Replika Monologue: With Passionate Hatred

Replika presents the narrative of a middle-aged Hungarian intellectual who suffered a serious ’soccer trauma’.  Reading the monologue full of absurd and horroristic scenes, the transformation of a passionate fan of the ’50s and ’60s into an utterly desperate man deliriously envisioning the death of Hungarian soccer (and his own) is unfolding in front of our eyes.

Moral Panics

The aim of this selection is to introduce the theory of moral panics to Hungarian readers.  David Kitzinger’s study overviews the main contributions to the theory, and discusses current theoretical debates.  He argues that the most promising direction in current research is its combination with approaches to social movements.  The second article is from Stanley Cohen’s pioneering work, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) on the attitudes towards the ‘60s youth cultures.  Cohen discusses the creation of mods and rockers through exaggerated public response to and distorted media presentation of the clash between mods and rockers in Clacton in 1964.  In Antipornography Campaings. Saving the Family in America and England, Cecil E. Greek and William Thompson elaborate on the role of Christian fundamentalism in moral panics over sexually explicit media production and “Playboy-lifestyle”.  The last article presents the values behind moral panics in a Hungarian context with the help of a collection of campaign texts from the Hungarian Association of Large Families.

Evolutionary Thinking in the Social Sciences

The papers in this section elaborate on evolutionary theories and explanatory models in contemporary social sciences.  (The topic is related to questions discussed in the June 1999 Replika issue on Daniel C. Dennett’s philosophy and cognitive theory.)  In the essay Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, the authors Leda Cosmides and John Tooby introduce the ambitious trend of evolutionary psychology as an approach to psychology, in which “knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind”.  The subsequent papers by the Hungarian authors were originally written for the Eighth Congress of the Hungarian Cognitive Sciences in Szeged in February 2000.  By highlighting correspondences between the laws of linguistic diversity and change and the dynamics of evolutionary processes, Klára Sándor and György Kampis argue for a new conception of language in their paper entitled Language and Evolution.  In his essay The Development of Cognitive Functions: Rite, Rule, and Time, Vilmos Csányi discusses the development of cognitive functions from an evolutionary perspective, and analyzes the role of rites, rules and time on the different stages of development.  In the last essay of this selection, Csaba Pléh discusses the metaphorically represented biological theories on the spreading mechanisms of ideas in the wider context of traditional social scientific explanations.

E-way: Ergodic Literature

In his study on “cybertext”, Espen J. Aarseth introduces the notion of “ergodic” to analyze how non-linear texts (including ancient literary works) and contemporary computer-based multiple user dungeons differ from more prevalent, ink-on-paper genres.  Aarseth looks at the differences between the performance of a book reader and that of a cybertext user, and pays tribute to predecessors of today’s ergodic literature, from I Ching, the Book of Changes, to the labyrinths of Jorge Louis Borges and Umberto Eco.