Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Hoppál Mihály: Az amerikai magyar kivándorlók családi fényképeiről

the family history, because with it they are able to document the important events of the family and by multiplying the photos there is a possibility to send them to the relatives living far from the family („. . . personalized record or history of family life" Musello 1980:36). Illustrating the main point of maintaining relationship with the other members of the family I would like to cite part of an autobiography: „In the early 1920's papa acquired his U.S. citizenship. He was proud to be a part of America. To be able to vote and have the right of freedom, religion, speech, and press. Since Papa had a car now, he and Mama decided it would be proper to take the family and go to the town and have a family portrait taken. Grandma Hegedűs had never seen any of Mama and Papa's children. And change were that Papa would never do going back to Hungary. It was too far away and he did not have money for travelling. The next best thing to do was to send a picture of his family. . . The pictures turned out well, and were sent to Europe. Mama saved pictures for her children and one for papa and herself" (Andrew 1983:196). The photos and collections arranged in an album can be „read" and refresh the memories easier than written autobiographies. When the family wants to repeat their histories it can do it often and it is easier to remember this visual life myth than the history spread orally. (The community memorizes the family traditions visually - Kunt 1982:32) By photographically altering and summing up the events of the reality the family photography resembles the folklore (Kotkin 1984:80). Pictures help the members of the family to conjure and to learn the collective family past. Studying the family album collectively is a rite of maintaining the family tradition with the aim of introducing the person to the tradition: this is the initiatory function. Most photographs show an idealized picture of the family which fulfill all expectation and abide by the obligations and rules, a complete family with a nice father and respectable mother (about the idealization see Goffman 1959). In general during the process of idealization the valid norms, values, feelings, belief and the different signs and symbols become visible. An other important cultural fact with which an anthropologist has to face with in the life of ethnic minorities every minor event acquires a symbolic meaning, its significance gets enchanced. And thus in our research considering the layers of the meaning of the family photographs we arrived at the last layer named „ethnic-symbolic" function (Gans 1979). On the one hand this means, as we mentioned above, that the photos are used to create an idealized „Hungárián" image, and on the other hand, every motion and object is reckoned to have symbolical meaning in the context of the foreign culture, ie. the American in the United States. Every part of the different gestures, dances, songs and meals are thought to have ethnical distinctionsign. These differences appear on the photos as well which - as a medium - influences and changes the impressions and converts the events into symbols. The family photography is a type of social activity by which the signs of the life history are produced. These pictures reproduce the common symbols for the social practice, and in an alien environment they reproduce the symbols of the ethnic identity. We cannot state that all the photos found in the American-Hungarian family photo albums exclusively were taken to stengthen and to maintain ethnic identity, but most of them were taken to reproduce consciously by preserving some parts of the life history as the symbols of the ethnic, individual and collective identity.