Cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai raises the problem of the definition of the place of locality in the global world. In Appadurai’s interpretation the concept of locality is complex, strongly linked to neighborhood, but also refers to relations and spatiality. According to the experiences of my ethnographic fieldwork in Beregdéda, Transcarpathia, the residents’ local identity is linked to the street of the village where their houses are situated. This is supported by the opinions such as “I was born in this street” or “I would not even move out from this street”. The local identity is defined by the neighborhood, whose materialistic, physical boundaries can be seen, but are rather fluid. The thinking about neighborhood is both personality and situation dependent: it depends on the personal, social and hierarchical relations and on ethnicity, too. However, it can be observed that ethnic and religious cleavages and the different fields of interest do not rule out the formation of neighborhood relationship. The ethnically more or less mixed spatial division of the village creates frequent meeting points of empirical encounters, which can be observed in the neighborhood relationships, too. The positive empirical experience of cohabitation in the ethnicity of the Hungarians, Ukrainians and Gypsies in Beregdéda is often created through the neighborhood relationships and everyday interactions, however the experiences cannot fully overthrow the stereotypes. The “general” negative stereotypical picture and the different experiences are present in the everyday life of the ethnicities as parallelly existing, quasi complementary observations.
Keywords: neighborhood, cohabitation, locality, stereotype
