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TRAVELLING PEOPLE,TRAVELLING OBJECTSAnna WesselyPublished online: 09 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Anna Wessely (2002): TRAVELLING PEOPLE, TRAVELLINGOBJECTS, Cultural Studies, 16:1, 3-15

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380110075234

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Abstract

The paper introduces the essays on consumption, shopping tourism andinformal trade in socialism, by presenting the framework of the researchproject in which they were produced. As opposed to tourists’ shopping,shopping tourism is de� ned as travel abroad with the explicit aim to buygoods, unavailable, dif� cult to � nd, or inordinately costly in one’s homecountry, for personal use or reselling to compatriots. Shopping tourismbecame a widespread practice in the East-European socialist economies ofshortage as soon as travel restrictions, at � rst among socialist countries and,later, to the West, had been relaxed. Following a discussion of of� cial andpopular attitudes to consumption during socialism, the author points outthat shopping tourism was not a form of popular resistance to the politicalsystem but rather a set of ingenious practices of adaptation to the everydayexigencies it created.

Keywords

economy of shortage; tourism; informal trade; consumption; practices ofadaptation; indigenization

TH E I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A RY R E S E A R C H P R O J E C T on shopping tourismwas launched in 1996 by Central and East-European academics, supported

by the International Research Centre for the Humanities (InternationalesForschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna. The essays below presentsome of the � ndings of a group of young researchers from Romania, Yugoslavia,Croatia, Slovenia, and Hungary.

Anna Wessely

TRAVELLING PEOPLE, TRAVELLING

OBJECTS

C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 1 6 ( 1 ) 2 0 0 2 , 3 – 1 5

Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502380110075234

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1.

This research had originally been conceived as a new form of cross-cultural socio-logical investigation which refuses to impose, for the sake of comparability, astandardized set of questions on the differentially structured objects of its study,that is, on the actors, sites, and national legal-institutional frameworks of con-sumption, travel, and shopping in the countries under study. The coordinators ofthe project thus insisted that each participant � nd that issue and angle forapproaching the common points of interest which he or she believed to be mostpromising or fascinating. Nevertheless, there was, from the very start, acommon, taken-for granted point of departure, represented by János Kornai’s(1992: 233) analysis of the shortage economy in the socialist system:

An economic system is a shortage economy if the following conditionscoincide: shortage phenomena are 1) general, that is, found in all spheresof the economy (in trade in goods and services for consumers, in means ofproduction, including investment goods, in labour, in exported andimported products, and in international means of payment); 2) frequent,and not only exceptional or sporadic; 3) intensive, making their in� uencefelt very strongly on the behaviour and environment of participants in theeconomy and the traits and results of the economic processes; and 4)chronic, applying constantly, not just occurring temporarily.

Following this de� nition, Kornai (1992: 234) lists the main features ofpeople’s everyday experiences of shortage in socialist countries: ’the countlessfrustrations of thwarted purchasing intentions, queuing, forced substitution,searches for goods, and postponement of purchases in their daily lives as con-sumers and producers’.

Another shared assumption of the research team of the project had been sug-gested by cultural studies, particularly those on working class youth subcultures.Was not shopping tourism after all a form of everyday popular resistance to thestate-imposed regulation of everyday life, the ingenious circumvention of con-straints and prohibitions which amounted to a form of political protest and thencame to play a major role in the implosion of state socialism at the end of the1980s?

Since the project involved doing a social history and ethnography of our-selves, discussions within the team included an aspect that would rarely be men-tioned in objectivizing descriptions of research procedures: the researchers’ ageand lived experiences. This project had been initiated by people in their forties,while most of the participants turned out to be younger by a decade or two.Lacking �rst-hand experience of the 1950s and 60s, they were inclined to acceptthe standard view on the drab and monolithic uniformity of everyday life insocialist countries, on the one hand, and the enthusiastic representations of

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Western welfare societies, on the other, since this pair of contrasting imagesstructured the ideological rhetoric of politicians and journalists after the demiseof state socialism in Eastern Europe. While we insisted, relying on our childhoodmemories as well as contemporary novels, diaries and other sources, on thediversity of life styles and survival strategies in the 1950s through the mid-60sand kept quoting data on the similar consumption habits of most Europeansocieties in the period of post-war reconstruction, the generation of our studentslistened to us incredulously and then questioned and reformulated the set of ourinitial research objectives. While we had originally designed a project on shop-ping tourism, they broadened the scope of investigation to include the study ofconsumption patterns and the development of consumerism in Eastern Europe,thus hoping to come to grips with the many unexpected phenomena they hadencountered.

