Their Own State(s) of Nature: The Enlightenment Social Imaginary and the Invention of Hungarian Ethnic Origins

The Jesuit scholar János Sajnovics's (1733-85) work on the 'sameness' of the Hungarian and Sámi language, first published in 1770, re-ignited discussion on the ethnic kinship and origin of the Hungarians, traditionally associated with the Turkic or 'Scythian' warrior peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Participants in this discussion relied extensively on international and domestic literature in ethnography and global geography, classifying these peoples according to the categories of stadial history as savage or barbarous. As Scythianism was entwined with discourses of social distinction and political privilege of the Hungarian elite, and the Kingdom of Hungary was both a multi-ethnic entity and part of the larger Habsburg composite polity whose enlightened reformist leaders were challenging these privileges, the subject had significant ideological implications. Representations of the Sámi even assumed dehumanising overtones. On a different level of abstraction, some of the contributors, like the par excellence Hungarian philosophe György Bessenyei (1746-1811), also dedicated important texts to larger questions of nature, human nature and culture. The paper examines the interferences among these different genres, and the ways in which assumptions about the nation's 'own' past and natural states, and their ambiguous confrontation with mainstream European intellectual developments, shaped emerging discourses of identity during the Hungarian national awakening, with long-standing consequences.