Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity Among Romanian Roma(Anthropological Horizons)

How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture – such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories – play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects – defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania – is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Translocal Communities of Practice and Multi-Sited Ethnographies Part I. Negotiating and Materializing Difference and Belonging 1. Symbolic Arenas and Trophies of the Politics of Difference 2. The Gabors’ Prestige Economy: A Translocal, Ethnicized, Informal, and Gendered Consumer Subculture 3. From Antiques to Prestige Objects: De- and Re-contextualizing Commodities from the European Antiques Market 4. Creating Symbolic and Material Patina 5. The Politics of Brokerage: Bazaar-Style Trade and Risk Management 6. Political Face-Work and Transcultural Bricolage/Hybridity: Prestige Objects in Political Discourse Part II. Contesting Consumer Subcultures: Interethnic Trade, Fake Authenticity, and Classification Struggles 7. Gabor Roma, Cărhar Roma, and the European Antiques Market: Contesting Consumer Subcultures 8. Interethnic Trade of Prestige Objects 9. Constructing, Commodifying, and Consuming Fake Authenticity 10. The Politics of Consumption: Classification Struggles, Moral Criticism, and Stereotyping Part III. Multi-Sited Commodity Ethnographies 11. Things-In-Motion: Methodological Fetishism, Multi-Sitedness, and the Biographical Method 12. Prestige Objects, Marriage Politics, and the Manipulation of Nominal Authenticity: The Biography of a Beaker, 2000-2007 13. Proprietary Contest, Business Ethics, and Conflict Management: The Biography of a Roofed Tankard, 1992-2012 Conclusion: The Post-Socialist Consumer Revolution and the Shifting Meanings of Prestige Goods

About the Author :
Péter Berta is an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, a Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Ethnology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.