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What does it mean to be Greek? What does it mean to be Hungarian? And what does it mean to be both? An analysis of different types and components of ‘collective identity’ – such as ethnic, national, European identity, or even some kind of global citizenship – can hardly be carried out if we ignore the mundane problems and activities of people: their ‘lifeworld’. In a study of collective or social identity, both the collection of data and the analysis itself imply an approach to national, ethnic and other forms of identity through the communication practices of the persons in question. Thus, a social-psychological and sociological study of identity can primarily be based on conversations or discourse. Interviews conducted for the purposes of social scientific research are nothing but such conversations and discourses.
There are, of course, various types of interviews, and only one of them is the so-called ‘research interview’. Interviews are conducted, for instance, at entrance examinations, during job seeking, by social service or immigration offices, and are often given by public figures, in which case they take a mediated form. Only one among the many conversations is the interview conducted for the purpose of gaining a social scientific insight. The ‘interview society’ thesis (Silverman, 2011), in short, claims that the interview is a fundamental means of generating and circulating information in today’s society. In the interview society, self and identity is created through interviews. The volume being reviewed is based on such interviews: it reports on the experiences of Greeks living in Hungary. The book focuses mostly on the lives of 6000–9000 people and their offspring who came to Hungary after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949.
Publishing the volume was doubtless a dream of Nikos Fokas, a Greek who is Hungarian. An unusual but nice gesture expresses this duality: the chapters appear in both Greek and Hungarian. Perhaps he is counting on readers of both groups, but this certainly exhibits the main theme of the studies: they are about people who are Greek and Hungarian, or Hungarian and Greek. The institutional and financial conditions of the work, as the colophon indicates and the introduction informs us, were provided by the Research Institute of the Hungarian Greeks.
The volume includes a short introduction and five chapters, and is illustrated by photographs from the immediate aftermath of the Greeks’ arrival in Hungary. The introduction, ‘The Greek Civil War, and Civil War refugees, reflected in Hungarian social scientific research’, by Nikos Fokas and Júlia Füredi, offers a short but concise overview of the historical, ethnographical and sociological studies on Greek refugees who came to Hungary after the Civil War.
Chapter 2, ‘The memory of the Greek minority of Hungary’ by Anikó Gregor, subjects 43 older interviews, recorded during the 1980s and 1990s, to analysis. The thematic components of these interviews – categorized under ‘arrival to Hungary’, ‘childhood’, ‘education’, ‘career choice’ and ‘mate selection’ – show the experiences of two generations of Greek families living in Hungary: the ‘one and a halfth’ generation, that is, those who arrived as small children, before they reached their ‘conscious’ age; and the second generation, that is, those already born in Hungary. The chapters of the narratives reflect the milestones of the decision and process of coming to Hungary and later individual life paths. Even though the theme of experiencing ‘Greekness’ is manifest throughout these interviews, the components of national or ethnic identity come to the fore primarily in connection with sustaining the community, child rearing and gastronomy.
The chapter ‘Community life and integration strategies from the perspective of the second generation of Greeks in Hungary’, by Anna Sára Ligeti, Hanna Mikes and Sára Szilágyi, concerns those who were born in Hungary. The analysis uses the sociological and social-psychological models of assimilation and acculturation. The chapter reviews the reports about the parents’ lives in Greece. It then provides a description of the conditions and daily life of the so-called ‘tobacco factory colony’ of approximately 3000 people who had been, upon arriving, accommodated in a building complex of a former tobacco factory. According to the interviews, this period was characterized by a feeling of transience, recurring ideas of returning home, a relatively uniform ideology, and – despite the meagreness of living conditions – basically positive emotions. These people were living the organic community life of a ‘tiny Greece’. With the passing of some years, they gradually moved out of the tobacco factory and started to live in smaller groups: in better apartments, but, at the same time, in weakening communities. Isolation was replaced in steps towards integration. Hopes for returning home within the foreseeable future were also starting to fade. At the same time, in connection with matters of the more distant future, such as schooling, mating and marriage, tensions often arose between parents and children – between their respective definitions of the situation: the parents’ ‘temporary residence in Hungary’ and the children’s ‘this is where we live’ kind of cognition.
