William Penn Life, 2014 (49. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2014-02-01 / 2. szám
Tibor's Take with Tibor Check, Jr. Historical preservation A STACK OF BOOKS lies in my apartment, collecting dust. I call it my "to-do" pile because it is composed of books that I have yet to read. This past winter break, I read one book from the pile, a book on anthropology entitled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, an author of several bestselling books on popular scientific topics for a general audience. In his book, Diamond surveys several currently existing and extinct civilizations, trying to determine why certain societies thrive while others go the way of the dodo. What I learned from that book inspired this month's Take. To be sure, I am not going to make the same tired conclusions that have been made by many American-Hungarians (yours truly included) that the diasporic culture of the Magyars of North America is quickly dying off. Instead, Diamond's work made me think of a different issue. He describes how scientists have to postulate on many of the finer details and complexities of many extinct cultures because there are no written records about these cultures: no books, no writings, no alphabet. Thus, Diamond writes, it is left to modern scholars to take whatever meager physical evidence remains (in the form of clay pots, bones, etc.), draw whatever conclusions they can and just guess at the rest. This observation made me wonder: If the American-Hungarian community continues to exist into the future, what will our descendants know in terms of what our heritage looked like? Felt like? Tasted like? Sounded like? I thought of some extinct societies and wondered if those peoples had thought, as we do now, that their various traditions, stories and other components of their civilization would persevere throughout the ages, never thinking that their feeble attempts to memorialize their culture would be swept away by time and the elements? I thought that we, too, may be falling into such a cognitive trap. After all, photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, records and tapes do not last forever. Rather, some of these historical technologies persist for only a few years before decaying. I realized I have no idea what a Hungarian wedding actually sounded like in 1912 or what a filledto-capacity Sunday morning Hungarian church would look like. Instead, I only have a vague idea, some cloudy, hazy concept distilled from secondhand accounts of what people know about such events. This regrettable fact is the fault of no person or group: the technology was simply not widely available to preserve the complexities of these memories and timeless occasions. We are lucky to have what few photographs and written articles still survive. But, today, there is no excuse for failing to preserve historical knowledge of our culture. Technology now exists to quickly and easily transfer physical documents (and even vinyl records) to electronic files that can be stored en masse on USB drives, external hard drives or small cards known as SD cards. From there, these files can be retained on those computer drives, or can be copied in a matter ■1 Consider & Discuss Do you think that historical preservation using electronic media is a good idea? Do you think it is too hard? If you are not “computer savvy,” would you be willing to learn in order to preserve your treasured documents, music and photographs? Is there a centralized repository for such records in your area, like the American Hungarian Foundation’s Museum and Archives in New Brunswick, N.J., or the Cleveland Hungarian Heritage Museum? Would you be willing to donate funds and family artifacts in order to make such a local repository a reality? - Tibor 6 0 February 2014 ° William Penn Life
