Key commitments and objectives of HAS RCH Institute of Ethnology:
- Editing ethnographic manuals, such as the Encyclopaedia of Hungarian Folk Poetry, and Encyclopaedia of Hungarian Folk Culture, as well as the yearbook Ethno-Lore, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica the only English language periodical of the disciplin and various further publication series of the institute.
- Transformation in various strata, groups, communities and regions different in their geography and type.
- Studying historical and present phenomena of social, economic and cultural processes and structures.
- Field and source exploration and analyses with various study methods.
- Theoretical and methodological issues in current folklore, collection of folklore texts and occurrences of vernacular religiousness, exploration of written sources, expansion, analysis of text corpora, utilisation of epigraphic research in society as a whole and issues of traditionalisation, the present and perspectives of folk culture and folk art, folklorism and revival phenomena.
- Tradition and modernisation, cultural conditioning and ideologies, religious features, perception of land and environment – field studies and ethnological studies in Siberia and in Central and South-East Asia.