A „jó anya” mítosza Magyarországon a reproduktív munka és a piac globális történetének szempontjából

Author(s): Gergely Csányi,Szabina Kerényi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 24/2018

Based on Foucault’s theory of the soul, as well as the methodological insights of Fernand Braudel and world-systems analysis, in our paper we demonstrate how the myths of the good and the bad mother were created by certain actors during the various cycles of the capitalist world system, and how these myths have been embedded into the logic of capitalistic accumulation. We show how these myths, on the one hand, contributed to securing the unpaid reproductive labour necessitated by accumulation, and on the other hand, supported a new market segment from the 19th century onwards. First we present an outline of the history of the myth of the good mother at the core of the world system, then we summarise the socialist myth of the good mother. Finally, we use empirical examples to illustrate the contemporary Hungarian myth of the good mother.

A szülés és a reproduktív technológiák értékelméleti megközelítése

Author(s): Kathryn Russell / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 24/2018

Social and technical changes in reproduction are drawing childbirth into the marketplace. People are creating new relations that separate genetic, gestational and social parentage. Reproductive engineering makes options of in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, surrogacy, and fetal tissue transplants. This paper explores an analogy between childbearing and social labor, arguing that the labor theory of value gives insight into the social functions of childbirth under capitalism. The valorization of childbearing is consistent with other ways of socializing the reproduction of labor power despite the capitalists need for an autonomously functioning private household sector. A value-theoretic approach is necessary to reveal how childbearing is being placed in material relation with other forms of labor under capitalism. Neither reproductive engineering nor biological difference are themselves sources of oppression for women, but when found in a historical context where value can be extracted, childbearing can become a form of alienated labor.

„470-et adott és csak egy kicsit fojtogatott” –szegénységben élő nők a félperiféria és a centrum között.

Author(s): Fanni Dés / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 24/2018

My paper concentrates on women living in poverty originating from semi-periphery countries commuting to core countries to the sex industry. I analyse the phenomenon in the context of the theory of Claudia von Werlhof (2007), which is based on Wallerstein’s (1974) world-systems theory and focuses on the relation system of economy and sexuality. Through a case study, my aim is to point out the structures of oppression through which the countries located at core regions exploit women living in poverty originating from semi-peripheral regions, leading to women from semi-periphery countries ending up in the sex industry in core regions. My aim is to answer the following questions through ten 261 interviews conducted with Hungarian women who sell sex in Zürich: (1) how do these women end up selling sex illegally in a Western-European city where prostitution is decriminalized? (2) What are the economic and power constraints that lead to these women sell sex in a Western-European city? (3) How does the feminization of poverty encourage women’s migration, and a form of commuting where the aim is not to settle down in the host country, but to maintain a life at the country of origin? My further goal is to make the experiences of Hungarian women living in prostitution visible based on feminist empiricism.

Az LMBT+ identitások és mozgalom politikai gazdaságtana a félperiférián

Author(s): György Mészáros / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 24/2018

This article aims to form a critique of the identity-based approach of the mainstream LGBT+ activism to place LGBT+ identities and activism to another, political-economical and anti-systemic frame and to analyse the EU’s mainstream approach together with its Hungarian counterpart. To complete this task the essay analyses some relevant texts and offers autoethnographic reflections. As the analysis of the international documents (such as the Yogyakarta Principles) and of the websites of the largest European LGBT + organizations (ILGA Europe, IGLYO) reveals, the mainstream LGBT+ activism applies a human rights frame and an identity politics- based liberal approach. This frame is followed by the Hungarian LGBT+ activism that often combines it with a discourse that contrasts the progressive “Western” liberal world with the backward “Eastern” world. This ideology focuses on the self-definition of the subject and builds rights and political activities on it, and understands the notion of gender in the dimension of identity. By this approach subjects are bounded to the structures of neoliberal capitalism, and LGBT+ identities are commodified. In the semi-periphery, this is topped by a self-colonizing tendency that presents the “Western” world as a superior one. At the same time anti-systemic authors have shown how gay (LGBT+) identity is embedded into the system of capitalist production and reproduction. LGBT+ identities are the products of capitalism, and its power relations are both reproducing the heteronormative model (especially in the semi-periphery) and incorporating the progressive, free, neoliberal “gay” subjects. Consequently this study argues that material relations should be considered in building the resistance to heteronormativity and capitalism.

