Rather than looking at the embedding of the individual within its respective social system of reference, the anthropological perspective strives to take into account the individual as a system of reference in itself and its relations to its environment as a departure point in the assessment of historical tides. As such, because it refers to the fundamental individual and its coordination within the immediate or mediated environment, the anthropological focus resides in the forthcoming analysis both on the individual behavior and on its social intertwining, particularly in terms of establishing one-to-one meaningful interactions also known as relationships. It was not so much the sociocultural background, I intuited, but rather a type of human perception and processing of reality and then the externalization of the results which came across to me as disturbing, haunting, dysfunctional in the two short-stories, Cat Person and Concession Stand Girl. The parallel movement of alienation and extreme immediate intimacy, increasingly visible in dating practices all over the world, but most prominently experienced in affluent, post-industrialized, service-based societies (USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, European Union) emerges from two major sources: on the one hand, the illusionary benefits of instant gratification; on the other hand, the delusional waves of continuous selfvalidation by means of external attention futile and superficial, but constant. (Fragment)
