COURAGE

connecting collections

The bequest of Hungarian folklorist and folk dance researcher György Martin is currently held at the Hungarian Heritage House. The collection offers interesting insights into the private practices of alternative culture during the Kádár era in Hungary. It contains many documents, including letters, documents about the folk dance house movement, and documents about research trips. György Martin’s correspondence in particular reflects the trajectories of a non-conformist intellectual agenda.

Zsuzsanna Erdélyi’s collection was the outcome of an unanticipated event in socialist Hungary. The ethnographer and her colleague Sándor Bálint created a collection of objects pertaining to Catholic folk practices in the mid-1970s with the public support of Cardinal László Lékai and the Catholic press. The survival of a significant number of private religious objects during the communist era demonstratd that many citizens lived active spiritual lives and cultivated the heritage of their parents and grandparents, despite the government prohibition against religion.

The Cornel Irimie Collection illustrates how ethnographers managed to negotiate the autonomy of their research activity with the communist state institutions and to conduct ethnographic research in contradiction with some of the official cultural policies. The collection includes more than 300 files of personal documents, student notes, field research notes and reports, drafts of academic works, acquisition reports, and exhibition drafts.