Emberi tényező? Az antropocén-narratíva kritikája

Author(s): Alf Hornborg,Andreas Malm / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropocene narrative and argues that it is analytically flawed, as well as inimical to action. Intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it.

Gombafonallal szőtt esszék az értékmentő felhalmozásról (Anna Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World)

Author(s): Alexandra Czeglédi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book entitled "The Mushroom at the End of the World" could be read from the semi-periphery of the global capital. The supply chains of an Eastern Hungarian mushroom-business leads us to Tsing's book, to the author’s concept of salvage accumulation. By introducing salvage accumulation, Tsing means the process of value creation when it occurs without established control system of capitalism, like as it is managed in factories. Raw materials (coal and oil) are annexed by capital, within the outside sphere of capitalism, which independently occur in nature. This value-saving process, in this way, refers to the capital accumulation which does not depend on controlled conditions of capitalism. Commodification, thus, does not take place on factories’ conveyor belt, rather outside of the social structure, deep in the middle of forests (2015: 62-63). Natural resources were already present before human existence, and reproduce even after the extinction of human species. Although Tsing's book might be a valid critique of David Harvey's accumulation by dispossession, the concept of the reverse primitive accumulation coined by Kalyan Sanyal seems essential for mapping the complexity of capitalism. The reversal of capital accumulation is a political tool which legitimises exploitative processes of capitalism.

A gondoskodás újraszervezése

Author(s): Noémi Katona,Loren László,Andrea Czerván / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

The starting point of our paper is that the capitalist socioeconomic system treats life-reproducing reproductive work and one of its forms, care as free resources, as individual responsibilities, placing their costs on families and households, especially women. The low level of state engagement and the emergence of for-profit market services further exacerbate the crisis of care as well as inequalities in care. In the paper, we first introduce grassroots cooperatives and initiatives in the field of elderly care and child care that revalue and reorganize care in a participatory, democratic and solidarity-based way in order to strengthen carers as well as those with care needs, and to improve the quality of their lives. These include workers’ (carers’) cooperatives, users’ cooperatives (cooperatives of people with care needs), multistakeholder cooperatives and mothers’ centers, the communities of women with small children. We then introduce political movements struggling for the systemic transformation of reproductive work and care. We argue that the institutions of care should be owned and controlled by communities, while the state should continue to play a coordinating, funding and regulatory role in meeting needs and recognizing care work.

“Who sharpens the knives in my house?”

Author(s): Anastasiya Fiadotava / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

This paper is a tribute to Belarusian folklorist and ethnographer Uladzimir Sysou (1951- 1997) whose extensive legacy includes collecting 139 jokes during his field research in southern Belarus in 1995. Due to his untimely death, these jokes and other folklore items remain unpublished and have, to my knowledge, not been noticed by folklorists. Half of the collected jokes focus on family relations, mostly the relationship between husband and wife. One of the most popular topics of these jokes is adultery. The joke texts show an ambiguous attitude of people towards it. While committing adultery is considered improper, not a lot of effort is made to conceal it. If (or rather, when) a case of adultery comes to light, it does not lead to any serious problems for either spouse in jokes. When studying these jokes, it is curious to place them in historical context and compare them to earlier, Soviet-era jokes about adultery. This study discusses why jokes about adultery in Sysou’s collection differed both quantitatively and qualitatively from adultery jokes found in Soviet collections. The study shows that the high prevalence of jokes on the subject in Sysou’s collection and the liberal attitude towards adultery manifested in them result largely from the decrease in selfand state censorship in Belarus in the early 1990s, set against a backdrop of value pluralisation triggered by the collapse of the USSR.

Extending ethnic humour theory:

Author(s): Aleksandar Takovski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

Most ethnic humour that has been studied so far consists of jokes which use ethnically nonspecific qualities such as stupidity or canniness in order to ridicule an ethnic group and thus to preserve and perpetuate ethnically based social hierarchies in western industrial societies. In light of this dominant logic in ethnic humour theory, the objective of this study is to problematize the relation of such non-ethnic qualities and the notion of ethnic identity, as well as their relation to a specific type of society, in an attempt to convincingly argue in favour of the need to differentiate between ‘ethnically-empty’ functional joke scripts and genuine ethnic joke scripts that are related to the ethnic identity of the target. In so doing, I extend ethnic humour theory by introducing and testing the notion of genuine ethnic joke scripts in order to motivate future research that will tackle other potential ethnic humour idiosyncrasies. Toward this end, I have collected and analysed joke material (N=369) coming from Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania, societies with histories and relations very different that those in the western industrial societies. Additionally, the study incorporates two questionnaires with members of the two largest ethnicities in the Republic of Macedonia, Macedonians and Albanians, to ascertain the relation between the genuine ethnic humour and ethnic identity.

