Page date:1 Dec. 2003
Davide Torsello. 2003. Trust, Property and Social Change in a Southern Slovakian
Village. Münster: Lit Verlag.
Slovakia
is a young and little studied country of the former socialist bloc. As in all
postsocialist Eurasia, continuing transformations of everyday practices are
still inadequately understood. This study combines anthropological and historical
methods to search for alternative ways of "reading postsocialism"
in the rural community. More specifically, it applies the notions of trust and
property to map the outcomes of over a hundred years of turbulent social change,
but not in the way that mainstream economists and political scientists have
used these concepts. Trust and property acquire analytic significance only when
contextualised into the practices and ideologies of the actors. This allows
the observer to grasp the nuances of apparently ambivalent behaviour and "uttered
mistrust" in other villagers and local institutions. Ambiguity veils subtle
strategies for keeping up with the instability of the times and obtaining the
best one can from the present. By providing a theoretically grounded ethnographical
account of historical transformation the book makes an original anthropological
contribution to the classic theme of social change in rural societies, while
at the same time engaging constructively with other social science approaches
to postsocialism. Trust, Property and Social Change in a Southern Slovakian
Village
Davide Torsello was born in Lecce, Italy. He studied anthropology at the Universities
of Hirosaki and London (LSE) and obtained his PhD at the Martin Luther University,
Halle-Wittenberg, in 2003. He was then awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at
Collegium Budapest in order to expand his research into issues of trust, begun
in this volume, into a wider comparative enquiry.
Orders should be sent to LIT
Verlag, eMail: vertrieb@lit-verlag.de
(telephone +49 (0) 251 235091)
Table of Contents
List of Maps ix
List of Tables ix
List of Pictures x
List of Charts x
Preface by Chris Hann xi
Acknowledgements xv
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Methodology 3
1.2 Theoretical Background 4
1.2.1 The Postsocialist Question 5
1.2.2 Changing Property Relations in Postsocialist Europe 8
1.2.3 Trust and Social Change 10
1.3 Strategies in Time and Space 15
1.4 Slovakia: General Background 17
1.5 The Region: Geographical Background 19
1.6 Historical Background 21
1.7 Local Ethnographies 25
1.8 Content and Structure of the Work 29
2 Temporal Constructions of Property: From Feudalism to the End of the First
Czechoslovak Republic (1769-1938) 33
2.1 Introduction 33
2.2 The Village: Origins 34
2.3 Demography and Class Structure 35
2.4 The Feudal Land Tenure System 38
2.5 Power Relations 42
2.6 Legitimation of Power 47
2.7 From the End of Feudalism to the First Czechoslovak Republic 50
2.8 Conclusion 55
3 From the Second World War to the End of State Socialism (1939-1989) 57
3.1 Introduction 57
3.2 The Hungarian Occupation and World War II (1938-1945) 58
3.3 From the Foundation of the Communist Party to the Second Czechoslovak Republic
(1921-1948) 64
3.4 Socialist Collectivisation 66
3.4.1 Initial Phase (1949-1959) 67
3.4.2 Second Phase (1959-1972) 68
3.4.3 Third Phase (1973-1991) 76
3.5 Modernisation and Change 79
3.6 Conclusion 82
4 Postsocialist Decollectivisation: The New Economic Order (1992-2001) 85
4.1 Introduction 85
4.2 Decollectivisation in Central Eastern Europe 86
4.3 Decollectivisation in Slovakia 87
4.4 Transformation of the Cooperative 91
4.5 Land Restitution in the Village 94
4.6 The Use of Land: Between Subsistence and
Market Economy 101
4.7 Discontinuity: The Role of the Old Gazdák 105
4.8 Conclusion 106
5 Household Economy: Work, Production, Consumption and the Hidden Bases of
Trust 109
5.1 Introduction 109
5.2 Household Structure and Employment 110
5.3 Household Production 113
5.4 The Relation of Consumption to Production 121
5.5 Work: Between Ideology and Practice 126
5.6 The Social Use of Land 130
5.7 Conclusion 137
6 When People Face Institutions: Informality, Emotions and Trust in Historical
Perspective 139
6.1 Introduction 139
6.2 Trust in the Socialist Cooperative 140
6.3 Trust and Mistrust in the Postsocialist Cooperative 148
6.4 The Local Administration during Socialism 153
6.5 The Present Relationship between Villagers and the
Local Administration 156
6.6 Conclusion 163
7 Values as Moral Foundations: Trust, Prestige and Social Roles in Change
