Paper Short Abstract:

While the case studies of the 1830s-1840s show that ethnographic and folkloristic interests were merged for Hungarian intellectuals in Transylvania, by the 1850s those who conceived larger collections and publications were clearly committed to collecting, recording, and publishing some specific segment of ethnography or folkloristics.

Paper Abstract:

The first comprehensive collection of Hungarian folk poetry in Transylvania was published in 1863 in Cluj (then Kolozsvár) under the title Vadrózsák (Briar Roses). The preceding period has been almost completely unexplored. Traces of an early interest in Transylvanian Hungarian ethnography/folk poetry can be found in the 1830s-1840s in periodicals and in the manuscript journals of Protestant boarding schools. My research of these sources over the past few years has clearly shown that interest in ethnography and folklore in this early period was not detached from each other and was strongly linked to travelogues originating from a more progressive approach of the Protestant boarding schools. In this period intellectuals who believed in the need for a social and economic change, and who were actively involved in bringing it about, recorded ethnographic and folkloristic phenomena alike. In my presentation, I will examine the interpretive communities of Hungarian intellectuals of Transylvania and their role in ethnographic-folkloristic collection.