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OCR
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 concerned. Apart from caricatures, our authors analyze illustrations taken from textbooks, newspapers, and also photographs, paintings, and even structures of architecture (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 (Halmesvirta); 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 cultures, for example, Africa, in Hungary (Kicsindi), and various non-European cultures within the same country (Sz. Kristéf). The title of the second volume, Competing Eyes, alludes to and attempts to combine 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 sociologically 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 culturalpolitical situation. We have found these two ideas extremely useful in understanding the historical 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
