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A specific economic and social realignment can be observed in Mongolia nowadays. Due to the rapid transformation in the last two and a half decades, the mentality and way of life of Mongolian people have also changed to a great degree and a specific national or nomadic ideology has appeared and gradually strengthened, which has become one of the pillar of national identity. This ideology is shared in many respects by Mongolians, living not only in Mongolia, but China and Inner Asia too.
In the economic environment the Mongolian society is changing at an accelerated speed. The urban population is getting far from the nomadic way of life and has started to follow behavioural models that are very different from the traditional patterns. With the regression of nomadism one of the fundamental constituents of the Mongolian culture seems to disappear. Although in the last 25 years Mongolians have increasingly adapted to the globalized culture, the tradition of Genghis has not totally vanished, what is more, nowadays it revives. The need for independent cultural identity is getting stronger. It plays a role in elaborating economic strategies that are adaptable to the changed environment. It can be observed, for example, in turnout of shamans in the towns, in the changes of the Buddhist Church’s social functions or in the “pretended” nomadic lifestyle around the main destination of tourism.
The word “Jew” is used as a more or less self-evident identity category, even though the content it conveys has been just as much transformed by secularisation, modernisation, assimilation and acculturation as any other identity category. In the world before secularisation and the modern idea of the nation - up to the nineteenth century in Hungary - a Jew was somebody whose religion was Jewish. The internal cracks caused the Judaism-based concept of Jewishness in Hungary to fall apart within a couple of decades. The fragmentation of Jewry was no less down to the challenge of national and secular identities, but these challenges only took effect because of the confirmations they promised in different situations. Departing from traditional Jewish ways was “rewarded” by social and intellectual success. Zionism - whose founder, Theodor Herzl, was brought up in the culture of Budapest and Vienna - conceived Jewish identity as a national identity and attempted to bring Jews, who were following divergent routes, together through self-identification with the nation. The Holocaust did not change the historical nature of the disintegrated Jewish identity. The anti-Semitic, disenfranchising Hungarian national consciousness said: it does not matter what you are - if I say you are a Jew, you are a Jew. Communism said: it doesn't matter what you are, if you are not a Communist, you cannot be anything else.
At the end of the 19th century, Georges Bizet’s Carmen was the most performed opera with a Spanish theme in the Iberian peninsula. It had made its breakthrough into the Spanish repertoire in the late 1880s, just as debates over the state and future of Spanish opera had intensified and were tied to emerging questions of national identity. In a period when full-length Spanish works (zarzuela grande and opera) were struggling to maintain a foothold in the repertoire, Carmen received numerous operatic productions and several adaptations into the Spanish lyric genre of the zarzuela, accelerating the process of acculturation of Bizet’s opera.The main ideologues of Spanish national opera, Felipe Pedrell, Antonio Peña y Goní and Tomás Bretón all engaged critically with Bizet’s “infamous espagnolade,” and it formed the backdrop to a wave of Spanish nationalist operas, from Bretón’s La Dolores (1895) to Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve (1905). This paper will explore the multi-faceted impact of Bizet’s Carmen in shaping the discourses of Spanish national opera, and its stylistic impact upon the new repertory of Spanish operas that were created at the turn of the 20th century.
Framed by Béla Bartók’s criticism of Ferenc Erkel’s nationally inappropriate style in his polemic “On Hungarian Music,” this article examines, on the one hand, the overlap between the conventions of the bel canto Italian mad scene and the structure of verbunkos in Act 3, scene 1 of Erkel’s Bánk bán, and, on the other, the dramaturgical and national significance of Erkel’s particular mixture of such international and Hungarian traditions. In particular, I consider the seeming incongruence between the typically celebratory mood of the csárdás and its function as the cabaletta of Melinda’s mad scene as an expression of Hungarian national preoccupation with victimhood (propagated by such foundational national texts as Mihály Vörösmarty’s 1836 Szózat, which has served as Hungary’s “second national anthem”). Melinda’s mad scene takes place on the banks of the Tisza River on the Great Hungarian Plain, a location of central importance to Hungarian national identity. This environment, which Erkel and his librettist invented for the mad scene, reinforces Melinda’s tragic role as a symbol of the nation. With eye and ear attuned to Hungarian traditions on several different levels, a close reading of this scene demonstrates that even when Erkel works within well-worn traditions of the international opera stage, he does so in a manner specifically suited to the spirit of nineteenth-century Hungarian nationalism.
