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 socialpsychological 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).