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Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
weapon against the hated Habsburg monarchy and the cultural inequalities of the
prevailing feudal society.”
Such a local, domestic, and political appropriation of Raff can be confirmed by
a rather unusual fact, too, namely that the third Hungarian translator, the radical
political thinker Mihaly Tancsics, has inserted a new passage into the text of the
1846 edition. Táncsics criticized Raff and his work in the preface,” and he argued
against the hierarchical concept of history in the chapter on “Man” with the fol¬
lowing words of his own: “The peoples of the earth might differ from one another
according to external features, such as skin color, size, education, etc., but consider¬
ing their inner characteristics, their natural configuration, they all are equal. And
this means that it is equally in the one’s as well as the other’s liberty to share in the
blessings of this earthly nature, since God has not made a distinction between one
man and another in this respect” (Raff, Pest 1846, 407; translation from Hungarian
and added emphasis by Sz. Kristóf). In this passage Táncsics could speak, however,
not only about Hungary but about all the suppressed peoples of the world, and, by
doing so, he fundamentally challenged the good old stadial, hierarchical concept of
the Enlightenment. He attempted to explain human history in this place as well as
elsewhere in his oeuvre from a new political, one might say, early democratic point
of view. His approach, together with the other, earlier editions of Raff in Hungary,
exemplify that fresh adaptations and new readings could have been applied to the
schoolbook in east-central Europe to contest the order of the world conveyed in it.
Conclusion
Raff’s schoolbook provides an excellent opportunity for the historian to study
the specific visual and textual strategies by which late Enlightenment and early
Romantic concepts of the social order and the sociocultural Other were imposed
upon students— young readers from eastern and western Europe, altogether. This
happened in parallel with the emergence (and not so many decades before the insti¬
tutionalization) of the sciences of ethnography and anthropology on the continent
2! As Peter Vajda, the second Hungarian translator remarked in the preface of the 1835 edition: “We
can surely say that we cannot expect to have a more useful natural history than this one (i.e., Raff). The
Germans have made it perfect ... and the Germans, in their country of sciences, tend to have a feel for
it. Let us follow them, let us enlighten our descendants’ minds by useful books ... If only each village
school could get a copy of it; then even our peasant children could get polished and strip off their cur¬
rent rudeness” (Raff 1835: vi; My translation: I. Sz. K.). For the period of Hungarian history concerned
here see Kontler 1999: 191-259.
22 The publisher has agreed to include the following sentence in the preface to the third edition written
by Táncsics himself: “With some words finally I make the following confession that I am not satisfied
with the system of Raff, but the publisher’s intention was not to have a new work done but to have that
of Raff corrected” (Raff 1846). It sounds like an apology for the publication of an already obsolete
work—and the schoolbook did not see any further edition indeed in Hungary during the second half
of the nineteenth century.
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