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)

"MOTHER AND CHILD" IN HUNGARIAN FOLKLORE: AN ETHNOSEMIOTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BELIEF SYSTEM* MIHÁLY HOPPÁŁ 1. ETHNOSEMIOTICS AND ETHNOMEDICINE The investigation of the history of knowledge presents frequent surprises to the researcher. For instance, it is intriguing to lock at certain parallel evolutionary processes between the history of medicine and that of semiotics. More specifically, there are many common features between the history of ethnomedicine and the history of ethnosemiotics. Terms with the prefix „ethno-" (ethnoscience, ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, ethnomethodology) appeared in the vocabulary of social/cultural anthropology toward the end of the 1960s. Newly amassed results of ethnology generated syntheses of folklore data. Earlier approaches in the tradition of Volkskunde were revitalized by Völkerkunde-type investigations: hence the prefix „ethno-". Accordingly, „folk medicine" became „ethnomedicine". However, I assume, the history of ethnosemiotics is less known to the participants of this conference. The term appeared first in a lecture by J. A. Greimas at the SIEF Congress in Paris in 1971. J. Stepanov's Russian language publication, Semiotika (1971) and two Hungarian studies (Hoppá 1971 and Voigt 1971) deal in some detail, with the principal subjects of this field. As a discipline of novelty (nouvelle vogue), it surfaced in a volume entitled Approaches to Semiotics (Sebeok, et alii eds., 1964),. and in the journal Semiotica. While semiotics is the „science of signs" (Morris 1971), ethnosemiotics is the study of verbal and non-verbal signs of a given culture. A basic thesis of the latter is that the functioning of a given culture is defined by the sign-processes expressed in the cultural codes of a given ethnic unit. The primary aim of the ethnosemiotic analysis is the recording of empirical phenomena through description and definition of culturally meaningful units and sequences of human behavior. It is analogous to, let us say, the observation of verbal language — an activity guided by rules of grammar and syntax. Let me now return to the history of semiotics and that of medicine to the times when the two have not yet bifurcated. The word semiotics comes from Greek, and its first application from the renowned physician Galen (130—201 AD.). It has remained in use to date, and stands for the study of symptomatology or semeiology. It might be worth mentioning that the medieval use of the term semiologie is still extant in France, and its English language equivalent is semiotics. According to Galen, semiotics (root: sema meaning sign) comprises one of the six branches of medicine. * A paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Ethnomedicine „Traditional Gynecology and Obstetrics", Dec. 8— 10, 1978 Göttingen