ABSTRACT
In contrast to the relative scarcity of academic works in Hungary that utilize a socio-historical approach to the investigation of daily life, international scholarship has long been occupied with the study of everyday life and considers its research one of the most significant questions in the field of history. From many points of view, the historians from the Annales school in France played a groundbreaking role in developing this field even if it was only later, during the 1970s and 1980s, that the many attitudes and approaches utilized in focusing on this type of research method were systematically organized. Merely listing the names of researchers, such as Fernand Braudel, Alan Macfarlane, Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Philippe Ariès, Michel Foucault, Alf Lüdtke, and Hans Medick, amply demonstrates the extent to which micro-histories represent a justified approach toward exploring the past. During the past decades scores of academic works have continued to examine the daily lives of everyday people in order to demonstrate how a given historical period can be reconstructed via the study of everyday objects, demographic processes, cultural habits, the private sphere, technical developments and their effect on society, the habitation of settlements, dress, nutrition, living spaces, furnishings, the usage of social spaces, and the gender-based differentiation of society. The research results garnered by examining these seemingly marginal topics have brought us much closer to understanding a particular social phenomenon or analyzing social change than would have otherwise been possible through the utilization of the tools and techniques related to a more conventional approach that focuses on a more traditional interpretation of the era’s political context.
