Changing Traditions and Village Development in Kalotaszentkirály

This essay examines the overall health of a village community in the folk cultural region known as Kalotaszeg, the area immediately to the west of Cluj Napoca in central Transylvania. Such a broad topic may appear at first glance to fit oddly into a discussion of oral tradition. The argument for its relevance rests on five premises.

The first premise: the communities themselves generate, nurture, and maintain oral traditions. When communities die, the vestiges of traditional life are assigned in a hit-or-miss fashion to museums, archives, academic discussion and/or stage performance. The second premise: oral traditions are only one aspect of traditional life, with analogs throughout the culture. The oral performance of songs and shouts, for instance, is largely inseparable from occasions for music and dance. Music and dance, in the main, operate within the same parameters that we ascribe to traditional song. Indeed, the practice of oral traditions is but one element in a fabric of traditional life that embraces music, dance, customs, indeed all aspects of material culture: textiles and clothing, furnishings, implements, dwellings, and so forth.¹ The third premise: several features that distinguish oral traditions are also associated with other aspects of traditional life. Table 1 summarizes some of these features’ patterns that are shared generally by the various forms of traditional life and contrasts them with the tendencies of post-traditional cultures. Although focused on oral traditions, with appropriate adjustments, the list of features may also be applied to music, dance, textile-working and other cultural activities.

Table 1.

Traditional versus Post-Traditional Cultural Tendencies

The fourth premise: no individual performance can be understood in isolation. Just as song, dance, music, and other forms are integrated into community life, so are they integrated into the life of any individual. An improvised dance sequence that is recorded by a researcher may, thus, not be considered a single work independent of its context, but must be seen rather as only “one part of an entire life’s work” (Felföldi 2005:28).² The fifth premise: ethnographic research methods recognize that the villagers themselves are the bearers of knowledge and expertise in Hungarian peasant culture. They are able to make intimate judgments about change, about challenges and, ultimately, about the viability of their communities. Moreover, just as the intellectual perspectives of ethnographers persist in a sort of disjunctive tension with life in village communities, so is there a critical tension between academic writing on oral tradition and the oral traditions that we study.

In short, the oral traditions that are the focus of our discipline depend on communities—for the fact of their existence and for their natural life span. Oral traditions and allied art forms must be understood as interdependent elements within highly complex village cultures and within the lives of each individual participant. The survival of traditional forms within a living, integrated culture depends not only on the choices of the villagers themselves, but also on the social fabric of their communities. Will the villagers choose to revive and conserve their traditions? Are there reasons to expect that the villages themselves will endure as communities of families with a shared identity and shared sense of place?

International interest in Transylvanian Hungarian dance began in the 1970s as word spread of the urban táncház “dance-house” revival in the cities of Hungary, then in its early years. Although observers had spoken of the “final hour” of traditional folk life,³ some venerated practitioners of dance and music were filmed and recorded after World War II; some survived beyond even the fall of Ceauşescu into the 2000s. But over this span of years, the numbers of traditional musicians, singers, and dance informants have diminished greatly. I have been visiting Kalotaszentkirály with my wife and collaborator, Ildikó Kalapács, every few years since 1995. Our visits have provided us with snapshots of the community’s development during the two decades since the demise of Ceauşescu’s totalitarian state.

Under the Ceauşescu regime, Transylvanian villages had become increasingly closed off to...