" Hungarian Village Women in the Marketplace duringthe Late Socialist Period." Pp. 349-505 In: Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares. Linda Seligmann, Editor. Palo Alto,CA: Stanford University Press (2000).

Hungarian Village Women in the Marketplace during the LateSocialist Period

Éva V. Huseby-Darvas

The focus of this article is on the activities of marketwomen in Cserépfalu, a northern Hungarian rural settlement, on the relationship between women's skill in marketing and their generational, gender, and local identities during and following the socialist period.1 For the women of Cserépfalu, a Calvinist village of 1,394 individuals and justunder 500 households at the time of my study, marketing and market related endeavors were critically important during thelate socialist period, especially between 1982 and 1989. Women carried on marketing ventures within either the scope of the second or third economy. Both these spheres remained formally outside of the centralized socialist state economy,yet neither the socialist economy as a whole nor individual families could have survived without these marketing ventures. Paradoxically, while village women contributed substantially to the household economy, and their marketing activities conformed to the norms of the local community by

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stressing the value of resourcefulness (kaparkodás), they were nevertheless stigmatized in the traditionally patriarchal village where a patrilocal post-marital residencesystem had been maintained until the late 1960s.

Village Women's Participation in Economic Sectors

Typically, Cserépfalu women did not commute to their workplace. They either worked within the village in one of several light industries that had developed since the early 1970s and/or hired out as occasional or seasonal agriculturallaborers on the Great Hungarian Plain, in a state farm or an agricultural cooperative.2 Most women also engaged in a number of supplementary income-producing activities.

Particularly since the forced industrialization that hadbeen imposed by Moscow beginning in 1949, men had engaged in long-distance and long-time commuting. This has led to a radical change in the composition of agricultural workers in Cserépfalu, as elsewhere in the entire region (Enyedi 1980, 1982; Andorka 1979). Mostly village women and older men tookcare of the gardens, orchards, and vineyards. This sphere (háztáji).of private production included small household plots as well as household animals and was left for peasants after centrally forced collectivization. This sector had become more and more economically significant since the late 1960s. The same was true of the marketing activities of middle aged women in Cser�pfalu.

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Women employed by the Mez�k�vesd Maty¢ Folk-Art Coop to embroider at home earned between 1,200 and 2,200 Forints3 permonth. Seamstresses and middle-level managers in the Budapest Underwear Coop worked in the small shop in the village and earned anywhere between 2,200 to 4,000 Forints each month. In addition to wages, regular employees in the state sector received the benefits of paid vacations, health insurance, sick leave, retirement pensions, maternity leaves,partially paid post-natal leave, occasional premium payments in cash, and finally, vacationing in resorts. Although the trade-unions provided this last benefit, villagers took advantage of it only rarely. The main reason they entered into or remained in the state economic sector was the social benefits; wages were a secondary consideration. According tomost informants, the wages from state sector employment were far too low for families to live on.4

In order to understand the nature of women's marketing activities, I provide below a brief overview of the dynamics of the rural economy before and during state socialism.

The Rural Economy before and during State Socialism

Before World War II, although extreme poverty in Cserépfalu and the region as a whole had forced many villagers to migrate seasonally, extra-village work activities served to reinforce land-, family-, and community-related values and life styles. One of the most critical

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indices of the enormous change that occurred during the socialist period was the increased importance of non-agrarian, mainly industrial, work, both away from and within Cserépfalu. Whereas the rhythm of the seasons had structuredboth local and migratory traditional work, the combination ofyear-round participation in urban and/or local industries, ahigh rate of regular, long-term commuting, and workers' residence in urban workers' hostels shaped economic rhythms during the socialist period.

For several centuries socioeconomic contacts between Cserépfalu and other settlements have been open via what the villagers call summázás (seasonal agrarian labor for hire), marketing, fairs, house-to-house vending, and so on, but the contacts grew, intensified, and changed considerably during the socialist period. Within the region, maty ¢ zás was the single most frequently practiced women's economic activity. Maty ¢ zás is the local and regional expression for embroidery for sale; an expression derived from the embroidery style which was and remains the very popular and colorful style of the Maty¢, the Roman Catholic subethnic group, which occupiesthe three nearby settlements of Mez�k�vesd, Szentistván, and Tard. Embroidery, often practiced by the village women of Cser�pfalu, was formalized and centralized by the regional Mez�k�vesd Maty¢ Cooperative. Single-village agricultural cooperatives within the area were fused into multi-village

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agglomerates. These externally induced changes affected Cser�pfalu natives' relationships with those in nearby settlements and led villagers to increased scrutiny and comparison of their performance and behavior vis-à-vis that of the populations from neighboring settlements.

The permanent exodus of villagers to cities and industrial jobs between 1949 and 1970 had a major impact on the village. The urban-industrial commuting culture also wrought dramatic changes in village life. Women and older men became responsible for intra-village economic activities,such as work on household plots, in orchards, and vineyards, and with domestic animals. The women were mostly employed inlocal light industries. Heavy strains and stresses became evident in all commuting workers' households; antagonistic orambiguous attitudes toward urban life, city colleagues, and urban-industrial jobs were apparent among many active and retired commuters. While villagers valued the opportunities in the cities, they were often contemptuous and condescending, and expressed fear about urban life and people. At the same time, though, the increased exposure to mass media, especially television,5 introduced the values of mass consumption and life styles to rural society and youngervillagers began to value highly synthetic cloth, shirts and blouses, blue jeans, Adidas sports clothes and the like.

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Parents and grandparents sought to provide their children with these highly coveted prestige items.

Three Economic Sectors during the Late-Socialist Period

Contrary to conventional use in the literature, here I use the following definitions of the first-, second-, and third-economic sectors. The first sector simply involves participation in the state sector. An individual in the first sector holds a regular, wage-producing job which offerssocial benefits. Regular or occasional work in the private sector, on the peripheries of the state sector or participation in irregular but still more or less lawful 6 income-producing activities defines the second sector. This was the main sector in which women's marketing was located. In all village households, people were involved in some kindsof second sector activities. Individual incomes from these activities were usually considerably higher than wages from the state sector. Working on household or rented plots, in orchards and vineyards; raising poultry, pigs, and rabbits for sale; engaging in short-term (four to eight weeks each year) seasonal agricultural migrant work; gathering, preparing, and marketing a variety of forest products; and making and selling noodles were among the economic ventures in the second sector. Village women bore the major responsibility for the day-to-day upkeep of the háztáji plot and care of livestock. Furthermore, in addition to the

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nearly 100 women who were employed by the state-owned Mez�k�vesd Folk-Art Cooperative, at least as many if not morewomen embroidered for boutique owners and other private entrepreneurs in the second economic sector.

Contrary to the first and second economic sectors, thirdsector economic pursuits were explicitly illegal activities. However, here I will divide the third sector into two categories, based on whether the majority of the villagers condoned or condemned a particular activity. The villagers considered some of these economic undertakings as "natural," "normal," or "part of life." "Everybody does it," people told me with a shrug. Some of them added "It is fine, but don't get caught by the authorities." Condoned economic pursuits included: taking alfalfa (or anything else) from thefields of the Cooperative; poaching in the woods; regularly selling homemade wine or fruit brandy in small quantities; some of the women's marketing activities to be discussed in greater detail below; these include some of the selling, buying, and exchanging of goods and other commodities for profit during so-called tourist excursions to Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union; fusizás, a type of moonlighting, in which people made or produced things for individual profit, usually during official working hours, from material that belonged to the factory or the plant where the person was employed, usually a

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state-owned place of work; selling or exchanging one's services for personal profit, for example, using a state-owned vehicle for the transportation of a neighbor's buildingmaterials. Regularly taking alfalfa and various greens fromthe state cooperative's land for the purpose of feeding household rabbits and supplementing the diet of pigs was alsofairly profitable in the long run. Most villagers believed that "it is there for the taking." However, if villagers were caught by the landwatchman (kerill � in local parlance), they were not only fined, but their names, along with the nature of the illicit activity, was announced on the village loudspeaker from the House of Council the next day. This public shaming tactic did not work very well: Villagers still went to the cooperative's fields at night. This activity, like poaching and gathering medicinal herbs, was usually performed not in groups but individually (cf. Bak¢ 1977:148).

