From the 1920s onward, the history of mentalities gained widespread popularity through the influence of the Annales School. Alongside the impersonal forces of society and economy, the forms and content of thought – the mentalities of past societies – came to play a central role in these historical explanations. After the mid-1960s, however, the concept of mentality appeared to have lost its substance. Critics argued that it had become too rigid, too all-encompassing, and that the existence of the monolithic mindsets it attributes to historical eras is unsupported by empirical evidence. From the 1990s onward, Roger Chartier, Bernard Lepetit, and later Paul Ricœur recommended that historians replace the unified, fixed, and finite notion of mentality with the more flexible concept of representation. This shift allowed for the interpretation of social categories in ways that aligned with new developments in social action theory. Even so, overarching unified interpretive frameworks continue to persist, transcending the diversity of disparate situation-bound representations. These frameworks, although not in the “closed” manner proposed by the monolithic concept of mentalities, can nonetheless expose some consistent patterns in mental phenomena.

Nincs absztrakt.

Sidestepping the investigation of revolutions and the dynamics of productive forces, the growing appreciation of material culture is better understood through recognizing the inextricable connection of everyday life to the objects that surround it. According to this perspective, our lives unfold not just among objects, but through them, to the point that the functioning of society is unimaginable without them. In daily life, objects and people intertwine in chains of action making the material world—fashioned by human goals and intentions—an indispensable element of both individual and social functioning. Applying scientific categories, dichotomies such as nature versus society or animate versus inanimate impose an artificial division on areas that are inseparable in the processes of life. Thus, after the Material Turn, the objects around us have emerged from their passive role. They are no longer seen merely as ornamental or passive bystanders to actions, the outcomes of which – admittedly, usually through human use they help shape. Viewed in this way, our objects are understood more as “external agents” of human thought than as inanimate entities. For historiography, this principle means that objects are no longer considered merely as exhibits that support arguments to bolster hypotheses or enhance historical accuracy. Instead, they are independent – even central – subjects of analysis.

Both the self-evident acknowledgment of hierarchies and the human ambition to move up in the ranks of society seem to be part of our ancient heritage. Accepting one’s superiors does not necessarily preclude attempts to climb the social ladder. However, this takes place in a social environment where rational considerations are only part of the overall strategy, as it can be seen in the interpretation of and responses to top-down designations; at the same time, behaviour is governed by habitus, which, in certain situations, causes cultural inertia or inflexibility in some groups. This inertia is not interminable, it can be changed by learning processes even in the course of a single individual’s lifetime. Upward mobility, however, is not wholly hinged on individual performance, but also on its context. The diverse social domains — including their institutions, the power positions within and between them, and the advancement opportunities achievable through the types of capital owned by the individual — constitute fields in which progress is only possible by exerting effort, similar to spaces familiar from everyday experience. As examples from the last decades of the Estate System clearly show, the synergy of social background, habitus, personal qualities, and external factors together can lead to both upwards or downwards mobility in the social hierarchy.

Nincs absztrakt.

The biggest challenge in classifying social groups is finding a durable definition. Besides the constantly changing scholarly approaches, this is primarily caused by the changeability of the social groups themselves. To resolve this double uncertainty, the present study proposes to use dynamic nominalism which places the emphasis on the changing realities of social phenomena and groups, as well as the factors that bring about these changes. Accordingly, a group may be presented in historiography as it is formulated by the members of the given group and outsiders, their authorities, institutions, professionals and intellectuals, often in response to each other’s definitions. Expressing the changes of the background, intellectual environment and aims of the actors and their definition, the groups are portrayed in motion. Based on this premise, the study traces the definitions of the Hungarian Jewry between the 1780s and 1848: this heterogeneous religious group, fragmented by internal conflict and interests, formed its own identity in response to the challenges posed by the external attitudes, expectations, the legal environment and major political programmes. The diversity of responses, ranging between accepting and rejecting urbanisation and Magyarisation, resulted in vast differences between the self-definitions and behaviours of specific actors, as well as in a social reality constructed as a group. In the case of the Jews, their national, ethnic and religious character, as well as the possibility to separate these aspects, was an important issue for the contemporaries. Between the last decades of the eighteenth century and 1848, the changes of economic, social and intellectual atmosphere alleviated the isolation and created a situation that demanded new strategies of self-definition from the Hungarian Jews.

