Liszka József (szerk.): Az Etnológiai Központ Évkönyve 2000-2001 - Acta Ethnologica Danubiana 2-3. (Dunaszerdahely-Komárom, 2001)
1. Tanulmányok - Borsos Balázs: A magyar nyelvterület számítógép segítségével meghatározott kulturális régiói
Acta Ethnologica Danubianu 2-3 (2000-2001), Komárom-Komárno Cultural Regions of the Hungarian-Speaking Territory as Defines by the Computer Preliminary research results1 Borsos Balázs In 1998, at the 11th International Ethnocartographic Conference held in Cieszyn, Poland, I dealt with the theoretical and methodological problems of defining the cultural regions of the Hungarian nation by a computer analysis of the Atlas of Hungarian Folk Culture. Here I summarise the main thoughts of this lecture and then I present the preliminary results of my survey of cultural regions, with comments on some problems of analysis that we have solved. Attempts to define regions of the folk culture of a certain nation are nearly as old as the science of ethnography itself. Investigations both in Hungary and in other parts of the world have focused on two mutually connected and interdependent areas: in one of them the folk culture of a certain region of the investigated nation was surveyed and thoroughly described and in the other some special cultural phenomena were looked for that made it possible to divide the land inhabited by the investigated nation into smaller regions. In the 19th and 20th century Hungarian ethnography mainly followed a route in which regional division was based on geographical features, complemented by some linguistic and ethnographical data (for example dialects in language, in folk music and folk dance etc.). To define these regions more correctly, historical points of view and the general character of culture were also taken into consideration. Cultural features regarded as specific can change owing to the effects of the history and the cultural evolution of the region. As Jenő Barabás emphasised: ’’certain territorial varieties are nothing else than differences in time.”( Barabás 1963, 103.) Moreover, although we can determine territorial groups by investigating only certain elements of culture, ethnographers mutually agree that cultural regions can be characterised not primarily by the presence or absence of a special cultural phenomenon but also, and most importantly by the special pattern of several cultural phenomena presented there as well as outside the region (Viski 1939, 350; Rosa 1975, 37-38.). Regarding all these, the next step in the investigation of the regional division of Hungarian folk culture is obvious. In order to define cultural regions more accurately, we have to use not only some certain elements of culture but as many cultural phenomena as possible, and to avoid the influence of historical changes and cultural evolution we have to choose a certain horizontal cross-section of time. If in this certain period of time we can investigate the distribution of a long series of cultural phenomena, we can define synchronic regions of Hungarian folk culture. For the opportunity of applying this kind of investigation we can be thankful to 1 The research was supported by the Bolyai János Research Scholarship and by the OTKA Program F 017986. 51
