Download - Economic Regimes, Local Worlds and the Changing Meanings of Work in Rural Transylvania. Südosteuropa 62 (2014), no. 4, pp. 454-474.

ÁRPÁD TöHöTöM SZABó

Economic Regimes, Local Worlds and the Changing Meanings of Work in Rural Transylvania

Abstract. This article presents the phenomenon of traditional reciprocal work (the kaláka) in rural agrarian communities in Transylvania . The paper’s theoretical background is derived from different approaches in economic anthropology, but it also makes use of perspectives from historical ethnography, economic history and economic sociology . While the paper begins with a particular social phenomenon that is characteristic mainly of rural communi-ties where both agrarian and non-agrarian work is done, it also offers an insight into general changes in the everyday conceptions and practices of work, and into the areas of wage labour, communal labour and household labour . The analysis of the kaláka in historical and contemporary perspective can shed new light on the way morality and rationality, aimed at risk reduction and going beyond profit maximization, as well as informality and formality, communal and individual behaviour are opposed but also interconnected in the everyday economic practices of such communities .

Árpád Töhötöm Szabó is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hungarian Ethnography and Anthropology at the Faculty of Letters at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj.

Introduction

In economic anthropology it is a well-known, even stereotypical argument that today’s pervasive market language and economic logic implies the existence of a homo oeconomicus, everywhere and all the time. However, many economic anthropologists have their doubts about that, and argue that the organization of economic life varies greatly in different cultures and at different times. Karl Polanyi, for example, draws attention to the fact that the notion of an economy based on the laws of supply and demand, presuming scarcity of means, is actually fairly recent and that previously, economic activity was embedded in different social institutions, mainly kin groups or groups that used redistribu-tion .1 If that is true, then we can presume that the relations inside the triad of

1 Karl Polanyi, The Economy as Instituted Process, in: idem / Conrad M. Arensberg / Harry W . Pearson (eds .), Trade and Market in the Early Empires . Economies in History and Theory . Chicago/IL 1957, 243-270.

Südosteuropa 62 (2014), no. 4, pp. 457-478

INforMAL LABour

458 Árpád Töhötöm Szabó

production–distribution–consumption will be constantly changing, and that production too – and within it the practices of work and the understanding and perception of it – will be in a state of constant change.2 Jürgen Kocka in one of his articles traces changes in the perception of work from the time of the Ancient Greeks through modern industrial society and right up to the present . He identifies certain basic differences which can be found both in the social distribution of work and in the way people think about work.3

With those considerations as its starting point then, the present article exam-ines a specific production, or more accurately a practice of organizing work, called kaláka4 in Hungarian and meaning the practice of working cooperatively in a form of borrowed labour during which a number of households come together to help another household. It is the same sort of thing as what English speakers might refer to as a ‘working party’ – or a ‘work bee’ in the United States.

The article points out that the previously mentioned changes can occur quite quickly, even during one individual’s lifetime . A further intention of this piece is to draw attention to the fact that the vagueness of the term ‘work’, that is to say the fact that ‘work’ means different things and is done differently in dif-ferent cultures, can be well observed in the fact that the same person might do things that reflect different ideologies in different spheres. For example, there is the sphere of wage labour, which is any work done for money; there is com-munal work, which is unpaid work done for the benefit of individual members of a community or for the whole community; and there is household labour which is work done for one’s own household. All of those different types of work require and reflect different moralities. Moreover, when analysing them, the historical perspective must be taken into account and it should not be for-gotten that the different spheres function differently at different times. Under feudalism in Transylvania, work outside household or community most com-monly meant the feudal corvée . Wage labour under state socialism generally implied state-guided labour, while the very same wage labour under capitalism has varied from state labour to work done in the grey zones of the economy.

People are active in all spheres simultaneously and their simultaneous pres-ence – spanning from feudalism through socialism into capitalism – can occur in different ways. In a number of cases, the spheres may be clearly separated, as with the moralities of wage labour and household labour under socialism. In

2 E . Paul Durrenberger, Labour, in: James G . Carrier (ed .), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham, Northampton/MA 2005, 125-140.

3 Jürgen Kocka, Az európai történelem egyik problémája: a munka, Korall. Társadalomtörténeti folyóirat 5-6 (2001), 5-17 .

4 The word kaláka is derived from the Romanian clacă .

459Work in Rural Transylvania

other cases, movements from one sphere to another might result in much more fluid boundaries, such as between community labour and household labour. Changes in the practices and ideologies of work reflect broader social environ-ments (the macro level) as well as narrower community relations (the meso and micro level) in which work is actually organized. Eric Wolf has stressed too the relationship between work and ideologies.5 Work is in fact a sensitive indicator of the relationships between the macro and micro levels, as well as of how they change. Nor is cooperation in work a phenomenon that occurs irrespective of time and space, even though work-like cooperation can be found in environ-ments as diverse as the Eastern European context we are discussing here, tra-ditional rural Finland6 and pre-(and sometimes post-)industrial Scandinavia,7 as well as the work practices of European settlers in North America.8

The focus here is work, cooperation and reciprocity as observed in a specific context, namely the rural regions of Transylvania. As well as outlining the general framework and conditions of cooperation, this paper also presents the forms of organization of the kaláka in the post-communist period and how it disappeared . The ultimate aim of the paper is to illustrate the experiences of people who found themselves at work in such changing circumstances.

The first part of my paper is an analysis of the conditions of cooperation and reciprocity, relying both on my own fieldwork and on historical resources, studies of peasantry and the theories of economic anthropology . In the second part, based mostly on fieldwork but relying too on the scholarly literature on reciprocity, I describe an example of cooperation that explains how an actual cooperative network functioned and what factors led to its disappearance. Fi-nally, in the third part, again mainly based on fieldwork, I have described the experiences of the inhabitants of rural areas and analysed the transformations they saw following the political changes there and the recent economic crisis.

5 Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History. Los Angeles/CA, Berkeley/CA, London 1997. See especially chapter 12: The new laborers, 354-383.

