Ethnography and Hungarian Prehistory
Ethnography and Hungarian Prehistory

Summary/Abstract: How to approach prehistory from the point of view of a Central European, “national,” ethnography raises a number of interesting questions. What I should like to do here is to recall briefly some episodes from the history of the discipline in Hungary. The title of this article may suggest that it was ethnography as an already established discipline which first started to express an interest in prehistory. In reality, the opposite was the case. It was an interest in origins and prehistorical times gradually evolving into institutionalized scholarship that turned to folk culture as a potential source for historical reconstructions. The history of ethnography, indeed what was one of its key trends, may well be described as its gradual emancipation from the role of a mere data base for prehistory.

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