Trapped in the Past? The Reproduction of Poverty and Marginality in a Hungarian Manorial Village

Abstract

AbstractThis article is an examination of the (re)‐production of poverty and marginality among former manorial servants and their descendants in a Hungarian manorial village. Manorial servants were a large subgroup of the agrarian proletariat in interwar Hungary; their long‐term, rural poverty – sometimes conceptualised as ‘traditional’ – has been aggravated by territorial stigmatisation and represents a specific case even within the context of rural poverty. However, the manorial settlement examined here (now the village of ‘Longfield’) is an extreme case given that a highly successful large‐scale farm has remained in the locality despite a long series of social, political, and economic changes. The presence of this farm influenced both this locality’s developmental path and its room for economic manoeuvring, as well as local people’s living strategies and life chances. The empirical basis for this analysis is a collection of 34 family‐history interviews conducted in ‘Longfield’. This article encompasses the continuities and discontinuities both in people’s narratives and in social and economic structures, and is thus an investigation of the dynamic relationships between and among lived poverty, perceptions of territorial stigmatisation which shape local living strategies, and intra‐ and intergenerational patterns of social and spatial (im)mobility.