Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interaction, migration and change
248 Maruška Svašek the rise, and being in her forties, Jirina was greatly disadvantaged. When I got to know that Hulshoff was looking for a cook/housekeeper, I recommended her to him. Jirina did not only get the job, she also moved into one of the houses recently bought by Hulshoff. The house, which had belonged to the mayor, was damp and in a bad state. Hulshoff did not use it because he planned to knock it down and build a bigger house on the spot. Yet to Jirina and three of her children, it was good enough as a temporary solution. On the whole, she was satisfied, and liked her employer, his wife and their children. She had a particularly good relationship with Hulshoff s wife, who was learning Czech and who taught her a few words of English. Ironically, in 1998, Hulshoff also employed Jirina’s eldest son Petr. Like his father, he had worked as a road worker, but he was dying to do something else. Even though - as noted earlier - he was sceptical of Hulshoff’s presence and disliked the idea of a foreigner "taking over" the village, he accepted the job all the same. He did, however, not show as much enthusiasm for the pheasants as the British gamekeeper, his Czech right-hand man, and some other employees. After a few years, he was advised by the gamekeeper to look for other employment and found another job as a forest worker. Conclusion While interpreting and recording particular emotions expressed by individuals or groups is bound to be an inexact science, perhaps akin to attempts by literary critics to interpret a piece of prose or poetry, what can factually be recorded is an emotional discourse i.e. a person’s self-professed state of being which he or she believes to be “emotional”. Biologists, psychologists and other scholars have sought to objectively “measure” emotions as physical or cognitive processes based on the highly limiting definition of emotions as biological or intrapsychic phenomena (cf. Svašek 2002). By contrast, this paper has defined emotions as narrative performances which are often used by individuals and social