The best introduction to the prevailing consumption patterns, expectations,and phantasies about Western goods as well as the general reliance in all strataof the urban population on cheap services in the 1950s is provided by the popular‘educational romances’ of the period, written for a teenage female audience andenjoying wide circulation. Considering the strict ideological censorship suchbooks had to pass, whatever references they contained to social divisions, thediversity of life styles and aspirations must have belonged to the common stockof taken for granted knowledge of the time. A highly popular novel of this typedescribed, for example, the events in the life of a fourteen-year old lower middle-class girl in Budapest in the year 1956. (The revolution of October 1956 is alsopresented as part of her experiences – and this without its compulsory desig-nation as a ‘counter-revolution’!) She lives with her grandparents in a tenementhouse in downtown Budapest. Compared to the staple images of a homogenizedsocialist society, completely cut off from the Western world, it comes as a sur-prise to � nd that our heroine tries to memorize the words of a Yves Montandsong during boring classes and keeps practising dif� cult � gures of rock and rollin the breaks at school. She also has a rather clear idea of the differences in wealth,social position, life-style, and political attitudes among the families in the housewhere she lives as well as of the people she meets. Moreover, just as all the othercharacters in the novel, she tends to unquestioningly accept these differences asfacts of life. After leaving school she starts working as an apprentice at a hair-dresser’s – an institution regularly attended by all segments of the female popu-lation:

. . . it opens at 6.30 in the morning. [. . .] It has to be that early becausemany working women come at this time. Typists, clerks who begin workat eight or eight thirty and want to have their hair washed shiny and combedpretty before that. Housewives can also come early, they carry their marketbaskets and go shopping after their hair has been done. [. . .] Later, aroundnine and ten, another sort of women arrive: elegant ladies, the wives of

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lawyers, doctors and even the actresses from the nearby theatre. [. . .]everybody is different and here, at the hairdresser’s, women becometalkative. Even the elegant ladies! They tell you about where they are goingfor the summer holidays, where one can buy cloth of genuine Australianwool, [. . .] It is not always possible to tell by the clothes who is who.Sometimes very simply dressed women turn out to be high-rankingof� cials. It was mere chance that they learned once that a middle-agedwoman who wore her hair in a bunch and always put a dark coat on . . .was a deputy minister! [. . .] And they wondered and pitied her for lookingso ‘unfashionable’. She could really have dozens of Australian woollensweaters and as many ‘Western’ things as she only wanted. She travelsabroad more than enough. Yet she doesn’t care, although she is not old.Aren’t people strange? That little Mrs. Mihályi, the wife of a head waiterdresses a hundred times better than this deputy minister.

(Gergely, 1962: 62–3)

2.

Shopping tourism, as opposed to tourists’ shopping, means travel abroad withthe explicit aim to buy goods that are unavailable or dif� cult to � nd in one’s homecountry. These goods will be bought either for personal consumption or for re-selling back home with a considerable pro� t. Shopping tourism is one of themanifestations of an informal private economy within the socialist system, conse-quently both its unof� cial representation in public opinion and its of� cial con-demnation in the press will be quite out of scale with its economic weight andsigni� cance. Do these exaggerations justify our regarding it as a form of politi-cal resistance? This description badly � ts the aspirations and practices of EastEuropean consumers, shoppers and traders from the 1960s through the 1980s.What we have found were rather strategies of adaptation to the ever-changingcircumstances, the exploration and exploitation of every gap and leak in an evi-dently dysfunctional system of central economic planning, state-controlledredistribution, and commerce. Thus, sooner or later, the research team had toface the inevitable question whether these ‘heroic acts of resistance’ could � our-ish due to the ingenuity of their perpetrators or, rather, thanks to the leniency ofthe political power holders who had realized the economic advantages andbene�cient social effects of closing an eye to the activities of petty traders in theshadow economy. This conclusion was also suggested by Václav Hole¹ ovsky(1965: 631) in his comparative survey of personal consumption in three social-ist countries:

