Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma by Péter Berta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma by Péter Berta Elena Popa Péter Berta. Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 390 pp. Located in the region of Transylvania, the Gabors are one of the many Roma ethnic populations in Romania. They are generally trilingual and have similar living standards to the non-Roma majority. In Materializing Difference, Berta meticulously follows the social life of silver beakers and roofed tankards—highly valued objects that form the core of the Gabor Roma prestige economy. The author’s oral history data suggest the Gabors have owned beakers and tankards as far back as the mid-19th century. These items were made by non-Roma silversmiths and belonged to churches and non-Roma elites, who used them to preserve wealth. The increased usage of cash and banking services has partially superseded the objects’ social and economic significance among the non-Roma. This has led to their sale, with many being acquired by Transylvanian Roma. In recent decades, Gabors have traded and pawned these objects at prices significantly higher than in antiques markets. Among the many transactions documented by Berta, the most expensive beaker sold for $1,200,000 in 2009 (63). Berta conducted 33 months of multi-sited fieldwork, between 1998 and 2019, mostly with Gabors, but also with Cărhar Roma. He also did research on Romanian and Hungarian antiques markets and monitored transnational auctions. The book draws theoretical inspiration from Appadurai’s (1986) concept of methodological fetishism, critiques of analytical groupism, and the theory of communities of practice, among others. Rather than focus on previously examined Roma “ideologies of [End Page 567] equality-centrism,” it describes and analyzes “the politics of difference”— especially prestige consumption and marriage politics—and their role in the ongoing production of Gabor Roma social and political identities, values, and hierarchies. As such, it contributes a vital perspective to the study of the Roma by showing how socio-economic and political differences are structured within one Roma ethnic population. The book depicts the Roma families as relatively integrated, both economically and socially. Many of them possess significant economic capital and have good relations with and comparable living standards to the non-Roma majority population. This portrayal, the author posits, could serve as an alternative narrative to analyses that tend to stereotypically describe Roma communities as marginalized, poor, rife with interethnic conflict, and characterized by “only slightly differentiated” social relations (14). Furthermore, Berta’s attention to the Gabors’ prestige economy, marriage politics, and hierarchies of patrilines shows convincingly that the Roma’s creation of identities does not occur necessarily in relation to the majority population, but rather in relation to intraethnic identity practices inextricably linked to Roma notions of respectability and social success. The Gabors are, thus, an example of an integrated community whose ethnicized practices construct intraethnic differences and allow them to represent their own Roma ethnic identity and belonging in relation to non-Roma or non-Gabor Roma. Such framing allows Berta to challenge the predominantly negative and homogenizing image of the Roma in Romania and Western Europe. Following the introduction, the book is divided into three parts and a conclusion. Part one comprises six chapters that illustrate the complex ways in which Gabors negotiate and materialize their belonging and difference. Chapter 1 introduces the Gabor Roma “politics of difference” and “ethics of sociability” (i.e., behavior, respectability, solidarity, and social appreciation), seen as intertwined phenomena requiring competitors seeking honor and fame to balance the two. It is this balance, and not egalitarianism, that Gabors regard “as the ideal model of social and economic relations” (52). Also, Roma politics—independent from Romanian politics—is an ethnicized form of politics conducive to hierarchies of prestige and difference organized by ethnicized goods and ideologies of values specific to Gabors’ ethnic identity and history. Thus, purchases of prestige objects and the creation of marital alliances generate reputation that does not translate into social appreciation among non-Roma. [End Page 568] In Chapter 2, Berta demonstrates the translocal, ethnicized, informal, and gendered characteristics of the Gabors’ prestige economy as a consumer subculture. The...