Seite 17 [17]
14
Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
The first chapter entitled Western Eyes, Eastern Gazes provides a kind of ascent
to the problems discussed in the volume as a whole. Vilmos Voigt in his “Icon Ani¬
morum by John Barclay and the Origins of the Characterization of European Na¬
tions” discusses the treatise of a British nobleman, published first in 1614 in London,
that, despite the fact that it does not contain any illustrations, can be considered one
of the most important predecessors of the textual-visual method of characterizing
cultures/ethnic groups in Europe. The approach of Voigt is primarily philological,
and he also points to the necessity of investigating the potential reception of that
work in different parts of Europe. Although the Jesuits of the academy of Trnava
(Slovakia) owned a copy of the book at least from the early eighteenth century on,
there seems to have been no reaction to it either from the Hungarian or Slovak side
during the period. Poland, however, singles out Lukasz Opaliriski, a Polish magnate
and political writer who did undertake the task of challenging Barclay’s character¬
izations in 1648. More research on the reception of this work in central and eastern
Europe may lead to new findings, just like in the case of the schoolbook discussed
in the second article of the chapter, Ildiké Sz. Kristéf’s “Domesticating Nature,
Appropriating Hierarchy: The Representation of European and Non-European Peo¬
ples in an Early-Nineteenth-Century Schoolbook of Natural History.” By means of
a richly illustrated German schoolbook, translated three times into Hungarian and
published throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in three
different cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, the paper provides an insight into one
of the media that has channeled western European late Enlightenment and early
Romantic concepts of the natural and social order in central and eastern Europe.
Naturgeschichte fiir Kinder was written originally by Georg Christian Raff, a histo¬
rian and naturalist in Göttingen, Germany. It was translated/adapted in no less than
nine different European languages (among them Slaveno-Serbian and Russian).
Relying on the pragmatical-sociological approach of Roger Chartier and the French
histoire de la lecture, Sz. Kristöf analyzes the engravings of the schoolbook that seem
to mediate a certain hierarchical, stadial order of nature and human geography that
dominated scientific and popular imagination during this period. Circumscribing
the distinctive aspects of the Hungarian adaptation, the author calls for a wider
investigation of the reception and appropriation of this work in central and eastern
Europe. Dagnostaw Demski’s “Playing With Otherness: Within and Beyond Ste¬
reotypes in Visual Representations” closes the chapter with an abundant survey of
methodological considerations for investigating “serious” and “non-serious” repre¬
sentations in general as well as during the period and in the region concerned. He
underlines that within the same reality there could exist a serious representation of
that reality or an event (depending on the state of our knowledge), a humorous ver¬
sion (funny/amusing or unfunny/unamusing), and a playful version. He argues that
they reflect several concepts, such as seriousness, discipline, surveillance, humor, and
stereotypes, and that these cultural concepts are worthy of further examination. Ac¬
cording to Demski, in the serious and playful use of stereotypes, they had the same