Replika Monologue: The Macho’s Way

Replika introduces a man whose life is infused with a passionate yearning for game and risk-taking.  A failed poet, this man is an unscrupulous womanizer whose macho identity needs continuous revitalization through numerous sexual relationships and the appeasing of his lust for gambling.
 

Techno Culture

The essays in this selection approach youth culture surrounding rave parties and techno music from different aspects.  W. J. Bockie and D. J. Fever’s paper – originally written in Polish in a highly subjective tone – gives a historical outline of British and North American techno parties emerging from the ’80s as well as a technical description of techno music and its production.  The Roundtable Discussion between Hungarian DJs organized and edited by Barnabás Bóta and Zoltán Fülöp reveals how Hungarian DJs see different aspects of techno-life both in the capital and the countryside.  It also explores the differences that characterize the organizational and economic conditions of DJs’ activities in Hungary and the Western countries. The Party.  Anthropological Thick Description written by Balázs Fejér is based on the author’s fieldwork done at the Hungarian Bal-Y techno club between 1993–1996.  Fejér explores the real and symbolic meanings of the spaces and roles available to the party-goers.  In the last paper entitled Youth Culture and the Making of the Post-Fordist Economy: Dance Music in Contemporary Britain, Tim Maughan and Richard J. Smith argue that in dance culture, the dominant form of contemporary youth culture, youngsters are taking central roles in using the technology, organizing parties, establishing their own labels, distributing them, becoming DJs, in short, producing contemporary culture.  In this process, they create a Post-Fordist economy which is fluid, diverse and decentralized, closely linked to a semi-formal economy. 
 

Shoppers, Consumers and Tourists

The papers in this thematic section are selected from studies written for the interdisciplinary project “Culture with Frontiers: Shopping Tourists and Travelling Objects in Post-War Central Europe” launched in 1996.  One of the project directors, Anna Wessely’s introductory essay is followed by the analyses of young Hungarian, Croatian, and Romanian authors.  Ottó Gecser and Dávid Kitzinger’s Fairy Sales: The Budapest International Fairs as Virtual Shopping Tours gives an outline of the history of these fairs in Socialist Hungary, and explore the meanings and symbolic function of virtual shopping by visitors.  Djurdja Bartlett’s Shopping Tourism: A Consumerist Manifesto deals with the practices of shopping tourism as a way of constructing one’s identity, and analyzes that process through the example of the urban middle classes in the former Yugoslavia in the seventies and eighties.  Finally, in The Culture of Shortage During State-Socialism. Goods, Consumers and Strategies in a Romanian Village During the 1980s, Liviu Chelcea studies the ways in which individuals coped with shortage existing on a macro level.  In discussing different strategies villagers used to obtain scarce consumer goods, Chelcea explores tourism, small-scale border trade with Hungary and the social networks with former German villagers who had emigrated to Germany. 
 

E-way: Embodiment and Eroticism in Cyberspace

Focusing on the relationship between human flesh and the digital world, the e-way section explores issues of embodiment, bodily engagement and eroticism in virtual environments.  In his elaborate study entitled The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments, Frank Biocca describes how virtual reality interfaces are evolving to embody the user in a progressive way (during which the computer user evolves as a cyborg), and discusses the effect of embodiment on the sensation of physical presence, social presence, and self presence in virtual environments.  In his essay The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace, Michael Heim discusses the philosophical significance of our involvement in cyberspace.  According to Heim, “our fascination with computers is more erotic than sensuous, more spiritual than utilitarian”.  In an effort to destroy the assumption that cyberspace is constructed merely of bits and bytes, Heim draws on the works of Plato, Leibniz and cyberpunk guru William Gibson to explain for man’s peculiar love affair with computers and networks.