Other economic ventures in the third sector were condemned by most of the villagers who considered them to be "cheating," "theft," "immoral," and "unbefitting of a real, proper and decent cser � pi .” Generally condemned economic activities included: some intra-village moonlighting, or exchanges of service in which some of the villagers were directly shortchanged for a single individual's high profit; "horse trading" (ember kupeckodás) with other people's labor

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while cheating, at one and the same time, both the employer -in this case the state- and also the employee -in this case, the fellow villagers; intra-village prostitution which was highly disapproved of, particularly by the majority of women who deemed the cost of 500 Forints per episode outrageously expensive; regularly selling wine and fruit brandy in one of the village's clandestine speakeasies that were known as b � grecsárda s; taking anything from a fellow villager, particularly from kin, fictive-kin, or neighbor, or doing something for one's own benefit that would get a fellow villager into trouble with the authorities.

To complicate matters, the first, second, and third economic sectors were neither sharply nor categorically divisible. Almost all villagers regularly participated in first and second sector activities, and, occasionally, third sector ones as well. Nearly all villagers worked in or drew pensions from one of several branches of the state economy. In addition, they tended to their private, rented, or household plots or engaged in other supplementary income-producing activities nearly all year round. Because the boundaries between the sectors were always shifting, the socialist state always had some control over the participants, who could never really be sure exactly in whichsector they were participating. For example, any sort of marketing activity for private gain or profit, including

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selling and buying on local marketplaces was strictly condemned ideologically until the late 1960s, when it became tolerated, but never really encouraged. To put it another way, marketing activity and profit making by selling never became a state condoned virtue during the socialist regime. Or to give another example, until the 1970s, moonlighting forpersonal profit was explicitly forbidden, yet within less than a decade the state greatly encouraged more or less the same activity (Stark1989; Szel�nyi et al 1988, Szel�nyi 1994)).

First and/or second economic sectors frequently providedthe goods, the time, the materials, and often the opportunityfor villagers to enter into and profit from the third sector.Even though the separation of these activities is arbitrary, both from the emic and etic perspectives, that these divisionexist has a bearing on the nature of women's marketing, and work and consumer-related identities, attitudes, values, andaspirations in Hungary.

The Division of Labor within Households

Traditionally, the division of labor within each family in Cserépfalu varied according to sex, age, and seasonal workactivities (See also F�l and Hofer, 1969). The family was a unit of production and consumption, controlled by the male head-of-household. In conjunction with a predominant patternof virilocal post-marital residence, every attempt was made

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to separate young wives from their natal kin. Even in the early 1960s, I was told by many village women, strict rules guided a young woman's "visitation rights" to her parents' house. While her father-in-law ruled the household, her mother-in-law tried to have complete control over the young wife's time, work, social behavior, friendships, income, and even her rate of reproduction. 7

Increasingly, after the late 1940s, with the beginning of state socialism, collectivization, permanent outmigration,and long distance and long time commuting by village men, the ideal (and often the actual) post-marital residence pattern became neolocal. This more recent pattern, along with all the socioeconomic changes mentioned above, has created stronger connections between young and middle-aged married women and their female natal kin. In economic ventures and in all spheres of social life, women are increasingly relying on their mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and ángy (ángy is an umbrella term for any female relative by marriage who is older than ego). These connections, like those in rural British communities as reported, for example, by Strathern (1982:72-100, 247-277), are continuously validated, reaffirmed, and articulated through the exchange of gifts, visits, labor, and favors. Some of the verbal expressions, and most secular and

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religious rituals also demonstrate the increased importance of ties between women and their female natal kin.

Since the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism in 1968,8 the Hungarian countryside has experienced an unprecedented material affluence (Balassa 1982; Hanák 1991; Knight 1983). This boom has had several consequences in Cserépfalu. Younger villagers, especially, have placed increasing importance on the obvious and exaggerated accumulation of material goods and conspicuous consumption. Social pressures have intensified in all age-groups. On the one hand, old and many middle-aged villagers have been inspired to give more than ever to their offspring. On the other hand, because of these pressures, many adult villagers are working themselves to the point of physical exhaustion. Some students of Hungarian rural society (for example Sozan 1983, 1984) have argued that this phenomenon appears to be self-exploitative, self-destructive and masochistic. The differences between incomes have become great and, as a result, economic and status stratification has increased considerably. Given these conditions, marketing has become an even more significant supplementary activity for village women in Cser�pfalu. Women of lower socioeconomic status aremost heavily involved in these activities.

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Village Women in the Market

Marketing has led the villager women of Cserépfalu to become actively involved in local, regional, national, and transnational economic life. While the elite, along with most men, and many young and old women in the village have always looked down on marketing activities, it is precisely through marketing strategies that middle aged women of Cser�pfalu have shaped and expressed their own positive, local, gender, generational, and to some degree, class identities.

Types and Kinds of marketing

In considering Cserépfalu women's marketing, strategies have developed in accord with whether or not they sell their goods in local, regional, national or transnational markets, and the kinds of merchandise they offer for sale.

At the time of my study while there was not a great dealof local marketing activity, 9 yet what there was, went on regularly, year-around. The most profitable local marketing involved home-brewed spirits and was considered illegal. Four local widows ran three establishments that, in local parlance, were and still are known and referred to as b � grecsárda (literally translated, a wayside inn where drinks are served in mugs rather than in glasses). Money almost never changed hands. Rather, the transactions took the form of traditional exchanges in which the widows

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received looted produce and other goods for their home-brewedspirits. The poorest villagers -- including those whose parents and ancestors, as far back as local memory goes, lived in one of the single-, or double-celled cave-dwellings on the peripheries of the Cserépfalu, the ultimate sign of poverty in the area (cf. Bak¢ 1977; Szab¢ 1936, 1937) -- didnot own wine-cellars and vineyards. The men from these and similarly poor families rarely had the opportunity to participate in pinc � z � s (the village men's institution of drinking and socializing (Huseby-Darvas, 1996)). Therefore these men frequented the b � grecsárda , the village version of "speakeasies," where, underground, they were able to get drinks at any time of the day or night for eggs, produce, or practically anything of value. Most villagers, especially the wives whose pantries were pilfered by their husbands, sons, and fathers-in-law in order that they could obtain drinks whenever they want, cursed and looked down upon the widows who ran these establishments.

A second broader sphere of marketing was regional in nature. The widows who ran the "speakeasies" also often traveled to the regional markets, and from time to time to the national markets, to sell the goods they accumulated in their drinking establishments. Regular and very dynamic marketing took place in a 25 kilometer radius around the village of Cserépfalu. The village women took produce and

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other goods to the weekly markets in Mez�k�vesd and Eger, anddid most of their flower selling in there. It is important to note that women from neighboring villages were not engagedin marketing nearly to the same degree and intensity as were the women of Cserépfalu.

Village women did some marketing in Miskolc, the county seat and second most populous city in Hungary; but, due to the distance and cost of travel, they did very little marketing in Budapest, the country's capital. Despite the high cost of travel, investment of time and energy and risk, women from the village regularly went to markets in Austria,Romania, and Czechoslovakia10 because they were able to realize much greater profits.

