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462 Eva Krekovicová, Zuzana Panczová Visual Representations of "Self" and "Others": Images of the Traitor and the Enemy in Slovak Political Cartoons, 1861—1910! Introduction The study of stereotypes in the social sciences has revealed the importance of observing stereotypes in their concrete context. It has drawn attention to the fact that stereotypes can emerge very guickly (such as happened with the stereotype of the Ukrainian as mafioso after 1989) and can spread indirectly and unconsciously (Uhlikova 2005). It has also shown that stereotypes provide rich material for manipulation. Stereotypes represent cultural patterns involving categorization, generalization, and persistence in time, in addition to processuality and contextuality. Culturally oriented research has also employed, alongside the term stereotype, the term image, which conveys broader and multilayered meaning, since images contain within them multiple stereotypes and not infrequently display a tendency toward ambivalence (e.g., in images of “self”and “others” in literature or in folklore). In this paper we set forth from the assumption that, in comparison with other forms of stereotypes and images, visualized stereotypes and images occupy a specific position in the processes of circulation and stabilization over time. “Visualizations provide the most easily accessible representations of other cultures, with the result that mental images formed on the basis of seen images generate very stable stereotypes (e.g., the typical Indian, the typical Jew)” (Uhlikova 2005: 13). In their function as a cultural code (Csdky 2004), visualized images are easily transferable (facing no barriers of language), while recent research in cognitive psychology has tested the hypothesis that visual stereotypes emerge in human thought through specific mechanisms unrelated to those that govern the emergence of semantic stereotypes (Dotsch 2012). And the genre of political cartoons has proven to be a rewarding object of investigation for research into visual stereotypes. We see cartoons as vectors of collective memory, complementary to other vectors (folklore genres, literary texts, aural [musical] stereotypes, etc.). The goal of this piece is to trace the development of ethnic and ethnic-related stereotypes/images through their public representations in the context of nationalism in the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth ' Translated by Joe Grim Feinberg.
