“TO EACH THEIR OWN PLACE”
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The socio-cultural network and strategies of Hungarian villages and towns in the sub-Carpathian region are characterized by an increasing tension between the political reinforcement of cultural boundaries with other regional groups and the growing economic importance of informal interethnic relations. The articulation of contrastive political ethnicity with the local social sphere lies in the local memory of collective deportation of Hungarian speakers in 1945 by the Soviet regime that is ritualized by commemorative monuments and events. Yet the diverse forms of inter-ethnic solidarity and co-operation are interwoven with and simultaneously effective in the fields of trade, exchange, smuggling, and temporary migrations across the border. Thus the ethnography of multiethnic regions on the margins of diverse national spaces susceptible to international dispute calls attention to the paradoxical inter-dependence between the durability of political ethnicities relying on the permanence of inter-ethnic solidarities and co-operation.