6 Andrew Gryf Paterson, Networked Roots of Talkoot, Cooperation, and Information Society in Finland, 2010, available at <http://www.osuustoiminta.coop/tekstit/tre2010_paterson_networked-roots-of-talkoot-in-finland_10-2010.pdf>. All internet sources were accessed on 23 January 2015 .

7 Helge Norddølum, The “Dugnad” in the Pre-Industrial Peasant Community. An Attempt at an Explanation, Ethnologia Scandinavica. A Journal for Nordic Ethnology 10 (1980), 102-112, Asbjørn Klepp, Reciprocity and Integration into a Market Economy: An Attempt at Explaining Varying Formalization of the Dugnad in Pre-industrial Society, Ethnologia Scandinavica. A Journal for Nordic Ethnology 12 (1982), 85-93 .

8 Solon T . Kimball, Rural Social organization and Co-operative Labor, American Journal of Sociology 55 (1949), no. 1, 38-49; Catharine Anne Wilson, Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood, The Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001), no. 3, 1-19.


In that section I refer on the one hand to the results of economic anthropology, and on the other to the anthropological and sociological scholarly literature on the East European – in fact mainly Romanian – post-socialist period.

The fieldwork which forms the basis of the study was conducted in three loca-tions at two different times. First, in the early 2000s, I carried out fieldwork in two Szekler areas, the eastern part of Harghita county and the northern part of Covasna county, with a particular focus on cooperation. Most of the inhabitants are Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Gypsies. I then worked in the southern part of Mureş county, visiting villages inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians, and Gypsies . In the second phase, in 2014, I returned to one of the Szekler villages inhabited by Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Gypsies, and to a village in Mureş county inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians, and Gypsies.9 In this second phase I tried to find answers to my questions about the local division of labour, concepts of work and work habits, and local experience of integration and discrimination through work. I carried out structured and semi-structured interviews, tried to take part in people’s activities and often worked alongside them so that I could conduct participant observation . Eventually then, the resources I could draw on were my own observations, my fieldwork journals and the records of the interviews I conducted.

Background and Short History of Kaláka

A kaláka was and still is a traditional form of cooperation practised mainly in rural communities in Transylvania, in agrarian and non-agrarian contexts . In short, the term refers to services provided to each other by the households of a rural community .10 The scholarly literature presents the kaláka as voluntary cooperation by the inhabitants of rural agricultural settlements,11 but it is pres-ently used with a wider meaning. Although at one time it was a very well defined institution of rural farming, a tendency has developed to use the term to refer

9 I worked in this village between 2009-2013 on topics related to economic history and economic anthropology, and the question of cooperation was included in the research.

10 “[I]f in someone’s household or farm a type of work, in order to be performed, needs a bigger workload than that available to the family, and they cannot pay for the work – or they do not even think of employing paid workers – they organize a kaláka .” Árpád Töhötöm Szabó, Self-Sufficiency, Moral Values and Cooperation: Traditional Reciprocal Works in Transylvania, in: Vilmos Keszeg (ed.), Who Owns the Tradition? Proceedings of the Symposium „Who Owns the Tradition? What Is Its Purpose? Tradition Between Culture, User and Contractor”. Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár 2014, 184-194, 187.

11 I have reviewed the related sources and literature in an earlier work. See Árpád Töhötöm Szabó, Kooperáló közösségek . Munkavégzés és kapcsolatok a falusi gazdálkodásban [Cooperating communities. Work and relations in rural economy]. Târgu Mureş/Marosvásárhely 2009.


to any type of work done by the members of one household for the members of another . According to the last census in 2011, the Hungarian ethnic group in Transylvania were a minority at 18.9% of the population of Transylvania and only 6.5% of the population of all Romania. That circumstance contributed to the turning of the kaláka, and the altruism and willingness to cooperate it im-plied, into a symbol of the minority group, and as a result it became simplified to a certain extent . A kaláka might then be described in this context as a form of voluntary assistance exercised within an ethnic group by its members, so that it might be more closely linked to moral concepts rather than economic conditions . However, a kaláka is a much more complex phenomenon, for in some cases it goes beyond ethnic limitations and cannot be explained simply by saying that people who live in villages are therefore more willing to cooperate.

Scholarly literature by anthropologists on reciprocity, works describing co-operative forms similar to a kaláka, yet other works on the history of society and economy as well as on ethnography all show that the motives for the sharing of tasks and profit are connected with the environment and with the exploitation of resources . At the same time, they emphasize that communities sustaining certain forms of cooperation can develop different, and even covert techniques actually to compel their members to cooperate . According to Peter Henningsen that is because the

“[t]raditional peasant society was dominated by a special perception of economy and economic behaviour which was indissolubly tied to the perception of life as a zero-sum game and of the surrounding world as full of danger, with misfortune liable to strike anyone at any time” .12

Historical sources on the kaláka provide two views of how it developed. On the one hand, it can be viewed as the free cooperation of peasants, devised so that the tasks ahead could be carried out so that no external actor participates in the creation of the necessary cooperation. However, the history of the kaláka allows another interpretation, according to which it was an alliance created by peasants to enable them to fulfil feudal obligations forced upon them by their landlords. Convincing arguments for both those interpretations can be constructed from the sources . I had chosen formerly free peasant (yeoman) and former serf com-munities as the location of my fieldwork, but even so I found no significant dif-ferences in their recent practice of the kaláka. In the free peasant communities, landlord coercion could not have had any significant role in the kaláka, while in the serf communities the role of voluntary association must have been rather

12 Peter Henningsen, Peasant Society and the Perception of a Moral Economy – Redis-trib ution and Risk Aversion in Traditional Peasant Culture, Scandinavian Journal of History 26 (2001), no. 4, 271-296, 274.


less significant. In any case the differences, if any, had disappeared by the end of the 20th century and are nowhere to be found in the available sources.13

