At the Eleventh Hour. The Principles of Folklore Collection in the Scholarly Oeuvre of Lajos Katona and in Hungarian Folklore Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century

Abstract

In Hungary, the academic study of folklore started at the turn of the 20th century. In the period between 1889 and 1920, institutions for the study of folklore and ethnography were established. The author points out that ethnographic collections in this era were motivated by concern about the loss of folk culture phenomena owing to changes brought by modernisation. Major arguments for the establishment of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society as well as the Museum of Ethnography referred to the need to salvage endangered items of folk culture from vanishing. Folklore collections were interpreted as rescue missions aiming to save material in the penultimate moment. The author of this paper investigates the way in which an outstanding folklorist of the period, Lajos Katona (1862–1910), professor of comparative literary studies, defined the essence, purpose, and method of ethnographic/folklore collections. Katona urged on several occasions that collectors of folklore be equipped with professional guidebooks and other auxiliary materials. He played a role in the popularisation of the activities of the Folklore Fellows, furthering the establishment of a network of voluntary collectors. Empirical data collection in the field is a central notion of folklore studies, one of the most important methodological and epistemological categories of the discipline, which functions as a distinctive feature differentiating it from other fields of study. Therefore, it is of central importance to shed light upon how and why the principles of the collection and recording of folklore phenomena in oral culture have changed.