Liszka József (szerk.): Az Etnológiai Központ Évkönyve 2000-2001 - Acta Ethnologica Danubiana 2-3. (Dunaszerdahely-Komárom, 2001)

1. Tanulmányok - Schippers, Thomas K.: A határok egyenlőtlensége s annak módszertani következményei az európai etnológusok számára

an audacious act (cf. for example Weiss 1962, 201-231), for it has generally been followed by much criticism (cf. here Burckhart-Seebass 1993, 15-26). So one may wonder if the „cultural boundary“ is only a „view of the mind“ (vue de l’esprit), just a heuristic tool „bon à penser“5 (Claude Lévi-Strauss) in the field or in the privacy of one’s study, but quite hazardous or even impossible to draw on a map.

These apparent difficulties in actually drawing borderlines of ethnographical facts may originate in a lack of (theoretical) knowledge about the mechanisms at work in “geo-cartographic” modelling and also in a perhaps too exclusive focusing on the micro-variations of the empirically observed field data. Here it should be remembered that most ethnocartographic research has been done within more global projects aiming at the building up archives and databases relating to national or regional “popular or folk culture”; here maps were generally considered as useful (heuristic) “tools” for systematically collecting empirical realia. As a consequence of this, a majority of researchers has sought to “track down”, with the utmost precision, ethnographic facts according to their location, and this has generally resulted in rather precise, exclusively dot-like mapping. But this quest for both ethnographic and topographical precision also has in many cases severely reduced the graphical “legibility” of the maps so established, as a majority of European ethnocartographic maps and atlases have illustrated in the past. This priority given to topographic accuracy to the detriment of legibility, often combined with ignorance of the mechanisms and rules of what Jacques Bertin (1967) has coined as “graphic semiotics”, seems to have prevented most ethnocartographers from questioning until quite recently the profound nature of the facts collected and their consequences for the possibilities of drawing limits and boundaries (cf. Schippers 1993, 115- 120).

As has been shown by mathematicians studying so-called ‘’’fractals”6 and as cartographers have known for a long time, a limit or a boundary is a phenomenon very closely related or even directly submitted to (consciously) chosen levels of pertinence or to chosen scales of perception. When one looks at a limit “too closely” it seems to literally disappear into an infinity of details, while a “too distant” look makes the limit hardly perceptible. So a limit or a boundary seems to have this curious property of appearing or disappearing according the scales and levels of pertinence chosen by the observer. One of the first consequences of this evanescent property of borders and boundaries is the fact that it obliges the observer to determine a “good distance” (Schippers 2001) necessary to actually establish its presence. Otherwise the drawn line will be considered as rather doubtful.

5 Nice to think.

6 The so-called “Theory of Fractals” was introduced in 1975 by the French-Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924- ). Fractal designates mathematical objects of which the creation or the form follow rules of irregularity or fragmentation. Nature offers numerous examples of fractal character like snowflakes, the ramification of bronchial tubes, of hydraulic networks etc.; a more popular approach to fractals has been presented by the British mathematician Ian Stewart (1982), see illustrations. Metaphorically the fractal idea is more and more used to designate phenomena which seem to “dissolve into infinity” when scrutinised in detail; for example the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger has spoken about Europe (and European individual identities) as “fractal objects” (1987/88:367-368).

175