Antall József szerk.: Népi gyógyítás Magyarországon / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 11-12. (Budapest, 1979)

TANULMÁNYOK - Hoppáy Mihály: „Anya és gyermek" a magyar folklórban — A hiedelemvilág etnoszemiotikai megközelítése (angol nyelven)

¡§¡. Hoppá : ,,Mother and Child

" in Hungarian Folklore 93 are cured by snakeskin. Snakebite would heal, according to another source, by bandaging the effected areas with the crushed snakehead (Gunda 1963:142, Wlislocki 1893:83-87). In Hungarian popular belief the snake plays a role primarily in healing, but even more importantly is safeguarding health and in the house snake, guarding the gate and the threshold, and in folk art snakes are represented on the shepherd's stick, on winejugs (Miska jugs) and on wooden tumblers. In any case it is not accidental that the legacy of a quack woman in the 1950's contained along with several superstitious objects also dried snake. There was a belief among the people, both the upper and lower classes, however, to use snake skins for easing birth. Even the work of Pápai-Páriz's, Pax Corporis, advises that the woman in labour should "be girdled with snake skin, which snakes shed

" for it is of great help (Pápai-Páriz 1690:232). We know from the correspondence of noblewomen that in the early 17th century they requested from each other the use of snake skins to ease birth, just as in the early 20th century peasant woman did likewise. Most probably this can be explained on the variants of analogy that according to folk belief the embrio would leave the mother with the same ease as the snake shed its skin. In addition it is also conceivable that ancient tradition of the snake cult plays a role, having especial healing power (Hoppá —Törő 1975:81). All the above data show a relative stability of beliefs, and belief system. 4. ON THE CONCEPT OF BELIEF SYSTEM It has already been pointed out by a number of scholars that communities have a culturally defined system of beliefs. One of my recent publications gives an overview of problems of belief system (Hoppá 1979). I think that further clarifications can always improve our studies, thus I wish to introduce the methodology of semiotics to the field of ethnomedicine. An antropological aim is to examine belief systems to discover its categories, the relationships between the units (syntax), the meaning of the units (semantics), and their functioning in the community (pragmatics). We planned our research with the Morrisian system of semiotics in mind (Morris 1971). A belief system is a subsystem of the system of culture. The reason why we singled out anthropology from other social sciences is that its primary focus is the study öfçų tųre, and of the belief system. Intensive and prolonged research was carried out in Hungary by the Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, using word-association, analyzing beliefs on illnesses and supernatural beings (Hoppá 1970 and 1974). Fieldwork was conducted in rural communities among peasants. Our informants were mostly of the elderly in addition to applying word association, we tried to elicite complete sentences from the respondants. The real aim of our work, was reconstruction of the network of beliefs.We prepared a net-like schema representing the syntactic description of the belief system, which may be useful for cross-cultural analysis. The procedure is fairly mechanical and can be computerised. It is more complicated if the collected texts contain several relevant elements, such as a belief regarding curing. The symptoms of the illness as a sign imply the course of the treatment. First, the cause of the disease is diagnosed (e. g. the child was given the evil-eye). This charm