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Power in our life can certainly be expressed in a variety of ways. One of them is power transmission through life cycle rituals. Soviet rule denied “religious traditions” and tried to form a new atheistic communist culture (and traditions). The new rituals were expected to replace older religious rites because communist morality and socialist internationalism was expected to overpower bourgeois nationalism. As indicated by scholars investigating into Soviet rituals and by my fieldwork data collected in 1999 in Northeast Lithuania and in 1998 in Southeast Latvia, the mission of creating communist traditions has not always been successful. I shall try to examine this process in my article by analysing the cases of “traditional” baptism as well as the phenomenon of the so-called “modern” name-giving ritual in Latvia and Lithuania.
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In major German concentration camps, museums were set up with the aim of collecting exhibits and displaying them within a Rassenkunde (race science) framework. As the discourse of racial anthropology was built on the rhetoric of the difference between the ‘pure’ races and people with ‘inferior hereditary quality,’ SS museums put on display ‘pieces of evidence’ with a view to rendering present and visible that which was absent and invisible: the hierarchical order of different races. Thus, collections displayed in SS museums in concentration camps were instrumental in the process of defining the Aryan Übermensch (superhuman) as the personification of all desirable physical, cultural and intellectual attributes, born to conquer and rule the world as a member of the Herrenvolk (master race), and the non-Aryan, above all the Jewish Untermensch (subhuman) as his opposite, a radically other and barely human, suitable only for menial chores.The first museum established in German concentration camps was opened in Dachau early in the 1930s. Similar museums worked in other German concentration camps (Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Auschwitz). The richest was the museum in Gusen I, the sub-camp of Mauthausen. In autumn 1940, when the SS began with the construction of a railway between KZ Gusen I and St Georgen railway station, a grave-yard from the Bronze-Age was found. All the finds were housed in an archaeological museum that was established at the Museumsbaracke (museum barrack) within the camp. By the side of archaeological findings, human skins, skulls and body parts were put on view. At the time of the liberation of Gusen I, on 5 May 1945, a collection of 286 body parts was found and a voluminous album with fragements of tattooed human skin. Today, from all the SS museums’ anthropological exhibits not a single one is on display in the museum exhibitions set up in the former concentration camps. So far, these establishments also escaped the attention of scholarly research. Thus, when I interviewed historians employed in Mauthausen Memorial Museum and in Gusen Visitors’ Centre, in 2005, they were completely unaware of the existence of above-mentioned museums during the war time.
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Museums constitute an important cultural and social resource. The main objective of museums is making certain objects in the collection visible or, on the contrary, leaving them invisible. In contemporary society the institution serves many important roles, being a place for displaying historical and contemporary values, an institution for preserving and displaying personal and collective memory, cultural values, for collecting tangible and intangible values, an institution for creating identity and ethnic kudos, a work place, an educational environment, a framework for promoting ethnic handicraft and art, a place for integrating different folklore festivals, exhibitions, shows; they are connected to tourism patterns and museum business. The article reflects the changes in the development of museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, focusing on the main key words being multifunctional museum, the museum as an open classroom, presentation of tangible and intangible history, the relation and mergence of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The issues of digitalization and preservation and the role of the exhibition curator and the person represented on displays have increased in the museology of the past few decades. The museums’ tradition of self-replication and an increased interest in museological anthropology indicate that museums fulfil an important role in society.
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This article analyses the change of articulation of ethnic boundaries on the coastline and the fjord areas in Finnmark, Northern Norway in the post-World War II period. From being a ‘social stigma’ in the 1950s a Sámi identity is today something that can be expressed in certain cultural constructed spaces. This change can be described as a result of socio-economic changes in the region, the populations’ firmer integration in a Norwegian culture and the ethno-political struggle of some Sámi that corresponded with a general development in the view on indigenous people in the Western world. Even if great changes have occurred there are still some resemblances with ethnic processes 50 years ago. A spatial ordering of ethnic boundaries and pragmatic assumption of Norwegian culture being neutral norm are among those features perpetuated until today.
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The purpose of this article is to assess changes in the museum institution as a response to the social environment. A metaphor of natural evolution is employed. The idea of ‘effective history’ is also introduced. The case in point in this article is Hungary and its museums. The period after 1962 witnessed strong growth in the public sector. The growth was seriously hampered by inflation in the second half of the 1980s. The environment, however, did not change drastically until the 1990s when there were dramatic changes in the amount and principles of public funding. A case study is introduced to mirror these changes.
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The re-reading of Eszter Égető perhaps László Németh's most popular novel.
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The legend and fabolous life of Tamás Széchy, trainer; and also his age.
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Reading of the narrative works by László Németh, ideas of the understanding of Bűn.
