Exhibitions

"Only real shamans' dreams come true"

15/Oct/2004 - 20/Feb/2005
For the 75th Birthday of Lajos Boglár

Lajos Boglár was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1929. His father worked as the Hungarian consul in Brazil at that time. His early meeting with the local native Americans was determinative for his future scientific career. During the Second World War the family was forced to leave Brazil, Boglár studied anthropology in the 1940s at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Between 1953-1979 he worked at the America Collection of the Museum of Ethnography and he was the first doing scientific fieldwork in this area. During the three decades spent at the Museum he created an Amazonian collection of international value. He enriched the collection with about 700 pieces, all of them well dated, accompanied with photo and film documentation. He made fieldwork in 1958-59 among the Nambicuara Indians in the Mato Grosso and among the Piaroa Indians in Venezuela in 1967-68 and 1974. After having left the Museum he made several journies to Brazil, and between 1991-1997 to French Guyana, where he studied the Wayana Indians. From that time he concentrated on Amazonian featherwork, and became one of the well-known scientific personality on the topic. He is also active in making films on rituals, art and social problems of the natives.

Boglár was the founder of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1990. Before that time ethnographic education concentrated mostly on Hungarian ethnography, and existence of the Department caused a profound change of perspectives in that.

Boglár's attractive personality and his commitment inspired several students to be interested in native Americans, and in the last years they accompanied him on ethnological fieldworks.

The Museum of Ethnography celebrates with this exhibiton the 75th birthday of Lajos Boglár

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