Another difficult question about the kaláka is whether it is the result of a moral order, related to mentality, or a consequence of specific economic conditions.14 One answer might be suggested by considering the interdependence of men-tality and economy, rather than seeing them in a clear ‘chicken-and-egg’ kind of causal relation. Any sort of causal relation is however very hard to establish today, since we know so little about the development of the kaláka, especially its relationship with the peasant mentality. Undoubtedly, the kaláka is connected with the economic and social conditions of individuals in communities which supported it . Lack of money and spare labour capacity, the amount of available land and the fragmentation of agricultural properties caused by distribution of families were all held in balance by the level of control maintained within the community .15

It is quite clear that the rules of participation and work descriptions were related to some kind of morality beyond materialist considerations, and that the organization of peasant communities was more than simply an answer to rough material conditions . In fact, material and moral conditions are in continuous interaction and the operation of peasant communities cannot be explained simply as economic logic dominating an economic discourse . There is certainly rationality, but not the sort that weighs up all possible costs and benefits; it does not aim to maximize profit, but to reduce risks and establish a form of security available to the whole community.16 Within that framework every form of cooperation reinforces a special kind of rationality by the dictates of which any potential individual gains are always looked at through the prism of the needs of the community .

In my opinion, it is that duality which has ensured the long-term survival of the kaláka – and by that I do not mean the survival of a sort of kaláka such as some intellectuals might suppose to have been derived from folklore . Rather, I am referring to the kaláka that has been part of traditional Transylvanian village

13 See for the details Szabó, Cooperating Communities . 14 Szabó, Self-Sufficiency, Moral Values and Cooperation, 189-191.15 See for instance Henningsen, Peasant Society and the Perception of a Moral Economy;

and Wilson, Reciprocal Work Bees .16 Peter Henningsen’s article about Danish peasants clearly shows this. James C. Scott’s

work confirms it, too. He dealt with this topic using non-European data and elaborated the view of the moral peasant on that background. See Henningsen, Peasant Society and the Perception of a Moral Economy; James C . Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant . Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven/CT 1976.


life from at least the middle of the 17th century17 until the time of land collec-tivization. The capitalization, the free wage labour, the increase in the role of money as well as the land concentration that transformed Transylvanian rural life in the 19th century reduced the kaláka’s significance, but its importance there is indisputable. Indeed, the more significant types of labour were carried out under the kaláka system until the 1950s, just before land collectivization, and it is no accident that an essential ingredient of a kaláka was some sort of festive character:18

“In the past, when people carried or threshed wheat, the whole family carried the wheat. They carried it together [...], the relatives. It went like this: today we carry yours, tomorrow mine, and threshing was the same, the relatives or friends gath-ered, or the brothers-in-law, and there was cooking, chicken soup and roast [...]. It was like a holiday, that is how it was.” (female, 78, 2004)19

I have mentioned the festive character of the kaláka mostly for the sake of com-pleteness because unfortunately there is insufficient space here to discuss it in detail .20 The feasts themselves were organized cooperatively and reciprocally, and under the appropriate local rules. For example, people not only attended a wedding, say – a social event not strictly related to work – but they assisted with the organization of it, in the collection and preparation of the materials needed, in the cooking of the food, and so on. Significantly, that same pattern of community behaviour, dating from before state socialism, was maintained after it as well:

“In the past and even today people bring chickens, flour, eggs. They did not give large sums of money, nor big presents . [ . . .] They call 50-60 people today [to help] . They start on Tuesday nowadays, until Sunday night [...] on Sunday they even wash the dishes .” (female, 78, 2004)

State Socialism and the Practice of Kaláka: Alteration and Preservation

Under state socialism, official economic management programmes monopo-lized resources as part of a completely new modernization project. Peasants had to surrender their land to create collective farms, so that one of the most important contexts of the kaláka disappeared, although many other types of work, such as construction, were still organized in that form. Still, working

17 The first written sources are from the early 17th century, but the system might date from earlier times . See Szabó, Cooperating Communities, 81 .

18 Wilson, Reciprocal Work Bees, 11 .19 Gender, age, and year the interview was conducted.20 Szabó, Cooperating Communities, 95 .


parties for agricultural purposes did not disappear completely, for it remained an important condition of the collectivization of farms that members of the col-lective, or even inhabitants of villages received land for collective farming . The size of such plots of land was usually 1500m2 although that depended greatly on negotiations carried out locally, or on the connections between the president of the collective farm and the villagers . In short, on the usual sort of informal practices that made village life practicable and bearable – even survivable – in the state socialist era:

“Once I sold some ripe peas. They threatened me with jail many times. Because I sold to the members of the collective farm at a better price than I could have with the state. We had profit but they disregarded it. We were not allowed, we should have sent it to the factory. Once I promised more to the people than I was allowed to, and even the factory workers [from the nearby town] had their plots for share-cropping. [...] But it is only me who knows how much I struggled to be able to pay them .” (male, former president of collective farm, 65, 2012)21

For the cultivation of the small plots of land received from the collective farm, reciprocity and the operation of networks continued to have an important role, which highlights the importance of the local informal practices.

During the fieldwork for this article, when I was discussing the state socialist era with locals, I often heard them say, in strongly nostalgic tones, ‘this house was built that way’. They meant of course that it was built by a kaláka, and only one or two specialist craftsmen would have been paid for what they did. People often worked in return for previous help, or they were effectively lending work to the family who had organized the kaláka . It is important to emphasize that such obligations were often inherited by sons from their fathers, and so were passed from generation to generation. The bridge thereby created between generations served to help ensure the preservation of traditional work practices. Clearly, we meet here the subject of symbolic capital, prestige and honour within village life,22 which underlines the importance of the kaláka from another viewpoint, for despite the fact that the villagers had limited access to land the kaláka continued to be important even during state socialism:

“Of course, [I built the house] with help. Because back then I only had to think of something, and ten-twenty people came to help. When I had the well dug out, so

21 For general conditions and for the culture of negotiations during state socialism see David Kideckel, Colectivism şi singurătate în satele româneşti. Ţara Oltului în perioada comunistă şi în primii ani după Revoluţie. Iaşi, 2006, 55-73 (Original: The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond. Ithaca/NY 1993).