The prospect of being able to secure a coveted piece of consumer durableshas far-reaching effects upon people’s behavior. [. .] and it seems to act as

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a general social stabilizer by substituting satisfactions here and now forattempts at a reform of the sociopolitical system. Consumer durables thusappear as a relatively sophisticated element of the Communist policy ofsocial stabilization and a partial substitute for direct control and repression.

Of� cial ideology notwithstanding, the populations in the Central and EastEuropean socialist (or democratic or people’s) republics were by no meanshomogeneous. Consequently, shopping tourism had a different meaning andfunction in the lives of the various socioeconomic strata. For the socialist middleclass of professionals it served status-seeking conspicuous consumption, the cre-ation and maintenance of social distinctions; for the enterprising lower middle-or working-class smugglers it opened up the possibility of complementing theirextremely low incomes and, perhaps, accumulating a minor fortune. The major-ity of the population rarely travelled at all, but eagerly bought the cheap goodsthe shopping tourists, particularly the lucky residents in the border areas withspecial border passes, and blackmarketeers offered through informal channelsand, later, on the loosely regulated market-places. Moreover, the function andpolitical weight of shopping tourism seem to have been different and varying withthe changes in national economic policies in the countries concerned.

The Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian members of our team all argued that,in former Yugoslavia, the permissive attitude of the authorities concerningsmugglers and private imports was clearly part of the highly effective politicalself-legitimation of the system. They rejected suggestions to understand shop-ping tourism as a form of inarticulate popular political resistance:

Could we say that some shopping tourists’ consumption practices weresubversive to the socialist system? When we speak about former Yugoslaviafrom the sixties through eighties, [. . .] we can hardly speak about trans-gressive consumption practices. Used to being told what their needs were,with a void inside in need of � lling, knowing who they should be but notwho they were, the shopping tourists were easy and uncritical prey toWestern advertising which presented irresistible and highly desirable life-styles. For them, unused to risk or competition, consumption was the onlyway to enter the world of Western values.[. . .] So, the politics of style wasnever really a counter politics, although in the big cities, with the latestfashions on the backs of smart people it had some elements of an elegantguerilla � ghting a system in which the dress code was of� cially prettyimmobile. Feeling strong enough, the system itself did not oppose theseharmless little subversions.

(Bartlett, 1998: 9)

In Poland, the shortage of supply compared to the buying power of the popu-lation – what Kornai calls forced saving or a monetary overhang – had driven

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many people into the informal economy which, by the late eighties, spanned thewhole continent with its network of semi-legal Polish traders. The Hungarianeconomic reform policy opted for another solution to the same problem: itdrastically curbed buying power and simultaneously increased market supply thusencouraging/forcing all who could to supplement their of� cial incomes byexploiting themselves, by working an extra 6–8 hours a day in the expanding‘second economy’ in order to acquire the desired luxury goods. By the 1980s,the same investment of effort was necessary merely to maintain the living stan-dard that the population had taken for granted a decade earlier. Finally, fromamong the countries included in our investigation, Romania in the 1970s and 80sseems to have represented the classical Stalinist formula of economic autarchy:it restricted both supply and demand and almost completely blocked access toalternative channels for the acquisition of consumer goods, i.e. travel or small-scale private production and trade (Chelcea, 1998).

3.

Our research focussed on tourism among East European socialist states and thetourist � ows between Eastern and Western Europe, particularly Austria as thenext country on the other side of the Iron Curtain for most East Europeans. Also,for a long time Austrians (and, somewhat later, Germans) tended to representthe foreign tourist in this part of the world. It is in relation to Austria that theparticular terms of touristic economic exchange and its cultural consequencesare most clearly visible.

