PhDr. Michal Markuš, CSc. (1912 - 2004) v súradniciach 50. - 70. rokov storočia

Rok, strany: 2010, 465 - 477

This paper is a segment of a project on the history of scientific thought in Slovakia, devoted to individual scientific figures. The author is concerned with the ethnographer Michal Markuš, a Slovak born in Hungary, who came to Slovakia in 1947 in the context of an exchange of Slovak and Hungarian populations after the Second World War. M. Markuš, a trained ethnographer and linguist, who had defended his doctorate in Budapest University and worked for ten years in a museum in Budapest, brought a notable increase of strength at a time when ethnographic science in Slovakia was beginning to be profesionalised. He began to apply his theoretical and practical knowledge in practice at the East Slovakian Museum in Košice, where from 1952 to 1957 he worked as director. From 1951 he held the position of elected president of the Museum Committee of the Union of Slovak Museums (ZSM) and began to press effectively to have qualified professionals appointed to work in museums. The communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 brought new tendencies into the museum field. Museum work was orientated towards a thoroughgoing teaching of history, that is to say in its contemporary interpretation; exhibition was conceived as an instrument for political education and propagation of political tasks. Instead of the "teaching of history", what was put into effect was a "teaching by history" or "formation through history". Hence in the late 1950s the activitis of ZSM also began to be transferred to politically directed institutions and the activity of museums as professional organs came to an end. M. Markuš´s further activity was focused on scientific-research work. In 1950 a branch of the Slovak Academy of Science´s Ethnographic Institute was formed in Košice at the East Slovakian Museum, which Markuš was appointed to lead, along with his work at the Museum. He carried out the first collective research in communities which had to be relocated for military reasons. A further research work of his in 1954 was connected with the most significant ethnographic project of the time - production of the monograph "The Mining Village of Žakarovce" (publ. 1956). From the standpoint of the history of our scientific discipline this was a research breakthrough, in which contemporary ethnography had to set itself in the framework of the Marxist-Leninist conception of culture and commit itself to a politically demanded object of research. In his scientific-research work M. Markuš made a priority of the area of culinary culture, which he described at the most neglected area of Slovak ethnography, and in subsequent years published a series of fundamental works on this question.

ISO 690:

Stoličná, R. 2010. PhDr. Michal Markuš, CSc. (1912 - 2004) v súradniciach 50. - 70. rokov storočia. In Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, vol. 58, no.4, pp. 465-477. 1339-9357.

APA:

Stoličná, R. (2010). PhDr. Michal Markuš, CSc. (1912 - 2004) v súradniciach 50. - 70. rokov storočia. Slovenský národopis / Slovak Ethnology, 58(4), 465-477. 1339-9357.