Fegyelmezés - büntetés
Janka Kovács: Mental Health Policy at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century: Theoretical Framework, Concepts, Proposals
Analysing theoretical approaches and pragmatic proposals found in literature of law enforcement and health administration, the study examines the contemporary theory of and approaches to the care for people living with an infirmity of either mind or soul. The overview also takes into account the English model, which was considered exemplary at the time, as well as concepts found in the references of German-language works and in Hungarian health administration-related texts. Special emphasis is placed on the contexts which these texts deploy, such as questions of poverty and discipline, the most frequently discussed topics, symptomatology, as well as the terms and speech modes used to describe the patients and their condition. Further questions concern whose remit healthcare was thought to be at the time, where mental health patients belonged within institutionalised caregiving, and what the actual and/or idealised image of these institutions was like in health administration and enforcement texts. The study scrutinizes contemporary pragmatic healthcare solutions by surveying theorists’ attitudes and answers to these questions – each coming from their own respective disciplines.
Balázs Tangl: Everyday Life in the Joint K. u. K. Army at the Time of Mandatory National Service (1868–1914)
The study explores the everyday life of the conscripts of the K. u. K. Army at the time of mandatory national service, primarily in Hungary. It predominantly relies on two novel source bases: diaries and memoirs held at the Military History Archives and the manuscript collections of the Hungarian National Library, as well as various disciplinary files preserved in the archives of the K. u. K. Eleventh Hussar Regiment. The theoretical framework is provided by the work of Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, and Michel De Certeau. In this vein, the army barracks are not considered as a “total institution”: the inquiry considers the privates’ responses to authority and discipline, their experience in the strict, closed and often cruel world of military life, and how these affected their internal norms. Thus, the study examines the barracks of the Austro–Hungarian Army as the primary site of the conscripts’ everyday life, in addition to charting their drills and exercises, various disciplinary practices, everyday practices, and the interrelationships among the soldiers.
Beáta Kulcsár: Penalty and Exclusion in the National Casino of Bihar County and Nagyvárad
In 1902 the Board of Governors of the National Casino of Bihar County and Nagyvárad revoked Gyula Vaiszlovich’s membership on account of his participation in a duel. His grievously wounded victim was Lajos Pallay, a renowned and widely respected lawyer of the city. His brother, Emil Vaiszlovich received the same sentence in 1904 when he was excluded from the Casino because of a street brawl. As the youngest sons of Adolf Weiszlovits, the city’s reputable undertaker, the brothers had uncertain financial situation and limited social capital. The study describes the protagonists in these incidents, as well as the exclusion procedure and its rationale, the motives of the decision makers, the logic behind the decision making process, and the sanctions’ normative and social determination. In juxtaposition, the study also presents the brothers’ own interpretation of the incidents and goes on to explore the consequences of the board’s decision extending beyond the walls of the Casino. Further, the paper enumerates attempts of non-institutional sanctions. In sum, the study provides an insight into the internal affairs of the Bihar County casino: its normative structure and its practices to sanction the breach of these norms; beyond this, it also reveals – within certain limits – the casino’s ability of social organisation beyond its own community. The study shows the casino in operation, in the process of community building and social organisation, and finally, arrives to informed observations about social control in action.
Katalin Baráth: Aggravating Circumstances Female Defendants in the Criminal Courts of the WWI Hinterland
The history of women in the hinterland has attracted little attention in the historiography of the Great War. The study aims to fill this gap by examining the populous but hitherto seldom investigated social stratum of poor rural women through conflicts they encountered as a direct consequence of the war. The source material derives from lawsuits in which these women, primarily from former Bács-Bodrog and Torontál counties (now largely in Serbia), were acting as defendants. While the WWI historiography of women, narrated from the angle of the increasingly bourgeois upper classes at the time, emphasises the advances in women’s emancipation, the present study reveals a different picture. The breakout of the war did not bring about the same manoeuvrability for poor peasant woman, instead the opposite took place. Although these women of uncertain social status could try (even illegally) to use new income opportunities to make up for missing income after the loss of the breadwinner, these rarely improved their difficult situation. The law, at the same time, was draconian even if the women’s sole breadwinner status in their family was acknowledged. In their assessment by the law the war counted as aggravating circumstance, if at all considered. In their case, the court hardly ever deliberated the exceptional situation brought about by hostilities – as if the war only affected men unfavourably.
László Matus: The “Counter-Revolutionary” Consolidation of the Hungarian Royal State Railways Defense Strategies in Political Litigation for Supporting the 1919 Commune at the Hungarian Rail
The documents relating to the disciplinary tribunals and councils of the Hungarian Rail are held at the corporate archives of the Hungarian State Railways. The present study focuses on the politically motivated disciplinary actions at the turn of the 1910s, revealing the identity-building acts of the processes of transition between old and new structures. The paper examines and categorises the defence strategies attested to in the documentation of defence and appeals, primarily the ones with a demonstrated preference of adaptation techniques. Political disciplinary cases are generally characterised by the topoi and slogans of the “counter-revolutionary” ideology appearing in the wording of the indictments, resolutions and protocols, and the fact that all rail employees were represented in them directly or indirectly. Thus, disciplinary actions were the arena for a political cleansing ritual, whereby the railway community excluded the politically deviant members from their fold. As the defence documents examined by the study reveal, the majority of the defendants recognised that the most critical condition for a favourable resolution was ideological adaptation and repressing all components of an alternative identity. As a conclusion, the assumption that the individuals’ strategy of false adaptation ultimately surreptitiously transformed into adherence to the norm evokes the Foucauldian disciplinary machine, which intricately interwove the entire railway community: the counter-revolutionary ideology was internalised by the narratives which were rephrased through the practise of deceit as a strategy, which in turn were primarily deployed because of the regular and continuous disciplinary actions.