22 Pierre Bourdieu, Symbolic Capital, in: idem, The Logic of Practice. Stanford/CA 1990, 112-121 .


many came to help, that I had to send half of them home, as there was nothing to do .” (male, 69, 2014)

So, while it is true that under state socialism the material foundation of the kaláka was certainly greatly transformed, we must understand that although people had no land, or only limited access to it, it was still easily possible for other types of work to be carried out under cooperative arrangements. The structure of particular communities, the density of social networks, traditional ways of organizing work, the system of inherited debt, the local organizations of hon-our and prestige together created favourable conditions for the survival of the kaláka. Moreover – and in saying this I make no excuses for state socialism, for it undoubtedly placed the lives of individuals and communities in turmoil23 – rural communities were still able to function in some ways. A possible reason for that is that the socialist power closed down the horizons of the communities from a certain point of view. Newspapers and other media were censored, and for the communities studied foreign travel was limited while it would have been virtually impossible for any of them to work abroad.

At the same time, the functioning of the rural communities, for example family feasts organized outside the official public sphere, symbolized a form of withdrawal from officially approved ideology and stressed the validity of grassroots forms of sociality . In that context, any kaláka organized in the state socialist period can be understood as an unofficial and alternative method of organizing labour, and even if we cannot speak of conscious resistance nor of the autonomous governance and regulation of private life and prosperity, we can still identify an arrangement of work outside the sphere of the socialist state. That then brings this interpretation closer to James Scott’s view that reciprocal work in a totalitarian context can have an indirect political meaning as well.24 In the state socialist era, the state aimed for total control; control over resources, time and each individual human being .25 The kaláka was a good opportunity for people to take back control even if only partially and temporarily, and to regulate both their time and their individuality in the form of their ability to apply their labour .

23 Gail Kligman / Katherine Verdery, Peasants Under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962. Princeton/NJ, Oxford 2011.

24 James C . Scott, Az ellenállás hétköznapi formái, Replika 23-24 (1996), 109-130, István Rév, The Advantages of Being Atomized: How Hungarian Peasants Coped with Collectivization, Dissent 34 (1987), 335-351 .

25 Katherine Verdery, The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceauşescu’s Romania, in: eadem, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton/NJ 1996, 39-57.


These questions obviously involve the separation of the spheres of the organi-zation of work. Before state socialism, paid labour was present only sporadically in rural areas, but from the very beginning of state socialism work was organ-ized in two or three spheres, separated to various degrees. Those spheres were the official one, which was paid, the communal and the household spheres. Official paid labour was part of the first sphere, which was sharply separated from the other two, the community and the household spheres, which in their turn were connected. Work carried out in the community was in fact an exten-sion of work done in the household, for those taking part in communal activity worked as members of the household, being relatives and friends, and followed the same moral imperatives as they did within the family; and so it continued after state socialism. Based on the reports, it was inconceivable for someone to work less hard in a kaláka, although people often tended to idle in the official state socialist sphere . one of the anecdotes heard in one of the villages sheds light on this. The story went that one of the tractor drivers arrived at work very tired. To avoid work that day, he announced that his tractor had broken down and sent for the tools to repair it. He then laid down under the tractor, tied his hands to the front shaft and slept soundly. Such behaviour was common in the state socialist era, even if such ingenuity was not. Significantly however, anything like that would have been firmly against the ethics of household and community work.

Re-privatization, Post-socialism: the Material and Moral Conditions of Cooperation after Regime Change

one of the characteristics of small-scale industrial agriculture in Transylva-nia, which saw a revival in 1990, was its traditional nature. That, among other things, induced the farming units, the households, to overcome shortage of labour by recourse to a traditional framework. Instead of offering money for labour they offered to do some form of work in return, and the kaláka provided the best framework for that. As agriculture was returned to private hands as the regime changed, the kaláka too enjoyed a short revival. Then, with changes in agriculture and in mentality, for example the increase in the role of individual values, it soon declined again .26 All the same, in a reduced and altered form it is still practised today .

26 Szabó, Self-Sufficiency, Moral Values and Cooperation, 184.


The practice of kaláka was connected not only to material conditions, but also to social and moral circumstances, to mentality .27 Moreover, one of the charac-teristics of re-privatization in Romania was that the legal principle of restitutio in integrum applied to it, by which the situation of property ownership was restored to what it had been before collectivisation. Re-privatization also followed the logic of atonement, with the authorities attempting to create political legitimacy rather than trying to help establish profitable peasant businesses. The macro level ideology of the ‘reversibility of events’28 met micro level expectations, for the majority of people were convinced29 that the only correct way to proceed was to return land use – and the manner of its use – to what it had been before collectivization. That led to several obvious and significant consequences, but for our purposes here only one is of interest, which is that in a resource-deficient environment – and especially in the absence of money and machines − people still had to cultivate their land somehow, something encouraged not only by the wish to make life better, but by moral considerations as well.

Moral considerations of that kind exerted a strong influence on Transylvanian agriculture during the 1990s, and in a manner very much characteristic of peasant life people interpreted the present, and the people living now, from the point of view of their moral obligations to their ancestors.30 In the absence of money and machines therefore, one of the ways to fulfil such obligations was to organize certain work phases making use of the resources of relatives, neighbours and friends – the kaláka in fact .31 As small-scale agriculture in Romania witnessed a boom in the 1990s, naturally the kaláka too was reinterpreted, and for many people the re-instituted practice of it felt like the regaining of possession of their lands, and the reinstatement of the fragmented structure of the land . The

27 “Mentality is what changes last“, as the French historian Jacques Le Goff put it, “and the history of mentalities is the history of the sluggishness of history .” Quoted in Henningsen, Peasant Society and the Perception of a Moral Economy, 280 .

