Who and What Counts as Local in the Central Eastern European Periphery: Spatial-Temporal Belonging, Local-ness in the Hungarian Countryside

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This interdisciplinary dissertation will contribute to understanding cultural identity in and from Europe's epistemic borderland, Central Eastern Europe (CEE). It sees this border zone as trapped by Western categories that tend to translate spatial differences into temporal ones, understanding non-Western practices and customs as signs of cultural and developmental backwardness. This is further exacerbated when local elites deploy similar thinking regarding marginalized areas within countries of the CEE. The project uses this as the context to examine attempts at community-based tourism development in one of the poorest regions in Hungary, in the rural North-East of the country. These initiatives are being supported by the NGO sector which, in Hungary, is monopolized by the local intellectual elite, mainly from the capital (Hann 1995, Lomax 1997, and Ray 1996). In this setting, the project looks at how 'local-ness' is defined and who controls senses of rurality and locality in these developments. The specific enterprise to be studied sets out to enable a collaborative creation of a local version of placeidentity that is supported by the PhD partner NGO. It is a version that straddles divisions of ethnic Roma and Hungarian identity through walking tours. These tours mobilise place through many different objects, animals, crops, equipment, and buildings in spatial stories that offer more than a visual consumption of scenery. The project uses oral history interviews, documents, 'go along' interviews and participant observation to study the community fashioning its own version of place in the tourism encounter.