Cultural Lenses and Biological Filters On What Makes a Hungarian in the Present and in the Distant Past

Abstract

The definition of a memoir is “an account of the personal experiences of an author.” This paper provides the reflections of a physical (biological) anthropologist specializing in the genetics of the Indigenous peoples of North America who was born in Hungary, raised in Canada, and served twelve years as president and vice chancellor of the University of Manitoba. This professional background may question the relevance of these reflections to Hungarian studies. However, issues raised by János Kenyeres, the keynote speaker of the 2019 American Hungarian Educators Association conference, in his examination of Hungarian identity manifest in Hungarian literature—specifically, regarding “essentialist thinking”—are related to fundamental issues about the nature of human diversity with which physical (biological) anthropologists have been grappling since the eighteenth century. In an era in which commercial genetic genealogical services promise to identify ancestors and ethnicity, and genetic studies of living peoples as well as archaeogenomic studies of skeletal remains seek to identify relationships, current perspectives on what does—or does not—constitute “the essence of an individual and the groups to which one belongs” are worth considering. Facts, wherever they occur, are subject to interpretation. It is the cultural interpretation that we give to genetic identity that imbues that concept with meaning. [email protected]

Keywords

• Memoir
• anthropology and race
• 1939 Hungary
• genetic data and cultural interpretation