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.

A szén-dioxid mint értékmérő. Hogyan teremt értéket és pénzt a klímaváltozás?

Author(s): Steffen Dalsgaard / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

The introduction of the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to save the climate through a number of schemes, or mechanisms, that commodify carbon. Among other things, these schemes create monetary incentives to reduce carbon emissions through the trade of permits and credits, and they make carbon an object of financial speculation. Most controversial is apparently the potential of carbon thus to be a universal yardstick for value by commensurating moral spheres of human action (the environment, the economy, development, etc.) that some people regard as distinct. This paper explores the consequences of the speculative aspects of carbon as a standard of value and as potential currency.on

Ökofeminizmus

Author(s): Ariel Salleh / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

Ecological feminism is sometimes understood as a subset of social ecology. This is true in as much as ecofeminism addresses the interaction of social and natural processes. However, it would be false to suggest that ecofeminism derives from social ecology, or from deep ecology, or eco-Marxism [Chapter 6]. Ecological feminism is sui generis; its first premise being that society–nature relations in the dominant global economy are fundamentally sex-gendered in both material and ideological senses. In this respect, ecofeminism takes a methodological quantum leap beyond other political frameworks. Ecofeminism is also distinct from liberal and socialist feminisms, since these perspectives focus rather uncritically on the pursuit of equality. Ecofeminists are not looking for an equal slice of a toxic pie. Attention to the positive and negative implications of sex-gender difference is prioritised by ecofeminists, before attending to an equality that simply reinforces Eurocentric masculinist values as the universal norm. Likewise, respect for the principle of difference as cultural autonomy joins ecofeminism and postcolonial concerns. Further, the framing of liberal and socialist feminisms has been anthropocentric, whereas ecofeminism is oriented towards oikos and the interconnection of all life on Earth.

Felkészülés az olajcsúcsra: mit tanulhatunk Kuba "különleges időszakából"?

Author(s): Emma Piercy,Rachel Granger,Chris Goodier / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

It is against recent experiences of proliferative consumption of the earth's resources that planners and politicians must confront the challenge of peak oil over the coming years. With so few examples of peak oil available worldwide, this paper explores the realities of this in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 – the so-called special period, which decimated the country's imports of energy, food and other vital supplies. Drawing on primary research collected in Cuba during 2008 and in an attempt to stimulate debate about how western countries and cities might respond to future losses of global resources, this paper examines the policy responses implemented in Cuba in the fields of transport, spatial planning, agriculture and energy. Despite the Cuban situation being politically different from other countries and the fact that the loss of resources during the special period were abrupt and unplanned, it is argued that there is still considerable scope for a wider application of the concepts to other towns and cities, if not countries and cultures.

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 történettudomány válsága és haszna az antropocén témák tükrében: egyenlőtlenség, hatalom, világrendszer, ellenállás és deep history (Bonneuil és Fressoz: The Shock of the Anthropocene; Lewis és Maslin: The Human Planet)

Author(s): Róbert Balogh / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 25/2019

The importance of the books reviewed here lies in their ability to go beyond the Anthropocene versus Capitalocene debate and in describing a framework of notions that lead to the conclusion that the adequate response to the risks that global biophysical changes bring about is a new mode of living replacing the current form of consumer capitalism. The authors of the two books are two ecologists and two historians. Their arguments converge on the point that if we live in the Anthropocene, then the academic response to this condition is a critical theory that includes a new narrative about human history and analysis of the processes that brought about the current condition and that need to be changed. The new ground that the volumes break makes it possible to hypothesize that historiography may overcome its decades-long crisis as a result of increasing sensitivity to socio-natural phenomena and interaction with biological sciences.

