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  • Hungarian Gypsy picture book: The historic iconology of the Gypsies in Hungary 1686–1914 by Gábor Bencsik
  • Hans Richard Brittnacher (bio)
Hungarian Gypsy picture book: The historic iconology of the Gypsies in Hungary 1686–1914. Gábor Bencsik. Budapest: Magyar Mercurius. 2013. 315pp. isbn 978-9-6398-7224-0.

The book’s title is misleading and it is actually the subtitle that clarifies the study’s concern: its primary focus is neither on the Gypsies’ self-perception, nor on Hungarian society’s attitude towards them. Instead, it addresses the many important details behind the reality of the lives of Hungarian Gypsies from the seventeenth through to the beginning of the twentieth century, exploring their domestic appliances and objects of everyday life by analysing pictorial representations of them. In his short yet substantial introduction, Theoretical Framework, Bencsik refers to the writings of Rudolf Arnheim, Hans Belting, Peter Burke and Kristof Nyiri to explain how the pictorial turn deprived humanity’s writings of its hegemonial assertions. This turn began to accept pictures as significant, relevant sources for historical reference: ‘The pictorial turn is no constraint, but an opportunity; an opportunity to gain knowledge and arrive at new conclusions previously hidden from the scholarly eye’ (p. 8). Whether in wood cuts, etchings, paintings or photographs, images have more to say about their artists than the people they display; nevertheless they are always based on empiric experience. It is this very empiric experience that shows traces beyond its aesthetic distortion that need to be preserved.

Bencsik’s study seeks to mark the shift away from a merely critical prejudicial research tradition that has dominated the scientific discourse in recent years, which predominantly addressed perception and the constructed character of otherness, moving towards a positive knowledge about the reality of ethnicity. Particularly in Central Europe and Southeast Europe, which contain a demographically significant population of Gypsies, a change of research perspective takes on special meaning. In today’s political climate, Hungary’s aggressive politics towards the Gypsies enables an investigation of Hungarian history and the contemporary application of Gypsy clichés, which are poisoned with hate – a research, that was as evident as politically useless. Instead, the historian is called upon to use incorruptible methods to examine the nation’s demographic roots, the century-long existence of Gypsies on Hungarian territory, and the unproblematic coexistence of Hungarians, Germans and Gypsies throughout a long historical period. Indeed, ‘Gypsies were well integrated into the social mainstream’ (p. 293). [End Page 107]

The book is illustrated with 200 images, some of them coloured and boasting impressive technical quality. The volume itself is divided into three chapters according to theoretical and fundamental considerations: the first, The Depiction of Gypsies, provides a historical account and overview of the figures of the Gypsies from the first testimonies in the sixteenth century to the expression of an ambivalent, two-folded perspective towards the end of the nineteenth century. The first witnesses testified to the strangeness of the Gypsies, emphasized through typical horizontally striped clothing and the broad-brimmed hats. The next two centuries and the different periods of Hungarian history saw the forming of a set of visual stereotypes that can be found in almost all pictorial representations of Gypsies; sitting on the ground with bare feet, the bare heads of adults, the nakedness of children. It is astonishing that Gypsies appear to be a tolerated part of the multi-cultural Transylvanian society, whose services and products such as cauldrons, braids and clay bricks provided significant contribution to accommodating the rural population. With the spread of the second industrial revolution and the rise of mass production, the services provided by Gypsies fell into disuse, their products being no longer competitive. Cities boomed, and with the rural exodus, a sense of ‘cultural degradation’ ensued, which, in its wake, awakened an increasingly critical attitude towards the Gypsies. Previously, as Bencsik does well to point out, the pictures provide little reason to recognize conflicts between Gypsies and the dominant society. Only one in over 200 images depicts a case of theft, another one an erotic moment (‘erotic momentum’) which includes a Gypsy wearing great round earrings, dancing with a tambourine, while flashing...

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