A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Ethnographica 6. (Szeged, 2008)

Juhász Antal: Huszonöt év a tudomány és a közművelődés szolgálatában. Szűcs Judit köszöntése

Twenty-five Years in the Service of Science and Public Culture A Salute to Judit Szűcs by ANTAL JUHÁSZ Ethnographer Judit Szűcs, the director of Tari László Museum in Csongrád graduated as a teacher from the University of Szeged in 1971. At the beginning of her career, she worked as a tutor, later as a director in a dormitory, and became a director of Tari László Museum in Csongrád in 1983. She was most probably inspired by the linguistic and ethnographic lectures at university and so, turned to ethnography. Antal Nyíri (1907-2000) was the professor, who had a great influence even on her later research motto. Her first ethnographic work was studying the eating habits of her home town: Szentes; she wrote about baking bread at home, about bread-baking women and about small-scale baker's trade. She defended her dissertation on "Eating habits of Szentes at the turn of the century and in the early 20th century" in 1983 at ELTE University of Budapest. Her first studies were published in the same research topic area. In her methodology, she examined eating habits in a social context, and supplemented them with some data noted down phonetically. At the end of the 1980s she aimed at studying the folk society of the 20th century. She published several works about this topic; she studied the layers of local society through family stories and individual's lives. The novelty of her methodology was that she introduced the notion of the "family' as the smallest unit of society, examined and documented it thoroughly from the aspect of social ethnography. Owing to her research methodology, the notion of a 'large family' as a community of a house or of goods, its survival and operation have come to the surface in the settlements of the South Great Plain region she studied. She participated in several research projects and was a co-author of village monographies on Mindszent, Szegvár, Csólyospálos and Jászszentlászló. Her study on folk eating habits in the early 20th century published in the volume of Ethnography of Békéscsaba was exemplary. She participated in the project organized by the Ethnographic Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on Career and Social Network, and the research team studying migration processes in the South Great Plain region. From the 1990s she has studied handcraft, and the objects and materials of a peasant household with pleasure. In the latter topic area her study entitled 'The Story of a Csongrád Homestead and an Inventory of Objects' is exemplary from the aspect that it is now an irreplaceable document on the changing homestead life. Her science organizing activity is also significant. As a small-town museum director, she organized several nation-wide ethnographic conferences (Ethnographic Research Opportunities of the Society in the Great Plain - 1993; Wear and Society, in other words, Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds - 1995). She hosted the International Student Summer Seminars organized by the Department of Ethnography at the University of Szeged in 1995-96. Furthermore, she was a director, co-director of several exhibitions: she organized the furnishing of the House of Regional Traditions situated in the city district called 'Belsőváros' and several other ethnographic art exhibitions. An outstanding example is the permanent exhibition opened in 2002 on Csongrád'

s folk life. She has multiplied the collections of the Csongrád museum in the past twenty-five years.