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

Péter László: Banner János: Szeged tárgyi néprajza Tömörkény munkáiban

János Banner - Szeged's Ethnography in Tömörkény

's Works by LÁSZLÓ PÉTER Archeologist and ethnographer János Banner (1888-1971) was greatly attached to Szeged as well at the beginning of his career. Between 1913 and 1920 he worked at Móra Ferenc Museum (for a while, as a successor of István Tömörkény, who was the founder of the ethnographic collection), then he started to teach at the six-year secondary school of Szeged and later, became an assistant professor at the university. He habilitated in 1922 at the University of Szeged on Hungary's ethnography in comparison to the country's demography with special emphasis on the Great Plain and Southern Hungary. His career proves Ferenc Mora's saying that ethnography and archeology are two halves of a walnut; in other words, "There are no two areas of science that would be so much alike as ethnography and archeology. I dare say these two areas are the two sides of folk science. Archeology is fossilized ethnography and ethnography is living arheology." At the beginning of his career, Banner wanted to become an ethnographer, only later did he become a master of archeology and a teacher of generations. In 1924 he received a position at the Archeology Department of the university, which was relocated from Kolozsvár (Cluj) to Szeged, where, in 1929 he received the title of a professor extraordinarius. In the first semester of the academic year of 1922/23 János Banner held a lecture on István Tömörkény'

s ethnography. As he wrote later: "As far as I know, no one has studied Tömörkény's works from this point of view." Owing to his nephew, Péter Szablyár, the typed version of the lecture on Tömörkény's ethnography was offered from the scientist's legacy to the collection of Móra Ferenc Museum. We do not know when and why it was written; however, it was surely based on earlier researches. Undoubtedly, János Banner's work of exploring Tömörkény's ethnography at such depth and detail is a pioneering one. Although the writer and museum director was appraised as an ethnographer after his death; however, only later were there attempts at an ethnographic analysis on his works. For example, Imre Katona (1921—2001), instead of relying on the missing papers of the field of science, studied the ethnography of navvies in Tömörkény's short stories. Similarly, Ernő Tárkány Szűcs (1921—1984) examined folk law in Tömörkény's short stories. Upon the unity of object and word, József Mihály Végh's study (1939—1982) is a very impressive ethnographic work. He appraised Sándor Bálint as the founder of the ethnographic collection in the museum of Szeged. Antal Juhász and the author of this article have published several papers in which they presented new details on Tömörkény's ethnographic observations.