Всяка носия разказва

Author(s): Rositsa Radeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2020

Notes from the Workshop

От съставителя

Author(s): Iva Kyurkchieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

TEA FARMING INDUSTRY IN TURKEY AND SOCIAL-ECONOMIC HISTORY 1920-1960

Author(s): Rahşan İNAL / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

This study aims to present the economic and social history of the tea farming industry in Turkey between 1920-1960. In Turkey, the “domestic tea” farming industry was initiated and continued under an initiative led by the nation-state at all stages. The present study investigates the historical process between 1920 and 1960 based on news reports from the central and local press, agricultural journals of the time, and parliamentary records, using also local, and regional historical resources. The state-led initiative is considered both an intervention that regulated social and economic structure in rural areas and a policy to encourage “domestic” tea consumption. The reasons underlying this intervention are addressed in two periods. In the first period, the primary goal was to overcome social and economic problems specific to Rize, the central city of tea cultivation, and the Eastern Black Sea Region, of which Rize is a part. In the second period of the state-led tea farming initiative, the goal was to complete the goals of the preceding period, and to satisfy the domestic demand for tea consumption through “national self-sufficiency” policies, and to start tea exports in the years to come. As a consequence of these efforts, not only tea has become a drink easily accessible by all social classes in Turkey today, but also the social structure in the tea-producing rural areas has been transformed.

“This is not a political party, this is Facebook!”:

Author(s): Villy Tsakona / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first four years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other hand, the particularities of the sociopolitical context in Greece and, most importantly, the pervasive lack of political trust among Greeks allow for an interpretation of the jokes under scrutiny as expressions of disillusionment and disappointment with politicians and the political system in general, and as manifestations of mild, playful aggression towards them. The findings of the study reveal that the accusations raised in the jokes against politicians capture and reproduce quite accurately most of the aspects and causes of political mistrust in Greece.

How to do things with jokes:

Author(s): Debra Aarons,Marc Mierowsky / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2017

In How to Do Things with Words (1962), the philosopher John Austin claimed that we use words to do things in the world, not merely to express a state of affairs. This proposal introduced speech acts, and essentially initiated the study of linguistic pragmatics. Speech acts in everyday communication include persuading, apologizing, criticizing, humiliating, complimenting and a host of other intended behaviours. Austin accentuated the idea of speaker intention, on one hand, and hearer’s response to that intention if successfully conveyed, on the other. We consider some of the speech acts used in the work of selected standup comedians to analyse the way they determine the relationship of performer and audience. We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between the licensing of certain speech acts in standup comedy, and the success of these speech acts in shaping the social lives of the audience. We show that this relationship is at the forefront of standup comedy’s social impact and that it can generate heightened consciousness of the social and political environment of the time. Finally, we consider the question of whether socially critical standup can have any noticeable effect on the attitudes or behaviour of both live and digitally mediated audiences.

School and the value of knowledge:

Author(s): Anastasiya Fiadotova / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Over the past century Belarus has experienced a dramatic increase in educational level. Obtaining secondary education is now considered normal, getting a university degree is prestigious. However, such an attitude is relatively new to Belarusian society. Joke texts that date back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century indicate that formal education was widely considered useless, as it did not equip children with skills they needed in real life. Formal education was often contrasted with learning necessary skills at home, invariably in favour of the latter. In the Soviet era, formal education was made compulsory and suddenly became an integral part of people’s lives, but it still lacked a link with children’s future careers. Parents could not always appreciate the benefits of education, but had to send their children to school anyway. The clash between the “old” attitude and the “new” reality produced jokes. Jokes that have emerged in the post-Soviet era reflect the omnipresence of education in contemporary Belarusian society. Some school jokes point to a greater understanding of the value of knowledge in modern children―yet it is often not the formal knowledge they are expected to get in school. Overall, school in jokes has become a setting where issues prominent in society at large come to the fore, even if this goes against the will of the educators.

Commentary piece:

Author(s): Edyta Koncewicz-Dziduch / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

Ethnic jokes are a form of comical narration extremely widespread throughout the social life of various nations. They generally centre on neighbouring nations and reveal a positive assessment of one's own ethnic group, usually negatively evaluating other nations. The subject of the analysis is jokes about Montenegrins, who are known in the Balkans for their laziness and slow lifestyle. However, they are able to transform this unfair stereotype into an advantage, a cultural identifier, which is reflected in popular culture, numerous jokes and tourist promotion of the country.

Book review

Author(s): Christie Davies / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

A multimodal analysis of conventional humorous structures on sensitive topics within rural communities in Romania

Author(s): Violeta Rus / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

When it comes to humour, performing humorous structures means not only producing amusement, but also implies the ability of perceiving the comical, ludicrous or absurd in human life. In this paper, I consider humour as a way in which people in the rural community express themselves freely, without boundaries or constraints. Therefore, the interest of the present article is to identify and analyse sensitive humorous topics in Romanian rural communities. In conducting the study, the following steps were taken: I videotaped people from the Upper Valley of the river Mureș (selected with sociolinguistic criteria such as gender, age, occupation), I transcribed the audio-video records and I divided the data into thematic categories: jokes, traditional shouts and funeral songs or dirges with humorous structures. Starting from these methodological steps, I attempt to perform a multimodal analysis, which consists of analysing both the text and the audio-video record. In the first part of my research, the analysis of the text focuses on specific structures of conventional humour performed in jokes, traditional shouts and dirges by the main theories of humour: superiority, release and incongruity theories of humour. In analysing the audio-video stimuli, I dwell upon identifying the degree of influence of the psycho-sociolinguistic parameters (gender, occupation and context) on the performance of humour, concentrating on markers of humour such as intonation and visual cues. After analysing the humorous sensitive topics in Romanian rural communities through a multimodal perspective, my conclusion is that speakers combine linguistic and non-linguistic elements in order to make a text humorous.

