Hungarian Ethnochoreology, also termed Dance Folkloristics, has produced a monumental work that, in my view, presents the methodological basis for this discipline in general. This is a volume with a selection of works by the researcher who provided this solid foundation, György Martin. Edited by a group of his followers, who also include their commentary articles, the volume has even similar pieces from other Hungarian colleagues. I will not discuss the latter in-depth for the sake of space. Lajos Vargyas chronologically surveys Martin’s scholarly work, Tamás Hofer positions him in social and cultural history research, seeing his achievement here in a European context, and Katalin Paksa portrays the significance of his work for ethnomusicology.

The book opens with Colin Quigley’s fascinating discussion of how Anglophones received Martin, which also resonates with what Martin told me in some inspirational talks in 1980 when I met him at a conference in Stockholm. I feel that Quigley tends to harmonise a situation that, for me—and I think for Martin—at that time felt like an enormous gap between two disciplines and their very different ontological roots. The anthropology was fuelled and funded by the colonial masters’ needs to understand their colonised people. From my perspective, they tended to see dance as an embodiment of social structures in a preferably exotic community, and the dancing gave material to case studies on questions of power structures, gender, kinship, and aesthetics. Martin said that one question was repeated to him everywhere on his United States tour: “What is the meaning?” The dance patterns had little intrinsic value or academic interest. Since his study of dance came from folklore, he saw dance material as a valuable heritage to document in ways that enabled it to be re-embodied. The detailed and advanced analysis of the movement patterns allowed a profound understanding of dancers’ strategies for building their dance and for aesthetic preferences. It offered material to understand the enormous scope of cultural variation between geographical units and fed the tracing of the history dances, which was significant for nation-building.

Martin highlights this point on the back cover; one of his vital agencies was to avoid the undertones of nationalism in dance history-writing; “specific national dance cultures have common roots.… Instead of cultivating historical myths further [believing that the dances are unique for each nation], research must bring light to real historical relationships in the interest of unprejudiced national self-consciousness.” Martin’s political and cultural agencies, such as the dance house movement, is briefly referred to, but we miss his own texts on this.

It is a pity that the volume only compares and portrays Martin in the Anglophone context. He had many European colleagues who worked in parallel to him in terms of approach, even if many barriers prevented them from cooperating and referring to each other. We miss his East European colleagues, the prominent Jean-Michel Guilcher in France, the Austrians Richard Wolfram, Felix Hoerburger, Karl Horak, and a sizeable Nordic group formed in the 1970s in this debate. Technically, it is understandable and defendable to focus on the Anglophone world, which gives the most intriguing and contrasting perspective, but the resulting “optics” are worrying.

The book has twenty-six articles, nine introducing and discussing Martin’s work and seventeen written by Martin himself. Some of the latter had been published in English earlier, and many only in Hungarian. In this way, those who do not read Hungarian are getting access to a large new part of his research. It tells us much about his enormous production that just by browsing the content list, we can see that the editors could have included so many more essential articles if space permitted. Martin’s pioneering work in Ethiopia is mentioned only in a short paragraph, but it is crucial to how Martin transferred his methods to sets of a very different material.

The articles that survey Martin’s work or discuss the issues he raised frame the main content in excellent ways. Among the latter I would like to mention how Sándor Varga situates Martin and his work politically and in the academic disciplines he worked in and tried to influence, showing difficult working conditions, due to restricted access to colleagues in other parts of the world and their material. The volume is not an uncritical apotheosis of Martin’s work. In a later article, Varga critically reassesses Martin’s conclusions in essential case studies. Similarly, Vivien Szőnyi’s article provides a very sharp and critical evaluation of his theoretical foundations, revealing the problematic working conditions and the disciplinary restrains and isolation. Criticism strains also come from the disciplinary value systems pointed to above between anthropology and ethnochoreology, where anthropological priorities tend to win. János Fügedi gives an advanced introduction to Martin’s work with the analysis of movement elements and structure. Due to its complexity and the problem of presenting its methods and results, it is one of Martin’s most critical methodological achievements and seems to have given much of the foundation for the work with structural analysis in the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology. This part ends with Zoltán Karácsony follow-up with a discussion of Martin’s well-known concepts of improvisation and regulation.

The ontological difference between studying one’s own people and the other brought out very different aims and needs in Martin’s period, and still does, even if to a lesser degree. In the perspective of the strong wave of decolonisation in the early twenty-first century, it is critical in earlier colonised countries to establish ethnochoreologies at home in the hands of indigenous researchers. This volume presents a wealth of approaches to ethnochoreology at home with agendas very different from the ones of the old anthropology. The book should serve as an inspiration and an essential guide for methodologies in countries now establishing indigenous ethnochoreology with strong safeguarding agendas. It can easily be combined with the theoretical gaze of anthropology now that the discipline gap has decreased considerably. Still, it is not easy to transfer a methodological framework built mainly on the Central and East European dance structures to material in other parts of the world. It is a task for the future to continue the methodological cooperation to construct overarching perspectives and strategies for adaptations. Neat anthropological case studies still lend themselves much more effortlessly to conference communication and exchange over similar topics than complex studies of dance structures. They are more compelling to publish for an international audience. For practitioners’ communities with safeguarding agendas, understanding the strategies in practical dancing is more important, which is evident to see in Hungary. The scope of a book review does not allow for a discussion of Martin’s articles which are the main content. I will therefore end by commending the editors for the sober, and at times modest and critical frame they have given Martin’s work.