Session 6: Constructions of Selfhood (and Others)

1st Global Conference

Tuesday 22nd September – Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Post-socialist Hungarian Identity and Foreign Tourism
Iren Annus
Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary

Hungary has experienced a series of fundamental transformations in the last 20 years which have brought about not only lasting changes, but also newly emerging challenges for both the country and its people. The country did away with goulash communism in 1989, shifted to a western-style democracy and a free/mixed market economy, and entered into an alliance with its perceived former enemies by joining NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2006.

These transformations also contributed to the re-constitution of identities, perceptions and positionings of the self. We were convinced that we were culturally part of the West (and not the Rest, which in this particular Hungarian context was understood as the Balkans), but then we feared the loss of our particular culture, which we perceive as indeed ancient and unique.

This new post-socialist identity has also had to be managed and marketed. The presentation maps the ways in which it has been communicated to foreigners through the tourism industry, which has also had to take on a new shape in the last two decades – once Hungary had lost its previous appeal among westerners as the communist country relatively easy to visit in the 1980s and once the ecstatic push to see the newly self-liberated state in the early 1990s had waned.

The presentation argues that the dynamic dichotomy between sameness and difference has been re-shaped in post-socialist political ideologies and, consequently, in ethnic/national identities in Hungary. This dichotomy has become the new paradigm along which Hungarians position themselves as well as serving as the organizing principle based on which the tourism industry has been re-constructed for foreign markets. As a result, Hungary is marketed as a truly European place – cultured, well-developed, safe, decidedly comfortable and so forth – but then also as a unique if not exotic place, which is achieved through a set of practices of self-othering in relation to what we perceive as western.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

‘The Few, the Proud, the Marines.’ Hegemony, Empire and the Fashioning of the Superhuman Community in the Rhetoric of the US Marine Corps Television Commercials
Józef Jaskulski
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland

The paper analyzes the recent series of TV commercials encouraging enlistment in the US Marine Corps as an example of a modern hegemonic discourse, which exploits American patriotism, the image of a collective superhero, and the rhetoric of the epic to construct a communal, masculine identity that serves the imperialist dialectic. What can be found abundantly in the marines commercials is a set of components that, set industriously together, provide the viewer with the Saidian consolidated vision of the imperial rhetoric that justifies and defends the functioning of the most representative of the US Army formations. Not only does such a rhetoric simply combine several mythologies in the figure of the marine but it also bends the very myths it uses to the advantage of the US foreign policy. The components embedded within the representational strategy are, among others: the epic paradigm of the invincible old guard (appearing throughout historical and popular culture narratives, from the three hundred Spartans to Cambronne’s Waterloo band and on), whose elite troops are driven by a code of honorable conduct; the communal super hero, as present e.g. in Eco’s analysis provided in Il superuomo di massa, i.e. a noble emblem of common morality, a patriotic mosaic of pop-art archetypes, and a Manichean image of good; a Baudrillardian simulation of traditional values of the American frontier; and, finally, a nearly-fetishist, visual fascination with male body and military uniform, which, together with the aforementioned features turn the marines commercials into a spectacularly directed visualization of the right-wing myth of sustained order, as analyzed by Barthes in his Mythologies.

Ethnic Statistics and Social Classifications in France: How the `Black Community´ was Born
Gado Alzouma
Department of Anthropology, American University of Nigeria

The status of France’s ethnic minorities has become a burning issue in recent years owing to the riots in October and November of 2005, as well as the National Assembly debates on the Taubira law, ethnic statistics, affirmative action, and the memory and commemoration of slavery and the slave trade. This period has also seen the emergence of a number of Black organizations that have frequently staked out a communautarian position and in so doing have repudiated France’s tradition of radical republicanism. As will be seen below, many actors have regarded these groups, as well as the concept of ethnic statistics, as a threat to national cohesion. Thus, Blacks have always existed as a common sense category, but they have never been accepted by national and academic institutions as a statistical category. The present article shows how, against the aforementioned backdrop, the Black community is creating itself as a visible group ‘’endowed with systems of value and representations” (Champagne 1984), and how the debate over ethnic statistics and the positions taken by the various actors (associations, journalists and politicians) on this occasion have contributed to this process of legitimization. Although France’s Blacks are still a largely fragmented group, they are constructing an identity for themselves in the republic via a process that is a reaction to the rigidity of France’s republican system and to the real (albeit denied) stigmatization and discrimination that Blacks are subjected to on a daily basis.