Village women were also clearly aware of how much they were exploited in another type of transnational market, the global marketplace, although they did not actually do the selling there. They never tired of telling how they were well aware that the blouses, dresses, tablecloths and other items they embroidered and sold as piecework in the regional center of Mez�k�vesd were then sold in the boutiques of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe for a much higherprofit.

What kinds of items did village women sell? More specifically, how did they obtain the goods they took to market? Were these goods produced, manufactured or

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constructed; gathered or pilfered; or were these items purchased and then resold for a profit?

Produced Goods

Women marketed surplus goods from the household plots (háztáji). These goods included vegetables, fruit, home-madenoodles, cookies and cakes, as well as home-brewed wine, and spirits. The village women sold most of their produce at regional markets, but also some of the spirits locally.

Handicrafts and Manufactured goods

Enterprising fathers, father-in-laws, husbands, and (very rarely) the sons of the women constructed or manufactured goods in small local household shops, but the women always actually marketed these items. The goods included brooms, wooden utensils such as handles for implements, csiga-noodlemaking boards, carved mirrors, and other decorative items.

Gathered goods

Groups of village women, most often with the help of their children, gathered mushrooms, snails, flowers and berries in the forests near the village and sold them in either regional or national markets.11

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Pilfered goods

These include some of the produce that were grown by thelocal cooperative or on other cooperative or state farm grounds where villagers went to harvest. At times, part of their remuneration was in the form of bags of onions, boxes of fruit or early vegetables that were brought back home, divided into small units and sold at a considerable profit atthe regional or national markets. Just as often, however, they would "take" bags of harvested produce, hide them in thebaggage compartment of the workers' bus, and bring them home for the village women to sell on the various markets.

Purchased goods

These items included birth control pills and other prophylactics that village women had accumulated over many months by having various doctors prescribe them for themselves and for all their female kin. They would have theprescriptions filled in various regional pharmacies12 after which marketing women would smuggle them, along with much needed butter, coffee, and canned foods, into Romania where birth-control devices were illegal and strictly prohibited.13 They traveled by bus to Transylvania and sold the birth-control pills, condoms and other prophylactics, as well as the foods to ethnic Hungarian 14 women there. After investing some of the profits in Romanian goods that they planned to sell elsewhere, the women would then return to

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Hungary, and invest the remainder in sweet Soviet champagne and freshly baked Hungarian bread in a particular bakery saidto be the best in the region. With these purchased goods they then traveled either by bus or train to Austria, where they would go to a particular merchant on Mariahilferstrasse who bought for resale the champagne and bread. Then the women would go to another Viennese merchant and buy yards andyards of "Viennese velvet" --a material that in the 1980s was highly valued in the village, for making "Sunday suits" and confirmation clothes for teenagers and young men-- or gold jewelry, or yards of other cloth, or what they called "Viennese scarves."

The Case of Snowflowering

Financially the most rewarding, and symbolically the most significant, occasional economic activity Cser�pfalu women pursued was the gathering, preparing, and marketing of snowflowers (Galantus nivalis) in early March, and of lilies-of-the-valley (Convallania maialis) in May. These flowers have specific symbolic meaning in urban rites celebrating thearrival of spring and summer, respectively. The set of activities associated with each plant is called, in local parlance, h ¢ virágozás , literally meaning "snowflowering," and gy � ngyvirágozás, "lily of the valleying."

Conversations, and participant observation revealed thateach activity consisted of four distinct phases. The first

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was a long planning period between Christmas and the actual event when open conflict within families and between middle aged village women (those who were at the time about between the ages of 30 and 55 years) 15 would ensue, a phenomenon which I will discuss in greater detail below. Second, small groups gathered the flowers in early March or May. Each group was comprised of two to five women (here again, most groups were based on kinship, fictive-kinship, and neighborhood ties). Third, large groups of 12 to 18, usuallycomprised of a wider network of kin and neighbors, women and female teenagers, would prepare the bouquets. Even old womenwere involved in this phase (although they continuously complained about it). Finally, individual middle aged village women would take the flowers to the regional market of Eger, Mez�k�vesd, or more rarely to Miskolc or Budapest, and sold them.

These flower-gathering activities have been a part of women's economic strategies since long before World War Two. Here I will only discuss snowflowering. Snowflowering began to involve long-distance travel and complex strategies in theearly 1970s when, as I was told, snowflowers "just died out in the nearby woods." Subsequently village women traveled toBudapest to buy large quantities of flowers from Transdanubian vendors at the Nagycsarnok (the Central Market of the Capital). They would then take the flowers back to

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Cser�pfalu, prepared small bouquets, and then travel to Eger where they sold the flowers. A 42-year-old villager gave this account:

My husband and my brothers quarreled and yelled at me. Spending all that money, buying all those flowers, they said, was just too big a risk. But my co-godparent and I did it anyway. We ended up making two to three times the amount we spent in Budapest and on travel....But after a couple of years I said to my co-godparent, 'Let us try to go to Transdanubia and pick our own flowers like my neighbor's neighbor, R¢zsi, is doing with her [group]. Why make these Transdanubian Svábok 16 rich?' But R¢zsi would not tell us where they were going!! It was a secret she swore never to reveal. So my co-godparent and I just had to find our own forests. We always keep it a secret too, like all the other cser é pi women do....We lose five day's vacation time or get sick leave from our [state sector] jobs. Plus we lose money on the expensive train and bus tickets and have to pay those Svábok for three to four nights of lodging....They just look down on us as if we were Gypsies, as if we did not have a house or anythingof our own. And the city folks on the Budapest metro (en route to another train station) just stare at us and our big hátyi 17 baskets as if we were n é gerek [in Hungarian: African-Americans, Blacks] ...but it is still worth it.

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In one week I make more money than two-and-a-half to threemonths of my wages at the [state sector] job....So my husband still yells at me. When I tell him I will go he curses at me; my children are ashamed of me and the foreman gets angry....But if I didn't do it, my children would not have anything, just like I didn't when I was their age.

The small gathering groups began to organize and plan around Christmas. Women listened to weather reports, talkedwith village men who commuted as woodcutters to Transdanubia,and visited back and forth before they decided on the precisegathering location. Lodging was difficult to get in Transdanubian villages, and a woman never really knew ahead of time how big the crop of snowflowers would be that year until she had actually arrived in a particular forest. Thus,the chances of finding lodging and enough flowers depended upon the number of people knowledgeable about a group's destination. Keeping the destination a secret in a communitywhere everything was known about everybody led to a number ofopen conflicts year after year.

Discussions about snowflowering, how the profits would be spent, and the reactions of one's family to the venture were most intense between Christmas and the second week of March. Within the small gathering groups, women criticized those villagers who "do it as a hobby, like look at my

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cousin, she gets 18,000 Forints into [the family's] budget every month from her husband and children, yet she still goesyear after year." After the snowflowering was over, however,these groups would dissolve and might or might not reorganizethe same way the following year, as women moved fluidly in and out of different circles. The very same cousin who was openly criticized for participation in snowflowering might, two weeks later, become the main travel and business partner in a selling and buying excursion to one of the neighboring countries, where part of the profit from the venture would be"reinvested" in goods not easily obtainable in Hungary. 18

Once the women returned to Cserépfalu with the gathered flowers from Transdanubia, the preparation of bouquets began immediately. This occurred in kaláka style [informal, traditional mutual help-associations] among the villagers. "Those relatives and neighbors come over who can rely on me, when they need help with the harvest, hoeing, or any other chore year around," a 37-year-old woman said. This was considered a very serious obligation, so if a relative was sick or could not help for some other reason in the preparation process, she would send a relative, or even a child or neighbor in her place. During these sessions the women shared details about their journey, lodgings, the gathering process, and the return, but they would never mention the precise location of the forest in front of the

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helpers "so they will not blab about where we found all theseflowers."19

With the bouquets packed in baskets, boxes, and suitcases, the women then boarded the bus and traveled to Eger because, as they said, "the pápisták [Roman Catholics of Eger in this case, pejorative] are such saintly folk. They always buy flowers, not only to give [on Women's Day], but also to take to their churches and cemeteries." Intra-village competition was keen, not only in the Eger market, but also en route to that city on the bus. The women exchanged comments with one another like "mi az izek faszánakgy ü tt ö k tik is, hisz vagyunk mink a komaasszonnyal é ppen elegen!!" ["Why, for the sake of the iz's 20 prick, are you coming too? It is enough that my co-godparent and I are going!!"). Yet, they kept a close eye on one another and whenever village women had trouble with Eger authorities or flower vendors, they would form a united group once again, and help their co-villager sell her remaining bouquets, and cheer her up by cursing at the Eger authorities, once the latter were no longer on the scene. Village women purchased the obligatory place-ticket in the market in Eger, which theoretically gave them the right to sell, but local flower vendors often called in the authorities, who then tried to send the villagers to other, less favorable locations at the market. Village women also sold bouquets on streets, front

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of churches, and busy intersections away from the market of Eger. If they were caught, they had to pay a fine for illegal vending.

