Village Voices: Public Hearings as Ethnographic Data in Border Village Communities
Village Voices: Public Hearings as Ethnographic Data in Border Village Communities

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the usefulness of, and the lessons that can be learned from, a type of source that has been insufficiently analyzed and used to date — that is, the minutes of local councils, and of public hearings in particular. Data from 29 sets of minutes from four neighboring small settlements in the Hungarian-Slovenian border region (Apátistvánfalva, Kétvölgy, Kondorfa, and Orfalu) suggest that the use and inclusion in research of the text corpus that comprises the large available quantities of such sources can effectively supplement, although not replace, ethnographic fieldwork based on participant observation. At the same time, the examination of this text corpus, along with other internal sources belonging to the local public sphere, makes it possible to construct an image of the internal workings of a settlement and the dynamics of its power relations that would not otherwise be accessible for study.

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