28 The term “refers to the project of restoring matters ‘as they were before’, thus leaving behind a recent past now exposed as a fatal mistake”, cf. Christian Giordano / Dobrinka Kostova, The Social Production of Mistrust, in: Chris Hann (ed .), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia . London 2002, 74-91, 77f .

29 Based on the subsequent reports, with the exception of the former agrarian elite.30 “Their rationality was, however, culturally conditioned, and must be especially

assessed in a long-term perspective in which social obligations and fundamental feelings of responsibility toward the descendants and the farm overshadowed more short-sighted calculation of profitability on the individual level.” Klepp, Reciprocity and Integration, 93 .

31 It seems that similar situations lead people at different times and in different places to similar solutions: “through reciprocal labour, the farm family was able to create capital. It was also better able to cope with risks. With a low standard of living, no insurance, and the possibility of sudden and unexpected calamities, it was essential to be on good terms with your neighbours .” Wilson, Reciprocal Work Bees, 3f .


following quotation reflects the fact that in the 1990s people were accustomed to work together, which is not the case now:

“It existed in the beginning, back then... but today everyone minds their own busi-ness. No, no, it does not exist at all. In the beginning we really stuck together, and three-four people went to work [...] in the 90s, back then I used to have brothers-in-law, and I went to work for them... but today... it is like... I don’t know... everything is so lonely... or I don’t know, everyone is minding their own business, to finish their own works.” (male, 61, 2012)

The functioning of the kaláka and of reciprocity is well illustrated by a specific and typical case involving the cooperation of four households . In one of the villages, at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, four households situated in a larger neighbourhood of ten households (more exactly dwell-ings) operated a network of co-operation in which the works performed were typical, although their intensity set them apart . For three or four summers the households constantly helped each other and carried out various tasks, large and small. They mowed (mostly by hand), made hay, brought in the wheat, harvested corn, and saw to both large and small scale building works. While the kaláka succeeded in freeing the members of the households from the need to find money to recruit a work force from outside, it encouraged them to rely on more and more loans of labour, creating the pressure of an ever increasing spiral of prestige and honour .

The fact that only four of the ten households cooperated shows how specific the situation was. Two of the houses were empty, three were lived in by wid-ows who could not participate in maintaining reciprocal relations, and one was inhabited by a person who was allocated work elsewhere due to his kinship relations. The head of the latter household had been accustomed from time to time to carry out services for the other four households for money, for example transporting items using his cart . The average area of land belonging to each of the four cooperating households was three or four hectares, with none larger than six hectares. Everyone owned hand tools, while at various times two of the households had horses and a cart. The head of one of the households had worked on the construction site of the so-called White House in Bucharest sometime before 1989, and his tools had inventory numbers marked on them, making him the butt of the others’ jokes because of course everybody could see he had come by them illicitly. Because there was no agricultural machinery like tractors or combine harvesters, on the one hand cooperation was easier since it could hardly become asymmetric in character, but the actual work was harder. From time to time therefore they had to bring in mechanized services, which needed to be paid for. However, produce was only occasionally taken to market, and then mostly only the local one. Households that could do so sold a few swine,


pigs or calves, but all in all the households’ market presence was irregular and generated only low income. Their case was by no means exceptional, and most villagers at that time followed more or less similar patterns under conditions of shortage of funds and constantly changing circumstances .

The head of one of the cooperating households was of official retirement age, while members of the other households, or at least a number of the ones who regularly participated in the kaláka, were in paid employment as well. Partici-pants in that particular version of kaláka were therefore simultaneously active in all three of the spheres of paid, community and household work. In certain cases they earned money for their work, in other cases they did not; sometimes they paid money for services, sometimes they did not . Thus the kaláka was em-bedded in other forms of work organization, but it seemed a good way to meet economic challenges under the particular circumstances. At least it allowed for the partial avoidance of the use of scarce funds . At the same time, because items and services that could not be procured from within the household had to be paid for, paid labour or incomes from outside the household were of great im-portance . All of that required constant negotiation as everyone tried as hard as possible to accommodate their working schedules and to harmonize the needs of the various households .

The answer then, to the question I posed about the reason for their cooperation and how they kept account of their debts, is in fact very short and concise: “Life is long. Those who think of helping others only if they can help them back are weak persons” (male, 61, 2000). That answer in turn moves the interpretation to the level of general reciprocity32 and addresses the system of reciprocal work exchange within the given community.33

While objects and their exchange can be quantified relatively precisely, at-titudes to work show much greater flexibility even though work carried out in the sphere of official or paid labour is also quantified. As an example, it is com-mon in such communities for the exact amount of goods given at weddings and other ceremonies to be carefully recorded in a notebook. In the case of weddings, money is recorded too, and I myself heard of certain individuals who noted how many wreaths and bouquets were offered at funerals, so that the family who received the gifts could give back exactly the same amount. Clearly, such conscientiousness points towards balanced reciprocity.

However, the villagers did not behave quite so punctiliously regarding work. Perhaps naturally, they differentiated work carried out with the help of a cart or a tractor, because of course machinery can do many times the amount of work

32 Marshall D . Sahlins, Stone Age Economics . London 1974, 193 .33 Klepp, Reciprocity and Integration, 91 .


that hands and backs can do. For work done by human muscle power there is a great deal of variation. Obviously, a fit man doing a whole day’s worth of heavy physical work is not doing the same thing as a boy helping around the house for an hour or two; nevertheless, such data do not appear in the accounts maintained by villagers. In fact it must be admitted that there are no data and there are no true accounts; but there are traditional obligations and there is traditional knowledge, and together they make up a general moral order that can be interpreted as part of the same habitual system .

