Oldal 17 [17]
OCR
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 Animorum by John Barclay and the Origins of the Characterization of European Nations” 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 characterizations 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 Peoples 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 historian 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 Stereotypes in Visual Representations” closes the chapter with an abundant survey of methodological considerations for investigating “serious” and “non-serious” representations 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 version (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. According to Demski, in the serious and playful use of stereotypes, they had the same
