Kemény István Collection

István Kemény, a sociologist who was always on the periphery under state socialism, was asked by the government Office of Councils to do a survey on the lifestyles and circumstances of Hungarian Roma. He did the research within the framework of the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was his working place at the time. The survey was done in 1971. The researchers formed their questionnaires in selected counties. They did interviews with Roma and non-Roma people (who worked in local councils, schools, or for the police). The researchers typed the recorded interviews in some copies, using indigo. They gave one to István Kemény and one to the Sociological Institute. As part of the project, Kemény held “seminars” in the Institute every Tuesday to give the participants a chance to improve their knowledge of the subject.

The interviews were collected by sociologist Gábor Havas, who also participated in the project. In the middle of the 1980s, Havas was informed that the Sociological Institute wanted to eliminate the research materials from 1971, so he took the documents into his residence, and he realized that many of the interviews were missing. At the end of the 1990s, the Hungarian Roma communities asserted their claim to the research material, because they wanted to use it for a Roma civil rights self-assembly. Colleagues at the Roma Press Centre took efforts to gather the texts of the interviews and create a collection out of them. Workers at the Centre copied the documents, and they found another text too. Although they got money by submitting a tender to digitalize the documents, this was never done. After the liquidation of the Press Centre, the documents ended up in a bicycle storage facility in a housing project. In the end, the Open Society Archives (OSA) was given the collection at the suggestion of colleagues of the Voices of the 20th Century Archive. The material has since been fully digitalized thanks to the Voices of the 20th Century Archive. The research that was done in 1971 addressed some 2 percent of Hungarian Roma population, but only a small fraction of the findings were published in an internally issued book by the Sociological Institute in 1976 entitled “Report on the Research Done in 1971 on the Hungarian Roma.” Only one study was published in its entirety in this work. The writing of Gábor Havas also published in 1982 in the book Research on the Roma.

Owner: Gábor Havas, Voices of the 20th Century Archive and Research Group