symbolic elements of everyday culture - MTA Szociológiai ...

Agnes Kapitany (DSc) and Gabor Kapitany (DSc) are Doctors of Hungarian Academy of Sciences, scientific
advisers of Research Institute of Sociology (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and full professors of Moholy Nagy
University of Art and Design, Budapest (MOME).
They are sociologists, cultural anthropologists and semioticians. Their main research fields are visual
anthropology, social anthropology, sociology of values, cultural studies and social theory.
They published 20 books and more than 100 articles in Hungarian, English, French and German.
Introduction
This book contains the authors’ selected works published in English. The greater part of these articles deal with
the fields of sociology of knowledge and socio-semiotics. There are five separate thematic blocks of these texts.
Analyses of the (radical) political changes of the last few decades constitute the first chapter. The authors
focused their attention mostly on the changes of values and symbols of everyday life, the political campaigns
(or institutions of “collective memory” such as museums). In the second group of articles they analyzed
different symbols of everyday life, and their changing process. In the next block the paper elaborates on
national symbols of everyday life. In the fourth block there are two theoretical articles from the point of view
of socio-semiotics. The appendix of this book (the fifth part) contains a longer text: the summary of a social-
psychological method, developed by the authors, which was presented at the II European Congress of
Psychology (1991). (This method was published in two books in Hungary, and it is part of the curriculum at
doctoral schools).
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