Oldal 18 [18]
OCR
Introduction general goal—to mark order in a broad, shifting world. The serious representations were unable to detach themselves from what they represented and could create prejudice unintentionally. The humorous representations, due to the attitudes they projected and the tools employed, both playfully and satirically targeting intolerable parts of reality, did not provide space for the idealization of one’s own culture and tradition. As a result, they both shape collective imagery in different ways, and both seem to fail to go beyond stereotypes. The second chapter entitled Forming Nations and Constructing the Visual “National Body” discusses one of the most significant aspects of modernity in our region, its relation to imagination as well as the images’ complex relation to the sociocultural world in which they are embedded. In Anssi Halmesvirta’s “Encountering the Hungarian Alterity: An Analysis of a Narrative by a Finnish Traveller,” the case of Finnish intellectual Antti Jalava, who dedicated his scholarly work to Hungarian issues from the early 1870s onward, is discussed. Halmesvirta’s approach is historical-analytical. Building on the mutual relationship between Self/Identity and the imagined/constructed Other, he investigates the travel book of Jalava and his geographical description of Hungary from the 1870s/1880s, and his textual analysis is complemented by that of contemporary pictures entitled to show “national characteristics” of the people living in Hungary. As opposed to the Russians or Germans, the Hungarians, though living geographically far away, felt mentally close to the Finns because of the linguistic-kinship relations. The Finns had thus very high expectations for meeting “friendly and receptive relatives” in Hungary. Interpreting the writings of Jalava, Halmesvirta tells us, however, how Jalava was becoming more and more disappointed while realizing how his cherished Hungarians, in their nationalistic fervor for their own language and culture, were prejudiced against minorities’ language education. The primary lesson of Halmesvirta’s study, namely, that the relation of Self to Other is always historically preconditioned, as are its visual representations, likewise comes through in the next three articles of the chapter. Anelia Kassabova’s “Inclusion and Exclusion: The Role of Photography in the Nation-Building Process in Bulgaria From Approximately 1860 to World War I” discusses the relation of photographic practices and the process of the construction of the “national body” in Bulgaria between 1860 and World War I. She analyzes the oeuvre of three generations of photographers Karastoyanov working in Sofia after the establishment of the Bulgarian national state (in 1878) and being integrated continuously into different eastern and western European networks of communication, too. Kassabova relates the majority of the products of such early photography to the nation-state movement of the Bulgarians as a “civilizing” political organization. A bunch of photos showing “revolutionists and fighters for liberty” seems to have been connected to the Bulgarian independence movement (the struggle against the Ottoman Empire), and, after the establishment of the Bulgarian national state, another bunch of photos originated in central (state) order and state practices of “national” memory, showing Bulgarian lieux de mémoire. Founding her study on 15