In March of 1983, 53 women from Calvinist Cserépfalu sold flowers in Eger. By contrast, just a couple of women from the neighboring, primarily Roman Catholic villages, Bogács and B�kkzs�rc, were engaged in the same activity. While traveling home from Eger, village women joked with one another on the bus, called the neighboring villagers by pejorative nicknames 21 and comparing not only their individual profits made from selling the flowers but also Cser�pfalu's profits versus those of Bogács' and B�kkzs�rc's.

Particularly since long-distance travel was involved in snowflower gathering, intra-family and intra-village conflicts loomed large around this very significant marketingand supplementary income-producing venture. From the moment married women declared their intentions to pick flowers untilthey returned from selling the bouquets in Eger, their husbands fought against these activities. 22 Old village women, who a few years before had picked and sold flowers themselves, now argued with their 30-40-50-year-old daughters, saying, "Why are you doing it again? You don't sleep for a week; you don't really need to do it." Children and teenagers who participated in the preparation and, occasionally, even in the transportation of bouquets to the

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markets, refused to help with the actual selling process because, they maintained, their mothers' selling on the market embarrassed them.

Most members of the village elite were also openly critical of the women's flower selling ventures.23 The most frequent responses of marketing village women to the negativecomments and questions made reference to their resourcefulness and religion: “Yes, we do. We here are the authentic, resourceful Calvinist women” (igen; mink vagyunk az igazi, kaparkod ó Kálvinista asszonyok ).

The Case of Maty ó zás

Throughout the year village women also engaged in embroidery piece-work (maty ó zás ) in groups of three to ten. In warm weather they sat and embroidered on low wooden stoolsin front of their houses in circles or semi-circles. In the center of each of these groups was a chair with a portable radio playing. During the cold season and most evenings, thewomen would gather in one woman's house, again forming a semi-circle around a turned-on television. The radio and television were merely mise-en-sc è nes . The women paid little attention to them as they talked, or on rare occasions, sang. One group, for example, that consisted of eight villagers, had been embroidering together for twenty-two years. These women jokingly referred to their group as the “work brigade of the Lower End of the village” (Alv � gi

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Maty ¢ z ¢ Brigád ). Within and beyond Cser�pfalu these embroidery groups served several important social functions. They fulfilled a quasi-ritual sociocultural function similar to that of the traditional spinning house associations that operated until the mid-1950s. They were the key centers of intra-village communication and important agents in extra-village social relationships. During the spring, summer, andearly fall when the groups gathered on the sidewalks, villagers who walked or rode by in their cars or bicycles stopped and chatted with them, exchanging gossip and information about village affairs, market prices, and eventsand what was happening with the idegeny rokonyok (kin who are strangers, who had become strangers) and theh � tlen hazaárul ¢ k (unfaithful traitors, that is the villagerswho had emigrated permanently from the country. Money, marketing, financial obligations, work, and other responsibilities preoccupied participants in these conversations. The women discussed who was behind in their payments of church tithes, known as “the wages of the pastor,” (pap b � ri ), where particular villagers obtained the necessary funds to cover essential obligations such as these church expenses, wedding presents, baptismal presents, new clothes and jewelry for godchildren's upcoming confirmations.The behavior of village men was also an important and recurring topic among the Maty ¢ z ¢ women. How much, where,

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and when did men drink? Which bachelor was seen going into the house of the village whore? Who beat his wife? Did she deserve to be beaten on a particular occasion? These were the topics of daily discussion. Most of the marketing and other commuting women, on their way home, got off the bus andheaded directly toward the nearest Maty ¢ z ¢ group to chat for 15 to 20 minutes in the afternoon. This way they caught up on all the village events that occurred that day, and also shared with the local embroidering villagers the news from the region.

Aside from serving as key centers of communication within the village, the many members of the embroidery groups, through their marketing strategies, provided a directlink between Cser�pfalu and the wider region's social and economic networks. Many women traveled by bus to Mez�k�vesd where the Cooperative's headquarters was located and monthly regional meetings were held for the representatives of the over 3000 Coop employees from the area. The Coop was the single largest employer in the Mez�k�vesd district (Kratochwill 1980:29). These occasions offered women opportunities to meet other women from neighboring villages and to make comparisons about the quality of each village’s embroidery and the profits they were making. Within Cser�pfalu these comparisons might take place between individuals and between the various embroidering groups, but

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at the regional meetings the women from the village represented themselves as a united Cser�pfalu front.

The embroidery groups also tied the village economy intothe global economy. The women knew that the blouses they embroidered were intended for Western export and thus broughtHungary much needed hard currency. The women's favorite topic involved long and argumentative speculations about the Hungarian state's profit in contrast to their individual incomes. Visiting ex-villagers who lived in and visited fromNorth America informed the Maty ¢ z ¢ women that the embroidered blouses retailed for as much as $80 to $129 in Canada and the United states. For embroidering a child's blouse the women got 46 Forints (about $1 at the time), and for the most elaborately embroidered woman's blouse they received 115 Forints from the Coop (work on the latter could take as long as 15 hours). Young, middle-aged, and some older women believed that "the difference between retail price and piece-work wage is pocketed by the state, so they make more money on us per blouse than we earn in almost two months!!" Women involved in Maty ¢ zás were aware of their exploitation, ironically, by the socialist state. Some of the older women told me stories about Maty ¢ zás in the old days:

In the thirties we had to walk to and from Mez�k�vesd (18.4 kilometers one way) to pick up material and deliver

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the embroidered garments. That Jew, the shopkeeper, paidus 35 fill � rs (pennies) for each blouse. We left for [Mez�k�vesd] at one in the morning so we would be there intime. Now it is good for us; we have everything deliveredand picked up by the local representative. So why do you young ones complain? They made money on us in the old days; they make money on us now.

The meaning of work

In Cser�pfalu, the attitude of village men and of non-embroidering, and even part-time embroidering, women toward the entire activity of embroidery was uniformly negative. Asone 20-year-old woman put it:

My mother used to work. Ever since I can remember she always worked. From spring to fall she did agricultural seasonal work all over the country. She was even organizing seasonal migrating groups for about five years.Then after a couple of seasons of rice harvest her legs just went. She has not worked since then. [She] just passes the time by embroidering for the Maty¢ Coop in K�vesd.

