Fejős Zoltán (szerk.): A Néprajzi Múzeum gyűjteményei (Budapest, 2000)
THE COLLECTIONS OF THE MUSEUM OF ETHNOGRAPHY OF BUDAPEST - Summary
Függelék 1051 THE COLLECTIONS OF THE MUSEUM OF ETHNOGRAPHY OF BUDAPEST SUMMARY The Museum of Ethnography of Budapest was created in 1872 as a department of the Hungarian National Museum and it became an independent national institution in 1947. Thus the objects and archival documents of the Museum have been assembled in the course of more than 125 years. The almost 250 000 artefacts, millions of hand-written notes, reports and printed documents, as well as the photographic material consisting of 400 000 photographs and slides, and the thousands of hours of audio, film, and video recordings together constitute the largest and most significant source material of Hungarian ethnography. Much of what we know about the traditional culture of the Hungarian people and the transformations in their lifestyles and material culture is due to this source material. The international collections provide a picture of the cultural variety of the human race and of its traditional and to some extent current profile - which apart from the possibilities afforded by today’s mass media - would not otherwise be known in Hungary or - in this quantity and quality - anywhere else in Central Europe. The Museum of Ethnography of Budapest is one of the largest museums of its kind in Europe. This handbook serves to provide a systematic overview of Museum’s holdings. Two main principles guide the volume. On the one hand, it is clear that the evolution of the collections is part of a historical process in the course of which the research and acquisition agendas of museum professionals were not constant but rather they were very much changeable, furthermore a variety of such objective or subjective factors as the conditions of storage, limited budgets for acquisition, or the interests and training or even habitus of the curators also shaped the museum’s collections. On the other hand, the historical process of the evolution of the museum collections at the same time also created and continually transformed the “objective" reality which had been defined and selected as the subject of study. Such concepts as “folk culture” and “exotic cultures" of the peoples of the world came about as a result of curatorial perceptions and practices and the meanings of these terms were transformed over time. The aim of this volume is not simply to write a history of the museum, rather it has set as its goal the examination of the evolution of the collections both as sources of ethnographic knowledge and as abstractions, in other words a reconstruction of the ideas that shaped the history of ethnographic collecting in Hungary. After an introductory essay, the volume presents an overview of the material of the Museum written by the current curators of the various collections - we also invited some of our former colleagues to contribute - informed by a set of uniform questions. The chapters present the collections with the following issues in mind: 1) The history of the collection: how did the collection come into being, what were the most important acquisitions and attempts at building the collection? This section will also attempt to reconstruct and interpret the explicit and implicit considerations guiding the acquisition process. 2) The current composition of the collection: on what basis is the collection internally classified; what is the distribution of the material according to geographical origin and most important types of objects; what are the most glaring lacunae; what is the level of the documentation of the material and how well- known is it?
