The goal of my paper is to analyse the micro-level operation of the Soviet political dictatorship through the example of one of the Transcarpathian settlements. The paper describes the disciplinary (reward) techniques being used by the communist elite in the collective farms (’kolkhozes’) and examines the everyday responses and adaptive strategies of the members of the rural society of this period. The study is based on different archival documents and narrative interviews.

The first part of the paper presents some regional features of the change of the elite after 1945, the second part discusses the informal and formal privileges of the new rural elite (farm and factory leaders, leading-edge workers, Stakhanovites) in the context of the local political and economic inequalities.

Keywords: state power, party elite, inequality, consumption, informal and formal rewards

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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

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The largest population movement in the history of Europe since the Second World War has been the migration processes of recent years, which reached its peak in Hungary in 2015. The significant demographic movement has generated noteworthy social reactions and has developed different narratives in the civil sector and also in the field of political power. In Hungary, the refugee issue has become a decisive topic of political discourse since 2015, and the ruling party coalition was among the first in Europe to represent the security policy. As a result, the refugees appeared as a source of danger, so the government has communicated a position of their rejection. In spite of this context, grassroots volunteer groups were organised in the civil sphere, who helped the refugee masses passing through Hungary in 2015.

In my paper I analyse a very brief but very intense manifestation of Hungarian civil society involvement as a social response to current conflicts. I am looking at how the grassroots crisis management of the 2015 migration wave unfolded in Debrecen. My cultural anthropological research is based on online and offline participatory observations, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with volunteers who helped refugees in Debrecen.

In my study I focus on the motivations, attitudes, social responsibility of volunteers and their voluntary activity embedded in a broader socio-political set of conditions. The goal is to create a complex, multivocal illumination of the phenomenon. In the first part of my writing, I analyse the formation and operational peculiarities of philanthropic organizations showing solidarity with refugees in Debrecen. Then I focus on the individual aspects of volunteering. Finally, I am examining the socio-political context of the civil voluntary movement, also presenting the political interpretations of refugee assistance and its impact on volunteering. My aim is to outline a segment of the contemporary volunteering phenomenon in order to provide a framework for understanding the events recently affecting the civil sphere.

Keywords: contemporary volunteering, grassroots, civil sphere, social participation, philanthropy, helping refugees

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The article presents the characteristics of sexual violence during the Yugoslav Wars at the beginning of the 1990s. Towards the explanation of the phenomenon of conflict related sexual violence, it introduces the milestones of the history of the Federation and the power-based nationalistic narratives which had led to war. Then, with the main focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina, it analyzes survivors’ testimonies, to demonstrate how the narratives appeared during the perpetration of rape. It briefly touches upon on cases of Bosniak-Croatian and Serb-Croatian phases of the war. The primary aim of the research is to highlight how political narratives and goals appeared in the characteritics of sexual violence. The results of the study shows why a general, and exclusive explanation of conflict related sexual violence is unacceptable.

Keywords: ethnic cleansing, genocide, conflict related sexual violence, nationalism, political narrative

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