The Siberian Journeys and Legacy of Vilmos Diószegi

Sántha, István (2003) The Siberian Journeys and Legacy of Vilmos Diószegi. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 48 (3-4). pp. 313-325. ISSN 1216-9803

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Abstract

Vilmos Diószegi was led to a study of Siberian shamanism by research into the pre-conquest, archaic stratum of Hungarian folk belief and folk customs, the still unsolved mystery of Hungarian ethnogenesis. He made three research trips in Southern Siberia (1957, 1958, 1964), and one in Northern Mongolia (1960). Shamanism was a taboo subject for Soviet-Russian researchers in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and Siberia was closed to foreign researchers. He pressed on and carried out his planned fieldwork, always supplementing his fieldwork with research in local museums, libraries and datafiles, establishing professional, scholarly and human contacts which were to serve him well later when he edited his international volumes of studies, and created and continuously expanded the Shaman Archive. The scholarly legacy of Vilmos Diószegi, the Shaman Archive, after his death did not remain intact. Vilmos Diószegi's manuscripts, books, photographs and sound recordings are now officially preserved in four places: the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in the apartment of his widow, Judit Morvay, in Szentendre. Between 1998 and 2002, when taking stock of his scholarly legacy, I tried to visit all the places where his scattered legacy is preserved. The following overview is based on this work.

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