165
7.1 Introduction 165
7.2 Value Orientations in Central Eastern European
Peasantries 166
7.2.1 Social Change and Values 169
7.3 Changing Values in Királyfa 171
7.4 Prestige and Social Evaluation 173
7.4.1 Male Values: Sociability, Public Action 174
7.4.2 Female Values: Resourcefulness, Thriftiness, Religiosity 179
7.5 Human Actions and Qualities 183
7.5.1 A Quantitative Approach to Value Analysis 186
7.6 Conclusion 190
8 Managing Instability: Trust, Social Relations and the Strategic Use of Ideas
and Practices 193
8.1 Introduction 193
8.2 Trust in Social Institutions: A Quantitative View 194
8.3 Between Mistrust and Expectations:
Patterns of Kin Interaction 199
8.4 Family and Village Relations 204
8.5 Community Action 208
8.6 The State and Interethnic Trust 212
8.7 Conclusion 218
9 Conclusion 221
Bibliography 227
Appendix: two inheritance case studies 239
Index 243 List of Maps
Map 1: Slovakia 19
Map 2: Nitra Region 20List of Tables
Table 1: Types of farms in the Nitra region (2001) 21
Table 2: Királyfa: Population 36
Table 3: Social position in the village during feudalism 39
Table 4: Land tenure during feudalism 40
Table 5: Cadastral area and ownership in the village (1867, 1893) 41
Table 6: Average size of (arable) land plots 42
Table 7: The 1920 Land Reform in Slovakia 53
Table 8: Ownership in the hands of large and middle landholders (1940) 60
Table 9: Gazda and arable land property in 1940 and 1955 61
Table 10: Economic development of the Királyfa socialist agricultural
cooperative (1950-1972) 69
Table 11: Production and husbandry in the Királyfa socialist agricultural
cooperative (1950-1972) 70
Table 12: Work and production in the unified cooperative (1973-1989) 78
Table 13: Transformation of agricultural productive organisations in Slovakia
(1989-1998) 90
Table 14: Work and production in the cooperative (2001) 93
Table 15: Agricultural land use in Királyfa. Results of a random survey
of 100 households 102
Table 16: Population, employment and occupation in Királyfa (2001) 111
Table 17: Household and working structure, Királyfa (2001) Sample of
100 households 112
Table 18: Prices and average income in the _al’a district (2001) 114
Table 19: Gardening in the village (2001) 118
Table 20: Relation between consumption and production in household economy 123
List of Pictures (all taken by the author, except for numbers 1 and 2, by
József Papp)
Picture 1: Cooperative women’s brigade (1961). 71
Picture 2: The tobacco business (1958). 73
Picture 3: Land cultivated privately in long, narrow strips. 95
Picture 4: A cooperative-farmed wheatfield. 101
Picture 5: Street selling along the _al’a-Galanta road. 104
Picture 6: The anthropologists’s landlady in her pantry. 110
Picture 7: The house garden. 117
Picture 8: Communal help during the pig sticking. 135
Picture 9: Pig sticking. 136
Picture 10: The peasant was a ‘man of a thousand skills’. 173
Picture 11: The nyári konyha (summer kitchen). 178
Picture 12: Corpus Christi procession. 212
Picture 13: One of the four altars. 213List of Charts
Chart 1: Worst Quality 187
Chart 2: Worst Action 187
Chart 3: Worst Quality, gender differences 188
Chart 4: Worst Action, gender differences 189
Chart 5: Trust Level 197
Preface
More than a decade after the political transformation of the former Soviet
bloc, the consequences at the level of everyday practices are still inadequately
understood. The significance of this level is increasingly recognised, particularly
in countries such as Slovakia which are about to join the European Union. A
large majority of Slovaks who voted in the referendum of May 2003 favoured joining
the EU, but the turnout barely exceeded the required 50%. All over the region,
there is evidence of disillusionment with ‘the West’ and even widespread
nostalgia for the socialist past, in particular for the security and order it
offered. The social sciences have been slow to address these realities. Some
disciplines, notably economics, were conspicuous in the specification and implementation
of core new institutions, such as markets and private property. When neither
‘shock therapy’ nor more gradual paths of transformation brought
the results anticipated, analysts were increasingly obliged to pay attention
to other factors. Some looked to ‘culture’ to explain why some social
groups, or even whole countries and ‘civili-sations’, were failing
to take advantage of the development possibilities which privatisation and market
economy had opened up for them.
