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This article looks at the fate of the kind of home furnishing in Hungary known as “bourgeois” (polgári lakáskultúra) as a way to investigate the middle classes that have emerged since the fall of state socialism. In the 1990s, political discourse was full of speculation about the revitalization of a historic bourgeoisie, and the media regularly featured the material culture of such a historic class. Such furnishings were indeed highly valued among an urban intelligentsia, and seemed to represent evidence of a long history of Hungarian bourgeois taste, civilized values and refinement starkly at odds with socialist material culture, tastes and manners. However, I argue that for many of the emerging middle classes in the 1990s and 2000s, this form of furnishing was no longer a suitable expression of the kind of class position to which they aspired, nor for how it was being newly legitimized. As I show through my anthropological fieldwork among the aspiring middle classes in the former “socialist” town of Dunaújváros, even families who owned such furnishings sold them or demoted them to less prominent places in their homes. Although the socialist state had attempted to devalue inherited, antique furnishings in its promotion of modern lifestyles in the 1960s and 70s, it was not until the end of socialism that such furnishings began to fail to represent middle class respectability. New ideals for such a class were based on entrepreneurial achievements in the present rather than on inherited status, and new home décor was an important way in which this new middle class subjectivity was being constituted.
Károly Viski (Torda, 1882-Budapest, 1945) was an outstanding figure in European ethnology in the years between 1920–1945. He was born in Transylvania and trained as a secondary school teacher of Hungarian and Latin at the university of Kolozsvár. As a young teacher he taught in schools in Transylvanian towns and did research on the history of the Hungarian language and dialectology. In 1920 he joined the staff of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest and became an expert in decorative arts, material culture and European ethnology. His book on the folk art of Transylvania written in the early 1920s was published in many languages. He played a role in the choice of a European, Scandinavian orientation for Hungarian ethnology and in strengthening ties with Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Poland. He was the spiritus rector and editor of the big four-volume synthesis published in the 1930s which presented traditional Hungarian material culture and folklore in a broad European context. He devoted special attention to research on the cultural heritage of the peoples of Transylvania, the co-existence of the Hungarian, German and Romanian ethnic groups and the history of cultural exchange processes. He did a great deal for museums, collections and exhibitions of ethnography. Between 1940–45 as professor at the university of Kolozsvár and later of Budapest he trained a whole series of outstanding students (e.g. Károly Kós, János Kodolányi, Ágnes Kovács, Mária Kresz, Károly Gaál, László Vajda).
This paper is concerned with the problem of the appearance and distribution of the traditional nomadic weapon — the composite bow — in Ancient Rus. The authors have summarised evidence on fifteen complexes with new finds of composite bows at the most ancient Russian sites. The preserved overlays of the bows enable us to reconstruct the technology of assembling bows of various types. The article also summarises evidence on the characteristic items of the equipment of eastern archers, which together with a composite bow constituted a single set: bowcases for keeping the bows and quivers. The results of the present studies have drawn the authors to the conclusion about the wide distribution of complex nomadic bows throughout Ancient Rus in the 10th century. The outmost concentrations of the finds have proved to be related with early towns and the culture of the rising Ancient-Russian elite — “druzhinas”. In the present study, the use of two types of bows in Rus — the “Hungarian” and the “Pechenegian” (“Turkic”) types — has been demonstrated. Among the Ancient-Russian finds, bows of the “Hungarian” type hold a prominent place. The most ancient finds are dated to the third quarter of the 10th century. The appearance of composite bows was part of the process of distribution of items of armament, horse-gear, costume and accessories connected with the nomads of Eastern Europe among the Ancient-Russian military subculture. Some of the finds come from rich funerary complexes which belonged to professional warriors of a high social status, who may have been participating in the war campaigns of Prince Svyatoslav in the Balkans and on the Danube.
From the coffee grinder to Sputnik 1
The culture of objects and woman in the service of ideology 2
The essay examines the popular Hungarian weekly women’s magazine Nők Lapja through the Sixties socialist consumption and the culture of objects and the discourse concerning the image of the socialist woman, not from the perspective of economics or the history of consumption, but from the point of view of cultural history. It focuses on the change of strategy during the Cold War, which from the side of the West signified the use of soft power, while in the East it implied the modification of socialist modernization, in so far as emphasis was shifted from aggressive armament and the conquest of space to everyday prosperity and consumption. The narrower segment under examination is the project in the Sixties that addressed the modernization of the kitchen and the woman of the house, a project which extended to the manufacturing of household appliances aimed at facilitating domestic chores faced by women who also had full time jobs, the introduction of a network of self-service businesses, the expansion of the use of canned food, as well as hygiene, environmental culture and the cultivation of taste. According to the imagery and the texts found in publications of the time, posters and women’s magazines, it was not socialist modernism and the official policy of emancipation that confronted the inherited mentality of the masses as a hindering factor, although this is what contemporary official discourse attempted to imply. This mode of discourse, the style in which the modernization of the household and the housewife and the expansion of consumption was communicated through pictures, advertisements and objects conserved old patriarchal topoi in opposition to the official political discourse of emancipation.
Jelen tanulmány a bizánci állam fennállása idején a Bizánci Birodalom fennhatósága alatt álló területeken folytatott régészeti feltárások történetét, illetve a kutatás jelen állását kívánja röviden bemutatni. Tekintettel arra, hogy bár sok, főként ősrégészek és klasszika-archaeológusok által hosszú ideje vallatott lelőhelyen váltak ismertté bizánci rétegek, „bizánci régészet” megfelelően körülhatárolt formában mégsem létezik, első lépésként az összetételnek mind a bizánci (kronológiai és földrajzi értelemben egyaránt), mind a régészet tagját érdemes körülhatárolni. E rövid áttekintés második fele az eddigi kutatások főbb vonulatait tekinti át, különös figyelmet fordítva az 1970-es évektől kezdve felmerült új kutatási irányokra és metódusokra. Mindemellett az alábbi tanulmány egyik fő szempontja annak bemutatása, mivel járulhat hozzá a régészet a bizánci mindennapok megértéséhez.
Az identitás régészetének elméleti alapjai
Theoretical foundations of the archaeology of identity
The Archaeology of Childhood . Children, Gender and Material Culture . Walnut Creek. Bierbrauer , Volker 1998
This paper deals with new epigraphical material which was excavated in Wādī al-Hašād in Jordan. The importance of this study lies in the publication of these yet unpublished inscriptions.
. J. Apel K. Darmark 2009 Evolution and material culture Current Swedish Archaeology 17
“Oblivion” in Lunca de Jos. Anthropological Study in the Contemporary Material Culture of the Csángós in Gyimes] . Kisebbségkutatás 13 ( 3 ): 404 – 422 . Jackson , Hildur – Svensson , Karen 2002 Ecovillage living. Restoring the Earth and Her
Some observations on the three vessels with characteristic decorative elements of La Tène culture from the cemetery in Szob
A La Tène kultúra jellegzetes motívumaival díszített három figyelemre méltó edény a szobi temetőből
found in Ludas – along with the bracelet with openwork pseudo-filigree decoration 27 – is now part of the representative works of the art of the Celts of the East. Absent from the western Celtic milieu, the presence of this type in the La Tène material