Irén Bácsalmási: An Attempt for the Socialist Re-education and Punishment of Prostitutes in Hungary between 1950–1960
The study demonstrates that even though official ideology condemned solicitation for prostitution as a reprehensible activity against Socialist morale and norms, participation in prostitution was weighted solely on the basis of obligatory class category labels. Whereas before 1950, the authorities made a sharp distinction between legal (registered) and illegal (clandestine) prostitutes, following the abolition of legal prostitution, the distinction was made between “class aliens” and “working class” prostitutes instead. In police action undertaken between 1950 and 1960, the sentencing and its implementation were preceded by a thorough examination of the class category of the accused, which greatly affected the quality of both. Class alien prostitutes were instantly criminalised and were deemed reprehensible, which clearly suggests that the retribution was exacted not for soliciting but for the perpetrator’s class affiliation.
András Kiss: “Let the Party HQ Blow Up!” Disciplinary Cases at the Csepel Car Factory (1950–1961)
The study examines the corporate policy of discipline and punishment through selected snapshots from the life of management and staff at the Csepel Car Factory. Although the paper investigates the topic primarily from the viewpoint of the workers, it also touches upon some cases that involved middle and upper management. This latter is notable precisely because from the 1950s onwards both management and workers were liable to be demoted or brought to disciplinary action for a variety of reasons. The forced industrialization of the early 1950s, as well as the resulting performance pressure dictated by the corporate plans, provided the establishment with opportunities to “set examples.” These cases included the sanctioning of “voluntary leavers”, workers committing “Plan fraud,” or being late for work. The workers and their direct superiors attempted to solve most cases “among themselves” which suggests the existence of informal arbitration. The cases resulted in legal procedures proper, as well as party disciplinary actions against the factory’s employees. Cases involving the party state and the corporation’s internal disciplinary policies reveal that the practices of discipline and punishment in this period were far from standardized and egalitarian.
Sándor Borbély: Disciplinary Techniques and Adaptation Mechanisms in the Transcarpathian Border Region
Through the example of a Transcarpathian village, Tiszapéterfalva, the study presents the micro-analysis of post-1945 Soviet political dictatorship. By exploring the social and political conflicts as well as the interactions and tensions between the local society of the village and the state as external power, the study focuses on everyday forms of resistance against dictatorship, such as theft, breaches of work discipline, slowdown, sabotage, workforce migration. Parallel to these, the study examines the corresponding reprisal and corrective procedures, such as disciplinary notices, fines, deducting workdays or remuneration, demotion, which were deployed by rural collectives in order to create, reinforce and consolidate the communist regime in the 1960s and 1970s. The study argues that the adaptation techniques emerging in various fields of social life – especially in the transforming circumstances of property rights, labour organisation, income structure and political situation – and the corresponding corrective procedures together formed a system whereby they mutually controlled one other.
Petra Polyák: University and Discipline Aspects of Judging the Behaviour of University Students before 1956
The party state’s economic and social aims, based on the Marxist–Leninist ideology, significantly affected the definition of the types of behaviours considered insubordinate, the means of sanctions, as well as the operation of the authorities dedicated to enforce them. In the re- and over-politicised atmosphere of universities and colleges (much like that of the rest of society), actions such as asking inappropriate questions, cheating at exams, even simple truancy, were liable to gain unfavourable political charge, which were organised along the easily recognisable labels of current politics and ideology – “reactionary,” “clerical,” “kulak,” “right-wing tendencies” – affixed upon the accused students. The documentation of the disciplinary procedures, however, are informative not only about the zeal to create and expose the enemy, but also about the accused students’ motivation behind their actions. While Hungarian historiography studies the “anti-regime” behaviours (or those labelled as such) of higher education students and responses of the authorities mostly in the context of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, German higher education research assumes a more nuanced and in-depth approach to the same topic. The toolkit developed to instigate regime-friendly behaviour, as well as the forms of repression exerted upon both students and educators are both of central importance in studies of East German higher education history and monographs published on institutional histories. Their approach is largely determined by the methodology and terminology developed through decades of research in the field of East German social resistance (Opposition und Widerstand). While this approach rightly stresses the opportunities for individual action and the limitations of attempts of total social control, it mainly focuses on finding confrontational contacts which means that it is not entirely sufficient for the exploration of the multi-layered relational web between authorities and students in itself. As the present examination of the pre-1956 behaviour of university students does not seek evidence for student resistance, the chosen approach – while utilising the methodological considerations and terminology of opposition research – attempts to synchronise it with the concept of Eigen-Sinn (c. self-will), which has a stronger hermeneutic power in exploring the relationship between individual and authority. The present analysis of the 1955 disciplinary action against the students of the Russian department at the University of Szeged, thus, merges the theoretical and methodological approaches of both opposition research and Alltagsgeschichte.
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