To put it simply: tourist shopping belongs to one of two types. It may, ofcourse, represent a form of leisure activity or a rational economic transaction.As to the �rst, it may be recalled that as early as in 1844 the � rst pleasure excur-sion organized by Thomas Cook already included in the package a guide to rec-ommended shops abroad. Catering for the tourists’ appetite for shopping is anever-expanding international branch of industry. For the more irrepressible thetourists’ uncanny sense of irreality becomes due to the lack of any practical orpersonal contacts to the places they visit and the people they meet, the moresalient shopping and eating in restaurants become as the only occasions wherethe familiar patterns of relating to the environment, of accomplishing somethingmay apply and thus help dispel the anxiety of meaninglessness or boredom.Tourists’ shopping is, however, of a fundamentally different kind when it is a formof rational economic action. Everybody is, as a matter of course, happy to availthemselves of the cheaper drinks, cigarettes, or perfumes offered duty-free onairports or ferry-boats, and nobody wants to miss buying items abroad which areknown to be signi� cantly cheaper than in their respective home countries. Thesame ecomic rationality was, and still is, manifested by Austrian and German citi-zens who regularly cross the border to the East in order to buy huge quantities

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of cheap food and cheap skilled labour, i.e. the professional services of dentists,optometricians, beauticians, hairdressers, etc.

But all this rarely develops into that extensive and systematic exploitation ofthe differential pricing of goods in the neighbouring countries for which EasternEuropean tourists were known. The enormous scale of this activity can be attrib-uted to several factors. First, state subsidies were differently allocated in eachcentrally planned national economy, and second, there could be a chronic short-age of some type of goods in one country while the same were available in plentyacross the border.

The sociological literature on tourism has rarely paid attention to tourismfrom and to socialist countries. The prevailing talk of a Communist bloc blottedover the differences among East European countries, took no notice of theborders which divided them or of the obstacles to travelling from one countryto another, which began very slowly to disappear only in the 1960s. The moti-vations and activities of Yugoslav tourists in Hungary, Hungarians in Czecho-slovakia, etc. have rarely been given a thought – even though the bulk ofshopping tourism in this region from the mid-60s up to the early 80s and, incertain cases, even today is constituted by their movements and transactions.The customs authorities of the concerned countries tried in vain to curb privateimports. When, for instance, the prices of several items of everyday consump-tion were cut by 20–40% in Czechoslovakia in January 1964, the mass migra-tion of Hungarian shoppers across the border to Czechoslovakia forced theHungarian National Bank to intervene and argue for customs restrictions toprotect the national currency; the media poured out reports on, and denuncia-tions of, people who smuggled, hoarded, and privately sold Czech products, say,rubber boots. Private imports from Western Europe were on a much smallerscale, yet the papers kept on talking of despicable persons who would use thepermission to travel as tourists to the West every third year not for visitingmuseums or enjoying scenic beauties. Instead, they would cross the border toAustria, stay just a day or two and spend all their money on pocket radios, fancywatches, ball-point pens, nylon stockings, fashionable scarves, sunglasses, orraincoats.

Whatever strong language the media used, however high the imposed � neswere, private imports kept steadily growing, the practices of the suitcaseeconomy became diversi� ed and led, in the early to mid-1980s, to the emer-gence of semi-formal marketplaces, either adjoining markets or on the outskirtsof towns. The names these markets were given by the population are highlyrevealing. In Hungary, � rst they were called Polish markets in acknowledgementof the fact that most traders came from that country. The next designationreferred to them as the Comecon markets, re� ecting the ironic recognition thatthey represented the former practice of private trading on a large scale, i.e., apractice which systematically exploited and, thereby, mitigated the de� cienciesof a bureaucratically organized trade among state monopolies in the countries

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under the umbrella of the Council of Mutual Economic Aid. Finally, in the 1990sthey began to be called Chinese markets, indicating not only the predominanceof Chinese traders and goods but also the diminishing differences in price-levelamong former socialist countries.

