A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF TEACHING
A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF TEACHING

Summary/Abstract: Higher education, including “universities”, began in Hungary at the beginning of the 14th century. That system was disrupted by the Ottoman invasion in the first half of the 16th century. The present university system was launched by founding of a Jesuit university in Nagyszombat (1635), which later became the royal, then the state university of Hungary, and today is the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. There from about 1784 we can register teaching activity, which we understand today as directed towards folklore, ethnography, and later even towards cultural anthropology. From 1872 the “second” Hungarian state university was opened in Kolozsvár, which fled from there at the end of the First World War (and operated in Szeged from 1921 on), came back for some years during the Second World War, and was divided after the war again. By 1910 other state universities were created in Hungary, which work today in Debrecen and Pécs. Ethnography and folklore are now regularly represented there, in Debrecen from 1949 on, in Pécs from 1989 on. (But, of course, with some anteceding activities.) In Szeged the first professorship in ethnography (practically in folklore) was established in 1929, and after many years of interruption today there is a university institution of ethnography, folklore and cultural anthropology. A university chair for visual anthropology exists at the Miskolc university from 1982 on. At the recent ecclesiastical universities in Hungary there is no regular teaching on those topics.

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