Give me a break:

Author(s): Tabea Scheel,Daniel Putz,Chris Kurzawa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Job demands, like time pressure, consume employees’ limited resources, which need to be restored through recovery in order to maintain psychological well-being and work performance. Employees in high-strain jobs need to replenish their emotional resources throughout the work day. This can take place during breaks if employees are able to psychologically detach from the work demands. Given the stress-relieving functions of humour, we hypothesised that affiliative humour during breaks would attenuate affective impairments related to time pressure and would decrease negative emotional spillover from breaks to subsequent work. We conducted moderated mediation analyses with bootstrapping based on a cross-sectional sample of 170 employees working at four retail stores. Time pressure was positively related to affective irritation, which in turn was related to more spillover of negative (and less spillover of positive) mood from breaks to work. Laughing with colleagues during breaks moderated the link between time pressure and affective irritation, such that this relation became nonsignificant when the frequency of joint laughter during breaks increased. Hence, pleasurable social break activities appear to be important for within-workday recovery. Employers should encourage their employees to take their breaks consistently and to socialise with likable colleagues, especially during periods of high work load.

Book review

Author(s): Ioana Ciurezu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Gender bender agenda:

Author(s): Adrian Hale / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

This paper asserts that we accept or reject humorous texts discursively on the basis of what we perceive as authorial agendas. This “authorial agenda spotting” is activated by discursive “triggers”, which identify, filter, reject, endorse, or otherwise subjectively interpret the discourse of a textual author. This study was prompted by observing the negative reception of a humorous text by a predominantly Muslim postgraduate student cohort who signalled cultural identity and social cohesion by rejecting a text which subverted gender performance according to their discursive expectations. The study sought to compare this triggered effect with the reception of the same text by a distinctly pre-disposed audience comprised of same-sex-attracted bloggers. This reception in turn was contrasted with the reception of the text by mainstream media reviewers. The text itself seems to spark these discursive triggers in all three audiences. It is taken from “The Dame Edna Treatment” (2007), a TV-media entertainment programme, which features the celebrity guests k. d. lang and Ivana Trump being “interviewed” by the Australian comedian Barry Humphries in character as “Dame Edna”.

Book review

Author(s): Szymon Wach,Piotr P. Chruszczewski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2015

Exploring Canarian humour in the first locally produced sitcom in RTVC

Author(s): Maria-Isabel Gonzalez-Cruz / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

Between December 2011 and May 2012, the public television channel (RTVC) in the Canary Islands (Spain) aired, in prime time, the first locally produced situation comedy. Titled La Revoltosa (henceforth LR), it was the most ambitious production in the channel’s more than 14 years of existence. This series was said to display a humorous interpretation of Canarian society. Indeed, according to the executive producer, the characters reflected ordinary Canarian families. One of the attractions of the series was the inclusion of popular Canarian comedian Manolo Vieira as the main protagonist. In this paper, I briefly outline the strategies typically used by this important figure of Canarian humour before I discuss two episodes of LR to explore the resources they employ to provoke humour. Particularly, I study the role played by language, and analyse how characters and situations are portrayed, thus examining universal humour in contrast to regional or ethnic humour. This comparison between the humour strategies used by Manolo Vieira and the ones employed in LR will enable us to determine to what extent this sitcom favours the Canarian (ethnic) humour traditionally represented by Vieira or rather resorts to more general (universal) humour strategies and stereotypes.

Can ethnic humour appreciation be influenced by political reasons?

Author(s): Carmelo Moreno del Río / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

The aim of this paper is to compare the appreciation of humor that a sample of citizens in Spain has expressed about two different types of ethnic humor produced by two successful television programs from two autonomous communities in Spain: the Basque Country and Catalonia. Both regions are well-known in the Spanish society for their specific cultural and political features, which are seen as different from the rest of the country. To some extent, their particular character is fixed in the Spanish collective imaginary by some particular stereotypes, represented in stupidity and canniness jokes, following the model investigated by Christie Davies. In contrast to these jokes, the present study focuses on the ethnic humor circulated in these two regions, a kind of humor that is based on their specific identity and where it is possible to combine elements of self-deprecating humor and elements of aggressive humor towards Spain. More specifically, this work tries to test if the political background that these two regions represent in Spain –societies that dares the cohesion of the Spanish identity, even fighting for nationalist recognitions of political rights- could influence or not in the appreciation that the Spanish citizens as a whole have of this ethnic humor that Basques and Catalans produce.