Abstracts
1997/26 

Cancer and medical treatment 
In its last issue Replika launched a new column in which interesting persons talk about the questions they are preoccupied with. The current issue presents a deeply touching monologue. One of our colleagues, who has died in a metastatic uterine tumor, tells the three-year story of her medical treatment. The monologue was recorded few months before her death. As a sociologist of health she gives a penetrating critique of the contemporary Hungarian health-care system, focusing, primarily, on the power structures within the gyneacological departments and the communication patterns between doctors and patients. She also talks about the hopeless struggle of patient organizations against the deficiencies of the institutionalized medical practice in Hungary.
Consumer socialism
Consumer Socialism is the second thematic section in a Replika series that explores the emerging interdisciplinary field of consumption studies. In this issue, four articles investigate the politics of consumption in East European state-socialist societies. In the first essay, “Way of Life, Ideology, and Household Economy", Miklós Vörös analyzes some characteristic findings of Hungarian economic and sociological research on consumption practices in the seventies and eighties, the period of late-socialism. In the historical context of the failure of the state-socialist countries to catch up with the consumption level prevalent in the capitalist societies, conducting empirical research on consumption and social stratification gains political significance. The paper also identifies several research topics within the field of consumption studies that so far have been neglected by Hungarian sociologists and economists. In the second article, entitled “The Specter of Consumption", Ferenc Hammer and Tibor Dessewffy investigates the effects of a political compromise between the Kádár regime and the majority of the population in Hungary. After suppressing the 1956 uprising, the new government bought political legitimacy in exchange for allowing Hungarian people to accumulate consumer goods. In order to maintain the level of consumption they had got used to, people began to invent creative techniques of consumption to multiply the selection of goods even in the shortage economy of the seventies. The next contribution is entitled “Consumption and the Culture of Inhabitation in Hungary in the 1970's". In this paper, Katalin S. Nagy analyzes the cultural aspects of interior decorating and living space management and argues that the typical apartment in Hungary could be characterized by its “dysfunctional density". The fourth article, “The Road to the Consumer Society", invites us to explore the emerging Wunderwirtschaft of the German Democratic Republic in the 1960's. Ina Merkel discusses the spread of modern consumerism in East Germany and examines how the the Communist party sought to control this process by fighting against “consumer ideology" and emphasizing the importance of planning consumption. Merkel shows how the consumption policies of the Communist party led to contradictory outcomes: shortage and waste, uniformization and stratification.
  
The power of the news
Three articles constitute this thematic session, each highlighting different aspects of the news industry. In the first paper, Zoltán Gayer presents a sophisticated interpretation of the visual representations in Híradó, the evening news program of the Hungarian Television. In his contribution, entitled “Some Characteristics of the Visual Rhetoric of Híradó", the author deconstructs the manipulative visual techniques of news production, and suggests that an important function of deploying these techniques is the self-legitimation of the mass media. The second essay is written by Jean-Marie Charon, a French media-expert. In his “The Question of Gaze: CNN, the International Televison Network", he shows how CNN constructs contemporary history by distinguishing between what the editors think are “significant" and “insignificant" events. According to Charon, whether an event becomes CNN-news or not, depends predominantly on the organizational (infra)structure of this international television network. In his famous article, “Trouble in the Global Village", the Swedish anthropologist, Ulf Hannerz compares the professional activity of the foreign correspondent to that of the anthropologist. He analyzes how foreign correspondents construct the image of the troublesome “Other" and the adventureous, heroic “Self", and contrasts their journalistic representations to anthropological ones.
 Emotion and memory: The “second cognitive revolution"
part 2.
This thematic section contains four articles that seek to contextualize and interpret Rom Harré's programmatic essay, which was published in Hungarian in the previous issue of Replika, together with critical reflections written by Hungarian philosophers and linguists. In this second rejoinder, Hungarian psychologists analyze Harré's theory. The first article, titled “Beyond Ether: The Social Constructivist Conception of Cognition" and written by Péter Bodor, identifies various social constructionist ideas within the history of psychology and compares two recent versions of social constructionism: the one developed by Jeff Coulter and the other, advocated by Rom Harré. Csaba Pléh's contribution, “For a Narrative or Discoursive Renewal?", revolves around the issue whether is it possible to be social constructionist and anti-Cartesian, and still work with the concept of “mind". In Tibor Pólya's interpretation, presented in the essay “Psychology Outside the Self", Harré's discursive psychology is parallel to behaviorism, although its stress on social processes makes it unique. In her paper, “The Return of the Classical View of Remembering", Anikó Kónya explores a few features in Harre's conceptualization of memory and remembering, and shows how they are related to the “classical theories" of remembering.


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