Ildikó Barna’s chapter is titled ‘I don’t dream in Greek anymore: The identity of the second and third generations of Greeks in Hungary’. As an analytical framework, the author offers a sociological and social-psychological description of collective identity and multiple identity, and then gives a substantial overview and comparative analysis of interviews with members of the second and third generations. Members of the third generation are mostly born of Greek–Hungarian mixed marriages. Whereas, in my interpretation, the second generation is characterized by a sometimes ambivalent, but nevertheless natural, dual ethnic identity, the third generation can be described by some kind of an incomplete dual identity. In the case of the latter group, because of a deficiency in mastering the language, customs and cultural elements, some personal shame can occasionally be detected.
Júlia Koltai has undertaken the task of analysing the mutual stereotypes of Greeks and Hungarians. In her chapter, ‘Greek–Hungarian looking glass’, she first discusses the concept of stereotypes, and then, building on the relevant parts of the interviews, she analyses the picture the Greeks frame about Hungarians, the supposed characteristics attributed by Hungarians to Greeks, and the auto-stereotypes of Greeks. She also describes notions about other minorities of Hungary detectable among the Greeks. She gives detailed documentation of characteristics surfacing in the interviews, such as Hungarians are ‘depressed’, ‘excluding nationalists’, ‘problem solvers’, ‘precise’, ‘less friendly’, whereas Greeks are ‘special’, ‘strangers’, they have a ‘southern mentality’, a specifically ‘Greek temperament’ and ‘a positive worldview’, they are ‘family-friendly’, ‘community-oriented’, and they ‘stand up for themselves’.
In her second study, ‘As long as your mom is alive, traditions are being kept: The role of gender in the formation, preservation and passing on of traditions among Greeks in Hungary’, Gregor tries to show the gender division of labour within the process of cultivating and passing on national identity. The analysis implies that women carry significant weight in this respect, and, in fact, in mediating the language and customs, the greatest part of the burden falls on their shoulders.
The analyses collected in this volume mostly proceed in the following way: they first sketch out a relevant set of available sociological and social-psychological concepts, such as stereotypes, assimilation, acculturation and gender, and then with their aid move on to interpret the interviews, thereby illustrating most of the concepts introduced. This is a common deductive method, one that indeed promises much insight, but it is nonetheless hardly able to exceed the limits of a simple demonstration of the heuristic value of pre-existing concepts. In the course of a possible future analysis of the interviews, an alternative, more inductive approach could be fruitful. This would mean not only an illustration of pre-existing concepts, but would also offer the opportunity to uncover deeper, hidden content and elements of the interview material.
According to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1985), man is a self-interpreting animal. The daily creation of identity, just like its sociological reflection, is a mode of one such self-interpretation. The studies in this important volume reflect upon – and realize – this identity-work. They offer examples of how the self-interpreting animal works.
The word ‘identity’, just like ‘love’ or ‘hatred’, is a noun – but we must not be misled by this fact. Identity, in this respect, is similar to emotions: they are not things, but rather emerge as a result of a permanent social labour as social constructs (Bodor, 2004). So is identity: it is not something created in a single act, it is not a finished product – our work never ends. For example, just as love is an achievement that requires continuous labour, so too the construction of identity demands continuous labour – social and individual activity.
At the Borders of Identities tries to reconstruct the identity of Greeks who ended up living in Hungary. The reports published in this volume explicitly and implicitly demonstrate the created, constructed, laboured and reflective nature of identity. Know Thyself – Γνῶθι σεαυτόν! This grand and open-ended task is made up of many, many steps. Perhaps this is the most important message of this book.