The critical sociolinguistic study of diasporization among Hungarians in Catalonia
- Autores: Gergely Szabó
- Directores de la Tesis: Joan Pujolar Cos (dir. tes.), Csanád Bodó (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ( España ) en 2023
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Rosina Márquez Reiter (presid.), Roger Martínez Sanmartí (secret.), Kristin Vold Lexander (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento por la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX O2 Repositori UOC
- Resumen
The thesis seeks access to how contemporary diasporas evolve, how diasporization takes place under the conditions of late modernity, and how language features in this process. By diasporization, I refer to the process(es) in which diasporic groups emerge and individuals start to engage in certain diasporic practices, i.e., social practices that are associated with their ethnic or national origin or with their imagined homeland, or with boundary management in the host-land. Writing diasporization and diasporic instead of diaspora, I attempted to emphasize that I did not wish to treat diaspora as a bounded entity or as sharing common conditions. Rather, I presented diasporization as an emerging process that creates commonalities and so-cial practices among people who share similar experiences of dispersion.
I studied first generation Hungarians in Catalonia between 2018 and 2022. As the Hungar-ian presence in the whole of Spain has been a fairly new phenomenon, the participants of this study provided a great opportunity to identify contemporary and novel aspects of mobility in late modernity in which language plays a key role. The research questions dealt with the discourses that circulated among Hungarian diasporic subjects in Catalonia, the practices they engaged in, and the resources that were deployed in their specific processes of diasporization. To truly address these questions by ¿thinking diaspora from below¿, the research was an ethnographically informed critical sociolinguistic one that drew on collaborative methodologies in order to include the emic perspectives of the participants. To capture these perspectives, the research combined many data generating techniques, such as ethnographic fieldnotes, biographical interviews, online focus groups, collection of material traces, and collaborative interpretation with the key participants of the research.
I treated the questions articulated by the key participants as traces of the multiple foci of interests and concerns of the diasporic subjects. Therefore, I brought them into dialogue with the three conventional criteria of diasporas (dispersion, boundary-maintenance and homeland orientation) in sociological literature as well as with the sociolinguistic concerns about lan-guage and migration. I argue that the contemporary diasporic experiences of Hungarians in Catalonia do revolve around these criteria, but their experiences can be lived in individually fluid and complex modes in which language plays an important role. Four possible dimen-sions of the diasporic were identified in the thesis: the chronotopic, the boundary-management, the posthumanist, and the rhizomatic dimension.
The chronotopic analysis of the narratives of the participants on dispersion showed that participants with a longer history in Catalonia displayed more loyalty to Catalonia or to Spain in general, while the newcomers tended to treat the space and the time around their transnational mobility as more flexible than before. The analysis on boundary-management showed that the Catalan language was still seen as an authentic language of Catalan people that cannot become the voice of a Hungarian diasporic subject without political commitment and the accumulation of cultural capital, whereas the Castilian language functioned as an anonymous language of all. The posthumanist approach to diasporization showed that the diasporic is produced and perceived through a wide arena of multilingual (that is not necessarily connected to the Hungarian language), multimodal and multisensory resources, and certain forms of home-land orientation can be expressed through such production and perception. The rhizomatic way of looking at the diasporic acknowledged that it is not necessarily a constant looking back or a nostalgic reconstruction of the homeland, but it can also embody reorientations and redefinitions of the identity such as Hungarians in Catalonia starting to identify more generally as Eastern Europeans.
