What is it like to live in a village of about 2000 inhabitants near the Hungarian-Romanian border for young people between the age of 20 and 30? How the relationship between the rural and the urban is represented in their narratives depicting their everyday life? What kind of rural and urban images are dominant in their stories? How everyday life is reflected in the use of diverse social and cultural spaces? What sort of interconnections can one observe between the rural and the urban, concerning the social praxis of using different social spaces?
While studying these problems we have come to the conclusion that as a new millennium begins it’s worth reconsidering the relationship between the rural and the urban and reinterpreting their connections both in the field of Hungarian cultural anthropology and European ethnology. We have also realised that it is worth taking a closer look at the methodology of studying local societies today. Our observations are built on theoretical and methodological findings, Hungarian and international as well, primarily from the domain of cultural anthropology, European ethnology and rural sociology, and they are based on the data and experience of an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a Hungarian settlement, Tyukod between 2012 and 2014.
At present our contemporary society is exceedingly complex, which also applies to the relationship between the rural and the urban. Therefore, it seems quite necessary to widen our perspective or the field of ethnographic research. That is to say, it can be rewarding to develop an analytical and theoretical framework that treats the local social lifeworld and the diverse sites used by locals (including the rural, the urban as well as the online ones) together in research and interpretation as different parts of a single complex. Our work is a pilot project for the achievement of the above mentioned aims, one that, in connection to the practice of critical anthropology, contains both the lessons and the shortcomings of such an endeavour.
Keywords: rurality and urbanity, representation, use of space, critical anthropology, fieldwork, multi-sited ethnography
