2000
Eurozine
2000
2010-09-30
Abstracts for 2000 7-8/2010
Ákos Szilágyi
Overmanaged democracy
A short study on the contemporary Russian political system, apropos of the parallel developments in Hungary and Russia. Szilágyi reviews the changes and circumstances causing the current centralized and overmanaged system. He provides a summary of how it functions with the substitution of the democratic institutions on different levels. The revision of inner state sovereignty in Russia are the oil resources, something which is inevitable for the maintenance of the system. This is a typical Russian method of managing political and economical crisis, but not a realistic way to modernize. Hungary has no such resource, only an illiberal change of the system could be managed, and the foundations for such a system could only be created by ideology, spectacles and force.
Holly Case
The "Jewish question" meets the Transylvanian question
The American historian states that contrary to most of the Holocaust historiography the "Jewish question" in itself was a partial problem between the two world wars in the politics of the Central-European countries. These countries saw the Jewish question (and the question of other minorities) in the light of territorial politics. The inconsistency of the Hungarian and Romanian political practice facing the Jewish (and other) minorities can be derived from this point of view. The seemingly separate politics of population, religion and politics concerning minorities that came from the questions of territory and sovereignty was evident in the Transylvanian question and had their roots in the unsolved problems of the 19th century. Combining the temporal historical contingency with the geopolitical circumstances could help to reach a better understanding of the Holocaust.
Noémi Herczog
The pleading of Don Juan
An aesthetical analysis of Endre Kukorelly's new novel Ezer és 3. Despite his aesthetical Don Juan lifestyle, the lyrical "self" of the novel is a reflective character, his problematic morality, the never-ending inner self-contradictions of this reflective self, generates the animating tension of Ezer és 3.
Pál Léderer
....they came and dragged her out into the street to shave her head....
Pál Léderer sociologist provides an historical, social-psychological approach to the unofficial reprisal of women collaborators after the Second World War in France. Léderer embeds his explanation into a broader framework, surveying a longer period concerning the slow development of French emancipatory legislations, traditional social beliefs on the role of the woman, the gender relation in French society, as well as the impact of the official family model of the Vichy government. Léderer points out that the reprisals penalized mostly those women who worked in firms expropriated by the Germans during the occupation. The unofficial public abuse of these women as sexually degraded prostitutes served to rebuild French common identity.
Yannick Ripa
The "purifying" head shaving of republican women in the Spanish Civil War
Yannick Ripa analyses the psychological and ideological motives behind the ritual practice of head shaving of women. Beside the oppressing and terrifying function, it indicates a specific, bestialised view of woman contrary to the Falangist ideal. The "red female", through sexual and criminal degradation of women in Falangist reading, needed purification from the "Marxist plague". The cutting off of the female symbol as a punishment, alongside with castor-oil treatment, was to be the salvation and rebirth of the bestial woman, which has theological and also Spanish historical roots and was supported by the psychological profile of revolutionary woman in Falangist psychiatry. In practice, the humiliation by shaving breaks identity: it transfers the object of hatred to the self, and helps the marginalization of the "untrustworthy elements".
Vladimir Petrovic
Ethnopolitics of death
A short preface to the document "The partial Relocation of the Hungarians of Bácska", Belgrade 1945. Vladimir Petrovic points out that the Serbian ethnologist and village researcher Sreten Vukosavljevic, the possible author of the document, as a minister of colonization was one of the mediators between Serbian human sciences and Yugoslavian minority politics after World War 2.
Dániel Margócsy
The camel's head
Science historian Dániel Margócsy claims that the artistic imagery played an immense role in early modern natural history. In early modern age, natural history and art used a common logic, a literary strategy: the metonymic composition. It had a paradoxical impact: rhetorically, natural history needed protect itself from the danger of appearing nothing more than an imaginative enterprise. In practice, however, the logic of compositional metonymy allowed for the development of a two-way traffic of ideas about and images of exotica. The survey of nature was descriptive and projective at the same time, and even contained the cataloguing of potentially possible, but uncertified assumptions.