THE WISŁOK PROJECT, 1978-1985
THE WISŁOK PROJECT, 1978-1985

Summary/Abstract: In a frequently cited article first published in 1968, Tamás Hofer contrasted the deep, intimate knowledge of the national ethnographer or ethnologist with the “slash and burn” practices of the Western anthropologist (Hofer 2005). Trained in Hungarian néprajz, Hofer was one of its most brilliant representatives for more than half a century. He also read widely in socio-cultural anthropology and his jointly authored study with Edit Fél is the definitive account of the social organization of the Hungarian peasantry in the pre-socialist era (Fél and Hofer 1969). Yet Hofer was adamant that néprajz was a separate discipline. Dialogue with the international comparative discipline was a good thing, but it should not diminish the value of the research carried out “at home” by an ethnographer who shared the national culture of those whose beliefs and practices were the object of the study. My teachers in social anthropology in Cambridge took it for granted that anthropology was a comparative social science, but Hofer’s “slash and burn” metaphor contained an implicit reproach. The social or cultural anthropologist who, having completed one empirical project, moved on promptly to tackle another in a quite different location, could not hope to match the in-depth knowledge of the national ethnographer who (like Hofer himself in the case of the village of Átány) grew up in the same society as the villagers and returns to the same location again and again for years to achieve a deeper awareness.

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