Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interethnic spaces
Border region or contact zone 145 local and regional urbanistic, reorganisation and consolidation development projects in the following decade. Before the assimilation scenery - log house quarters disappearing from big and small towns - it is important to study and to record the data relating to the identity creating and identity dissolving processes of socialist urbanisation. How do these and similar spatial processes influence the identity of Hungarian minority communities? Which of the two models will define the ethnic processes in the following years and following decades: the acculturation model- and within it integration and twofold identity forms fostered by bilingual and bi-cultural environment- or the bipolar assimilation process leading towards marginalisation? Are life situations of minorities always necessarily borderline cases loaded with tensions? Do the transformation of border regions, which all belonged to peripheries once, and the takeover of power by ethnic space- and identity- structures, show the end of over-regulation and unidirectional character of identity-creating processes? Indeed, the village as a minority living space still bears characteristics which distinguish it from the town. These characteristics are ambivalent: the "swept away” villages of Dezső Szabó6 can be drawn on the map of Hungarian minorities in the same way as those villages which have the force to keep their ethnic identity. Today we know that this holding force comes not solely from the village itself. The village with its delicate social, spiritual and historical network is able to reproduce and reinforce this identity; or, on the contrary, the changing and radically transformed peasant society, and later the commuting, "outworking” village communities, which at the present forcedly switched to agricultural entrepreneurs (or in a worse case to unemployment), transform and push this identity into the background. Towns, in particular the centres of regions with Hungarian majority in Southern Slovakia, such as Šamorľn, Dunajská Streda, Komárno, Šahy and Rožňava could be identity-keeping and identity-strengthening centres of Hungarian communities to the same extent or even better (due to advantages deriving from their position) as today the village is.
