Antoni Judit: Tapa, a fakéreg művészete. Válogatás Ignácz Ferenc gyűjteményéből. (Távoli világok emberközelben I. Gödöllői Városi Múzeum, 2006)

TAPA. ART FROM THE BARK Introduction: The Story of the Collection It is all but natural that the primary task of the Town Museum of Gödöllő - by virtue of its collecting area - is to study and to exhibit the history of the place, that of the town of Gödöllő and of the region around it. Nevertheless, our museum has in store, for the unsuspecting visitors, a number of special surprises, which fall outside of that "obligatory scope". We have prepared now one such surprise which, we hope, will offer everybody a pleasant experience. All our thanks are due for it to Mr. Ferenc Ignácz, ex-citizen of our town, who lives now abroad. Ferenc Ignácz was born in 1928 in Gödöllő where he had been working as a dentist and dental technician for nearly twenty years. His love for nature directed him to hunting and to zoological studies. From the nineteen seventies onward, he made several trips to different African countries, where, committed by the Hungarian Museum of Natural History, he had been trying to recover the zoological collection burnt down in 1956. During his stays in Africa, his interest has gradually shifted to ethnography, and when he finally settled down in Australia in 1980, he could turn to profit his wide experience after he became honorary associate of the Australian Museum of Sydney. In the past twenty years, he had been widely travelling in various parts of the world, mainly in the Far East and in the archipelago of the Pacific Ocean. He went several times to Papua New Guinea. Wherever he travelled, he had always been collecting and buying; first only as souvenir, then with a scholarly purpose in mind, the objects which were characteristic of the local culture. This was how came into being an enormous collection of ethnology and of natural history consisting of several thousands of pieces, which he donated to his home town in 1988 and which came to be housed in the museum. Ferenc Ignácz has also left to the town his library of scientific and scientific educational books, his photos, films, filmstrips, sound recordings, all related to the collection. In order to show to as many people as possible this material unfolding magic worlds, we have been organizing numerous exhibitions from this huge and variegated collection in the last 15 years, not only in Gödöllő, but also all over the country. A permanent exhibition is open in the Town Museum of Gödöllő for those interested in the subject. With the foregoing volume, we intend to start a new series on peoples living outside Europe. As for the collection, it is presented as being divided into several subject areas. The reason for this is the profusion and the diversity of the material and also the fact that the collector has never tried, except for one case, to bring a given culture into prominence and to illustrate it in details: the material provides only a taste of the lives of peoples of different regions. Mr. Ferenc Ignácz lives in Sydney also at present and continues to put on the collection: the last consignment was received in 2003. In his collection there are altogether 79 pieces of tapa and 21 pieces of objects related to tapa making. The motto of the series: "The purpose of ethnography is the peace among peoples." is taken from Julius Lips, the famous German ethnographer, and I chose it because it is also my creed. The concept of "tapa", its origin, the breadth of its prevalence The generally known name of the fabric made of the inner bark of a tree i.e. of the phloem, is of Polynesian origin: the Samoan "tapa" originally designated the undyed fringe of the bast fabric, and the Hawaiian "kapa" was the name of one of the bast fabric varieties. This name started to be known in the beginning of the 19th century, partly on the strength of the first travelers' accounts, partly upon the influence of sailors, of whalers and of seamen of mainly Hawaiian origin engaged to ships. The name of the bast fabric is different in the other islands. They call it "masi" in Fiji, "siapo" in Samoa, "ngatu" in Tonga, formerly they called it "hiapo" in the Marquesqs islands, and "ahu" in Tahiti. These words designated the fabric made everywhere of similar raw materials and by identical technique. The centre of the fabrics made of bast is Polynesia, but other major ranges of prevalence are also known in the neighbouring Indonesia (mainly on Sulawesi), and in the farther South America, in the region of the Amazonas River, and in a certain part of black Africa. Linguistic and archaeological data equally support the theory according to which, as far as the propagation in Oceania is concerned including Melanesia and New Guinea, the peoples who dispersed both the different tree species used as raw material and the manufacturing technique as well as the craftsmanship uniform up to the present were the bearers of the "Lapita culture" which can be associated with the early Polynesian population.