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THE KÓSPALLAG OLD HOUSE PROJECT AS PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH AND ECOLOGICAL LOCAL DEVELOPMENT Pal Géza Balogh — Luca Kaszäs — Rebeka Márta Kiss Preface, definitions of our work Perhaps the simplest definition of our work carried out in Késpallag within the Köspallag Old House project is participatory action research. It differs entirely from ethnographic research with traditional methods in several regards, though undoubtedly that is also one of its aspects; we make interviews, take photos, digitize archive photos, collect and inventory objects, and try to process and archive the accumulated material continuously to make them ready for a future museum collection. On the other hand, many of our activities belong to community development: we organize events, recruit volunteers, collect donations, restore, and perform other physical chores collectively. Seen from this angle, our project is like a locality development process with an anthropological emphasis, because it centers on the re-adoption of sets of knowledge closely tied to the locality (on local knowledge, see Brosius 2006). It highlights the desires and intentions of the local community by discovering and re-activating its capabilities (on the capability approach, see Sen 1999; Mälovics 2020: 103-107; Bajmöczy — Gebert — Mälovics 2017). The central aim is to enhance local self-government and at the same time decrease external dependence; to aid the emergence of a new, more communitycentered way of functioning with tighter interpersonal relations for the bridging of differences; and to contribute to the creation of a community living in harmony with the endowments of the local natural environment. At the same time, we regard all these elements of our presence in Kóspallag besides the ethnographic research as part of a major process of cognition and try to document as many moments of this process as possible. This is the motivation behind producing documents on local adobe-making knowledge, dietary knowledge, or, for that matter, on our experiences of the tender system and our collective actions pointing beyond the locality. In addition, in processes like this, every participant gains new knowledge about themselves and changes constantly, acquiring new capabilities and recognizing their weaknesses (all this will be discussed in more detail at the end of the paper). These elements all bring it close to the concept of participatory action research, which is also characterized by being engendered by local, grassroots needs that themselves determine the questions and the whole process, just as in this case (on participatory action research, see Udvarhelyi — Désa 2019; Pataki — Väri 2011; Mälovics 202: 75-108). The ecological aspect is manifest in our work in several ways. An important goal is to get to know the ecological elements of the peasantry’s former traditional way of life and to restore it to contemporary practice. The creation of a local country house is also typical of the eco-localist world view in general (on eco
