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Once in his Chronicle compiled ca. 1015, Thietmar von Mersenburg names Saint Stephen of Hungary (d. 1038) Vajk. In scholarly literature, the view prevails that king Stephen received this pagan, Turkish by origin, name in his childhood. Contrary to this opinion, it is evident that the name is a literary creation of Thietmar: this bishop often calls foreigners in Slavic (slavonice dictus/dicta), most probably his native Sorbian. For example, he uses the name Beleknegini for the mother of Stephen, Sarolt, and the name Prokuj, for Stephen’s uncle, Gyula. All these Slavic names applied by Thietmar are hapax legomena.
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Predominantly, this study examines two issues. First, why in a very short span of time the real historical person of Jánošík turned into a folklore and literary character and what kind of interaction can be revealed between these two fields. Second, why compared to the whole of the Slovakian folklore the Jánošík tradition is so scarce in Slovakian communities of Hungary. The author also attempts to answer to the question how the Jánošík legends attested in these communities appeared among the Slovakians who settled down in Hungary in the late 17th and early 18th century.
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In Russian religious songs Blessed Virgin is always near her son. She is an agile and warm-hearted protector of people. Man has three mothers: Mother of God, archaic Russian “mother-earth” and man’s mother who gave birth to him. The characteristic comparison of folk-songs and profound symbols is remarkable.
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A prominent Orthodox polemist of the 17th - early 18th cc., Myxajlo Andrella’s style and language were not representative of the heterogeneous culture in Transcarpathian Rus’ only. The author maintains that Andrella’s script- and language-switching, chaotic as it may appear, is basically identical with that in the works of Berynda, Vysens’kyj, and other Ruthenian authors who as multilingual speakers were likely to spontaneously mix words or phrases. The author argues that, both in form and language, Andrella’s writings were rooted not so much in the Galician cultural and literary tradition as in the Ruthenian cultural model of the 17th c.
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Galicia in the second half of the 19th century was home to two main groups which differed in their attitudes toward the composition of the Ukrainian literary language: one group (the West Ukrainian Russophiles) favoured the use of a standard language heavily influenced by Russian and Church Slavic elements, the second one took attempts to create a modem Ukrainian (“Ruthenian”) language prevalently on the basis of the folk language. Volodymyr Navroc’kyj, who was one of the founders of the Galician Ukrainian national movement and took an active part in the development of the national idea among the “narodovci”, realised the obligation of participating in the process of national building as well as in the formation of Ukrainian terminologies, particularly terminologies of natural sciences. A detailed analysis of his morphology, his grammar, and his lexical base, particularly his contribution to the development of Ukrainian terminologies, reflects the will to create the Galician variant of the Modem Ukrainian standard language and shows how this variant of the Ukrainian language was heterogeneous and complex.
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1. Péter Király neunzigjáhrig by: István Nyomárkay 2. К 80-летию Зёльдхеи by: Иштван Хетеши 3. К 80-летию Михая Петера by: Жужа Хетени 4. К 80-летию Иштвана Пете by: Карой Бибок 5. Приложение - Дополнение к списку научных трудов Иштвана Пете (1957-2002 гг.) 6. Список научных трудов Иштвана Пете (2002-2008 гг.) – 2002 7. К 75-летию Лены Силард by: Анна Хан н Каталин Сёке 8. Деятельность докторской программы «Русская литература и культура между Западом и Востоком» в свете защищенных докторских диссертаций by: Жужа Калафатич 9. Вопросы языка и культуры на XII Международной научно-методи¬ческой конференции «Современный русский язык: функционирование и проблемы преподавания». Российский культурный центр в Будапеште, 30—31 марта 2007 г. by: И. А. Бойцов (РКЦ в Будапеште)
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The central effect of globalization is cultural convergence. The notion of “cultural creolization,” amplified from creole linguistics, offers a model wherewith to understand the cultural convergences of Europe and the rest of the postmodern world. Creolization, like diaspora, is a word with a history that is relevant to cultural analysis. Despite the claims of other terms like acculturation, transculturation, mixing, and hybridization, I advocate creolization to remind ethnologists of the decisive power differences that are always present when cultures converge. Creolization also denotes the creation of something discontinuous and new, which could not have been predicted from its origins. I sketch the relation of this concept to history, sociolinguistics, communication theory, anthropology, and religious studies, in the light of definitive linguistic research.
