Replika Monologue: The Globe-Trotting Waiter
Replika presents the monologue of a man who travelled all around the world as the “offical” waiter of different sport teams, including the Hungarian Olympic team.  Accompanying the sportsmen to Helsinki, Melbourne and Moscow, he was witness to their success and failure, as well as to history, when 48 members of the team did not return to Hungary after the 1956 Olympic Games.
 

Reception-Oriented Approach in Media Research
The papers in this selection explore how people use the media, with special emphasis on reception processes.  In their introductory essay, Tibor Dessewffy and Zoltán Gayer fit reception theories into the theoretical and historical frame of media research from the early ‘80s.  David Morley’s Nationwide project, first published in 1980, marks the beginning of a new approach in media research.  He is interested in how the reception and interpretation of the media-text depend on the particular viewer’s social-, economic-, and subcultural embeddedness.  In his essay entitled Reception Analysis: Mass Communication as the Social Production of Meaning, Klaus Bruhn Jensen discusses a qualitative reception research from sociological and communicational aspects.  The last paper by Roger Silverstone, entitled On the Audience, critically reconsiders the history and trends of reception theory from the viewpoint of his empirical findings.
 

Migrants of World Cities
The papers in this thematic section explore both theoretical questions considering late-modern world cities, and the actual strategies used by immigrant ethnic groups.  In his already classic essay, Ulf Hannerz examines the cultural role of world cities.  He identifies four social categories or groups which play significant role in the making of world cities (the transnational businessmen, the immigrants from the third world, the specialists of expressive activities, and the tourists), and discusses two constitutive elements of the cultural flow both in world cities and between cities and the peripheries (cultural market and special forms of life).  Peter Niedermüller examines the world city in the context of late-modernity and focuses on the negotiation of ethnic identities by immigrant groups living on the city’s periphery.  The author gives an overall review of the anthropological/sociological theories and the empirical analyses concerning the concepts of modernity, late-modernity, city and ethnicity.  In her study, Aysa Caglar explores the reality of a particular urban ethnic minority: the Turks in Berlin, and discusses in bourdieuan terms their strategies of social mobility.  In the last article, Paul Silverstein studies the transnational Alegrian-Berber movement and the localized Breton and Occitan militant organizations.  He examines how discourses and practices of centralization and integration have produced categories of non-national difference which immigrant and ethnic minorities have appropriated to construct sub- and transnational identities. 
 

Debate
Syed Faid Alatas contributes to the international debate on the colonization of the social sciences started in the 1996 Replika English Special Issue.  Alatas applies the market analogy to the study of the state of the social sciences globally as they relate to the First World.  By criticizing the academic dependency theory as the only articulated approach that utilizes this analogy, Alatas suggests alternative metatheories, such as that of the rhetoric of social science.
 

E-way: Information Society and National Culture
Kristóf Nyíri explores the relationship of information society and national culture in a globalized world.  He believes that in order to enable the local labour force to successfully compete in the global labour market induced by different information and communication technologies, the state has to raise education and research to a high level.  The successful competitor has to speak at least one foreign language, and has to come from a national culture which is distinctly open to the world.