This young woman expressed the attitude, generally held in the village, that embroidering and selling the pieces was notwork; some of the villagers even saw it as a luxury, or leisure activity. Middle-aged women who worked either for

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agricultural cooperatives or for one of the local light industries, and did embroidery during their lunch hours and their early-morning and late-evening "free times," consideredfull-time Maty ¢ zás a luxury. As one 47-year-old woman, who worked full time and went to the market regularly, commented,

These women can afford to waste their time just sitting around and gossiping all day while they embroider. They are all "rich peasants." Their fathers just handed everything over to them: the house, the land, the vineyard. We, who started from nothing, must work for ourhouses and for our livelihood. Most of these Maty ¢ z ¢ women are still kuláks (rich peasants). They did not change even after the land was taken from them; their rankhas remained and they don't really have to work. Of course, there are a few poor ones who are weak or sick andthat is why they can only embroider. They cannot work regularly, so they just embroider and don't do anything.

Reinforcing Local Values and Identities.As I have shown above, the gathering and marketing of

various forest products is a significant supplementary income-producing activity among a particular group of villagewomen in Cser�pfalu.24 Villagers from nearby settlements commented to me repeatedly that

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These stubborn Calvinists collect a few roots and a coupleof berries and down they run to the [Mez�k�vesd] market....Even now that the bus fares have doubled, the cser � pi women fill the bus on market days.

Even though young people helped occasionally with the gathering, it was almost always middle-aged women who did theselling. A generational difference in marketing was apparent. 25 Much to the dismay of marketing women, young women were reluctant to participate in the process of sellingin the marketplace, even when they accompanied their older kin and helped to carry baskets filled with produce to the market. "They just stand there, as if they were not even cser � pi women," a 56-year-old woman commented, adding,

My grandmother taught me how to talk a lot and how sellingon the marketplace must be conducted when I was a little girl. Every market day we were selling in K�vesd and fromspring to fall she took me along to the villages south of here. Back when I was a child, we still went house-to-house selling lime....My daughters used to help with everything, but always refused to sell with me in the market. Not that they were pretending to be upper class, gentle-folk like so many of these young ones are. It's just that all that schooling ruined them, so selling embarrassed them, and did not come to them naturally like it came to me. My husband did this, it is his fault, even

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though I told him that all that learning would ruin the girls. But he insisted after he came home from the army. He said, “They should be anything, but not peasants like us. Peasants are treated with such contempt, almost likeGypsies, in this country.” We had land before the Coop took it from us. I had hoped that the girls would marry, bring home nice cser � pi [local] sons-in-law and we would all work and live here, all together....But we are on pensions now; the girls got all that learning and moved to the city. They have a better life now than the prince26

had in the old days. Yet my daughters never could earn even a single Ady [here: slang for a 500 Forints bill] selling in the marketplace. What kind of cser � pi woman isone who cannot sell on the market?

Despite these generational and familial conflicts, as I have shown, marketing activities during the late socialist period were very important in supplementing the incomes of middle-aged women who were often employed full time in the local state sector.27

Villagers over the age of 55 years were most critical ofthe increased material demands of younger people and repeatedly made comparisons between traditional and modern consumption patterns. Yet, ironically, they supported the very life styles they criticized. As elsewhere in the rural sphere (cf. Sim¢ 1983), in Cser�pfalu older people lived

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their lives for their children. Their economic actions were shaped primarily by the ever-increasing demands of their children and grandchildren. They deemed it natural, though difficult, that every extra Forint, both from their pensions and from supplementary economic activities, would go to theiroffspring. Paradoxically, while village youth were embarrassed by their mother's and other female kin's marketing activities, these endeavors were the very sources of income spent on luxury items and other goods that the young coveted.

Sacrifice and Resourcefulness

The saying, “a person is crazy without money”(bolond az ember p � nz n � lk � l ) was heard frequently in Cser�pfalu. It was uttered more by middle-aged women than either young or oldwomen or by men. They offered the saying as an explanation, a cause, and a reason for a person's actions and also for intra-family problems. To counteract the predicament of going crazy without money one had to be resourceful (kaparkod ¢ ). Indeed, the most important trait in the ideal male or female villager was to be demonstrate resourcefulness. This trait was central to socioeconomic behavior, and in Cser�pfalu it was an essentialized characteristic attributed to and equated with genuine cser � pi ness. When villagers contrasted

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themselves with those of neighboring settlements, resourcefulness and diligence or the lack thereof were mentioned most frequently and were considered a critical component of their own Calvinism, which differentiated them from their Roman Catholic neighbors.

Villagers also evaluated outsiders, such as some among the local elite and urban work-mates and bosses, in the lightof their degree of resourcefulness. The village doctor, who in five years of practice in Cser�pfalu and B�kkzs�rc amassedvisible wealth, and the village school principal-cum-Communist Party Secretary, who in less than two decades in the village achieved affluence, were openly admired for theirresourcefulness. The local pastor, who moved to Cser�pfalu in1980 with several nice possessions including three truckloadsof fine furniture and a station wagon, was highly respected for his perceived resourcefulness. An ex-director of a nearby agricultural cooperative was described by one man as

the best kaparkod ¢ (most resourceful) boss we have ever had. Sure, he filled his own pockets first, but took really good care of us too ...When he got caught [for embezzlement] he was sent to direct a smaller coop up north, where his father-in-law had an important position....Well, we got a new boss, who had empty pocketsand a big family; he was too busy being kaparkod ¢ only forhimself, without considering us, so we changed jobs.

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In this last case, while the villagers still considered the new boss's resourcefulness a positive trait, they condemned him for not sharing with the workers.

The older villagers not only said that they lived for their children; they continuously gave them everything they were able to give, whether or not their children still actually lived in the village. For example, former villagersliving in the cities and working as professionals or skilled industrial workers estimated that, in addition to eggs, meat,fruits, and various produce, they received between 30,000 and100,000 Forints in cash annually from their parents and grandparents who were residing in Cser�pfalu. Both generations insisted that this was a natural part of parentalduty and obligation. As an urban professional man maintained,

Look, I am an only child. My parents live for me. My mother cooks a large pot of beans on Mondays and they eat that all week. She has not bought herself new clothes [since she got married]. They don't go anywhere [here he ignores the fact that his mother is selling on the market twice each week]; they have no material needs or demands.They kill two pigs each year; we go down to Cser�pfalu andvisit for pig kills, name days, Easter, and harvest [and grape-harvest]. We used to take them chocolate, beer, andsmall household appliances, but we don't do that anymore.

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They were upset that we spent money on them. We [he, his wife, and two children] obviously could not live as well as this if they would not help. What else can they spend it on? My father has already built a crypt for over 100,000 Forints. I guess he was worried that we would notgive him a decent resting place....They have more than they need, we have less than we need. So it is a simple equation.

Middle-aged and older villagers often discussed the size, value, and frequency of cash and other kinds of gifts conveyed to their children, grandchildren, and godchildren. They explicitly competed about who gave more and whose offspring owned more material goods. To give as much as possible was not merely a symbol of high status and a sign ofindividual worth. With the ever increasing importance of consumption and accumulation of goods among the young and some of the middle aged, social pressures to give intensifiedtremendously by the 1980s. Giving to one's offspring was implicitly equated with Calvinist values-- working hard, self-exploitation, and continuity, and sustained good relations between the generations. To be able to give to one's children became a key motivating force behind resourcefulness and saving every Forint carefully. During the period of late socialism this type of giving became the

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raisone d’être for the labor of middle-aged and old villagers.

