A Herman Ottó Múzeum Évkönyve 19. (1980)

FEJŐS Zoltán: Kivándorlás Amerikába a Zemplén középső vidékéről

326 FEJŐS ZOLTÁN arising from it seem to be the most interesting subjects. The cultural re-adaptation means less conflicts among the cultural touches, and the most important question will be what influence had emigration caused in the life and the cultural tradition of the people. These are special material and mental influences, appearing first of all among the active participants of the migrations, but is present in the receiving community, too. Thus the total emigrationremigration process contains double cultural influence, the complex phenomenon of accomodation: on one hand to the new social-cultural conditions, on the other hand to the left, earlier circumstances. The notion of acculturation is capable to express the moments of the special movement of people present in the emigration, and its different phenomenons can be understood as different phases of the acculturation process. Very complex source material had to be used for the study of emigration so far in time from the people of our days. The bases of the study are provided by the personal recollections, being more and more difficult to collect. This group of sources is to be completed with indirect data which have become largely confused due to the contemporary articles, actual political analyses, reports, later historical analyses, scientific studies. A special difficulty arises from the fact that in Hungary at the time of the emigrations no ethnographic descriptions were made, and only slight interest was paid even later towards this phenomenon. The reproach of the appointed theoretical tasks could be realised in the paper only partially. The study is based on the material collected in some villages of the Zemplén mountains in North-East Hungary, and it was completed, as mentioned earlier, with secondary data, such as the articles of contemporary papers about migration. The villages (see: footne 9.) in question belonged to the former Abaúj-Torna and Zemplén counties (now: Borsod Abaúj -Zemplén county); they were in the centre of emigration showing the greatest intensivity of emigration. According to statistical calculations made after the critical analysis of statistical evaluations the emigrants of the two counties gave 13% of the national emigrationto America between 1899 and the 1st World War. In coordance with the data the remembrance of the emigrations is still living. The remigration ratio is similarly high: they constitute somewhat more than the 10% of the cca 450 thousand remigrants of the couintry. Thus the study of the territory can yield such a representative material which is vald not only forthe given territory but also indicates tendential movements in the country. We endeavour to give a unilateral system of the complex and manyfolded problems of causes of emigration on the basis of G. Germanľs theoretical model. Modifying the model to a slight degree, three main aspects are to be viewed to reveal the causes of emigration: 1. objective (objective, economic-social push and pull forces, the system between the mother country and the receiving country that mediated the push and pull forces: the emigrational routes, the correspondance, the agents etc.); 2. cultural (migrational tradition developped in the traditional peasant life being characteristic of the given territories, and the disintegrational process caused by the slow capitalisation); 3. subjective aspects (personal reasons of emigration: e.g. illegal marriage, wish for land, fleeing from military service, thirst for adventure etc.). From the three constituents it can be told that the emigration outfolded in course of the mutual influence of objective push and pull forces through the sieve of the norms and values defined by the culture of the communities, from personal decision. The main aim of the emigrants, the material enrichment, determined their way of life and actions. For those, who planned to return, the New World meant but a new possibility for work, and the need of total adaptation to a new society and culture did not arise. The