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A Brief Account of More than Two Hundred Years of Teaching
Folklore and Ethnography (Including Cultural Anthropology) at Hungarian Universities
Higher education, including “universities”, began in Hungary at the beginning of the 14th century. That system was disrupted by the Ottoman invasion in the first half of the 16th century. The present university system was launched by founding of a Jesuit university in Nagyszombat (1635), which later became the royal, then the state university of Hungary, and today is the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. There from about 1784 we can register teaching activity, which we understand today as directed towards folklore, ethnography, and later even towards cultural anthropology. From 1872 the “second” Hungarian state university was opened in Kolozsvár, which fled from there at the end of the First World War (and operated in Szeged from 1921 on), came back for some years during the Second World War, and was divided after the war again. By 1910 other state universities were created in Hungary, which work today in Debrecen and Pécs. Ethnography and folklore are now regularly represented there, in Debrecen from 1949 on, in Pécs from 1989 on. (But, of course, with some anteceding activities.) In Szeged the first professorship in ethnography (practically in folklore) was established in 1929, and after many years of interruption today there is a university institution of ethnography, folklore and cultural anthropology. A university chair for visual anthropology exists at the Miskolc university from 1982 on. At the recent ecclesiastical universities in Hungary there is no regular teaching on those topics. The report gives a brief history of the university institutions, focusing on their major directions, professors and chairmen including also references to university teaching of the other chairs close to folklore, ethnography and ethnology (cultural anthropology), as e.g. (physical) anthropology, geography, archaeology, Finno-Ugric studies, Oriental studies etc. The bibliographic references include the recent publications, with indications of other publications. Because the paper is the very first one of its kind, it could not be exhaustive or complete. The universities outside of Hungary (e.g. Cluj/ Napoca, Novi Sad, Bucureºti), where today we find programs on Hungarian folklore and ethnography, were not specially described in this paper. From the careful studies of research history in Hungary it is clear that at Hungarian universities - in the modern sense of the word - the teaching of folklore has about a 220 years old tradition. (See the facts about Dániel Cornides.) For “ethnology” (i.e. traditional cultures of the peoples around the world) we can refer to lectures from about 1873 (by János Hunfalvy). It was Antal Herrmann, from about 1898 (first in Kolozsvár, then in Szeged), who gave special university lectures on ethnography and folklore. Sándor Solymossy was the first appointed university teacher of “ethnology” (in fact of folklore) in Hungary (special lecturer in Budapest, professor at Szeged university 1929-1934). The full university institution of Hungarian ethnography and folklore was created in 1934 at the Budapest university, under the leadership of professor István Györffy. Today there is regular university teaching of folklore and ethnography in Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged and Pécs (to some extent in Miskolc too). Cultural anthropology (ethnology) has its university programs in Budapest and Miskolc (and to some extent it is represented at other universities too).
One of the most controversial areas of folkloristic studies are those concerning the theories on the genesis of genres, on the mobility and variability of the folkloric “text”, on the process of its transition from one genre to another. There are still a lot of unanswered questions and unproved hypotheses concerning these intimate mechanisms of a mentality system of a certain social group, a mechanism that generates the re-functionaliztion of a folkloric “text” according to specific needs and specific contexts. For beyond the simultaneous presence of the same motifs and themes in genres with different functionality we have to take into consideration the case of those “texts” that due to the change of the register, in Hyme's sense, in which the transaction of meaning takes place, of their mode of performance and even of the arena of their performance, are being re-functionalised into another folkloric genre. Starting from the special case of the Romanian narrative song Letin bogat (The Rich Latin) also known as Cacircntecul Nasului (The Godfather's Song) we shall try to analyse the ways a narrative song has been ritualised by means of its performance as a distinct sequence of the wedding ritual, developing in time into a sort of ritual song. More than that we shall also focus on the reverse process nowadays that of another semantic readaptation of the song due to the de-sacralisation of the wedding ritual and its transformation into a spectacular ceremony.