At the same time, older villagers recalled times not long ago--the early 1960s when land collectivization was completed--when their fathers or grandfathers had total control until they died of all the family income, money, and possessions and, in contrast to current practices, the young generations gave all their earnings to the head of the household in which they resided. Most of the old villagers, however, were not bitter about these particular changes but took it as "a matter of course," "the way life is." Yet, it was not the old but the younger villagers, and in particular,the middle-aged, who most often perceived themselves as sacrificing their lives for their children and families. Thephrase, "I sacrifice my life," recurred most frequently amongmiddle-aged women, including women most involved in marketing, and among the commuting village men. The men pointed to commuting itself and the problems they encounteredon the job, away from the village, as principal evidence of their sacrifice. They explained their problems, conflicts, and life's difficulties in terms of regional and individual differences, rural-urban differentiation, and varying expectations and interests, rather than criticizing the sociocultural contradictions inherent in the society and the system. Women between the ages of about 40 and 55 years of

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age explained the reason for their sacrifice by comparing their lives to those of their mothers and grandmothers. As a43-year-old informant maintained,

My mother always worked, yet she did not have the responsibility on her shoulders like I do and my sister does. You see, it was the father's responsibility that thefamily had enough food, enough wood. Now women must make do and always have enough. Life was simpler for my mother. Even though we were poor she did not know the meaning of the word 'nervous'. Now we [her age-group] areall nervous. My husband comes home twice a month [from the city]. He either gives me the money he did not spend on drinking, or the kids and I take it out of his pockets when his [kin] drag him in from the workers' bus.28 It ison my shoulders that everything goes well; my kids have tohave everything like others do. Today we have much more [material goods] than they had in the old days, but we have to sacrifice our lives to keep up.

Conflicts between Men and Women

One commuting village man would not let any of his womenfolk go to market and was careful that they did not go to the city without him. He told me why he had to commute and expressed his opinion on cities and city life:

[there] are no regular jobs close to the village. Move tothe city? Never!! All city women are whores. They

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confuse the concepts there. Here in Cser�p we know what we want in a woman: she must be a quiet lady in company,a peasant when work needs to be done, and a whore in bed. But city women are whores in company, pretend to be greatladies when work should be done, and they are not even peasants, just filthy pigs, in bed....How can they be goodmothers? They just fool around, but say that they work overtime, and ignore their kids. My wife is the way a woman should be. How could I expose her to city life? You see, here the eyes of the entire village are open all the time. I can be working 200 kilometers from home and even then I know that my woman behaves properly. The foreman said to me, 'I want to put your name on the list for a city flat; you could move in two or three years!!' I said, 'I don't want that dirty decadent underground lifefor my family.' No, I will never move to the city....I just got my nephew a job in the factory. Now the six of us from here will be in the same plant. That is the onlyway, the best way: if we... stick together. The more there are of us the better we can show them in the city....Sure I would like to work fewer hours, spend more time with the kid and the [wife], watch television, and take vacations. But I cannot. I must sacrifice like I doif we are to get ahead. My son has everything. He is happy. He just got a digital watch and an Adidas leisure

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suit. We paid over 2000 Forints for these. He just completed the first half [of the first year in elementary school] with an outstanding report card. You see that little television set in there? Nobody has this mini-model in the village yet. I just bought it. Now we have three working TVs....I know what I sacrifice my life for and it is the only way.

Incidentally, in this particular family the man was in skilled industrial labor; he commuted three times a week, andearned between 5,500 and 6,500 Forints per month. Together, the three women earned about 6,000 Forints a month embroidering. In addition, the two older women got state retirement pensions, each receiving 1,650 Forints monthly. The family income from supplementary activities was an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 Forints a month, depending upon the season and other factors. The women started embroidering at five in the morning and finished at ten or sometimes eleven o'clock at night. Of course, between embroidering, they tookcare of household and garden chores, vineyard and orchard work, three pigs, many more chickens, and one child. Finally, after nine years of what the husband considered "just sit[ting] around," the wife went to work in a village institution as a cook for 2,200 Forints per month. In addition to this forty-hour-a-week job she continued to embroider an average of four hours each day, seven days a

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week. But none of the women from this household were ever allowed to sell or go alone to the market place.

Most men were explicitly upset about both marketing and the embroidery groups themselves. As one man stated,

Whenever I get home the women [his mother, grandmother andwife] have their noses in the cloth and just sit around with the neighbor women and the cousins and gossip. I keep telling my wife, 'It is all right if grandmother doesnot want to work anymore. She is ninety-two years old. And if mother wants to sit around, I cannot force her to work. Her legs are always swollen, so let her rest. But why don't you want to work?'

Among commuting men of all age groups there was, as I discussed earlier, a very positive and explicitly articulated, as well as a repeatedly stressed, self-evaluation regarding their own diligence, abilities and accomplishments. While village women emphasized their own diligence, thriftiness, and shrewd ability to sell goods on the market, village men extolled their own excellence and good reputation as workers. The maintenance of close-knit social groups during work was equally important to women and men. Since most women worked in the village with co-villagers, this was considered a matter of course. Therefore, there tended to be less talk about it among womenthan among men, although they talked often about how much

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better they were than any other villager nearby during and after gathering, marketing and particularly flower vending and embroidering.

Could this have been part of women's response to the negative evaluation of the village elite, men, and others? Very likely it was, along with the maintenance of a powerful,and rather pervasive ideology 29 which, in effect, underwrote, supported, and justified the reinterpretation of what certainly no longer resembled puritanical, traditional Calvinist values. Acquisition and sacrifice were indeed part of the Protestant ethic described by Weber (1976), but the type of consumerism I found in Cser�pfalu during the late-socialist period clearly was not. But where could the villagers reinvest their savings to expand their own enterprise during that particular regime? Thus the new strategy became a peculiar type of late-socialist manifestation of Calvinism, amalgamated to a particular type of socioeconomic idiom30 that celebrated consumerism.. Conceptions of meaning, continuity, and local economic reality increasingly centered on obtaining more and more material goods and on the related trait, resourcefulness, a Calvinist trait that these women deemed to be locally specific. During this late socialist period rural villagers, whether young, old, or middle-aged, appeared to have been "dominated by the making of money, by acquisition

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as the ultimate purpose of...life" (Weber 1976:53). Thus acquisition appeared as the era's summum bonum: " Sacrificing one's life" was explained with and justified by it. The notions of getting, having, and showing various goods functioned as--what Erikson (1963:402, orig. 1950) called in a different context--"so many opiates to lull...[the villager]...into the new serfdom of hypnotized consumership."31

Summary and Conclusion

Middle aged women in Cser�pfalu during the late period of state socialism conspicuously demonstrated their capacity to adjust themselves to the system and to ingeniously assert and redefine their identities through resorting to the uniqueopportunities that the peculiar coexistence of the public andprivate economic sectors created. Following the New EconomicMechanism that began in 1968, these women were able to reinvent the tradition of marketing which had been deeply buried or at least dormant in the early, very difficult periods of state socialism but which came back in full force during the 1980s. Discovering the past led to various traditional and novel extra-village economic ventures and thus cser � pi women succeeded in broadening their scope of economic activity to a transnational scale.

These middle aged village women were successful in accumulating economic resources in order to increase

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distributive power within their households whose younger members were increasingly entranced by the positive qualitiesassociated with conspicuous consumption. At the same time, village men's position within the household and the village was weakened by their often forced inclusion into the ranks of socialist urban industry. When most village men began to commute to work, women became the pillars of households and family life. Middle aged marketing women, through their innovative economic strategies, also managed to assume new facets and characteristics of identity.

Through their long distance mobility women became economically influential. Nevertheless, they were much criticized. These new manifestations of their economic role provoked symbolic and social attacks on the part of the men, and other age groups of village women. The market women tried to resist and divert efforts of stigmatization by referring to the much valued, allegedly local, and Calvinist trait, of resourcefulness (kaparkodás).

