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• On the Roma issue again - Discourse analysis and reality

  265-274

  Péter Alabán

  Views:

  44

  At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, several works on the Hungarian Roma, their history, their current exclusion and their unresolved social situation, based on the same approach, partly on social history and partly on sociological surveys, appeared. Gábor Kertesi in 2005 ("On the margins of society. Roma in the labour market and in school") and Csaba Dupcsik in 2009 ("The history of the Hungarian Roma. History in the light of Gypsy studies 1890-2008") were published by Osiris Publishing House, while Tünde Virág's 2010 book ("Kirekesztve. Falusi gettók az ország margemén") was published by Akadémiai Kiadó as a result of a successful OTKA grant.
  The most recently published work, presented at the 83rd Festive Book Week, is the first joint publication of Balázs Majtényi, a constitutional lawyer who is concerned with the protection of human rights, and György Majtényi, a historian who is particularly interested in the cultural and social history of the 20th century (including the Kádár era). The book, which can be ordered online with two different hardcover editions, was based on a 2003 study, which was later jointly expanded, combining the research results of several disciplines and "maturing" into a separate volume. However, it fails to provide the in-depth analysis of the subject of the title: it (also) fails to provide a factual social portrait of realities, of phenomena experienced and lived on a day-to-day basis, of phenomena examined from several perspectives, and of realistic alternatives to solutions.

• About the Understanding of Discursive Social Sciences and its Possible Aspects

  93-107

  László Péter Lipcsei

  Views:

  44

  This article observes a paradigm shift occurred in several disciplines of social science which
  also differs in theoretical and methodological aspects from science pursuing objectivity. The
  interpretative social sciences primarily focus on the study of meaning and sets texts and talks
  into the centre of understanding. Social facts are taking place in an intersubjective sphere,
  namely among each other. In this paper they are consequently called ‘socially meaningful facts’.
  Therefore, understanding and meaning of these socially meaningful facts can be study without
  snapping social reality by means of different survey techniques, which would also necessarily
  reduce the richness of social meanings.
  In this paper the vote is given for the transition of discourse approach into a paradigm.
  A couple of aspects are introduced in order to make an attempt to prove its scientific significance. On the other hand misunderstandings are also falsified. According to these misconceptions, a
  text-based approach and an actual postmodern scientific scheme is nothing else than a literary
  project, which also denies the pure existence of reality and only considers all previous knowledge
  as relative. Instead of that, this paper states that every single fact of society has meaning which
  is mediated through narratives by the language itself.