ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Internationalizing Hungarian Szikes Soils

• In Event: Dividing Nature: Classification and its Discontents

English Abstract

Terms for environmental features like karst, loess, or chernozem soils came from specific locations before being generalized for use around the world. This paper would like to show the example of a failed attempt to naturalize a regional term in international nomenclature— the case of the Hungarian term for alkaline saline soils, szikes. The unique chemistry of this soil type, under specific grassy vegetation, already attracted the attention of scholars of the Enlightenment in the Habsburg Empire. The improvement of szikes landscapes became a debated topic of the emerging Hungarian agricultural science and a symbolic matter of Hungarian national identity. At the early decades of the twentieth century, when the network of international soil science began to form, szikes soils offered Hungarian scholars a common ground for the scientific debates about soil formation—about interfaces of aridity, parent matter, groundwater, humans and non-humans. Hungarian soil scientists were actively promoting the szikes term in their writings and conference presentations, and it began to appear in international publications, and the szikes soil made a case for international recognition of Hungarian Scholarship. For example, Hungarian agricultural chemist, Elek ‘Sigmond became a leader of a specific Subcommittee devoted to studying Alkali Soils of the International Society of Soil Science, and proposed a general classification of alkaline soils, applicable all around the world. However, from the 1930s, the Hungarian term became less common in international language while more specific Russian terms, solonec and solonchak, became prevalent.

Author

• Noémi Ujházy, University of Nottingham