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How did you come into contact with ethnography, and why did locality become the focus of your research?
A detailed presentation of this question would be long. Because of my family background I have had some awareness, roughly since kindergarten, of ethnographic, historical, and even local-historical ethnographic research (village monographs).

When I enrolled at ELTE exactly 30 years ago in the history and ethnography programmes, I already knew what local history was,

and at the university I could learn from multiple sides the methodological significance of deep drilling into locality.

In the second half of the 1990s — like many in my generation — I was strongly influenced by the then-new historiographical directions with social-historical and cultural-historical perspectives. I am certain that the great European mentalities-history and historical-anthropology summaries pushed me toward undertaking in my doctoral dissertation a macrolevel overview of the Early Modern relationship system of “church and folk culture” (through the analysis of customs and rituals tied to turning-points in human life). However, my interest in locality did not diminish even during that time. As a doctoral candidate — as a side-thread independent of my doctoral topic — I wrote a traditional village monograph: my first independent book appeared in 2002 about Tiszaalpár.

I did not lose faith in localities and in the micro-historical approach even in those years when most of my research and studies were used in meso- or macro-level overviews. My monograph on the Franciscan exorcist worldview of Zombor, published in Hungarian in 2016 and in English in 2020, is a strong expression of this local and micro-historical attraction. At the same time, from the 2010s onwards I more clearly formulated the need to research, within local communities, the Catholic lower clergy and the Protestant pastoral staff from the perspectives of historical ethnography/folkloristics, historical anthropology and church history.

With the support of the MTA “Lendület” programme, our first project from 2018 to 2023 had the goal of exploring the local embeddedness of this social stratum, its role in local communities and its intellectual and culture-transmitting aspects in 18th-20th-century Hungary and Transylvania. The research experience then led into the new research starting (in October 2025) in which

we now no longer focus on one social stratum, but place locality itself and everyday life at the centre.

What exactly does the method of point-like deep drilling mean in a regional horizon, and how does it differ from traditional ethnographic research?
In the first year of the research, we must identify those historical localities which have the broadest source-base from the perspective of examining everyday life. This is fundamentally different from both local history and ethnographic practice, because there the selection of the research settlements is usually based on other criteria, and indeed, let’s admit, in the past more often the settlement selected the researcher for the task (cf. municipal commissions, home village, place of residence, etc.). In ethnographic research, there is an old and significant tradition of investigations carried out in localities; compared to these, however, we plan much more historical research. Since our project’s preferred time-frame (1750–1950), our scientific knowledge is neither “retrospective” nor “present-researching.” Our sources are not the “oral tradition,” but almost entirely archival and manuscript documents. The regional horizon must not be abandoned by a researcher familiar with historical-ethnographic landscapes, because otherwise the broader spatial, social and cultural context and connections of the selected localities could not be revealed.

Local intellectuals (priests, teachers, clerks) and everyday members of the community saw the world from different perspectives. What connections do you see between local power structures and the evolution of everyday life?
A key question of our research will be to uncover how — in the terms of the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai — local intellectuals (e.g., priests, teachers, clerks, doctors, officials, artists) in the 18th-, 19th- and 20th-centuries participated in the creation of locality, and how they positioned themselves within the context of the changing power structures. If, for example, we think of the many new settlements established in the 18th century after the Ottoman occupation, whose population arrived by spontaneous or organised migration, as one might say, from all directions, then compared to our previous knowledge we must examine the formation of these local, social and cultural formations in a deeper and more structured framework.

It greatly helps the interpretation of sources if we view the formation of local cultures as a process,

including material, economic and social aspects, but also the local organisation and fixation of custom, religion, belief, morality and communication. We believe that thereby we transcend the old ethnographic paradigm’s frozen and uniformised concept of “folk culture,” the dichotomy of elite and folk culture, and through the historical study of the organisation of locality we actually approach the forms of local everyday life.

Which archival or manuscript sources do you find the most exciting or reliable for your work? How do they deliver for the mapping of folkloric knowledge?
For most of the period we examine, for the historical localities we only have information thanks to the literate intelligentsia. This is a condition which a historian-ethnographer like myself must make peace with early in their career. Our research on lower clergy was a breakthrough because we did not only treat the written heritage of the locally living priests as a “mirror” or “door” through which the culture of non-literate social strata could be approached, but we regarded this social stratum and their sources themselves as primary research objects, as a result of the above mentioned local turn.

Compared to church historians

we were more interested in the ego-documents interpretable in the local context,

which may contain the imprints of historical actors’ own worldview. Into this category we include parts of legal cases, as well, which contain witness statements for various reasons. I myself tried to reconstruct the mentality of the Zombor exorcist from his own written, “semi-official” letters, in which he supplied redundant argumentation and abundant information about his peculiar demonological views, his belief in healing with transcendental power and the missionary force of his interpreted successful exorcisms. When an 18th-century Croatian Franciscan monk documents in long reports, deeds, cunning and violence of demons dominating the bodies of possessed women and men in Zombor, then we undoubtedly come close to the folkloric conceptions of bygone centuries.

Have you encountered anything in your work so far that particularly excited you, or fundamentally transformed your thinking about folk culture?

In localities the concepts of “folk” and “elite” culture are meaningless.

The formation of local society and culture is the result of the interaction of every social stratum living in the place and the surrounding power-contexts, and moreover it has no frozen snapshot moment — it can only be grasped as an ever-changing, processual, irregularly-contoured entity. Hopefully, by the end of our five-year research we will see these processes, structures and interactions more finely. In my own earlier research, most of which focused on the last century of feudalism / the era of the estate-system (from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century), I did not so much find traces of “pure” folk culture, but rather the local imprints of, among others, norms and norm-violations, religious praxis, human emotions, gestures and attitudes.

In your experience how has local identity transformed under the influence of globalisation and the online world?
This is a very large topic, which many social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists, cultural researchers) deal with. My research group’s emphasis on historical research does not reach these processes, however the earlier levels of uniformity — for example that of nation-states — necessarily affect them. Many researchers have described that the internal organisation of locality is not incompatible with the challenging other levels (for example regional, national, global), indeed it can only be interpreted together with them. What concerns my non-researcher, private-person experience, since, I myself have been living in a village in Pest County for two decades, it shows clearly that

the spheres of community-organisation are now locally coloured also by online platforms.

Consequently, present-day locality research can only be successfully conducted by the so-called multi-level ethnography.

What do you consider the greatest challenge for today’s young researchers in this field?
If nowadays someone deals — whether historically or in present-day research — with the locally organised formations of everyday life, they inevitably meet a set of phenomena that is complicated, a “dense” and hard-to-penetrate network. Only with great patience, humility, and varied analytical techniques can we reach the micro-level understanding from which, moreover, in most cases (yet) not “models” and “laws” can be deduced, but “merely” the increasing, mutually reflecting case-studies indicate as guiding lights the richly varied patterns of the formations under study. It is a matter of scientific taste, but I myself believe in the legitimacy of the latter and in its useful deployment within a foreseeable time.