Abstrakt: | The monograph is devoted to the issue of collective memory of an ethnic minority
living in the Ostojićevo village in the Serbian Banat, whose roots trace back to the
town of Wisła, located in the Cieszyn County. The members of this community are
the descendants of 19th-century labor migrants who mined and brewed saltpeter for
the purposes of the Austrian army, moving within the borders of one country from
the Austrian Silesia to the southern reaches of the Habsburg dominion. With time,
Evangelical saltpeter brewers started to settle in Banat, where the local Hungarian
community named the newcomers the Touts, a moniker which comes from the word
Tōth, used to denote settlers from Slovakia. It is estimated that currently, the size
of this community oscillates between 120 and 150 people.
The publication aligns itself with research on the relationship between language,
culture and society, underscoring the determining role of language in one’s
perception of the world, interpretation of social and cultural phenomena as well as
its function in consolidating communities. Linguistics of memory, adopted as the
research perspective, aims to showcase the interdependence between language as
a medium of memory as well as a means of its preservation, and between the culture
of a particular language community and its discourses (including the discourses
of memory) that shape collective identification. The monograph shows — in the
context of the transformations in the Tout collective memory — the way in which
the language code influences the shape of that memory, as well as the way in which
language, as a memory-shaping tool, can also serve as a tool of shedding inherited
trauma, which, in turn, results in a transformation of the group’s identity. Due to
the numerous factors that influence language as a tool in the process of shaping
the collective memory of the community, which, as a result, influences the way the members of that community identify, the analysis has been conducted within
a very precisely defined social context, taking into account historical determinants
that constitute the foundation of the current social and political situation of the
Tout community, as well as the inter-ethnic relationships in the local community.
To provide a background for the analysis of the social memory of the Touts,
the monograph describes the linguistic and cultural conditions of the multiethnic
community of Ostojićevo. It discusses the linguistic competence of the minority
group, taking into account their social arrangement, which includes different spheres
of life: the Vistula dialect is characteristic of the sphere of family life; Slovak is the
domain of the religious sphere; Hungarian is used in contact with neighbors and
colleagues; Serbian is the official language of education and media, while Polish is
used when interacting with the citizens of Poland as well as the officials at the Polish
Embassy in Belgrade. The description of cultural practices (on the example of wedding
customs) as well as inter-ethnic relationships in the rural society, on the other
hand, unveils the dynamics of the transformation of objective markers of identity
and the functioning of cultural patterns in specific instances of contact with others,
which result in partial assimilation of the Tout community with the majority groups.
The description of the communicative memory of the Touts, passed down in
narratives of the past from generation to generation constitutes a major part of
the monograph. It discusses stories of the ancestors, recorded during ethnographic
field research, which — next to denomination and language — shape the Tout
community. Intergenerational transfer, which solidifies the ethos of the Tout Evangelicals,
allows them to participate in the collective knowledge and memory, which
constitute the foundation of constructing the awareness of collective belonging.
Moreover, the monograph describes the process of folklorization of remembrance
stories, which has emerged as a result of conventionalization and objectivization of
intergenerational transfer.
The current transformations of communicative memory into cultural memory
result in changes in the ethnic identity of the Ostojićevo Vistulans from local to
national—Polish. The internalization of a new collective memory based on the Polish
national symbolic universe is the result of actions on the part of various institutions
of power, understood as various institutions of public life. As a result, new ways of
affirming the Polish national identity appear, including linguistic tools (poems and
songs in Polish) and creating new places of memory (Polish House) or introducing
ways to differentiate between us and them (costumes for Polish folk music groups).
The monograph is supplemented by an analysis of the rhetoric of memory in media
messages, including Serbian television and documentaries, which, as multimedia
texts of culture, emerge as carriers of memory, playing a large role in the shaping
of collective identity.
Memory, which reveals itself in narratives and discourses about the past as one
of the ways to categorize the world (owing to the collectively sanctioned selection of
what should be remembered and what should be forgotten), constitutes the basis of
inculturation and identity creation among the members of a community. It should
be noted, moreover, that the further we reach with our memory, the more difficult
it becomes to verify the memories against reality, and the easier it become to notice the influence of language and culture on the picture it paints. The observation of
the transitional stage between communicative memory and cultural memory, which
can be currently witnessed in the Ostojićevo Vistulan community allows us to witness
the role of language (understood in the broader communicative and cultural
context) in transformation of memory and the following changes in identification. |