The role of forgetting can be examined on various levels depending on the interpretive model, ranging from the isolated individuals of earlier psychological studies, through the dynamic memory systems seen as the result of social activities by sociology and anthropology, to the concept of long-term cultural memory manifest in and canonised by objects and texts. Individual-psychological, social-communicative and historical-cultural levels fuse in the practice of recall: looking at this process from the angle of forgetting, they make remembering selective. On the long term, the fate of events, knowledge and practices that remain unrecalled is fading and eventual oblivion, which can be interpreted as the dynamic relationship between these three levels. Identity is another important interpretive factor of the social practice of remembering, and thus that of the practice of the inseparable forgetting too. The self-image of the individual and society, based on the prevailing self-images, presents expectations to the individual and society: how do they see themselves and what should they be like? The social forces in various historical periods outline their own specific patterns of remembering and forgetting. Depending on their position, certain social groups can have more or less power and efficiency in hindering identity-transforming processes, whereas some do not have a real chance for this. Due to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernisation, as well as mass migration and lifestyle change, in many places, traditional worlds have been relegated to museums and oblivion. In a world of accelerating time and ephemeral phenomena and experiences, the cultural amnesia brought about by modern space creation and market economy can be counterbalanced by a precisely drawn, order-centred past which gains currency as an important point of reference in one’s identity.

Although it often remains unnoticed, memory is inseparable from forgetting. The process of remembering, which includes different stages from experiencing to encoding and retrieval would be impossible without the selection of forgetting. It is necessary in order to unburden the human mind, which would otherwise suffer from serious problems related to the processing of surplus information. We cannot pay attention to everything happening in our environment. There is too much information to be processed, but even more important is the fact that we simply do not need that much for our ordinary lives. What we will not forget has relevance in regard to our personal aims, self understandings, norms and values which are embedded in wider sociocultural contexts. Forgetting as a deeply social phenomenon is operating through well defined social mechanisms. Remembering in social context is based on communication. Unmentioned information or certain aspects of the original information are likely to fade away. The more we are silent about certain memories the less they can spread in society and become part of the collective memory of the wider society. Traumatic pasts that may haunt whole social groups cannot be easily worked through in the context of silence. We tried to examine the workings of forgetting and silence by analyzing examples from twentieth century hungarian history.

Recent studies in memory and remembering emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. Sites of memory, the symbolic cultural toolkit and the social frameworks of memory contribute to the construction of individual and collective memories. Neurocognitive research found that memories exist in our brains as imperfect imprints of original event experiences. Consequently every single recollection is a kind of reconstruction, which is governed by the current aims, self image, strategies and situation of the working self. Culture serves as an external source of identification, which strengthens the community’s collective identity anchoring it to past times. Both for individuals and collectives, one of the main functions of remembering is providing an enduring identity that makes individuals feel comfortable, „at home” in society. Just like autobiographical memory in the case of the individual, the selective workings of collective memory help to create a coherent self for society. Remembering as an inherently social and communicative process, which is mediated by cultural artifacts (narratives, symbols, objects) is the product of group work. Ingroup memories through regular commemorations bring community members closer together, stressing common fate, feelings, orientation. As inherently social beings humans almost spontaneously form groups of collective memory that strengthens their identity and sense of belonging. People make sense of their life in time and community, with the help of a society’s cultural narrative frames. The community members’ identity in space and time is located by culture-specific narrative templates, making remembrance a crucial activity on the individual and the collective level. It is through this activity, that we experience our sameness and continuity in time.

The paper would like to examine some aspects of the cultural and social functions of education in different historical contexts. By emphasizing the significance of a culture in the construction of social reality I wanted to call the attention to the importance of the socio-cultural background of this construction. Culture, as a system, that is to say a kind of toolkit; which enables us to become parts of it, to play our roles according to its norms, values and rights, together with the given power-relations of a society constitute the „playground" for social actors. The socio-cultural and historical dependence of understanding our world and expressing ourselves in it through „meaning making" (giving meanings to objects and phenomena), is a crucial factor in interpreting and constructing social and historical „realities". This „meaning making" however is not, was never an arbitrary process. Culture, defining the general criteria of „right" and „wrong", facilitates and legitimates some meanings while suppressing others. Changes in the structure of a society often have cultural consequences as well: people see and interpret their world and themselves in it differently (like the bourgeoisie in 18th and 19th century Europe.) Education (in the family and at school) is of primary importance when speaking about the mediation of the above mentioned toolkit. Comparing two basic models, the estate-society and bourgeois society it becomes clear that education could not be context-free: the given norms and power relations always influenced the ways of understanding the role and significance of education.

Nincs absztrakt.

An Interview with Vera Bácskai.