Just as the community appreciates diligent, hardworking people, so it appreci-ates too those who are eager to help others. There was a case when a man, not from one of the four households concerned here, delivered roof tiles to one of the households. When the owner of the house asked what they would cost, the delivery man said two things to avoid having to accept payment. “Come on”, he said, “your father used to help us out a lot . And think of it as if I’d come to put the tiles up!” (male, 32, 2000). In that case, the owner of the house saw re-deemed a loan of which he himself might have been unaware. At the same time, in his second remark the supplier of the tiles referred to a general obligation that would have been well understood by everyone in the village. It is important to emphasize that common and sometimes unspoken knowledge means that in such cases people often turn up uninvited to help. The building or roofing of a house are times when a household can provide the necessary workforce only by recourse to a system of reciprocity . The system has another clear advantage in that during busy periods, a household has available a workforce from outside but there is no need to supply goods nor continue to provide employment for them when the intensity of work decreases.34

The exchange of services during a kaláka points to general reciprocity in every sense. Often instead of the AB-BA type of direct return we can identify a much more complex network of AB-BC-CD-DA, and so on. We see therefore a type of circular reciprocity, extended over time and throughout the community and within which the participants, the exchanged amount of work and the precise services and goods circulate almost untraceably .

According to one of the dominant approaches from the field of economic anthropology,35 the value of certain items is based on the amount of time invested in the production of them. That requires that work must be somehow quantified which, along with the need to enhance the effectiveness of the work, is an impor-tant task of modern work organization, economics and the sociology of work,

34 Bourdieu, Symbolic Capital, 118 .35 Durrenberger, Labour, 125 .


under both capitalist and state socialist systems .36 Generally speaking, there is no such quantification with the kaláka system, nor is there external control . The increase in its efficiency is much more the result of habit and reciprocity than the result of exact calculations, which is interesting in that it demonstrates the duality of how people take part in work, within both more and less accurately quantified systems. People sometimes might take part in a kaláka even at the cost of using their free time to perform unquantifiable and unpaid work for others.

While it is perfectly clear that the work they do in the kaláka has monetary value, they completely omit it from the frameworks of “institutionally organized and guaranteed misrecognition” .37 “We do not count the work”, I often heard people say, when they were reckoning the costs of certain activities. I talked to one of the leaders of a household about whether it was worth going to the forest for wood, or whether it was easier to buy it: “I brought a cart of wood the other day. The horse is mine, the cart is mine, I have a chainsaw. I only have to pay for the felling permit and the fuel. And we don’t count the work” (male, 40, 2000).38 It was perfectly obvious to the man that it was more profitable to do the work himself than to spend money buying the wood, as by relying on his own efforts he avoided unnecessary expenditure. That approach is not only significant in itself, but it facilitates the loaning of work as well as work-based cooperation. That is especially true if we take into account, as already mentioned above, that the aim is not to maximize profit but to reduce exposure to risk.

Economic transactions like those above are embedded in social relations, and there are social bonds between the organizers of the work and the ones who do it. Consequently, the work bears different meanings. First of all, work within someone’s own household or community differs greatly from work done under contract, by a workforce selling its labour. Rural people do not consider their workforce as an asset, indeed in many cases they do not consider it to be finite and as a result they think they can always use more and more of it. So work car-ried out in a person’s household or community has not become a commodity .39 The imperative of not counting the financial value of the work presupposes a relationship between man and his environment that has been emphasized

36 Tibor Kuczi, Munkásprés . A munka kikényszerítésének története az ipari forradalomtól napjainkig . Budapest 2011 .

37 Bourdieu, Symbolic Capital, 112 .38 He uses the popular brand name of the Soviet-made chainsaw: ‘druzhba’ [дружба],

which literally means ‘friendship’.39 Karl Polanyi, The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land,

and Money, in: idem, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic origins of our Time. Boston/MA 2001 [Original: Boston/MA 1944], 71-80.


by Bourdieu as well: “Pains are to labour what the gift is to trade”.40 That dual approach to work underlines the fact that market capitalization has only partly been integrated into the rural economy; in fact, there are two systems working in parallel, although they do meet in a quite natural way. That view is also sup-ported by the duality of another aspect of work. Within the capitalist mode of production, work has been detached from the social essence of people. Work and the worker are present with independent statuses, and the performance of work has become alienated from who performs it. In contrast, for activities carried out in rural households, work still forms part of the social relationship, of the system of kinship, of the relationships between neighbours or even be-tween farmers and day-labourers. The nature of the job is not detached from the person, as a worker is also a father, a husband, a relative or a friend, and sometimes a co-worker.41 Work is in that sense familiar, but in another sense too, for a “family atmosphere” is created during such work opportunities. A fa-vourable mood is as much part of such events as hard work, but is considered normal only in connection with household work. For paid work, it is not so.

My interlocutors reported several cases in which the target they had set them-selves could be achieved only if night lights were to be installed in the yard, and they should work until late into the night. Self-exploitation and overwork is no stranger to the rural community – but only when working for oneself. Such cases clearly show how malleable the border is between household and community work.

The lack of quantification and the fact that work is embedded in social rela-tions does not necessarily mean that the work carried out by kaláka is completely informal. Obviously, it depends on how we interpret formal and informal, the relations and transitions between the two. It also depends on whether we ac-cept that informal work is done in stateless societies, for there are rules within them too. Or should we state rather that informal economies are created by regulations rooted in the modern economy, that everything that lies outside the official rules and therefore cannot be included in account books and cannot be taxed is informal?42

Based on my field-work experience as an ethnologist and my reading of anthropology and economic history, my argument is that there are multiple

40 Bourdieu, Symbolic Capital, 117 .41 In Marshall Sahlins’s view this is the case of the domestic mode of production. Sahlins,

Stone Age Economics, 76f .42 M . Estellie Smith, The Informal Economy, in: Stuart Plattner (ed .), Economic Anthrop-

ology. Stanford/CA 1989, 292-317, 295. Philip Harding / Richard Jenkins, The Myth of the Hidden Economy. Milton Keynes, Philadelphia/PA 1989, 15.


transitions between the informal and formal spheres. An informal economy in my interpretation is an extension of an existing formal one, the movements between the two being far from teleological, not therefore a progressive trans-formation from black to white.43 The kaláka is much more formalized within a community, so it cannot be considered informal . one may not arrive at nor leave a kaláka when one likes, certain works are strictly delimited based on gender while others are not, and the quality and quantity of food and drink is regulated . The participants in a kaláka cannot and do not ask for money, nor do they receive any. Every member of the community is aware of those rules and if they wish to remain participants in the system implicit in them, they are obliged obey to them .

