The Collective Remembering of the Religious Changes in Eastern Slovakia
The Collective Remembering of the Religious Changes in Eastern Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the analysis of the narratives which were obtained by means of the ethnographic research in a village in eastern Slovakia, inhabited by Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians. We consider accounts of the local conflicts resulting from the alterations of government policy towards the Greek Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century. We identified the narrative templates employed by people of the two confessions in their stories: (1) the story line stressing unity and division of the community, used by both Orthodox Christians and Greek Catholics; and (2) the story line emphasizing the suffering and the final satisfaction of the Greek Catholics. We concluded that narrators make use of these templates in accordance with their motivations, to pursue various goals on particular occasions of meaning-making. Our results highlight the advantages of ethnographic research in the investigation of collective remembering in small communities.

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