2012. december 9., vasárnap

Egy 1971-ben megrendezett konferencia emlékei: nyugaton

Arról a bizonyos, 1971-ben megrendezett konferenciáról, amelyet még Enyedi György szervezett:

„Our conversation began in 1971 in a noisy reception hall in Budapest. Anne Buttimer enjoyed seeing the quotations from textbooks in quantitative geography contract into a real person. On my side I was happy to be able to apologize for not having rendered an account of Swedish social geography that Anne had asked for in a letter, sometime in the early sixties. The following day we went for a walk. Human nature being as it is, it was not long until I selfishly began preaching ’time-geography’, using an envelope and the sandy park way to explain my graphs and what I believed they were good for.

Anne had just finished a paper on Vidal de la Blache’s geography, and we agreed that his central concept of genre de vie was a common ground where our interests met. I also became convinced that Anne had great sympathy for the general direction of my efforts to grasp ongoing processes in their evolving context. An older scholar as much as a younger one likes to be understood and appreciated. I was glad to have won a proselyte.

But with Anna Buttimer one must be prepared for the unexpected.

Everyone is familiar with a situation like this. Summer evening after a warm day: well known near things and sounds as night comes on. Suddenly a flash of light engraves sharp contours up to a distant horizon. You find yourself in the midst of a landscape with depths that routine daytime preoccupations have prevented you from seeing. To see them is revealing and alarming. One fine day some years after Budapest Anne said to me that the worldview depicted in my kind of diagrams reminded her of a ’dance macabre’. I felt a startling flash of light. I was alarmed. My whole effort had for decades been to work towards a holistic view of geography which should be able to catch evolving life.”

(Torsten Hägerstrand, Foreword. In: Anne Buttimer and Tom Mels (eds.) By Northern Lights: On the Making of Geography in Sweden, 2006, pp. XI) 


Szerintem ez két szempontból is nagyon tanulságos lehet (ezeket nem most gondoltam ki):

1. Hägerstrand "modelljeinek" magyar interpretációja miatt: az időföldrajzot pl. nem alkalmazták (szemben a kvantitatív-modernista diffúzió elmélettel), és "modellként", nem pedig a kvalitatív kutatás kibontásával, a szerző eredeti kontextusának, céljainak megfelelően lett bemutatva;

2. a konferencia elhelyezésének, a "nyugati" tudás és intellektuális kapcsolatok kibontakozatlanságának, hatástalanságának lokális, magyar kontextusa miatt.


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