Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Epilogue

Epilogue 319

being an ethnic Hungarian who now has at least some formally recognised rights to social citizenship in Hungary but who is a full citizen of, and resident in, Slovakia. But we must also assume, I think, that at certain critical moments and in certain contexts (i.e. outside a strictly chronological order) being a Hungarian in Slovakia will matter, and will be either emphasised or disguised, while at other times it will be irrelevant. Part of the challenge facing the anthropologist and other social scientists is to make sense of these local practices, and to show how they alter or modify more legalistic definitions of citizenship regimes and rights, or of exclusion and inclusion.

This leads us to the final point I want to make about these papers. They are concerned with change and history, with the problem of time, and with movement and contextual identities. But many of them also have a robust practicality to them. In other words, the authors are not concerned only with the development of new concepts and discourses, but also with the ways in which human agency operates on the ground, in the ‘real’ world. They show, with concrete ethnography, the significance of race for social networks and food distribution at times of acute shortage (Caldwell), the practical implications of trusting or mistrusting in a small village (Torsello), or the importance of strategies of integration or acculturation in situations of interethnic tension (Árendás). And, in the final section, the papers tie together some of the links between the academic management and organisation of knowledge - the reproduction of knowledge practices- in institutions such as archives and university departments, and the research problematics and practices which these both generate and respond to in times of acute social and political change (Šutaj, Nováková, Lelovics).

Ultimately, what this volume of papers does is take us on a journey which begins in the realm of theory, and travels through a particular landscape and time: eastern central Europe and its regional and global networks, in the decade after the end communism (but taking into account the cumulative effect of varied and often conflicting pasts). On the way,