To understand the kaláka as an informal practice − besides the epistemologi-cal need to contrast the formal and the informal – it must be emphasized that participation in the informal sphere often assumes some kind of embedding in the formal sphere .44 I refer here not simply to the fact that an increasingly large proportion of the food and drink served at a kaláka requires a certain amount of external income. It is undeniably true too not only that the participants offer their physical strength, but that the specific knowledge and working techniques available will have been acquired in the formal sector. In many cases the actual materials and tools used come from the formal sector, as is well illustrated by the example given above of the four households. The tools with inventory numbers supplement the example only anecdotally, for people relied heavily on the resources of their formal jobs, “hired” tools from their factories, worked for themselves during official hours; all of which was, again, common practice for the villagers .

The case of the four households also shows that despite the stability of mentality, the organization of the kaláka and of community works depends to a great extent on circumstances . The close cooperation of the four households that had been going on for years stopped quickly. Agricultural activities were transformed and many people abandoned the cultivation of their own plots of land. The horse-owners sold their horses for good, and one person even moved away. Then, one of the house owners fell seriously ill and another died. But besides the specific reasons for that change, we need to account too for the gen-eral changes that affected the entire community and negatively influenced the evolution of the conditions that had until then favoured the survival of the kaláka .

43 Jonathan Gershuny, Idő, technika és az informális gazdaság, in: Zsolt Spéder (ed .), A min dennapi élet ökonómiája. Budapest 1993, 191-216, 197 .

44 Raymond E . Pahl / Claire Wallace, A háztartások munkastratégiái gazdasági recesszió idején, in: Zsolt Spéder (ed .), A mindennapi élet ökonómiája. Budapest 1993, 13-52, 38 .


Dis-Embedment and New Meanings of Work

Since the beginning of the 2000s it has become increasingly clear that prac-tices based on the revival of small peasant farms are not viable . Agriculture has seen a restructuring connected to agrarian policies and market pressures, which have all favoured larger farms as well as specialization. The structures of those small farms most familiar with the kaláka have been transformed, often becoming even smaller:

“At some point, really, and we should not go back much, only seven or eight years, almost every second household had [cows]. Now starting from here, I have one, and then I don’t know, there is one in every tenth-fifteenth house. And there are three out there, and then two there, and one at the end of the village. It is decreas-ing, people start to give up .” (male, 61, 2012)

The quotation at the beginning of the previous section anticipated those changes . The marginalization of the kaláka-type systems was brought about not only by a change in material circumstances but also by changes occurring in how the community functioned, and those changes were partly caused by a changed mentality. “I do not say that we do not stick together. Because whoever is in trouble, everyone is there to help . But if there is no trouble, everyone is left to mind their own business” (male, 69, 2014). The attitude to work has also changed: “Something is wrong, something is seriously wrong. Everyone strives to become rich, but they do not want to work” (male, 61, 2012).

Apart from the changes in mentality, the transformations are connected to changes in living conditions. Local work, even if it involved commuting, made participation in the kaláka possible; in fact, as we have seen, the kaláka system assumed that its participants were in paid employment. However, forms of employment that appeared in response to pressure from the new capitalist regime effectively prevented participation in a kaláka . Moreover, during state socialism, the kaláka was a kind of withdrawal from a system many people did not identify with or did so only partially, despite the best efforts of the political authorities .45

The market economy, on the other hand, presented itself as the ideological rival of the bad regime of the past, as if as the natural repository of freedom it could expect a much higher degree of identification. The new regime of market economy in Romania requires a higher degree of conformity regarding work, both in and outside the home . It turns out to be a basic experience in every

45 “Communist Party states were not all-powerful: they were comparatively weak.” Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and Why Did It Fall?, in: Eadem, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?, 19-37, 20 .


community that people have stopped looking after one another, and in the locals’ view their worlds have somehow disintegrated. Willingness to comply with the conditions of the market economy accelerated the marginalization of community practices:

“It is possible to get by, it is not true that it is not possible, but one needs to work, a lot [...] now everyone minds his own business at home and does not care about the others .” (female, 40, 2014)

It is also important that new concepts began to be associated with work from the mid-1990s onwards, when the closing of factories and mass redundancies started,46 and have become even more pronounced in the 2000s, especially since the economic crisis and since working abroad has become commonplace. For the villagers incorporated into the state socialist industry, the industrial workplace represented safety, and that perception together with a more general nostalgia regarding the old regime, has created a specific criticism of the present and its uncertainties . In the case of the labour migrants, their critique is expressed through the description of different forms of legality and illegality, betraying an acute sense of insecurity:

“We were not allowed to work illegally [...], but I got caught being in Hungary il-legally; I got two years’ expulsion [...] I worked in Spain for almost two years. So I wasn’t working all the time, I was a day labourer, but working legally... I worked legally for six months. [“He did not earn much…” – an interjection from his wife]. Five months and something . But the rest only illegally .” (male, 51, 2012)

In fact the new concepts of work are often formulated in terms of insecurity, poor health, and stress,47 but in the case of people working in the United King-dom, for example, the unfamiliar weather too became an important part of the perception of work. Working abroad means separation from home, from the family, from local networks, and is bound up with completely new experiences the processing of which could no longer be helped by community resources no longer available:

“[…] so we switched, I did, we did, we started to go. [...] But then it became very bumpy, so we had to go. At home relations ceased to exist, and then we could not stop, we had to go and to continue going.” (male, 54, 2014)

This does not mean that the kaláka has disappeared completely . Its intensity and role have obviously decreased, and the work done by its agency is no longer

46 David A . Kideckel, România postsocialistă. Munca, trupul şi cultura clasei muncitoare. Iaşi, Bucharest 2010 (Original: Getting by in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture. Bloomington/IN 2008).

