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

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

(The title of the research: Identity Preservation through Traditionalizing - a Comparative Study in Modern Hungary and the United States. - Participants: Zoltán Fejős, Ethnographic Museum, Budapest; Peter Niedermüller and Mihály Hoppal, senior research fellows of the Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; American organizer was Linda Dégh, from Hungary Tamás Hofer). At planning the research project, tradition was meant to be a constant reproducing force of the ethnic identity in the culture. It is obviously not only a Hungarian speciality but the way how the community chooses some parts of its tradition in order to preserve it for the descendents and to use it for identifying the community, could characterize an ethnic group belonging together in a given social and historical context (see the report in the special issue of the Journal of Folklore Research 1984 vol. 21:No. 2/3.). The folklore, the festive folkways and the forms of the everyday behaviour are capable of expressing the ethnic insistance of the people. The traditions brought by emigrants have lost their importance, some parts of it disappeared and new „habits" have been born during the decades. Later these live on as particular American „Hungárián traditions" for the new generations. One of the tasks of our research was to examine the regularity of the current patterns of behaviour that have been formed by the Hungarian emigrants in order to express symbolically their ethnic belongingness. Besides participant observation as a research method I chose personal in-depth interviews to collect life histories. Therefore I could record approximately hundred hours of oral histories with about fifty Hungarians of South Bend. If it turned out in an interview that a visited family or person had a great number of photos I asked for a permission to reproduce them. My assumption is that the photos could serve as direct visual resources in getting acquainted with the life style. The Hungarian inhabitants living in South Bend, a small town in Northern Indiana were in the centre of my research. According to the data of the 1970 census a quarter of the population out of 110 thousand belongs to some kind of ethnic minority group, or their ancestors belonged to them in the first part of the century. Today about 5000 people can be considered as Hungarians in the ethnic sense of the word. In 1920's the figure was exactly double of today's so this American-Hungarian community is the third bigest in the USA after that of New York and Cleveland. The Hungarians have arrived in many waves at South Bend where the famous car factory the Studebaker, the Oliver plough factory and other factories have assured the poor emigrants of the counties of Győr-Sopron and Vas the opportunity to work. The first Hungarian settlers arrived in 1882 and until 1930's many people followed them. By sticking together the Hungarian community during some decades has created a flourishing social life (Hoppal 1986). The first generation of the emigrants built a few churches, clubs for meetings and celebrations, dancehalls, a Hungarian bank, cinema and some neighborhoods. The second wave of the emigrants the „upper middle-class" Hungarians arrived in the USA after the Second World War. The third wave was the refugees of 1956. It was interesting to discover the differences between the waves of emigrants in the preservation of the traditions and the adaptation to the new situation (Hoppal 1984). Despite of the hard work and five months we spent researching the families we did not have enough opportunity to look into the life of them. By recording the stories of a few dozen families we could collect some data about the life of the individuals and the community. We got to know some family photo albums which I could see at ten better known families out of fifty. (It means about 1 percent sampling which is equal to the sample of Musello 1984:29). I have taken one and half thousand photos during my fieldwork about the life of the American-Hungarians, three hundred photos were