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Dagnostaw Demski and Ildik6 Sz. Kristóf Introduction This book is a result of the second in a series of conferences that examined the subject of how the Other has been represented in central and eastern Europe. The conferences were organized by various research institutes in various countries in the area, and supported financially by the Visegrad Fund. The first of these conferences—/mages of the Other in Ethnic Caricatures of Central and Eastern Europe—was organized by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and held February 18-20, 2010 (Demski and Baraniecka-Olszewska 2010). The second conference—Visual Encounters with Alterity: Representing East-Central and Southeastern Europeans in the Nineteenth Century and the First Half of the Twentieth Century—was held at the Institute of Ethnology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, May, 24-26, 2012. The differences between the first and the second volumes have resulted from the slightly different purposes of and visions for the two projects. In the case of the first conference and volume, we had a rather general intention to gather popular images of the Other from all over central and eastern Europe in order to create a forum within which it would later be possible to scientifically collect and study such visual material from certain time periods. The first conference and its product thus provided us with a means for longer-term comparative research and analysis. Having accomplished this, however, we had not yet focused on cultural comparisons, but planned to do so as a continuation of the project. The current, second conference volume is generally devoted to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as the first one was. While more general issues were targeted in the first volume, such as identifying important relations between images and politics, images and ethnicity, images and identity, images and humor, and so forth, we also hoped to point out mutually formed imageries (e.g., by the Poles and the Lithuanians or the Austrians and the Hungarians about each other) and identify specific subjects of representation (e.g., the Russian Bear or the Orthodox Jew). Our primary purpose, however, was to publish the related visual material—especially newspaper caricatures from the above-mentioned time period. The authors of the second volume, partly overlapping with those of the first, could pose more precise/exact and also (perhaps) methodologically more advanced questions. While more attention was devoted to the humorous aspect of representing the Other in the first volume, the second has widened the scope of investigation and attempted to consider the issue of meeting the Other in its entire strangeness. Thus, we have gained insight into the multifarious process of the transformation of the Other in central and eastern Europe during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
