Transylvanian villagers : three centuries of political, economic, and ethnic change

This book is about political, economic, and social changes over three centuries in the lives of Transylvanian peasants—a specific community of them, but placed within a much broader set of transformations in Eastern Europe. There are many reasons why these people might be of interest, but one general reason is that for most of us, they are bathed in a silence we would not anticipate from their European location. The protagonists of this story lived in one of Europe’s great empires, the Habsburg Empire, yet how many of us have ever heard of the Uniate church, or Horea’s revolt? (In general, our western mentalities give less attention to peasants than to other groups, a slight that is magnified when peasants constitute nearly all of the population.) Most of us are amazed, not having known it before, when we discover that something one could arguably call “feudalism” persisted in this region until at last abolished by edict or law in 1785 and 1848. Although we understand a fair amount about the IRA and Basque nationalism, few Americans have the slightest idea how to comprehend the significance of full-page ads in the New York Times, protesting “ethnocide” of Hungarians in Transylvania. And while Western and Mediterranean Europe have become familiar through travgjjjjg.;! and frequent exposure, how many of us have an adequate seiiaft;; ' of what daily life is really like in the “communist bloc” countrie|Jpp$; Asked to draw a map, many Americans do not even know whefi1 Bulgaria or Romania or Hungary actually is. Such silences, particularly when they concern areas that are fairly close, in geographical terms, are telling. They tell of systematic gaps in our experience, of skewed distributions of ethnic groups in western social structures, and of political biases in how the world is communicated to us publicly. Although in literature and art, silent spaces may be integral to the total aesthetic, in social science and history they are suspect, representing failures that embarrass our pretensions to knowledge, both of the world and of ourselves in it. This book invites us to hear from people and groups to whom we have not much listened. It tells something of how states were built around them and how their economies were affected by changes in patterns of economic activity far beyond their local horizons. It talks of how a principal component of their self-conception, their national or ethnic identification, was formed and transformed through time and acquired different meanings for different groups in society.