With roots in the Old World and fertile ground in the New World, the tall tale ourished in America, especially within the boasting, expansive atmosphere of the American frontier (Burrison 1991: 6–7). Hunting, fishing, weather, domestic life, and agriculture were popular topics, and opportunities for artful exaggeration were numerous. This paper examines the tall tale as artistic folk humor in which the narrative is carefully constructed and performed for best effect. Field recordings, printed texts, and folklore-archive texts will provide examples for analysis. Finally, examples of tall-tale postcards add a visual dimension to the genre.
The present article introduces a recently published dictionary of Russian nicknames by famous lexicographers Harry Walter and V. M. Mokienko. The dictionary is the first summary (comprehensive) work in Russia for such specific lexical group. The dictionary describes traditional folk, as well as present-day nicknames of famous people. Based on only one group of nicknames as secondary nominations, the study focuses on concrete models of nomination, mechanisms of motivation, as well as on specifics of functioning of nicknames in the modern Russian language. Conclusion is made about principal closeness of nicknames to small forms of urban folklore.
The Precious Scroll of Watermelons (the earliest known manuscript is dated 1867) is a representative example of narrative texts used in the scroll recitation practices of southern Jiangsu since the nineteenth century. It uses a subject widespread in folklore to propagate belief in Bodhisattva Guanyin, a popular Buddhist deity, and thus it combines indoctrination with didacticism and entertainment. A comparison of several variants of the Precious Scroll of Watermelons (falling in between 1867 and 1989) demonstrates the evolution of its functions and cultural meaning in the modern practice of precious scrolls recitation, taking ‘telling scriptures’ of Changshu as an example.
Abstract
At the center of the study is the motif spread in Italy and Greece, in the Middle Ages and in folklore, of Mary's search for Jesus during the Passion. The historiographical and philological reconstruction of the motif takes its cue from a medieval Italian text, the “Pianto delle Marie marchigiano”, and first investigates modern Italian songs, to show their continuity with the Middle Ages; then the observation expands to the Hellenic “moirologia”, to highlight the strong resemblance to the Italic counterparts; we therefore try to bring these similarities back to historical unity, showing that we are dealing with two forms in which a long-lasting cultural memory persists.
This paper examines the concept ‘snowstorm’ in Russian by comparing five synonyms, which do not contain the element ‘snow’. These markers are метель, метелица, вьюга, буран, and пурга. The dominant word in this synonymic row is the semantically and stylistically neutral метель, while all the other words can be described by such characteristic features as intensity, the way the wind moves (ringwise or horizontal), territorial-geographic aspects (such as the steppe region or the northern regions), or folklore and vernacular usage. Within this conceptual field, the author also takes into account the typical verbal collocations of the examined nouns.
Les sept fils d’un homme sont changés en cerfs. Ils refusent de quitter la forêt où se trouve la source pure à laquelle ils s’abreuvent. La Cantata Profana, inspirée du folklore roumain, mais largement retravaillée par Bartók, suggère plusieurs interprétations possibles, fondées sur l’analyse des mythes et et sur l’interprétation des contes, notamment à la manière proposée par Georg Lukács, dont Bartók fut, d’ailleurs, un admirateur circonspect. Les relations tourmentées de Bartók avec le christianisme, particulièrement avec le catholicisme, placent en outre son oeuvre dans une perspective supplémentaire, dont l’horizon est la nature.
The paper discusses the Russian word селезень ‘drake’, which is problematic from the point of view of etymology. This word can be explained as a lexical contamination connected by a grade metathesis to сизый ‘blue-grey’ and зеленый ‘green’: сизый (in Slavic folklore, this adjective is a constant epithet for a drake) and зеленый (this word indicates the plumage colour of the male bird) = *сизелень > *силезень > селезень (because of силезень ‘spleen’). The paper is based on historical and lexicological material and uses dialectal examples that ensure the reliability of the author’s conclusions.