In the Czechoslovakia of the 1950s, traditional folk music was officially presented as the most important resource of national musical identity. Folk- or folk-inspired music was ubiquitous. Although this intensity had subsided in the following decades, the role of folk music as a symbol of national identity remained strong until the end of the communist rule in 1989. While the ideology of nationalism used folk music as its tool, it also influenced the way this music was collected, researched, and presented. The article presents examples from two closely related areas to document this phenomenon: folk music research and folk music revival. A closer look reveals how the idea of state-promoted nationalism influenced the ways researchers presented their findings, how they filtered out material that was deemed unsuitable for publication, and how traditional music was revived on stage or in media by folk music and dance ensembles. Critical analysis of research materials and audiovisual documents from the 1950s and 1960s will show how censorship accompanied a folk song from its collection in the field, through publication, to a stylized production on stage or in film.
It is evident that The Three Kings march of the Christus oratorio by Liszt is a verbunkos associated with the Eastern identity of Hungarians. What message did Liszt, who used musical motifs very consciously, wish to convey to the people of his time? I will approach the question not from a musicological aspect, but in the form of a cultural-studies type research. On the basis of the studies of Jácint Rónay and János Erdélyi dealing with national characterology, I wish to highlight how the Hungarian national identity and the myth of Eastern origin were related. I shall also examine in my paper paintings that bear close connection with the piece in question. Among these, Adoration of the Magi by Stephan Lochner is of vital importance, as according to the biographer of Liszt, Lina Ramann, it was the inspirational source of the movement in question of the Christus oratorio. The study attempts to find an answer to the relationship between the Lochner painting and The Three Kings march as well; and we shall see that it is also related to the question of the Eastern identity of the Hungarians.
Buildings as embodiments and symbols of security and power
Az épület mint a biztonság és a hatalom megtestesítője és szimbóluma
. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 7 Vale, L. (2008) Architecture, power, and national identity . New York, Routledge
Buklijas, T.: Surgery and national identity in late nineteenth-century Vienna. Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., 2007, 38 , 756–774. Buklijas T
Summary Visual images do have a constitutive role in the formation of culture and as a consequence in rendering cultural stereotypes. Since the communication by ways of pictures became prevalent and overwhelming with the easy distribution of pictures by “mechanical reproduction' (W. Benjamin), it is important to be aware of the nature of images and their relationship to verbal signs. I do share W. J. T. Mitchell's idea that “speech-acts are not medium specific', thus pictures just like words do possess semiotic power; that is they do take part in meaning-making (Bal), as well as in the production and the maintenance of culture, cultural identity and cultural memory. The importance of this recognition lies in the fact that Man is not only the producer, but also the product of culture; since this production is not exclusively linguistically based. Therefore, this paper aims at the examination of the relation of visual images and a text in the transmission of Hungarian stereotypes. I intend to carry out this in a medium that traditionally belongs to the category of “popular culture', yet its status was highly controversial in the time of its production in Hungary. This visual medium is that of the panorama, and the object of my query is Árpád Feszty's famous panorama, entitled “The arrival of the Magyars'. The painting carries its importance in many respects: it is not only an ideal and idealised “representation' of the settling of Hungarian tribes, but more importantly the veiled illustration of Mór Jókai's drama entitled Levente. My paper thus raises questions of the relation of the visual and verbal, of popular and high culture, and of the influence of national identity through verbal and visual imagery.
Csoport, társadalom, politika — Pataki Ferenc szociálpszichológiai munkásságában
Group, society, politics
A szociálpszichológia hazai intézményesítésben különösen fontos szerepet játszott Pataki Ferenc, aki 1965-ig a közösségi nevelés kiemelkedő szaktekintélye volt, majd az MTA Pszichológiai Intézetében egy szociálpszichológiai csoport kialakítására vállalkozott. Az ideológiai fenntartásokba ütköző szaktudomány legitimizálásának harcát ő vívta meg, amellett érvelve, hogy a szociálpszichológia művelése teszi teljessé a tudományos társadalomképet és kamatozik a gyakorlatban az emberek és csoportok kapcsolataiban. A hazai tradíciókra építve a csoportpszichológiával kezdte kutatómunkáját, amely a szociális identitás korszerű témájában teljesedett ki. Mint a szociálpszichológia akadémikus képviselője esszéisztikus írásaiban elemző figyelemmel foglalkozott a rendszerváltozás társadalmi atmoszférájával, veszélyes konfliktusaival és politikai fordulataival. Munkásságának záró szakaszán a magyar nemzeti tudat és a hazai demokrácia alapkérdéseit tanulmányozta és világította meg.
