Vargyas Gábor: Istenek, ősök és sámánok (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2012)

photos, he has worked out three big thematic units, which cover three big domains of the religious life of the Bru: the agricultural rites in connection with dry rice production, on which their subsistence is based, their shamanism related to misfortune and illness, and their ancestor cult related to funeral rites. The individual pictures present the most important moments of the rites in a strict logical order, step by step, moment by moment: this is how all the photos are composed into an analytic scientific text, into a study of monographic standard. Many people will probably ask the question why the Bru people are the subject of an exhibition. Why is it important today in Hungary to present a people living in the hills of Central Vietnam, following a lifestyle which is completely different from ours? When I speak about the people of my research, the Ostyaks, nobody asks this question. Almost everybody knows that they are linguistically related to Hungarians, and this might be the source of interest. When talking about Gábor Vargyas' exhibition the obvious fact does not occur even in form of an explanation: that every people is interesting on its own, not only for things related to us. We rather can ask the question as follows: Why should not be they the subject of the exhibition? Since it is possible to discuss within every culture the most general human questions - even if this culture is very individual due to its essential character - therefore the study of each culture contributes to our knowledge about the so called eternally human. Bronislav Malinowski, an important personality of classic anthropology - whom I respect together with Gábor Vargyas - has written these classical words: "There is [...] one point of view deeper yet and more important than the love of tasting of the variety of human modes of life, and that is the desire to turn such knowledge into wisdom. Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself - yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world's vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically.

" Gábor Vargyas has approached the culture of the Bru in this sense. Instead of simply presenting, he always links this culture to general human problems, and as a consequence, the problems appear for us to be scientific discourses. When I go through his university lectures or studies, many such questions arise: in connection with fortune telling - the dialectic of unsuccessful predictions and the survival of belief; in connection with the yiang Su, the guardian spirit of the village and the region - the building principles of human society, the role of descent and locality, resp. of ancestrality; in connection of rice production - how far it is correct to consider the deforestation by burning as environment damaging procedure. He suggests that every work phase is accompanied by rites and magic handling, composing a ritual technology, which determines basically the possibilities of technology change and technology process, the way how rice is transformed from the divinity yiang Abon's body to become simple "food" by loss of religious importance. When we look at the pictures, as I did already several times, we notice facts, which might escape our attention the first time. The pictures show an idyllic world, at the first glance. And we notice behind the scenes of peaceful daily life the traces of the drama left behind by the recent war in Vietnam, when we look at the photo of the young couple leaving for the clearing with the Kalashnikov slung over the shoulder of the smiling husband. This world seems to be archaic and closed but it is sufficient to notice Maradona's striped shirt worn by the dancing man during the funeral rite to know that even these people are not cut off from the world. We see this jungle as intact scenery, if we don't discover in the following pictures the cultivated area modified by man, as obvious in the recently abandoned clearing, where the forest starts growing or in the gold-yellow rice-field. Although Gábor Vargyas' exhibition is basically meant as a photo study, it is impossible not to realize the everyday story of human life present in it: the dumb smile on the face of the man due to the liquor consumed during the ceremony, the superior smile of the old woman who has seen a lot in her life, the playfulness of the woman keeping her two children on her lap, the strained attention of the shaman on the point of taking the fiery sword in his mouth, the worry of the relations accompanying the patient to the shaman and the honest enthusiasm of the village party secretary when participating in the shamanic ceremony. Through the instructive and explanatory pictures and beyond the scientific truthfulness human scenes reveal themselves, which are not reducing but rather legitimating the inherent scientific content: narrow life-worlds and world-political systems; humans and - as the exhibition's title suggests - "divinities, ancestors and shamans." Fates unfolding themselves only thanks to the camera and to the sympathy, humanism and straightforwardness of the attentive man standing behind the camera. To quote again Malinowski: "The Science of Man, in its most refined and deepest version should lead us to such knowledge and to tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men's point of view. The study of Ethnology - so often mistaken by its very votaries for an idle hunting after curios, for a ramble among the savage and fantastic shapes of 'barbarous customs and crude superstitions' - might become one of the most deeply philosophic, enlightening and elevating disciplines of scientific research." 9