Neighbor connections and contemporary groups in a closed society, in the city of Hajdudoroz

Abstract

Hajdúdorog is a local closed society, so the religious separation, the Hajdú military past and the agricultural nature of the settlement provide a specific approach to ethnographic researches. In my doctoral research, which includes this article, family and neighborhood relations are analyzed in this settlement. The temporal focus of the research is the 1940s which is the earliest decade that can be researched with informants through interviews. This article pays attention to the neighborhood of Hajdúdorog and contemporary groups, so locality is a key concept. The research question concerns the content of the relationships. How did the relationships in the environment of the neighborhood and contemporary groups, manifest themselves in Hajdúdorog in the 1940s? How did the above features affect this? The research was carried out within the framework of the ethnographic discipline. The article first presents the well-known works of the Hungarian ethnographic literature on the topic and then analyzes the empirical data. I applied the ethnographic method used in social disciplines to obtain empirical data. During the field work, I did in-depth interviews in Hajdúdorog with locals, all older than 75 years. I reached the inteview subjects using the snowball method and the interviews took place in the interviewees’ homes. The article examines the neighboring and contemporary groups separately. Based on the results it can be stated, that in Hajdúdorog the neighborly relations were daily. The tenths, the former special administrative units of the city, were still strong influencing factors in the development of relations in both groups, even during the researched period. The content of the neighborly relations was reflected in smaller household transactions, rental of tools, participation in pigslaughters (disznóvágás), assistance in fieldworks, special folk pastimes (tanyázás) which resulted in more intense relationships than with family relatives. The result of a closed society is that there was a closer relationship between those who lived within one part of the settlement than between relatives who lived in different parts of the settlement. In line with the above, the article seeks to contribute to the researches connected to locality. The subject of the article fits into the sociological neighborhood research category, such as Tönnies and Redfield's research and also fits into the neighborhood research of the Hungarian ethnography, which was also a base for this research. This work hopes to ultimately expand the row of Hajdúdorog’s literature. For further view, the article can encourage research that deals with a more detailed comparison of the role of the neighborhood and the role of neighbors and relatives in Hajdúdorog during the period that was examined in this article.