Imagine your story about studying in Hungary will become a folk tale in a century, where you are the hero winning against the hardships of the 21st century. No, it’s not a joke. Nowadays folktales can be a good tool to help people express their feelings and find solutions. Here you can read how folktales led my life to anthropology and it can help yours too, therefore you can tell stories better and your alumni meetings can be colourful.
“Bring me your folk tales and I’ll tell you who you are!”- said my professor, who taught me historical anthropology and the origin of folk tales, when I was a sophomore. This seminar was the hardest one and other students laughed at us and thought our major is light-minded because of examining tales. But it was our exam project to bring our folk tales and analyze it. That made us feel both funny and scared because we couldn’t really imagine how we would start our project and we secretly hoped it’s just a joke and it isn’t going to be a very serious exam.
Then we began collecting and debating on stories, read a horrible amount of books like Ginzburg Cheese and Worms or Imhof Lost world, Zemon David The Return of Martin Guerre and we began to create our story. Every week one of us was the storyteller and our professor was in deep silence. I brought a story from my fieldwork and spoke about my magical flower-patterned booklet, what hid the secrets of Korean people’s life.
That time I was researching the lifestyle of Korean people in Budapest and I used Lajos Boglár’s classic note-taking method. He was famous for his “black notebook” stories among Indians, in which he wrote all of the information (articles, handbooks etc.) about them and he read it in the tribal village and discussed it with the Indians.
This seminar determined our life, some of us became anthropologist, others chose a different profession, but all of us got a good direction from the tales where and how we want to live
Stories have their power. Everybody can benefit from them and they have their cycles. When we share a story in our communities it can be an example, moral or warning. When our community “preserves” it, some decades later it might become a folk tale or norm and later might even integrate into our culture. Even if nobody remembers the original story and some part were changed or details shifted from them through the centuries, what matters is that it’s preserved.
Hungary has a colorful, vivid culture, where tradition goes hand in hand with innovation. One example of this is the work of Dr. Ildikó Boldizsár, ethnographer and psychologist, who took centuries-old folk tales and lifted them to another level. She developed the Metamorphoses Therapy Method, where she combined her 34 years old world folktales-research with bibliotherapy to give back the power of tales for adults.
She asks what we can learn from the heroes of our stories. We can generally say that fairytale heroes live in a constant present, they don’t imagine their lives, they live them. Heroes are always on the move because they know that they can’t find all the answers in one place. They make their way through their fairytale and gain experience, which they then use for their own be
Think about the turning points in your life! Where are you now and how does your “tales” of being an Alumni appear in your story? We would like to encourage you to grab a pen and your favorite notebook and start writing your own fairy tale. Don’t forget to share it with us, too! As an Alumni Network Hungary member, you can share your stories in different ways, like writing your testimonials and share it with us, make a group for organizing alumni meetings or become one of our volunteers.