CRIME AND IMPUNITY: THE UNKNOWN IMRE LAKATOS

This Replika Monogram examines the political career of Imre Lakatos during his years in Hungary.  At the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he fled to England, where he became one of the world’s foremost philosophers of mathematics and science.  A protegé of Karl Popper, he maintained an interest in politics and gained a reputation as an outspoken defender of the “Open Society” and a fierce opponent of student radicalism, particularly during the so-called “Troubles” at the London School of Economics.  Few in his adopted home knew, however, of his previous incarnation as a demonic communist.
 

ARE SPORTS GAMES?

In studying the relationship between playing and modern sports, one can not avoid discussing Johan Huzinga’s famous work, Homo ludens.  According to his often quoted statement, modern sports are not games, since they lack the main characteristics of playful activity.  Approaching the problem from a historical-sociological perspective, Norbert Elias argues that modern sports have emerged as a the result of the civilizing process.  Their characteristics are historically shaped by the state monopolization of violence, and the individual’s internalization of the accepted norms of behavior.     
Allen Guttmann locates sports activities in the context of the different concepts of play, game, contest, and sport.  He criticizes Huizinga for overemphasizing the notion of contest in his analysis.  Frank C. Kew distinguishes the formal elements of sports activities from the informal ones, and claims that an activity formally considered as sport may be viewed differently from an informal point of view.  Tibor Tamás, the editor of this thematic section also cites Eldon Snyder, who shows that sports do not always lack playfulness, because elements of it always crop up in the pauses of “serious” sports activities.
 

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE: THE ANDES
   
One of the world’s oldest ethnicity-based discriminatory system is the “castas”, the Spanish colonial system of government, the social and cultural impacts of which are strong even today in the Andean countries.  After achieving independence in the nineteenth century, the young republics repealed the caste-system.  In reality, however, only the educated, urban people, and the property owners counted as citizens enjoying equal rights.  In ethnic terms, these were the creoles and mestizos, who appropriated the power of the old native nobility, the curacas, and who took the land of the indigenous communities.
The five authors in this thematic section explore different issues related to the Andean countries. Peruvian sociologist Carlos Ivan Degregori gives a comprehensive historical account of the above described process, and demonstrates that the only possible way of social mobility is to assimilate, to become mestizo.  Juan Carlos Estenssoro, Peruvian art historian, analyzes the fiesta culture that was central to the cultural life from the end of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century.  The article examines the religious and secular campaigns against joyful dance culture, against the cultural representations of indigenous people and the urban poor population.  
Ecuadorian scholar Andrés Guerrero explores the practice of the ethnic-based division of labor that has survived in the countryside, while Xavier Albó, Bolivian anthropologist scrutinizes what it means in this world to be indigenous.   Albó explores the ethnic meanings of the different words for native identity–the indian, the indigenous, the campesino (peasant), the urban citizen, the miner, and others.  In the last article of this thematic section, the Chilean sociologist Larissa Adler Lomnitz analyzes the meanings and conditions of belonging to the urban middle-class, which is partly determined by the membership in the mutual aid network called “compadrazgo”.
 

ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURES

This collection of essays represents different approaches to the insertion of entrepreneurial activities in cultural and historical contexts.  Brigitte Berger and Tibor Kuczi examine the cultural conditions that foster the development of market economies and the formation of entrepreneurial activities, while Robert C. Ulin focuses on the intersections of cultural production and economic legislation.
Drawing from historical and demographic research, Berger claims that the accumulation of capital was preceded by sociocultural transformations that engendered the figure of the modern entrepreneur.  In addition to the historical analysis of the emergence of Western entrepreneurial culture, she cites anthropological and sociological studies on Chinese family enterprises and the conditions of entrepreneurial activities among the Third World underclass.  Thus, the author shows that the subsistence strategies organized around the household economies of the poor may actually bring about successful entrepreneurial activities.  
In his analysis of post-socialist economic transformation in Hungary, Kuczi seeks to explain the immediate reemergence of the spirit of capitalism after 1989, or in other words, the swiftness by which the state-socialist economy, based on state-owned industries, was replaced by the dominance of the private sector.  The author believes that the answer to this riddle can be found in the specific life-paths of the entrepreneurs themselves:  before 1989, many people sought to achieve economic autonomy for themselves, established important connections and accumulated means of production that could be utilized in the economy of the private sector.   
In the last essay of the collection, Ulin examines the causes of the exceptionally high prestige of Bourdeaux wines.  He shows that wine is basically a cultural invention, as differences in quality, however naturalized or taken-for-granted, are actually results of legislative discourses and economic policies.  These discourses serve the interests of the winegrowing elites but they are reproduced by other segments of the wine industry because non-elite growers can also benefit from the symbolic capital of the wine classification system originally produced by the elites.  This symbolic capital has been further reinforced by the production of a cultural continuity between quality wines and the aristocracy and the ensuing image of noble and grand wines made it possible to raise their price as well.  
“WHO IS A GYPSY?”

In its last section called Replikázás, Replika returns to its old tradition of securing space for important ongoing debates. Gábor Kertesi’s polemical essay is an answer to János Ladányi and Iván Szelényi’s article “Who Is a Gipsy?” (Kritika, 1997 December). Criticizing their central assumption, Kertesi argues that the “impossibility thesis”– the idea that it is impossible to estimate the size of the Gipsy population due to the large number of possible definitions – is valid in case of every scientific problem inadequately defined.