This is the immediate temporal and intellectual context for Davide Torsello’s
study. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2000-2001 in the pre-dominantly Hungarian
village of Királyfa in southern Slovakia, he offers in the first instance
a meticulous account of changes in property relations, particularly concerning
land, over more than a century of upheavals. Recollections of the traumas of
the early socialist period are vividly conveyed in interview fragments. There
followed a period of calm in the 1960s, during which substantial material progress
was made and the central agent of change, the agricultural cooperative, remained
securely based in the community. Socialist modernisation continued in the 1970s
and 1980s but, as a result of mergers decreed from higher levels, villagers
lost their previous close identification with the cooperative. Following the
demise of socialist rule, the organisation was transformed and its land passed
back into private ownership. But as in so many other rural districts throughout
the bloc, most land continues to be cultivated by the large-scale organisation,
which now pays rent to the individual owners. Torsello brings out the ambivalence
of the villagers’ attitudes towards this organisation, which seem to reflect
their views of socialism overall. At one level, still influenced by the painful
memories of collectivisation forty years before, most are keen to distance themselves
from an organisation that they identify with an oppressive external power. Yet
Torsello shows how, at the same time, people still depend on the cooperative
and use it regularly, sometimes in preference to private sector alternatives
(chapter 6).
The disparity between the level of discourses (one might say of stereotypical
representations) of socialism and its successor organisations, and the level
of practices, at which villagers readily transact with these organisation and
even trust them, is crucial to the overall argument. Trust displaces property
as the central conceptual focus in the closing chapters of the work (chapters
5-8). The theoretical foundations for these chapters are carefully laid out
in the Introduction. When the ‘hard’ institutions, such as new legal
codes to regulate property, proved inadequate to explain postsocialist developments,
numerous social scientists began to study ‘soft’ variables, and
trust has been especially popular. Torsello shows that some influential work
by sociologists on this topic is really no better than the sweeping claims made
by those ‘culturalists’ who conclude that whole societies have the
wrong values for economic growth. ‘Uttered mistrust’ (p.156) must
be complemented by a careful analysis of what is really going on at the level
of everyday practices. His arguments on this theme are appropriately supplemented
with references to classical works by North American political scientists, who
attempted to explain the long-term backwardness of southern Italy with terms
such as ‘amoral familism’ (Banfield).
This work therefore takes up a classical theme in the literature of the social
sciences and explores it in a new regional context, where none of the traditional
paradigms seem adequate to deal with recent transformation processes. More precisely,
Torsello picks up one of the most influential currents of recent years, the
new institutionalism, and shows that it may have some creative potential –
but only when empirically deployed in a close-up ethnographic analysis. The
western anthropological literature on Slovakia is extremely sparse, and there
is not a single monograph available for either socialist or postsocialist periods.