The often confusing socialist economic system that aimedat fast industrialization and the abolishment of independent private peasant economic initiatives shaped middle-aged women’s identities which stressed economic power and control over intra-family and intra-village redistribution. At the same time, the intent of ideologues and politicians was to establish a new kind of socialist society in which

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individuals would not be driven by egotistic and entrepreneurial motives. In this socioeconomic milieu the resourceful women of Cser�pfalu forged their niche on the fringes of the various sectors of economy and secured economic profit. Their intense identification with a Protestant ethic advocated the importance of acquisition andindividual sacrifice. According to this particular Protestant ethic--emphasizing self sacrifice, asceticism, andself exploitation-- they turned over the lion's share of theincome they accumulated to family members in an act of dutiful generosity that simultaneously enhanced the family's social prestige. Contrary to the tenets of the Protestant ethos, however, precisely because of the specific nature of the state socialist economy, they were unable to accumulate, save, or reinvest their marketing profits. Instead, these profits were rapidly drained by the rampant conspicuous consumption of their children. Paradoxically, the more thesevillage women had been embedded in the market defined by the socialist economic system, the more they found their identityin a Protestant ethic focusing on resourcefulness, diligence,persistence and sacrifice.

Epilogue

Ironically, with the advent of the "real" market economyand the demise of state socialism, the Calvinist women of Cser�pfalu have lost their ties to the markets in which they

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were previously actively involved. State socialism, and, consequently, the fringes of that system, have disappeared (Ag¢cs and Ag¢cs 1994). Under these new conditions, marketing women are no longer able to pursue their previous strategies. Because of the introduction of the new market economy the state can no longer afford to subsidize mass public transportation. Given the high cost of bus and train fares, it is no longer profitable for women to keep "runningdown to the market with every little root and berry." In addition, Hungary's borders have opened up in all directions,and people, attracted by entrepreneurial possibilities, have flooded the country. Along with Chinese, Vietnamese and other vendors have arrived silk and plastic flowers. The importance of the embroidery groups has decreased and embroiderers are sought out to a far lesser extent. With theend of the economic community of state socialist countries (COMECON), transnational commuting and trade have ceased to yield economic profits: individual socialist entrepreneurs have been replaced by large scale companies created and inspired by capitalist entrepreneurs. These new capitalists have not emerged from small scale entrepreneurs, such as the marketing women of Cser�pfalu.

With the end of socialist industry the subsidized factories and mines have been shut down. Workers and miners,forced out of jobs, are unemployed, and many of them have had

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to return permanently to villages like Cser�pfalu. The economic forces unleashed by the emergence of the real marketeconomy have thus extinguished the types of marketing activities I have discussed in this article.

Yet, as I observed during fieldwork in May of 1997 and 1998 in the village, the women of Cser�pfalu have responded to many of the new, seemingly formidable, challenges that arose since 1989. Some of the women who were middle aged in the 1980s reached the age of 70 by 1997. People over 70 are able to travel free on the buses and trains. Since those over 70 travel free of charge on buses and trains, now it is the older village women go to the markets.The migratory circuits have changed considerably in the yearssince the demise of communism in the region. As a result of the opening up borders, the new vendors--Bosnian, Croatian, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese--have flooded the Hungarian markets. Today a new and different kind of transnational competition for space and customers takes placein the marketplace. The older village women sell flowers andother things side by side the vendors who sell silk and plastic flowers and wreaths. When I visited the cemeteries, I noticed and commented on the many artificial bouquets and wreaths on the graves. The women of Cser�pfalu told me, rather sheepishly, that they buy these from the competitors because they last longer than fresh flowers do. Besides

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they, the cser�pi women, sell the fresh ones for a good profit anyway.32

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Notes

1 I lived in the village for a little over a year in 1982-1983, and have visited it regularly for various lengths of time since then.This paper is based on participant observation; the gathering of lifehistories; formal and informal interviews; and supplemented with archival, statistical, and other documented data. I thank the people of Cser�pfalu, particularly Ibolya and the other women for their kindness, warmth, hospitality, and patience. For careful reading of earlier drafts of the present paper and for helpful suggestions I am most appreciative of Gy�rgy Csepeli, Norma Diamond, Bill Lockwood, Linda Seligmann, Katherine Verdery, and Mikl¢s V�r�s. Without generous grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,and the International Research and Exchanges Board, my research over the years would not have been possible.2 In Cser�pfalu, women composed the great majority of employed people in the several local branches of the state economic sector. The main activity for about 200 women was sewing and embroidering. More specifically, about 86 individuals sewed and/or embroidered in the village shops of the Budapest Underwear Coop; over 90 women were employed by the Mez�k�vesd Maty¢ Folk-Art Coop; and 10 were working for the Miskolc Boy [sic] Service. The women who completed the partially-finished pieces in the village were considered to be bedolgoz ¢ k , literally "a worker who is outside working in." In this case, the women worked in their own homes for any of the several state branches of home industry. The connotation of the term bedolgoz ¢ k itself is worthy of interest. It implies an incomplete, secondary, inferior position in the labor market, established specifically for women. As far as I know, by definition, a man cannot be a bedolgoz ¢ .3 One dollar was, in the early 1980s, equivalent to about 46 Forints. In the Summer of 1998 one dollar is equivalent to about 218 Forints.4 Jokes like "the state pretends to pay us and we pretend to work" were common and reflected a rather somber reality. A reality that, inretrospect, some students of the period characterize as a "special hybrid of a dictatorship and 'normal' industrial consumer society" (Berend 1996:155).

5 Here I am talking about a very rapid influx of mass media: this village was without electricity until the late 1950s. By choice, a few old villagers’ households still did not have electricity in the early 1980s. Many villagers told me that they were listening to the news about the Revolution of 1956 on one of two portable transistor radios. 6 This is much more shady and complex than I have the space to discuss here. For example, for the several weeks of seasonal agrarian labor, or for preparing for and selling on the markets village women often take partially paid sick leave for a month or more each time by bribing regional doctors for a written certificate.As I explain below, legality and illegality, formal and informal economies, or first, second and third sectors often merge.7 Older and middle-aged village women often recalled the total control mothers-in-law had over their sons' wives. In turn, the mother-in-law was responsible to her husband, the head of the household, for the young woman's behavior. The mother-in-law, carefully guarding the already small family property from fragmentation, also kept watch over the number of children a young couple had. "When the bed was creaking in the middle of the night, mymother-in-law yelled out 'Stop that!! Why are you at it again!?!" (See Morvay 1981, orig.1956). The most affluent family, with 25 holdof land, lost a daughter-in-law. She became pregnant when there werealready two children, and her mother-in-law forced her, according to informants, to the midwife, who induced abortion with a sharp instrument. Within ten days the 24-year-old woman died of peritonitis. While this was far from a singular episode in the village (cf. T¢th Gusztáv 1939), having one, two, or at most three children with subsequent pregnancies forcibly aborted seems to have been the reproductive strategy of villagers with viable land property. In contrast, the landless poor often had from four to eight children per couple.8 The New Economic Mechanism (NEM) "was put into effect on January, 1968. [It] assessed economic opportunities more realistically, reduced the enforced pace of investment, and provided better incentives. More resources were now made available for the production of consumer goods, and steps were taken to raise the

population's standard of living. The development of industry was made less of a priority, and agriculture along with the infrastructure generally were to receive more attention than earlier.In addition, the new policy allocated considerable investment capitalfor the modernization of farming and abandoned the idea that Hungary should aim at economic self-sufficiency" (Hanák, in Hanák, ed. 1991:220).9 Shortly after the end of the Second World War the twice-weekly local market closed for good.10 Remember that my ethnographic present is between 1982 and 1989 when there still was a Czechoslovakia.11 In the case of snails, they sold them in either the regional state-employed collector who, in turn, delivered the snails in wet sand toa central state distributor who, in turn sold them to France. Only one large family, considered the very poorest in the village, actually ate snail-paprikás for which the children received much ribbing from other villagers.12 During the socialist period medicines were heavily subsidized bythe State so that "investment" in these ventures was minimal, mere fill�rs or the Hungarian equivalent of pennies.13 During much of the Ceausescu regime (between 1965 and 1989) pronatalist policies prevailed and birth control was not allowed. Rather, it was illegal for a Romanian citizen to buy, own, have or use birthcontrol devices, so this particular marketing activity was arisky and rather dangerous one. But there was a needy market and women from Cser�pfalu were more than willing to take the risk becauseit was a highly profitable venture to fill the obvious need.14 I seriously doubt if this was out of "ethnic prejudice" in favorof the approximately two million ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. Rather, as the marketing village women told me, with the Hungarian speakers they were better able to communicate and felt less danger inconducting illegal business.15 Those 50 years old and older would not be considered middle aged, but old in Cser�pfalu. So here I am using my own definition, based on the demographic profile of Cser�pfalu's female population inthe 1980s. Elsewhere I discuss in detail how age is perceived and expressed in Cser�pfalu (Huseby-Darvas 1987).