47 Ibid ., 195 .


as important as it once was. In smaller communities, families especially, close friends and neighbours still help each other:

“I go, when I have the time, I go and, let’s say, I help, but not that much ... I help in ploughing, mowing ... I mean with the mowing machine” (male, 61, 2012) .

Community also continues to be important to morality, but the moral back-ground which traditionally played an important role in maintaining the func-tioning of the kaláka has turned from being normative to being descriptive . People know of it, especially the older generation, but it is no longer a suitable framework for organizing community life.48 And finally, the third factor that contributes to a certain extent to the survival of the kaláka is the interest of Hungarian minority intellectuals, who have canonized the kaláka in the context of a new concept of “the rural”, wishing to create a picture of the pure village – including from the point of view of ethnic symbolism.49 That, however, is not the old kaláka: the intellectual view is much more connected to a contrived idea of authenticity50 and to wishful thinking than to the economic practices of a rural economy and its underlying habits .

Conclusion

In the traditional sense, a kaláka was the morally grounded answer of people in rural areas to economic and social challenges . The history of the kaláka can be traced from feudalism, through the abolition of serfdom and state socialist economic management, right into today’s new capitalist era. Persistent post-socialist practices of cooperation can be reinterpreted from the point of view of liminal conditions, living on the periphery. The period following the demise of the state socialist regime was liminal from many points of view.51 Post-socialism meant social and economic transition as former subjects of state socialism had to learn how to become subjects to capitalism, sometimes under bitter circum-stances and in barely tolerable situations. Living on the border, whether literally

48 The kaláka is not the norm anymore, but rather a narrative from the past . See Szabó, Self-Sufficiency, Moral Values and Cooperation, 192.

49 This approach perceives the kaláka as free cooperation and as an inherent characteristic of Hungarian rural communities. The Norwegian case of Dugnad also shows that nationalizing discourses could operate with similar phenomena. Asbjørn Klepp, From Neighbourly Duty to National Rhetoric. An Analysis of the Shifting Meanings of Norwegian Dugnad, Ethnologia Scandinavica. A Journal for Nordic Ethnology 31 (2001), 82-98, 87 .

50 Dean MacCannell, Staged Authenticity: on Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings, The American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973), no. 3, 589-603.

51 In a sense the word “transition”, which has been used extensively, sometimes even abusively in the postsocialist scholarly literature, denotes this very liminality .


on the country’s periphery or at the limits or even on the edge of survival, seems to have generated a behaviour reminiscent of the kaláka:52

“Reciprocal work was typical of all agricultural communities, but especially fron-tier areas where land was readily available and capital and labour were in short supply .”53

Although the word is used to describe cooperative works, kaláka can imply different practices at different times and in different places. It can even mean different things, as the types of work done within its framework can vary greatly. From the point of view of the informal economy, the kaláka outlines an interesting connection between the macro level and the micro level, between ideology and practice .

In feudalism, the kaláka − which originates from the very essence of feudalism or even from the voluntary cooperation of free peasants − used to be an organic part of the dominant economic system . on the one hand, redistribution can be seen as a kind of reciprocity,54 while on the other hand the households taking part in redistribution were in a reciprocal relation controlling one another. Being a practice of the low- and middle-ranking peasantry, its importance decreased under early capitalism when, depending on the location and internal organi-zation of certain villages, wider market relations became more important than local, reciprocal relations. However, it is still an organic part of the everyday economic practices of local communities, and its informal character should certainly be taken into consideration . The same applies to the period of state socialism: kaláka not only had an important role in local economies, but for a short time its importance even increased after state socialism. However, the new macroeconomic conditions and new ideologies have continued to be less and less favourable for its survival, while work itself is associated with basically different experiences.

The new circumstances and the new morality are in fact not at all favourable to the survival of the kaláka . Agriculture in Transylvania has been radically transformed, and sufficient example of that is provided if we think of the ef-fects of European Union agrarian policies .55 The state tries to regulate that area

52 Samuel Popkin argues for the opposite, but in his view peasants are profit maximizing entrepreneurs rather than morally embedded members of a community . Cf . Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley/CA 1979.

53 Wilson, Reciprocal Work Bees, 3 .54 Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 188 . 55 Katy Fox, Peasants into European Farmers? EU Integration in the Carpathian Mountains

of Romania . Berlin, Zürich 2011 .


too, so that even participants in a kaláka must become taxable employees .56 The new market regime simply questions the validity of the kaláka as an economic practice; the moral elements behind a market economy go against the values required for a kaláka. If we accept that the legitimacy of the market economy is based on the individual, on competition and money and that the market is seen as democratic and liberating from traditional constraints, it becomes obvious why the kaláka, based as it is on community, cooperation and avoidance of monetary exchange has become out-dated. So now we speak of it as a piece of heritage.

Jürgen Kocka outlines the metamorphosis that physical labour has gone through since ancient times, the way in which it was transformed from be-ing something onerous into being the road to salvation .57 Although the kaláka did not follow a similar path, its community work has gone through several metamorphoses. As we can no longer speak of the existence of the kaláka in its traditional sense, it has become a folkloric embellishment on the rural map of ethnic regions . Detached from the kaláka, the work that went into it has now become a commodity, the sale of which has come to require ever more effort, uncertainty and nervous strain .

56 See Law 18/2014 of 7 March 2014, available at <http://www.cdep.ro/pls/legis/legis_pck.lista_mof?idp=23558>.

57 Kocka, Az európai történelem egyik problémája: a munka, 6-10 . It is interesting that the Hungarian term for labour is munka, which originates from the Slavic word ‘muka’ [му́ка], whose derivations mean “pain”, even “torture”, in many Slavic languages.