virginia Woolf, although there are many other literature titles available. The books will be donated to the university library at ELTE. The remaining shipments will contain more literature works to be donated to the library, in addition to admissions test preparation books and writing practice guide books to be given to the FEAC. It is my intention that the book donation strengthen the university library and the resource materials available at FEAC in order to better prepare students for admissions tests and the application writing process as well as introduce students to various works of literature. As a final ongoing project associated with the Fulbright Educational Advising Center, I am in the process of updating and revising the current “Application Handbook: Surviving the Writing Process” as part of the handbook series available at FEAC. More specif-


Angela Bennett: The Dual Role of a Teaching Assistant in Budapest ically, I am integrating more detailed information about the application process where needed, as well as adding different examples concerning the written documents required for an application file.

Conclusion As the Fulbright Teaching Assistant for the 2003/04 year in Hungary, I have gained invaluable professional experiences relating to a host of topics from teaching academic English university courses, international

academic advising, admission test preparation and knowledge, developing educational resources both first hand and by donation, application writing skills, and leading seminars and presenting lectures. On a personal level, I also believe that I developed a deeper international understanding and interest in diverse cultures. Overall, I feel that with the assistance of my colleagues both at Fulbright and ELTE, a great deal has been accomplished over the past academic year.

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J. William Fulbright

William Fulbright was born on April 9, 1905 in Sumner, Missouri. His mother was a teacher. William inherited his mother’s curiosity for the world. He was educated at the University of Arkansas where he was awarded the B.A. degree in Political Science in 1925. He applied for, and was granted, a Rhodes Scholarship. Fulbright’s passion for knowledge began at Oxford and never really ceased. When Fulbright returned to the United States he was an exceptional student at George Washington University Law School. In 1936, Fulbright returned to Arkansas where he was a law professor and three years later, from 1939 to 1941 the president of the University of Arkansas - then the youngest university president in the country. In 1942, Fulbright began his career in politics - entering Congress at the age of 37. Being both passionate and astute he went on to a 30-year term in Washington. He was entering Congress in January 1943 and becoming a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Fulbright stood up for his beliefs - even if it was politically risky. In the mid-’50s, he opposed Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, he was the only Senator who vote against an appropriation for McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In this highly politicized environment, Fulbright was constantly calling for sympathy and understanding. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright worked hard to understand the nations that dealt with the United States. He never fell prey to the stereotypes of the cold war. He resisted to popular tendency of his times to belligerence and treated Soviet leaders with respect as he sought to reach understanding between peoples. It is in this spirit that the House adopted a Fulbright resolution encouraging participation in what would later become the United Nations.

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Senator Fulbright always stood by his convictions. He faced opposition in the Senate. Yet despite popular opposition, Fulbright never gave up hope for a better world. “If one believes that we are aggressive inherently, it makes it almost impossible to feel that we will ever get over this tendency to periodically destroy ourselves, our accumulated wealth and our lives. Or, is this tendency to aggression environmental, a result of experience and training? Of course, I belong to that school.” This last statement goes without saying, as does Fulbright’s position in American history as one of the country’s great humanitarians. In 1963, Walter Lippman wrote of Fulbright: “The role he plays in Washington is an indispensable role. There is no one else who is so powerful and also wise, and if there were any question of removing him from public life, it would be a national calamity.” Fulbright’s humanity was a constant throughout his career. Nowhere is this clearer than the educational program that bears his name. The Senator believed that “education is the best means probably the only means - by which nations can cultivate a degree of objectivity about each other’s behavior and intentions….Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.” Without the conviction and passion of Senator J. William Fulbright there could be no Fulbright Program. He received numerous awards from governments, universities, and educational organizations around the world for his efforts on behalf of education and international understanding. In 1993 he was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The Hungarian Government awarded him the Silver Cross of the Republic of Hungary in 1994. Senator J. William Fulbright died on February 9, 1995 at the age of 89.

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