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This article deals with the problem of the religion of the ethnic Germans in Hungary. It is assumed that Catholicism serves as an important item of the ethnic identity of this minority from diachronic as well as from synchronic perspective. Catholic religion has the historic function to help the ethnic survival. Religion has a very important role to divide and to unite ethnic minorities and the majority. A great deal of the Germans settled in Hungary in the 18th century is Lutheran. Catholic and Lutheran Germans are divided by their religion, which can be seen at their marriage customs, too. Since the Hungarian majority is also Catholic, both Germans and Hungarians have the cult of the Blessed Virgin, who is held by the Hungarian believers as Patrona Hungarica. With the help of a shared religion with the majority, they could develop a basis for national feelings and for assimilation, too.
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To be a Jew in communist Hungary between 1948–1989 was to be a person carrying a stigma. Jewish identity was suppressed in public and in many cases in private. Since the demise of the communist regime Hungarian Jews have begun to proclaim their identity publicly. In short Jews are “coming out”. In this paper I describe the ways in which Jewish identity is expressed and I analyze the factors, both internal and external that have facilitated such expression.
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The paper investigates the symbolical and real borders in the areas of contact between the Jews of the Hungarian countryside and the peasants between the two world wars. The symbolical borders are created principally by differences in mentality. These are the borders which for the most part and inherently separate. Tradition, culture, religion, way of life, in many cases the language, and the minority or majority status all separate. Most of these raise an insuperable barrier between the two social groups although – as we shall see – there are cases when some of these borders can be crossed. In contrast, economic interests and the need for social contacts generally make the Jewish and peasant communities dependent on each other, and here the borders also open up more often.
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This case-study reveals the elements of coexistence of Jews and Hungarians at a market town, Makó, in the Great Hungarian Plain, exploring relations in the interwar years and in particular the period between the Great Depression and the adoption of the first Jewish law, 1929–1938. Based on numerous interviews, the author has collected the mainly stereotyped opinions of the Hungarians about their Jewish neighbours.
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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.
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As the discipline began to create its institutional frame after precedents reaching back to the 18th–19th centuries, the first university department of ethnography in Hungary was established in 1929 in the Franz Joseph University of Szeged. Its first professor was the folklorist Sándor Solymossy (1864–1945). After his retirement the chair was not filled in Szeged from 1934 to 1947; ethnography and folkloristics were taught by scholars with the status of privatdozent. In the 1940s many of the leading representatives of ethnography in Hungary in the 20th century habilitated here: Gyula Ortutay, István Tálasi, Béla Gunda and others. In 1947 Sándor Bálint (1904–1980) was appointed to the reorganised chair of ethnography. The totalitarian dictatorship of socialism tolerated ethnography which it regarded as a national science. The Szeged department was not developed. In 1965 Sándor Bálint was condemned in a show trial and forced to retire. Development of the department and the teaching of ethnography did not begin until the time of the change of political system (1989–1990). Full-time training in ethnography, folkloristics and cultural anthropology has been given since 1992/1993. A special field of teaching and research in the department is ethnology of religion. The Szeged Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology now issues a series of publications, organises regular conferences and conducts an extensive exchange of students and teachers.
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The interest in traditional popular culture appeared in the eighteenth century in Szeged and was maintained mainly by the scholarly teachers of the Piarist grammar school, and the Franciscan monks. Accordingly, most of the contributors were priests. The most important representatives of pre-ethnographic, pre-folkloristic interest are András Dugonics (1740–1818), Benedek Csaplár (1821–1906), Lajos Kálmány (1852–1919), the Bunevac Ivan Antunovich (1815–1888), Sándor Pintér (1841–1915), and the Jewish Immanuel Löw (1854–1944). They conducted research on the fields of dialectology, history, folk poetry and religiosity. They discovered and presented the traditional life of Szeged and its surroundings.
