Paper Short Abstract:

The paper discusses methodological issues of a three-decade long ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on war traumas of the Hungarian population of a multi-ethnic region in Transylvania/Romania in 1944, buried in individual memory and incompatible with the official memory policy of the state.

Paper Abstract:

The presenter has been conducting systematic ethnographic-anthropological fieldwork in Kalotaszeg, a Hungarian minority region of Transylvania, Romania for three decades. In Northern Transylvania the dual change of rule during the Second World War, between 1940 and 1944, caused serious conflicts in Hungarian-Romanian relationship. The region under study, which lies on the border between wartime Hungary and Romania, was particularly exposed to atrocities, and the aftermath of the conflicts still lingered beneath the surface in the decades following the war. The historical experience of the atrocities and looting in the autumn of 1944 was an unspeakable trauma for the Hungarian population of the region. Deeply embedded in individual memory, and even obscured from generational family memory, the experience was not only incompatible with the official Romanian memory policy of the socialist period, but until recently there was no public opportunity for communal remembrance and community-level remediation of the pain. The subject was a sensitive taboo that only slowly came to light after several encounters, after gaining trust, in in-depth conversations where audio recording was almost impossible. I collated the narratives of the conflicts, collected in the field using oral history methods, with a group of written source materials that I was fortunate enough to find. In my presentation, I will discuss methodological issues in ethnographic fieldwork on war trauma, the validation of soft data collected in the field and a self-reflexive evaluation of my position as a researcher.