However, the old forms of across the border trade have not disappeared com-pletely. They still �ourish, for example, on the eastern borders of Hungary wherenew actors have entered the scene: traders from Turkey, the Ukraine, the BalticStates and other former Soviet republics. The authorities tolerate their semi-legalactivities since the growing number of impoverished Hungarian citizens cannotafford to shop except in these markets that continue to offer low quality, low-priced goods. Sociological and ethnographic surveys and interviews have yieldedvaluable information on the composition of the goods on sale in these markets,the scale of trade, and the actors involved. In general, Ukrainian and Romaniantraders sell very cheap clothes, tools, glassware and household appliances, forcingtheir Polish and Turkish competitors to specialize in more expensive and betterquality fashion articles. As Kókai (1995) points out, the area from which Hun-garian markets attract grey economy trade more or less overlaps with that delin-eated by medieval trade routes. Due to the repeated economic crises of the1990s, many workers in state-owned factories in the Ukraine received no wagesfor months or received them too late, in a currency that was developed in themeantime. For them the only chance of survival was to steal products from thefactories and sell them in a marketplace across the border. One ethnographicstudy (Csite et al., 1995) has found that several of those persons who used toengage in this kind of trade have by now accumulated enough capital to expandtheir businesses and become almost regular merchants, relying on a wide socialand commercial network. Most of them are men aged 30–35. Petty trading as asurvival strategy has not disappeared, either. It is a low prestige, low pro�tactivity, engaged in mainly by women from rural areas.

If the majority of actors in these poor people’s markets disregard all poss-ible customs and tax regulations, the trade activities along Hungary’s southernborder broke both national laws and the international embargo on commercewith Yugoslavia during the recent war. Before the war Hungarian towns in theborder region had been busily constructing supermarkets to cater for Yugoslavshopping tourists. When legal business was suddenly shut down and all those whoused to make a living from legal trade became unemployed, many switched toexporting petrol and weapons illegally to Yugoslavia.

The relevant literature abounds in observations on the liminoid situation ofthe tourist as such but little work has been done yet on tourists from a socialistcountry in the West or the Western tourists in Eastern Europe, except theoccasional newspaper report on the absurd or, at best, pitiful behaviour of therare ‘Eastern’ tourist in the West – stories about Soviet sailors snatching dozensof plastic bags in a Hamburg supermarket, about a Polish tourist who cannotmake his prospective customers understand that for some reason he wants to sell

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them a box of Nivea facial cream at a street corner in Rome, or about the catch-ing of a Hungarian shoplifter in Vienna’s Mariahilferstrasse.

Yet, the phenomenology of the East European tourist in the West is worthstudying. When for some Eastern Europeans restrictions of travel to the Westhave become less severe, the more well-to-do decided to pay approximately threemonths’ salary for a passport, the necessary visas, and (legally and illegallybought) hard currency. Once across the border, they experienced a shock. Theyrealized that their above average monthly income was way below the minimumwelfare aid that the inhabitants of the visited countries were entitled to. They hadto understand and learn to accept that they would never be able to share in thetypical tourist pursuits and experience. Travelling proper demanded that theylive on canned food brought from home, hunt for bargains or free services, payboring visits to distant relatives or the friends of friends in the hope of getting agood meal and, perhaps, free accommodation for a night or two, and face up tothe derisive smiles of the waiters if they dared enter a cheap restaurant and orderonly an hors d’oeuvre. Having patiently endured these ordeals, most of them feltthe need to justify the hardships suffered both to themselves and to those backhome by displaying the trophies of the journey: photos of the sights seen andsome desired rare object bought with the money saved from their shoestringbudget. (A research report prepared for the project analysed how these snap-shots were made to validate tourists’ stories about their having been present ina different world.) Since travel in the West was such a privilege, jobs with theprospect of business travels were highly coveted. Long distance truck drivers andairhostesses thus became the heroes and heroines of the popular imagination;their middle-class counterparts were the employees of state foreign trade com-panies.

No less interesting is the experience of the West European tourist in a social-ist country. A recent monograph on the history of tourist �ows between Austriaand Hungary (Böröcz, 1996) vividly describes how the working or lower middle-class tourist to Eastern Europe could expect to be treated as a coveted guestwhose af� uence was the object of general envy and who would be encouragedby hotel managers, tour organizers and other personnel to play the colonialmaster to the amazingly obliging natives.

4.

