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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).