16 While of the approximately 200,000 German-speaking Hungarian citizens who are often referred to as Swabian, or in Hungarian Sváb (sing) and Svábok (pl), many indeed live in Transdanubia, the marketing women in Cser�pfalu call everyone in that region of Hungaryby that name.17 Hátyi is a region-specific woven basket carried like a backpack.18 The village women spent part of the profit from their sales on church dues, gifts for baptisms, confirmation, and weddings, and clothes for children.19 I wrote a paper concentrating on snowflowering. I asked my landlady to read the proofs. She commented that it was fine, but gotupset because "any Swabian who reads this will realize how profitablesnowflowering really is and will go to our forests in Transdanubia and our market in Eger." She calmed down when I deleted forests' names from the paper and assured her that the villagers in Transdanubia (whom she, along with other cser�pi people, calls Swabians) were not likely to read that particular paper anyway.20 Iz (singular), Izek (plural) is a mythical, malevolent being, presumably male since its penis is mentioned in local curses. The etymology of the word is not known, but the word is used in the northeast Hungarian region frequently (cf. Morvay 1981, orig. 1956; Juhász et al. 1972:610).21 The population of each village in the area has a nickname by which neighboring villagers know them. Depending on the context and tone, nicknames might be used and perceived as either camaraderie, jokes, or insults. If there is no competition involved, for example,when an individual meets a villager from a neighboring settlement at a regional medical clinic, using nicknames would express closeness and camaraderie. Use of a nickname when going toward the market before selling flowers could express hostility in a joking manner; after selling flowers, nicknames would be used jokingly but boastingly at the same time; during or after soccer games between teams from neighboring villages, nicknames often served as insults, resulting in serious fights especially when alcohol was involved (Huseby-Darvas 1984; 1988).22 Even those husbands, who worked in Transdanubia and readily gavetheir wives Transdanubian weather reports fought against these

ventures, cursed their wives for wanting to gather and market the flowers; the men claimed that these activities were too risky, too embarrassing, and too cigányos [Gypsy-like]."23 Local teachers and others who were considered part of the village elite accosted women vendors at the Eger market with, "Do youreally need to do this? Are you not embarrassed by this when you don't even need it?" This appears to be a paradox, but it really isnot if we consider that in the village the elite are also very concerned about material goods and getting ahead, but they are critical of how getting ahead is achieved.24 It is interesting to note that poachers, as well as women who gathered medicinal herbs, conducted their activities in the forests alone, while women who were gathering fruits, berries, mushrooms, andflowers always worked in groups (cf. Bak¢ 1977:148).252. As one nineteen year old commuting village man said to me, [I would not be caught dead selling anything with the women folk on the market], I still help my mother and grandmother with picking snails and gathering flowers and berries for the market. There is always lots of work to be done here. Of course, there is good money too and my mother always saves my share [for when I will get married]..26 She is referring here to Prince Coburg, the last descendant of the Coburg family who owned landed estates in and around the region and large parts of the village until 1945.27 Occasionally, women filled with forest and domestic products to theMez�k�vesd market on the very first bus of the day. They sold either to individual buyers or to a single city buyer who had a stallat the market, thus earning three to five times their daily wages by seven o'clock in the morning. Then they returned to Cser�pfalu to put in their eight hours of labor in the state sector for the 100 to 120 Forints per day rate. Usually there was a specific reason for the market trip: money was needed for confirmation or wedding gifts, for children's new clothes, or for "greasing the palm" of an official, to "smooth" a permit, or for a doctor, so that he or she would treat a sick relative "better," or would prescribe birth control pills to be sold in Romania in an upcoming marketing trip.

28 As I already mentioned in passing, heavy drinking is widespread in Cser�pfalu (as the former village physician, Dr. Ferenc Kaucsek, elaborated in great detail, see Kaucsek, 1981). As elsewhere in Hungary--where alcoholism is officially recognized as a major social problem with an estimated 1,500,000 people afflicted by the disease out of a total population of just over 10,000,000 (estimated by the National Council of Anti-Alcoholism, Alkoholizmus Elleni Országos Bizottság, cited in Kaucsek 1981:306-308)--alcoholism and all it entails is a serious, growing, and apparently fairly recent phenomenon in Cser�pfalu. At least according to village elders and the non-native former elite, the villagers in this grape-growing settlement, as a 75-year-old man maintained,

always liked to drink and our lives were in part centered aroundthe vineyards and the wine cellars. Yet having and serving ¢ - bor [old wine, last year’s wine] at each harvest was the sign ofa j ¢ gazda, a j ¢ cser � pi [a good master of the land, a good villager]. We were always moderate in drinking too. A man was not a man if he got drunk. We condemned drunkenness in the old days. Now most cellars are empty by March [grapeharvest is in October] and all these young ones drink in excess.

Commuting, living in worker's hostels, and waiting for trains and buses seem to invite more drinking. This is substantiated by presentand former commuters and by their families. At the same time, some of the old village sayings and rules, both unwritten as well as recorded in the local church archives, indicate that at least some villagers did drink in excess in the old days as well. For example, it was recorded in the local church archives that "going through the cemetery while drunk [was] punishable...." There are also written and unwritten laws about men's proper behavior in wine cellars and vineyards (cf. Bak¢ 1961, G�nczi 1910, Szendrey �kos 1938:124-137, and Ujváry 1975:123-128). This is not intended, however, to cast doubt on the fact that widespread and problem-causing heavy drinking is more a current and growing social phenomenon in Cser�pfalu than a traditional one. Drinking in excess is explicitly related by most villagers to various stresses that are involved in commuting to urban-industrial jobs, and implicitly connected with radical changes

in life styles, demands, and values.29 It is worth noting the strong contradiction between both the official socialist ideology and the Calvinist notions of simplicity and frugality vis a vis the village socioeconomic ideology and strategy I am describing in this paper. According to socialist ideology, in socialist societies the ideal combined measure of human value is "talent, culture, social usefulness, and the degree of participation in important decisions" (Szánt¢ 1977:377). By contrast, in capitalist systems the bases for rank and social status are money, success, and career, along with a petty bourgeois mentality that centers on conspicuous consumption for its own sake (ibid.). It appears that the villagers' ideology, which guides theirsocioeconomic behavior, fits the pattern of the capitalist model as defined by Szánt¢, rather than either the Calvinist model or the socialist model, and increasingly so since the late 1960s.30 I mean here "idiom" in the same sense as Anthony Cohen (1982:319) defines it: entire behavior...including the total ideological and cultural apparatus which supports it." Yet, there isan existing and growing abyss between official ideology and local ideology insofar as explaining, justifying, and guiding socioeconomicstrategies and life styles in the village.31 It seems to me that these were harbingers of the values and conspicuous consumption patterns that appeared in full force, reinforced by advertisements and officially accepted and encouraged practices after 1989, i.e. the end of socialism (see also R¢na-Tas, 1995, 1997; V�r�s, 1996).

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