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Arts and Humanities journals’ primary focus is on presenting theoretical and empirical research in these respective fields. The main goal is to encourage educational research and connect academia to the scientific community. Researchers and scholars need to share their research findings with others to help better understand and act on the ongoing social changes in the field. The Arts and Humanities journals aim to provide a platform for everyone who shares a common interest in these fields and to group all the latest field findings in one place.
Arts and Humanities
The relationship between the *Tattvasiddhi and Madhyamaka has remained a central topic for centuries. Contemporary scholarship has predominantly focused on the philosophical commonalities between the *Tattvasiddhi and Madhyamaka. This paper, however, takes a philological approach, illuminating the relationship between the *Tattvasiddhi and Madhyamaka through the lens of Kumārajīva’s translation. Employing computational techniques to uncover phraseological and philological evidence, this paper argues that Harivarman – the author of the *Tattvasiddhi – and the pioneers of the Madhyamaka school as represented in Kumārajīva’s Madhyamaka corpus, share some literary sources, like sūtra sources and analogies, respectively indicative of the geographical proximity and shared argumentation traditions.
This essay seeks to clarify some problems that arose out of the study of a little, most likely forged work that cast serious aspersions on whether Mar pa Lo tsā ba Chos kyi blo gros had in fact met Nāropā in the flesh and thus had studied under him. Given that the authenticity of certain spiritual practices depend on and are sustained by a transmission that is unbroken, the absence of their meeting would of course shake the very foundation of the self-understanding of members of the Bka’ brgyud pa school of Tibetan Buddhism in particular and have profound doctrinal conseqences. The little work is included in the 1736 Sde dge edition of the collected works of Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147–1216), the third patriarch of the rival Sa skya pa school. Strikingly, it is not registered in any of the earlier catalogs of his writings. So far, the work with its attribution to Rje btsun and a possible forgery, may have first surfaced in an analysis of its contents given by Zhwa dmar IV Chos grags ye shes (1453–1517) who rightly cast aspersions on the assumption that Rje btsun was its author. This essay draws attention to the plethora of different dates the literature has offered for Nāropā and Mar pa and to the many problems one encounters with the dates of early Tibetan scholar-yogis. Most if not all these dates were originally given in the Sino-Tibetan duodenary cycle of the twelve animal-years. Later Tibetan reader-editors recalculated these by using the sixty-year Sino-Tibetan sexagenary cycle, and the result was that mistakes of twelve years or multiples thereof often crept in the re-dating of these individuals. After all, each of the twelve animal-years of a duodenary cycle appears five times in the sexagenary one.
A European getaway for female monsters
Representations of cultural alienation in the novels of Theodora Goss
Abstract
In my study, I explore representations of otherness and alienation in the Athena Club trilogy by Theodora Goss, a Hungarian-born writer currently living and working in the United States. In the first part of the analysis, I focus on the relationship between female identity and monstrosity. I argue that monstrosity in Goss' novels can be seen in the deconstruction of traditional nineteenth-century female roles. Hence, the female monsters of the Athena Club can be interpreted as a metaphor for self-realization and a representation of otherness. In the second part of the analysis, I will examine the experience of alienation from the perspective of the protagonist (Mary), along the opposition of home and abroad. I will point out that the experience of the new cultural environment, and more specifically the positive experience with Hungarian cultural realities, means the final elimination of the experience of alienation.
A range of early Chinese texts features the term louyi 螻蟻, which modern scholars and translators often interpret as signifying mole crickets and ants. This essentially means that they understand the two characters as standing for two different words, each denoting a different animal. However, a closer look at the examples in early Chinese texts shows that this was probably a disyllabic word referring to a single insect, namely, ants, with no involvement of mole crickets. Understanding what the term actually meant is important because it demonstrates how we, basing ourselves on pre-modern commentarial and lexicographic traditions, often unnecessarily separate compound words into their constituents. Although few specialists of pre-modern China today would subscribe to the much-criticized one-character-one-word model, translations still often treat the two components of disyllabic words as separate entities, even when the context makes it clear that they probably stand for a single word. More interestingly, this phenomenon sheds light on the development of the core vocabulary of sinology, revealing its cumulative and often highly conservative trajectory.
The Buddhist drama Maitreyasamiti-Nāṭaka is one of the most important Tocharian A texts, and the most important text about the life of Maitreya, the Future Buddha, in Central Asia. Interestingly, it has an equivalent in the Old Uyghur (prose) text Maitrisimit nom bitig. Although the Tocharian A fragments are often very small, incomplete parts of the text can sometimes be emended by comparing them with parallel passages in Uyghur. The present article for the first time provides an overview of the Tocharian A fragments from the Berlin Turfansammlung which were not included in the edition of Tocharian A texts by E. Sieg and W. Siegling (‘THT-fragments’). Some new Tocharian A materials are identified, edited and discussed here with the aid of the Uyghur parallels, which hitherto have not been published with an English translation.
