Abstracts
1999/37
Replika Monologue:
Schizo
Replika introduces
a woman who was born in 1944 during the siege of Budapest under German
occupation. Hardly surviving her birth, she lives a traumatic life determined
by her Jewish identity. The monologue reveals how history intrudes into
one’s life and leaves the person with unhealable wounds and unresolvable
anxieties.
The Politics
of Remembering
The essays
in this thematic section focus on theoretical questions regarding history,
collective memory, and national symbols, providing Hungarian, Romanian,
and Slovakian case studies. The introductory essay by Jeffrey K. Olick
and Joyce Robbins reviews definitional disputes and different approaches
to social memory in order to reconstruct a social scientific tradition.
Focussing on the example of the Right Hand relic of King Saint Stephan,
founder of the Christian Hungarian state in the tenth century, Árpád
von Klimo describes the historical processes of national symbol creation
and ritual. Klimo emphasizes the relic’s role in the political struggles
between the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Enikõ Magyari-Vincze
discusses the history of Babeº-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania,
and argues that present debates concerning its ethnic character embody
the Hungarian and Romanian elites’ conflicting perceptions about the two
ethnic groups’ relation in Transylvania. She identifies three strategies
of ethnic identity politics: conflictual segregation, consensual separatism,
and institutional assimilation. Margit Feischmidt and Rogers Brubaker analyze
the recent trends in the politics of commemoration in Eastern Europe from
historical and comparative perspectives. The commemorative practices and
discourses of 1848’s 150th anniversary in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia
differ both in manner and mood (from a mythic, sacral to a carnevalesque
and reflexive one) and in content (from a particularizing to a universalizing
discourse).
School Narrative
Géza
Takács tells the story of an alternative high-school of economics
from its foundation in the mid-1980’s to the recent past. Rather than an
outsider observer or an expert, Takács is a narrator who worries
about his heroes and faces his own problems as a teacher. The waning of
communism opened the way to the emergence of alternative educational institutions,
and the story of a free school’s adventure reflects the everyday changes
in a post-communist society. The essay is not only a pedagogical case study,
but also a literary sociography with special sensitivity towards social-psychological
aspects.
E-way: Internet
Media in Hungary: New Media, Old Problems
László
Turi discusses the Hungarian net-media in the context of international
trends. "Gift economy" is the keyword that helps to resolve the contradiction
between the sociologist’s and the economist’s interpretation of net-media.
Portal sites – like aol.com or Yahoo! – are the realizations of gift economy
on the Internet. Due to the limited number of Internet-users in Hungary,
the market of net-media is small, there are only a few true portal sites
in the .hu domain. However, the net-presence of the traditional electronic
media is increasing.
vissza
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