Liszka József (szerk.): Az Etnológiai Központ Évkönyve 2000-2001 - Acta Ethnologica Danubiana 2-3. (Dunaszerdahely-Komárom, 2001)
1. Tanulmányok - Botíková, Marta: Kulturális areák és etnikai határok
Acta Ethnologica Danubianu 2-3 (2000-2001), Komárom-Komárno Cultural Areas and Ethnic Boundaries Marta Botíková The problems of ethnic boundaries and their meaning in the cultural region have been of interest to me since the time I was carrying out postgraduate research and preparing my thesis at the beginning of the 1980s. My research dealt with the Slovak-Hungarian ethnic boundary in the area of the former counties of Tekov and Hont. I had chosen villages for study which were 50 km apart from each other and did not mutually communicate. Neither was an “ethnical boundary“ village, but both belonged to the same wider area, region, territorial zone or type. What I mean is a certain geographical space which is determined by the natural (geographical and climatic) circumstances, the macro-economic relationships, and also but not least by the prevailing main source of sustenance, i.e. by micro-economics. These circumstances are manifested in a certain cultural unity of the inhabitants. Similar bases were used in the research on the Danube Lowlands by J. Liszka (Liszka 1997,119). My research concerned villages located in the warm and fertile hilly territory where the main source of sustenance was the well-prospering cultivation of wheat and vine growing, as already described by the older topographic dictionaries (Korabinszky 1786, Fényes 1857). Neither of these villages themselves constituted important economic (market) or communication centres, but each depended on and was inclined towards different market centres within the wider region. Since in my research I concentrated upon the “objective“ ethnic differences, for comparison I chose villages which are as similar as possible from the economic, demographic and confessional points of view, so that the differences found could be interpreted as ethnic differences. Of course, within humanities research, however much we might try, we have only very few chances for creating such “laboratory“ conditions. This was so for the chosen village of Šálov (Garamnagysalló) - a village inhabited by Hungarians - which, judging by the number of inhabitants, was somewhat larger than the other village, and in relation to land ownership of the particular farmers, i.e. the frequency of the rich farmer families, in its social structure it was a little richer and its inhabitants were Calvinists. By contrast the Slovak village of Lišov was smaller, its rich farmers were poorer in comparison to those of Šálov, within the social stratification of the village there were relatively fewer of them, and from the confessional point of view the village was Protestant of the Augsburg Creed. My comparative data were relatively exact, as I based my research also on archival data from the census in 1930 where for both villages I worked with a 100 sample. Let me - also with regard to this source - state that the time span of the research covered above all the peri-79