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In the past one thousand years that the Hungarians have been living here we find complex examples of use of the land in the Carpathian Basin, as a large region forming a uniform geographical, ecological and economic system. The Great Plain played a decisive role and, within this, the valley of the Tisza where we find the harmonious co-existence of land and man, water and man along the river, in the periodically inundated areas. In research into farming on the river flats, ethnological studies adopting a new approach brought new results in recent decades. Four levels or zones of farming can be distinguished along the Tisza: the river level, the river flats, the flood-free areas and the sandy hills following the line of the river. Ever since the Árpádian period economic activity has been carried out in the areas known as fok, the system of channels connecting the river and the low-lying river flats. The wet farming on the river flats and the dry farming on the flood-free areas are mutually complementary forms of land use. The big river regulation projects carried out in the 19th century transformed the landscape and brought substantial changes in the methods and possibilities of farming.
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The tools used for woodcutting in Hungary in the Middle Ages were the hatchet and the axe. From the end of the Middle Ages the axe was used for felling and the hatchet for cutting and shaping. Under the influence of Western European forestry technology and planned forestry management, the saw began to appear in forestry work at the end of the 18th century and spread in the 19th century. In folk practice both the axe and the saw were used in the late 19th to early 20th century. The axe was used to fell smaller trees. When felling thicker trees a V-shaped cut was first made from the tree then two-men used a cross-cut saw from the other side of the tree to fell it. A hand-saw for one person was used to cut up smaller logs. It is an indication of the importance of the saw as a woodcutting tool that in the first half of the 20th century the term pár (pair) previously used for the groups of woodcutters was replaced by fûrész (saw). The last station of the process came in the mid- 20th century when the team of woodcutters working with a power saw came to be called a motor.
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Research on cottage industry in the Carpathian Basin has not paid very much attention to work with straw. In peasant self-sufficiency, in addition to wickerwork and rush weaving, plaits made of wheat and rye straw were among the main materials used for agricultural and household storage containers. In some areas the making of straw hats as an income-supplementing activity carried out together with agricultural work also acquired special importance. In the 19th century with the expansion of trade this cottage industry in places rose to the level of a manufacturing industry. At the turn of the century the movements promoting domestic industry and the trade exhibitions gave special impetus to this activity. It flourished right up to the Trianon decision of 1920. As a consequence of the dictated peace Hungary lost around two-thirds of its territory and economic ties were suddenly severed. In some parts of the Great Plain, e.g. in Hajdúnánás (today Hajdú-Bihar County), and especially in the villages of the Székelyföld region, traditional straw hat making has survived right up to the present as a women’s activity, providing a livelihood for many women working at home. This article deals with the industrial history background, with questions affecting cottage industry in general, and with the past of once flourishing trade connections, devoting special attention to a few villages in Hungary and in the Székelyföld region in the territory of today’s Romania.
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As Head of State, Head of the Church of England and the living symbol of the national unity, the British monarch embodies the political and religious institutions of the United Kingdom. Consequently, the ceremonies and events involving the monarch and the royal family constitute a central part of the civil religion of the nation-state. One potential problematic of the official discourse on national identity made available through the civil religion is the principle of heredity, which by elevating the status of royal birth simultaneously lowers the status of the mass of the people. However, this positioning does not cause widespread offense, or provoke general hostility towards the institution of monarchy. On the contrary, as the public mourning for Diana Princess of Wales demonstrated, royalty has the power to mobilise the sentiments and actions of millions. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over the past ten years, my concern in this paper is with unofficial public participation in royal ceremonials and events as folk version of the official civil religion. More particularly I am concerned with the ways in which these folk participants negotiate their socially inferior positioning by switching between the competing discourses of democratic egalitarianism and of heredity status, discourses which the concept of constitutional monarchy seeks to combine.
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