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Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
We could study its various forms taking shape during specific interactions that took
place between nations, between neighboring cultures, and between remote cultures,
and we could analyze interactions that emerged in war, in peace, during travel, and
so forth, and with “non-ethnic Others.”
While the first volume restricted the scope of interest to caricature (cartoons), in
the second volume, in accordance with the above-mentioned purpose, we thought
it necessary to broaden the forms and the media of the visual representations con¬
cerned. Apart from caricatures, our authors analyze illustrations taken from text¬
books, newspapers, and also photographs, paintings, and even structures of archi¬
tecture (such as pavilions built for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1867). Two categories
/aspects of representations predominate in the second volume: the serious and the
humorous.
Finally, there is a difference in the areas covered in the two volumes. In the
second, we extended the scope of interest beyond the area of eastern and central
Europe. Though the majority of authors, including Demski, Djordjevié, Kassabova,
and Padurean, deal with this same geographic area, we have also included valuable
visual and textual material from northern Europe, for example, Finland (Halmes¬
virta); material dealing with central and eastern Europe and their inhabitants from
the viewpoint of the cultures of western Europe (Derler, Kozintsev, Rosner, Sz.
Kristof, Zakowska, Voigt); and materials examining representations of distant cul¬
tures, for example, Africa, in Hungary (Kicsindi), and various non-European cul¬
tures within the same country (Sz. Kristéf).
The title of the second volume, Competing Eyes, alludes to and attempts to com¬
bine the approaches of two great Western cultural anthropologists: one is Mary
Douglas, whose Risk and Culture (written together with Aaron B. Wildavsky) has
given us the idea of competition that we have extrapolated from its original societal
reference (Douglas, Wildavsky 1982) to the area of culture and representations; the
other is Mary Louise Pratt, whose Imperial Eyes has provided us with the concept
of seeing as interpretation and value judgement, that is, interpreting/appropriating
things (Self and Other) from a certain standpoint that is defined both sociologi¬
cally and politically, colonially or otherwise (Pratt 1992). In accordance with this
approach, we had to realize that there is no neutral “gaze” and that “gazes,” that is,
representations are always hierarchized and not independent from a given cultural¬
political situation.
We have found these two ideas extremely useful in understanding the histori¬
cal period concerned and the specific sociocultural world that has produced the
examined representations of the Other in our region. This period was that of the
formation of nations and the modernization of feudal structures, on the one hand,
and the appearance of nationalistic struggles, rivalization, and armed conflicts as
well as societal competition within and between the old and the newly formed social
groups (ethnic, professional, status, party, gender groups, etc.), on the other. The
period of late Enlightenment and Romanticism was also the time in which the idea