Oldal 80 [80]
78 RÓBERT BALOGH
The fragmented nature of history as reflected
by hybridity and the Anthropocene era
One of historians’ main and most trivial problems are that they are in search of
fragmented traces from which they have to construct a story. This fragmentation
can be so excessive that it forestalls the narration of the story which the historian
seeks. With further persistent research, this difficulty might be overcome, but in
some cases it does not help either. Yet, when a model reflects historical reality, it
may be found in the traces — the sources — in a great many forms. This brings us
to the third important function of historical knowledge. In searching for traces,
the scholar’s attention may be directed to hitherto little-known phenomena or
processes. Gleaning sources from different places is also part of the historian’s
activity, creating as it were his/her own archive of the given theme. This is particularly
imperative when new questions have been asked, such as about hybrid phenomena.
One such question — the most intriguing one for environmental history — is
how to simultaneously grasp the various natural and cultural aspects of the immense
number of phenomena which have come into the focus of social scientific research
— first of all thanks to the work of the philosopher and historian of science Bruno
Latour — and which are called hybrids in academia (Latour 1993). Latour’s interest
in hybrid phenomena took shape as he was studying the late 19° century activity
of Louis Pasteur. The success of Pasteur’s procedure owed to its embeddedness in
the functioning of French society, and to becoming a spectacle. The laboratory
activity, and the connection between bacteria and milk became hybrids because
of their social roles. Research into the history of dairy farming in Hungary has
brought to the surface an exciting but little known early 20"-century economic
form, the dairy cooperatives (Vérés 1965; Knezy 1980; Bednärik 2009; Umbrai
2021). Their importance stems from the alternative they present to large industrial
milk processing, which massively contributes to humanity’s detrimental ecological
footprint. The history of dairy farming is also significant in that it leads us to the
level of the aforementioned deep history. The milk of cattle in some areas of Europe
and Africa has been present in human communities for millennia, sometimes as
the basic staple for survival. At the same time, lactose intolerance can be found all
over the world. However, the beginning of the 20" century represented a turning
point in the millennia of human history. It is from this point that one can speak
of supply chains, the dairy industry, and the growing role of butter and cheese in
international mass trade.
The hybrids include the rivers, and — perhaps more surprisingly — the forests.
Spectacular examples thereof are the disappearing border islands, for example Ada
Kaleh between the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire,
which disappeared in 1971 with the regulation of the Iron Gate section of the
Danube, then already in Romania. The web of relations between rivers, islands,
human communities and state violence (Yao 2022; Vadas 2021) is represented
and traced with poetic sensibility in the 2014 film Corn Island, directed by George
Ovashvili. Eva Bodovics’s research on Miskolc warns us that flood disasters are
also hybrid. Floods are often caused by thoughtless constructions or draining, and
their impact may fundamentally change the social relations, economic activities,
and, of course, infrastructure of a region (Bodovics 2022).