Does this loose talk of shopping tourism not amount to the lumping together ofcompletely different phenomena (i.e. tourists buying souvenirs and illegaltraders)? The answer to this wholly justi� ed question must be twofold. Firstly,although ‘tourist’ is a legal category applied to foreign visitors whose economicactivities are supposed to be restricted to consumption, many tourists fromsocialist countries used to engage in some form of trade in order to cover the

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expenses of their stay abroad. Secondly, foreign trade being a state monopoly insocialist countries, all those who wanted to conduct business abroad on what-ever scale had to pretend to be mere tourists. Apart from petty trade withmeagre returns which nevertheless helped to balance one’s household budget andmaintain or enhance one’s living standard, pro� table business meant trading ingoods the export of which was prohibited (e.g., works of high or folk art andantiquities from Eastern Europe to the West, COCOM-listed strategic goods likehigh powered computers from NATO countries to the East – the latter case is ofparticular interest, since the privately imported computer parts were mostlybought up and assembled by state-owned enterprises or research institutions) .

Finally, the roles of the illegal trader and the tourist were not mutuallyexclusive. It often depended on the chances a situation offered or denied whichof these roles were assumed. A unique document, the memoirs of a retired black-marketeer, was published in Romania in 1991. Its author offers a detailed reporton his business trip to Yugoslavia soon after the Romanian revolution in 1989.Since Romanians had rarely been allowed to travel to their Western neighbours,their ideas on Yugoslavia as an earthly paradise were formed on the basis of theirimpressions of the thousands of af� uent-looking Yugoslav tourists who used tosell all kinds of fancy goods in Romanian black-markets in the 1970s and 80s.Having crossed the border, our blackmarketeer found himself pushed everfarther to the West by the harsh competition not only of other Romanians butalso of the Bulgarian and Russian traders in the border area. Since business wasbad, he had time to look around and discover what he called ‘a picturesque land-scape’. The farther away he got from Romania, the more often his trip began tofeel like a boy scouts’ excursion. His report almost unnoticeably slips into speak-ing of himself not as a smuggler and illegal trader but as a tourist. The sight ofDubrovnik makes him rapturous: ‘Here we, the blackmarketeers, trained topursue pro� t, have forgotten about everything, about business, about how expen-sive life in this area is, and feel like we are in heaven. Now, we said to ourselves,we can call ourselves tourists at last’ (quoted in Vári, 1998: 12).

5.

Although most of the issues I have touched upon so far concern economies,goods, and forms of trade, the central question our research wanted to addresswas of another kind. What we had set out to investigate were invisible imports,the circulation of images and stereotypes, of ideas and know-how, their incorpor-ation into processes of ‘socially organised daydreaming’ (Urry, 1990: 83). Wewanted to understand the bottomless appetite for ‘things Western’ (Appadurai,1990), socialization into consumerism, and the ways in which local identitieswere formed drawing on the symbolic use of Western goods. (The quotedexamples may have suf� ced to indicate that, in many instances, ‘Western’ is a

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relative term, in matters of culture and geography.) Without a clear sense of theseprocesses one can hardly comprehend the ease with which, after 1989, people inour region tended to accept the late capitalist forms of advertising and self-fashioning.

With the exception of the Romanian case mentioned before, consumptionwas never criticized so relentlessly in the socialist countries’ press as, say, inWestern media and intellectual discourse during the 1960s. On the contrary,of� cial propaganda insisted ever since the early 1950s (Malenkov’s programme)that after heavy industry had been � rmly established, it was time to develop lightindustry, the production of consumption goods. Orators on festive occasions cel-ebrated social progress measuring it by reference to the rise in living standardsand the growth of consumption. The need for economic reforms in the 1960sput a cautious modernizing strategy and conscious efforts at consumer educationon the agenda. Among others, the international fairs organized in socialist coun-tries presented the world standard with which domestic production wasexpected and urged to catch up. Visits to these fairs became highly popular formsof window shopping, virtual shopping sprees. They effectively taught people dis-crimination as to the quality, functional requirements, and aesthetic design ofobjects of everyday consumption.

