Oldal 58 [58]
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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 following 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 considering 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 institutionalization) 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 current 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. 55
