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

Hanneleena Hieta: Ethnographer s and three realities - how agency and institutional tradition intertwine in the museum setting

feature of Csongrád County, the town-dwelling peasants of the interwar period, was also represented in Ópusztaszer.

29 A veteran ethnologist-museologist, János Kodolányi, Jr., praised the museum in an interview I made with him in 1998. In his view, the merit of the ethnographic museum is in its way of showing the "sunny" and sociable sides of the peasantry, rather than misery and social struggle, which could have been more in ideological favor during the Socialist era.

30 Since the final layout of the building process is open for the public to see in the park and on the park website, it is unnecessary for me to describe it in detail. In contrast, what is not so obvious is the personal agency of the ethnographers involved in the building process of the open-air museum. The building of a museum always involves decision-making and choices, as well as pure chance of what is available and on what terms. I will therefore dwell on the aspects of chance and personal choices in the following paragraphs. The first two units to be built on the site that were planned by Antal Juhász were the single farmsteads (tanya) of Szeged and Szentes areas. Juhász had carried out an inventory of the remaining farmsteads of the Szeged area in the early 1970s. By the mid-1970s it had become clear that there was no single entity from the mid-19th century that could be rebuilt as part of the museum. Therefore, the buildings were brought from three separate communities. The communities of Mórahalom, Ásotthalom and Domaszék had previously formed an area called Alsótanya, which was culturally uniform. When the buildings of this entity were erected, special attention was paid to their positioning so that the yard was closed on its North-East side, as the building tradition on the Hungarian Plain previously dictated.

31 A second tanya was needed from the area east of Tisza. One farmstead in the Hódmezővásárhely area had just been turned into an in-situ museum" and so Juhász turned to the Szentes area for his search. The collectivization of these areas had been more thorough than to the west of Tisza and it was a difficult task to find an intact single farmstead. However, one already deserted farmstead was found and brought to the museum. Remains of a circular animal shelter were found in the process and thorough inventories of several others were made so that a restored animal shelter could be erected in the museum. The recreation of life in the open countryside was completed by an elementary school building and a social club. Agyain, these came from two different communities, Pusztaszer and Pusztafeketehalom. " " While the single farmsteads were erected, plans were being drawn up for an agrarian small-town complex. The first of these buildings was an onion-farmer's house from Makó. Juhász mentions in my interview with him that Ferenc Tóth and László Felföldi from the Makó museum (a branch of the Csongrád county museum) carried out extremely scrupulous background research for the house. The house that was chosen could not be moved as its inhabitants did not want to sell it to the 29 Juhász 1987, 129. 30 TYKL/spa/148/u:4 31 TYKL spa/148/u:8 32 Nagy V. 1999,47 33 TYKL spa/148/u:8