Yet the Slovak case is of considerable interest, representing as it does a more
‘conventional’ history of collectivisation than its well-studied
neighbours Poland (where collectivisation was in effect abandoned in 1956) and
Hungary (where much more flexible models of ‘market socialism’ were
promoted after 1968). Torsello draws on a range of comparative materials (including
the Czech part of the former federal state) but, given that this village falls
on the northern edge of Magyar settlement, he naturally refers primarily to
works concerning Hungary. In view of the salience of ethnic issues in external
perceptions of Slovakia, he might have been expected to discuss Magyar-Slovak
relations in greater detail. But it is entirely consistent with his approach,
prioritising the socio-economic issues that matter to local people, that he
does not inflate the ethnic factor by attributing to it an importance that it
evidently does not have in the daily life of these villagers.
Davide Torsello’s study stands out in my view for two further reasons.
First, the historical depth is significantly richer than one is accustomed to
find in ethnographic case-studies. He uses archival materials to construct an
original argument concerning the importance of landed property in maintaining
the power of a dominant class over several generations before socialism (though
one might quibble over his use of the term ‘feudal’ to describe
late Habsburg conditions). This historical material is not simply an additional
item that ‘decorates’ the main argument of the work; it is followed
up in later chapters, which repeatedly emphasise that we cannot understand villagers’
contemporary strategies unless we are familiar with their history and how they
construct it.
The second important contribution concerns the recent transformation of local
social structure. He demonstrates that those seeking to establish themselves
as independent entrepreneurs today are not the dominant families of the past.
This is an important result in the context of a wider debate concerning ‘kulák
continuity’, associated particularly with the sociologist Ivan Szelényi.
The descendants of the elite families of the past seem for the most part to
have moved away from the village. It would be interesting to know more about
their present social positions, for there is some evidence from Hungary to suggest
that they were not simply swallowed up in the levelling processes of socialist
modernisation. At any rate, Királyfa seems to have remained in the postsocialist
period what it was fashioned into through the application of force in the 1950s
– a highly egalitarian community. Even if there is more wealth differentiation
nowadays (as I could observe myself when visiting on several occasions, notably
in the size and style of houses) this does not seem to be leading to any new
form of ‘class’ hierarchy. Per-haps one needs to widen the scale
of the enquiry, e.g. to the neighbouring town of _al’a, for these patterns
to come into view. Torsello’s study implies that socialist rural modernisation
has largely accomplished both its economic and social objectives; these accomplishments
have not been endangered by the return of the land to private owners, for reasons
that are partly contingent and highly practical (lack of skills, capital etc.)
but perhaps also because, in a sense that few if any articulate but many somehow
feel, the moral bases of the socialist intervention were sound, however imperfect
and reprehensible many facets of its implementation.
This is of course my reading of Torsello, who himself is careful to stay close
to his historical and ethnographical sources. But it is a reading suggested
by the fertile way in which he opens up the kind of discrepancies central to
many classic fieldwork-based monographs over the years – between what
people do, what they say, and what they think, and know deep down, but either
cannot express or do not feel they need to express (because the point is so
obvious). Torsello opens up these creative spaces not in the cavalier style
of a postmodernist, but in the course of a solid documentation of village history
and contemporary social structure. Even those who may disagree with some of
his conclusions are likely to find much of value in the empirical data he presents.
In summary, this study makes an important and original contribution not only
to the ethnographical literature on Slovakia but to anthropological accounts
of postsocialist transformation in general. Given the current fashion in other
disciplines for the concept of trust, the work deserves to reach a wider audience
in the social sciences. It is a good example of how a carefully researched,
historically informed case study, based primarily on ethnographic research,
can contribute to ‘macro’ issues. It does so both on the policy
side (e.g. its relevance to debates over the ‘readiness’ of the
eastern European countryside for European enlargement) and in terms of its implications
for academic paradigms such as the new institutionalism.
Chris Hann
Halle, October 2003.