| Abstracts
1997/27Replika Monologue: Buy and Sell In the Replika Monologue of this issue a man in his early thirties tells the stories of the various shady deals and legal enterprises he has managed during the last fifteen years of his life. Géza, who is currently the owner and manager of a prosperous travel agency, lives in a Hungarian town. Keeping his anonymity, he speaks openly and convincingly about how he started his businesses by buying and selling watches and jewelry, how he expanded his deals to the illicit exchange of hard currencies, how he made money even during his military service, and how he accumulated a small fortune by the age of twenty. An especially interesting part in his monologue is the period of the late eighties and early nineties, when the liberalization of traveling to Western countries facilitated his semi-legal trading activities between Vienna and his home town. Contrary to most Hungarians, who used the opportunity of traveling to Austria to import Western consumer goods, Géza shipped Hungarian products to Austria: musical scores to the conservatories of Vienna. Farewell to Kuhn Thomas S. Kuhn, probably the most influential philosopher and historian of science in the second half of the century, died in the August of 1996. This presents Replika another somber opportunity to continue the set of articles devoted to the major figures of the field (Feyerabend — 1994, Popper — 1995, Lakatos — 1996). The first three papers in this thematic section focuses on Kuhn’s famous incommensurability thesis. Gábor Forrai argues against the strong version of the thesis most readers have associated with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Márta Fehér explores Kuhn’s more developed, later thoughts on the issue, while János Laki examines the feasibility of the thesis in light of more than thirty years of discussion. Zoltán Jakab analyzes the central concept in Kuhn’s philosophy of science, “paradigm”, from a psychologist’s point of view. Imre Hronszky and Katalin Martinás discuss the applicability of Kuhn’s paradigm concept to the history of technology and thermodynamics, respectively. In the last article of our selection, Vera Békés describes the present difficult relationship between the disciplines of history of science and philosophy of science, and proposes the outlines of a comparative history of science. |
| Food
Devours Us
This section consists of extracts from three books, as well as an essay written by Mihály Andor which is first published here. In his book, Stephen Mennell describes how the influence of mass culture reached the domain of food consumption. He, however, does not regard this as tragic as critics of other branches of mass culture, espacially because mass culture in food consumption means above all that a greater number of people can eat more and better food than even a hundred years ago. The authors Beardsworth and Keil present how a modern food system necessary for the production of all the food that such a complex system would require has developed. However, they go beyond simply describing the positive side and try to turn our attention to the global unequalities of food supplies and warn us that it may be impossible to increase food production (or even to maintain the present level of production). George Ritzer presents an analysis of a special case of the manifestation of mass culture in food consumption, namely, the world of fast-food restaurants. He believes that McDonaldization extends beyond the sphere of food to other areas of social life. In his first published essay, Mihály Andor looks at meat eating and examines why meat is treated differently from all other types of food. He attempts to answer the following questions: why is meat valued higher than its market value in certain situations; why is it that taboos only apply to meat and not to any type of vegetables; why is there a hierarchy between various types of meats and how is it related to a hierarchy between people; why does meat and the battle of different opinions concerning meat, as opposed to vegetables, play such a crucial role in the self-definition of certain cultures; why does the distribution of meat follow the hierarchy of power relations both within the family and the society. Soccer Business Soccer can be interesting for social scientific research from a variety of perspectives. One approach to this sport is historiographic: it focuses on the social significance and salience of soccer through successive time periods. The June 1995 issue of Replika devoted a thematic section to this perspective. Another possibility is to study soccer as a phenomenon of global consumer culture. The present selection of articles partly draws on this approach and explores the economic environment for transforming soccer into a spectacle sport in Hungary. The first two articles in the section, written by Ferenc Dénes and Sándor Horváth, respectively, was originally written for a recent conference on refashioning the economic management of soccer. The section conlcudes with three interviews — two with soccer coaches and experts, Tibor Nyilasi and György Mezei, and one with a possible sponsor for the sport, József Bayer — all of which reflect on the issues raised by the opening articles. |