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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how public events in a small Hungarian town help maintain local society amid depopulation and vulnerability. The study examines how these events showcase community integrity and local power dynamics while allowing participants to reinforce their social status.

Paper long abstract

In public and academic discussions, rural areas are often identified with depopulation and decline, from which anyone who can leaves and migrates to metropolitan centres. At the same time, less is said about the experiences of those who remain in these places, striving to secure a favourable social position for themselves. In our paper, we show through local public events of a small town how local actors maintain the integrity of the local society through these community events.

We regard rural small towns as areas that typically face an influx of resources in the process of global capital accumulation. Outmigration manifests itself primarily as a loss of population, a kind of ‘emptiness’, which constantly threatens the reproduction of local class relations. In this permanent state of "vulnerability," public events will play a prominent role, as they provide an opportunity for these communities to appear as an integral unit with its own specific structure, hierarchies, and values to those who remain in the town. Furthermore, these events also provide an opportunity to showcase the integration of small-town society into broader power structures, such as national politics.

In our paper, we show how these events represent local power relations, how they hold local society together, and what values they give to locality. On the other hand, we focus on how participants of different statuses use these events to maintain, reinforce, or even improve their status. Our presentation is part of a three-year ethnographic research conducted in a small town in rural Hungary.