Abstract
While in Modern Hungarian labial harmony is confined to short front non-high vowels, in Late Old Hungarian some suffixes including non-high long vowels were also able to undergo labial harmony. This paper discusses three of the most widely attested suffixes in question, the ablative, the delative and the elative nominal case suffixes. All the three suffixes were originally grammaticalized from case-marked nouns; their participation in both backness and labial harmony followed on their integration into the morphological structure of host nouns. Their ability to undergo labial harmony was subsequently lost. An explanation is proposed for why they stopped harmonizing in labiality, based partly on the phonological parameters of variation extant in Late Old Hungarian, partly on homophony avoidance in the changing paradigmatic space of the case system.
Abstract
The concept of resilience has been crucial in anthropological community studies over the past two decades. While it is a useful analytical tool, it also has its limitations—many studies on resilience focus on a superorganic entity, the society. By immersing in soft, qualitative data and fieldwork experience, presenting individual life paths and decision-making, anthropologists can gain a better local perspective of what resilience is about. The presentation and transmission of individual choices and intersubjective lifeworlds offer valuable insights into areas that systematic research on resilience often overlooks. In this paper, I argue that it is worthwhile to shift the focus from systemic research to emphasizing individual choices, voices, and life stories in anthropological research on resilience. This shift may gradually imbue the concept of resilience with local concepts and practices. The presentation and communication of individual choices and personal experiences shed light on those areas where systematic research on resilience seems to fall short, marking the beginning of the most exciting part of anthropological research.
Abstract
According to demographic reports, while the marriage rate fell significantly during the pandemic worldwide, this was not the case in Hungary: despite the adverse circumstances, the number of marriages in fact increased, although, at the same time, the number of divorces also rose. What was the reason behind this? Is there perhaps a correlation between the two phenomena? Marriage “fever” during the pandemic, and the rise in the number of divorces, were a direct and indirect consequence of the pandemic and of the recently introduced family loans. The popularity of marriage and, at the same time, the rising divorce rate, and the related social criticism and crisis discourse in particular, triggered reflection on the part of those planning to get married. Engaged couples and newlyweds, contemplating their own marriages, began to formulate and circulate a variety of responses and opinions, albeit with common patterns, about their reasons for marrying and what divorce means to them. Through reinterpretation and innovation, they took concrete steps towards realization and ritualization. Among the main leitmotifs in attempts to reinterpret the meaning of marriage were the duration of marriage, the issue of divorce, and the ideals of individualism and conservatism. In the present paper, I describe marriage and divorce — or rather end-of-relationship — rituals during the pandemic based on the findings of the digital anthropological research (online questionnaires, digital ethnography, and in-depth interviews) that I conducted between 2019 and 2022. My main question concerned the extent to which the practices of reinterpretation and ritualization, observed at both community and individual level, can be seen as instances of community resilience.
Abstract
Resilience, adaptation, survival, endurance, change, transformation, imbalance – these are all responses to crisis situations and social and economic stresses that are increasingly becoming the focus of academic and public interest. The Carpathian Basin is constantly exposed to strong external influences, to which the local communities, households, and individuals must respond in order to regain their balance, or to transition to a new mode of functioning. In the last three to four decades labor migration became one of the most prominent responses to economic and social pressures and a coping strategy. The convertibility of inequalities and resources between different regions is an opportunity for stabilizing the state of insecurity at home. For the last few years, it has been a common preconception in resilience theories that only strong entities are capable of resilience. Recent research shows that resilience and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive; I offer case studies which illustrate this point. I draw on 15 years of fieldwork with Central and Eastern European migrant women working as care workers in Western countries and Israel. These cases show that the experience of vulnerability and the skills and knowledge gained from it contribute to increasing flexibility, adaptability, and learning capacity, and thus practically lay the foundation for resilient behavior. My research also explores the controversial issue in resilience theories of how responsibility is constituted; i.e., whether the idea of resilience is related to the shifting of responsibility from the social classes in power to the vulnerable groups more prone to disequilibrium. In examining foreign women integrated into the low-level segment of the occupational structure, eldercare, I find that if their physical or mental condition deteriorates, and they are on their own, their vulnerability increases, and the disequilibrium resulting from systemic problems can no longer be corrected through individual resourcefulness alone.
Abstract
In this paper I explore the kind of role that herdsman traditions associated with the Great Plain of Hungary (the puszta), a feature also over-represented in Hungarian ethnographic studies, play in the contemporary national consciousness by analyzing the results of a large sample questionnaire survey. I present my topic in its geographic and historical context, primary as reflected in the processes of symbolization and stereotyping during the 19th and 20th centuries. I have concluded that herdsman traditions and, within that, particularly the puszta and its most prominent representative, the region known as the Hortobágy, played an important part in capturing a sense of “Hungarienness” as far back as the 19th century, in the field of auto-stereotypes, hetero-stereotypes and exo-stereotypes alike. This was the result of such a profound process that even 20th century modernization, which in fact swept away the actual traditional lifestyle of the puszta, failed to shake the role that the peasant tradition of the Great Plain played in the field of national symbolization. Tourism, followed by the Hungarian heritage movement, successfully conserved the related cultural elements and shifted the center of tradition to such new areas as the revival movement and experience-consumption (festivals). At any rate, Hungarian society continues to look on the herdsman traditions of the Great Plain as the most authentic source of their national heritage.