Travelling ideas and travelling objects tend to undergo characteristic changesin the course of their migration. They gain new signi�cance by being � lled withlocally attributed meanings. It is in this form that they can become relevant propsfor the rede� nition of local group identities. In order to take roots, globalphenomena have to be ‘indigenized’ � rst. The outcome of this creative trans-formation is generally referred to as the hybridization of meanings. A highlycomplex case of refashioning, or reinventing, the meaning of a fashion object hasbeen examined by Márton Oblath whose research report demonstrated whatsort of meanings a made-to-order Chanel suit might acquire in the eyes of itswearer and her social circle in Hungary in the 1960s.

The best-known example of reinvention/indigenization is offered, perhaps,by Western beat music, which tended to have the same subversive meanings inEastern Europe even though the crowds of fans seldom understood a word of thesongs they were so enthusiastic about. They felt the novelty and inspiration ofthe music and � lled it with all their emotions of rebellion, aggression, and sen-timentalism. The imported forms encouraged and helped the expression of whatwas already there but could not � nd an adequate channel for articulation. Asimilar process could be observed in the 1980s with the spread of computers.There evolved, particularly in Yugoslavia and Hungary, a speci� c culture of com-puter hackers and program crackers who then created their own networks andforms of expression, including, among others, the creation of a peculiar verbaland visual language and the organization of cracker parties in state- or com-munity-owned ‘Houses of Culture’, an institution originally designed for theeducation of the population into collectives of ‘socialist personalities’. But, just

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as the societies in which they were supposed to � t, these ideal socialist person-alities failed to materialize.

Research reports produced in the ‘Shopping Tourism’project

� Djurdja Bartlett, Yugoslav Shopping Tourism: A Consumerist Manifesto� Liviu Chelcea, The Culture of Shortage During State-Socialism: Goods, Con-

sumers and Strategies in a Romanian Village During the 1980s � Tibor Dessewffy, Speculators And Travelers: the Political Construction of the

Tourist in the Kádár Regime� Ottó Gecser and Dávid Kitzinger, Fairy Sales: the Budapest International Fairs as

Virtual Shopping Tours� Zoltán Gayer,Photo Acts: Amateur Photographs Before and After the Regime

Transformation� Ferenc Hammer, A Gasoline Scented Sindbad: the Truck Driver as a Popular

Hero in Socialist Hungary� György Horváth, Suffering and Legitimacy in Yugoslavia� Darja Kerec, The Attitude of the Authorities and the Press Toward Slovenes’

Shopping in Austria and Italy� Márton Oblath, A Bespoke Chanel Suit in Hungary in 1966� Bozo Repe, The In� uence of Shopping Tourism on Cultural Transformation

and the Post-War Slovenian Way of Life � Alenka © vab, ‘You simply had to have it!’ Shopping Tourism under Socialism

in Slovenia� Alexandru Vari, Lived Experience and Inherited Meanings in the Case of a

Romanian Blackmarketeer� Péter Véssey, ‘Yikes, it rulez!’ The Hacker Frontier in Hungary

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1990) ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global culturaleconomy’. Public Culture, 2: 1–24.

Bartlett, Djurdja (1998) ‘Yugoslav Shopping Tourism: A Consumerist Manifesto’,manuscript.

Böröcz, József (1996) Leisure Migration, Oxford: Pergamon Press.Csite, A., Ivaskin, A., Orbán, S. and Varga, S. (1995) ‘Csencselök és maf� ózók

Kárpátalján’. Szabolcs-Szatnár-Beregi Szemle, 30: 253–61.Gergely, Márta (1962) Szöszi. Budapest: Móra Ferenc Könyvkiadó.Hole ¹ ovsky, Václav (1965) ‘Personal consumption in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and

Poland, 1950–1960: A Comparison’. Slavic Review, 24: 629–39.

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Kókai, Sándor (1995) ‘A nyíregyházi, ún. KGST-piac nemzetközi vonzása’. Szabolcs-Szatmár-Beregi Szemle, 30: 238–51.

Kornai, János (1992) The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Prince-ton: Princeton University Press.

Urry, John (1990) Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London:Sage.

Vari, Alexander (1998) ‘Lived experience and inherited meanings in the case of aRomanian black-marketeer’, manuscript.

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