Fellows Profile

Sylff fellowship received: 2021
Academic supervisor: Sándor Varga (PhD)

Vivien Szőnyi is a doctoral candidate on the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She worked as dance anthropologist at the Institute for Musicology in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2015 to 2019, and she connected in the education of Choreomundus Erasmus+ Programme from 2017 to 2019. Her research is interested in the functional transformation of Moldavian traditional dance culture from the middle of the 20th century till these days. She has engaged more fieldwork expeditions in Romania and The Republic of Moldova since 2012. She is a member of Hungarian Association for Ethnochoreology; Hungarian Cultural Anthropological Association; and International Council for Traditional Music.

Her supported research focuses on the transformation, social embeddedness, and functions of dance culture in a single North-Eastern Romanian village, Magyarfalu (Arini) populated by a Roman Catholic, Hungarian ethnic group. The transformation of dance life and dance repertoire of the local community is discussed in the context of ecological, political, economic, and sociocultural processes within the period of 1940–2010. Along with highlighting a dynamic relation between society and dance culture, the research aims to prove that the theoretical and practical frame of functionalism, the method of social anthropology, can be adapted for dance anthropological research.

https://u-szeged.academia.edu/VivienSz%C5%91nyi