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.

A lakhatási válságra adott közösségi válaszok

Author(s): Csaba Jelinek,Zsuzsanna Pósfai / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

Since the crisis of 2008, housing is yet again and increasingly becoming a form of profitable financial investment. This tends to dominate over the claim that each person has the need and the right to access affordable, good quality housing. Across the globe this tendency is intensified by state policies as well. However, bottom-up initiatives organizing themselves for collective housing solutions are also gaining ground. These self-organized, „self-help” models open the possibility for economically vulnerable social groups to support each other in finding solutions for their housing problems, and also to collectively access resources that would individually be impossible to reach. This paper presents such an alternative housing solution, notably the model of rental-based housing cooperatives. Rental housing cooperatives are institutions organized in a bottom-up manner with the aim of providing affordable, good quality and stable housing for their members. We discuss two examples from Germany and from Uruguay for successful rental housing cooperative networks, which have existed for several decades. Finally, we present the steps which have been taken in the past years in Hungary and in the Eastern European region towards the establishment of such a model.

A mai pénzügyi rendszer kritikája és reformlehetőségei

Author(s): Sára Lafferton,Gábor Horváth / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 27/2020

In this paper we try to briefly analyse the main working principles and the social consequences of the financial system. In the second part of our article we describe several alternative solutions to the current system: in our opinion, some of these could help and enable the work of establishing a democratic and solidarity economy.

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.

Humour, food and fashion:

Author(s): Arie Sover,Orna Ben-Meir / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

This article is the first study that researches the combination of three components: humour, food and fashion. It is based on an analysis of three unique fashion shows whose designer is the American Jeremy Scott; two under his brand, and the third as an art director for the Italian brand Moschino. The three shows connect these three components, while presenting the culmination of a food-humour theme in contemporary fashion, which had started with Moschino’s brand founder, Franco Moschino, in the nineties. Combining food and fashion is relevant in contemporary culture as it compares consumption of fast food to that of fast fashion. The link between laughter and food is ancient. A few days after birth, there are buds of a smile on a baby’s face, expressing its satisfaction with food. Smiles and even laughter often occur throughout a person’s life in the context of delicious food. The uniqueness of the above-mentioned fashion shows is not humour in itself, but rather its combination with food and fashion, the two seemingly different. The combination of these three components creates a cognitive challenge for the fashion spectators. We thus argue that this threesome constitutes an important, creative breakthrough in fashion. One of humour’s important functions is to challenge social, cultural and aesthetic norms. As thus it has been infiltrated into fashion shows since the 1980s, as a norm-breaker, but also as a marketing strategy. This article discusses the cultural function of food and humour in fashion shows, from a cultural semiotic methodology.

Book review

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

Book review

Author(s): Costas Canakis / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Book review

Author(s): Carla Canestrari / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Laughing across borders:

Author(s): Liisi Laineste,Piret Voolaid / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of cultural communication in this medium, passes along from person to person, and may scale (quickly or gradually, depending on the comic potential and other, sometimes rather elusive characteristics) into a shared social phenomenon, giving an insight into the preferences and ideas of the people who actively create and use it. The present research is primarily carried by the question of how the carriers of Internet humour, that is, memes and virals, travel across borders, to a smaller or greater degree being modified and adapted to a particular language and culture in the process. The intertextuality emerging as a result of adapting humorous texts is a perfect example of the inner workings of contemporary globalising cultural communication. Having analysed a corpus of 100 top-rated memes and virals from humour-dedicated web sites popular among Estonian users, we discuss how humour creates intertextual references that rely partly on the cultural memory of that particular (i.e. Estonian-language) community, and partly on global (primarily English- and Russian-language) cultural influences, thus producing hybrid cultural texts. The more interpretations are accessible for the audience (cf. polysemy Shabtai-Boxman & Shifman 2014), the more popular the text becomes, whereas the range of interpretations depends on the openness of the cultural item to further modification.