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Remarks on the works, documents and cult of Albert Wass is nowadays Hungary.
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Media are no longer just a witness to sports events, facilitating our access to them, but have become the most powerful judging platform for sports competitions, serving as a guide for their interpretation and evaluation. The present study focuses on media framing of sports actors’ responsibility when it comes to major sports competitions. Who is responsible for the team’s performance and results? In analysing media discourse, framing effects of sports events coverage will be examined from two inter-correlated dimensions, textually and visually. Based on an event-related corpus of on-line press articles from four national newspapers, this case study covers two major sports events: 2010 European Women’s Handball Championship and 2011 World Women’s Handball Championship. The discursive analysis of the press articles shows that, if winning competitive settings favour the emergence of a personification effect, building up sports heroes on both textual and visual dimensions, the responsibility of failure is rather diffused towards a collective referent. However, the visual component of press articles, along with the indirect strategy of addressing the responsibility issue throughout reported speech techniques, works as an alternative to the personification effect.
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‘Social phenomenology’ (Schütz, 1970; 1978) and its concept of the ‘lifeworld’ has received limited attention in the research methods literature. Few contemporary researchers, with the exception of Aspers (2006a; 2006b; 2009) and Svensson (2007) have developed procedures for undertaking social phenomenological research in occupational settings. I developed a social phenomenological approach to explore, from an emotional labour perspective, how public relations (PR) consultants experienced, practised and understood their everyday interactions with clients, colleagues and journalists (Hochschild, 1983). If emotion is understood as a relational practice, the analysis of socially-constructed discourse is essential to access emotional meaning structures within occupational cultures such as public relations. I adopted an iterative analytical process whereby I interviewed, twice, a sample of six participants. From transcript analysis I produced a ‘description of practice’ document for participants to check (Aspers, 2006a; 2009). ‘Bracketing’ (Husserl, 1963/1913) involved writing self-memos throughout the research process, and finally, a self-reflexive account. Thematic analysis of findings resulted in a rich understanding of emotion management and identity work in public relations. This paper demonstrates that an iterative and reflexive analytical process that involves participants in cocreating social reality, is a compelling approach to understand the ‘lifeworld’ of social actors in occupational settings.
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We analyze the relationships seniors have with mobile communications in two different European contexts, Romania and Catalonia. By means of a qualitative approach, we describe the ways older individuals incorporate mobile phones in everyday life communication practices, and the motivations supporting these decisions. To understand motivations for using a given communication device –as the mobile phone– we took into account the channels individual has access to; individual’s personal interest on using available devices in everyday communications; the location of the members of the individual’s personal network; and the pricing system that determines the cost of mediated communication. The empirical analysis is based on two case studies conducted in Romania and in the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Catalonia) in different moments, between 2010 and 2012. Participants were 60 years old or over. Information was gathered by means of semi-structured interviews that were recorded and transcribed, while a common methodological design allows an enriched insight. Besides gender, we take into account heterogeneity of ageing for a more nuanced analysis. This paper constitutes the first step in the exploration of common trends in the relationship seniors have with mobile communication in different European countries.
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Existing discussion of the relationships between globalization, communication research, and qualitative methods emphasizes two images: the challenges posed by globalization to existing communication theory and research methods, and the impact of post-colonial politics and ethics on qualitative research. We draw in this paper on a third image – qualitative research methods as artifacts of globalization – to explore the globalization of qualitative communication research methods. Following a review of literature which tentatively models this process, we discuss two case studies of qualitative research in the disciplinary subfields of intercultural communication and media audience studies. These cases elaborate the forces which influence the articulation of national, disciplinary, and methodological identities which mediate the globalization of qualitative communication research methods.
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The author reconstructs Chinese self-stereotype, using the data from the surveys carried out among the students of Polish philology in Beijing, and some Chinese proverbs. She takes into account students' opinions concerning the following questions: who can be described as real/typical Chinese, what are the features of his character; what are the characteristic features of South and North parts of China residents, what is their attitude towards family, work, money, education, food, tidiness, religion. The author explains how important is the social rank for Chinese and describes the need to retain one's reputation.
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The author discusses features characteristic for a Silesian, such as: strong sense of identification with his own group, reluctance towards foreigners accompanied by (self-stereotypical) tolerance, inanity resulting from worse education or inability to switch from an ethnolect to a national language. Among these features the author counts also diligence (which is regarded as positive or negative feature), passion for purity, attachment to the family, religious attitude, beloved habit of eating „krupniok‟ and drinking beer, listening to and telling jokes. Concluding the article, the author indicates how stereotypes were changing gradually and she distinguishes between static and dynamic stereotypes of Silesians.
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