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

Abstract

Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma is an important contribution to Romani studies and research in anthropology, ethnography, and folklore, especially material culture. Based on long-term fieldwork, Péter Berta conducted multi-sited ethnographic research in Romanian Transylvania, primarily among the Gabor Roma. He tells a fascinating tale of traditional Roma and their intricate relationships with antique prestige items—silver beakers and roofed tankards (the most valuable of which are sold, among Romani brokers, for over a million US dollars, yet worth, among European antique marketeers, only fractions of these amounts). Berta views the multi-layered workings of Romani life through the lens of material culture as he examines how beakers and tankards inform Romani ethnic, social, cultural, political, and economic identity. He challenges the dominant narrative on Roma in Western academic discourse and media that focuses on marginalization, deprivation, and powerlessness. “Being Gabor,” Berta argues, is not centered on resisting “the negatively defined majority society” (p. 14), but rather constructed within a Romani arena empowered by an ethnicized, translocal, informal, and male-gendered prestige economy. In Berta's story, many Roma have money (some of them untold amounts), and thus rank and power. Through elegant ethnographic accounts and readings of how beakers and tankards generate wealth and status, Berta deconstructs and reconceptualizes Gabor Romani identity.The book contains an introduction, 13 chapters, and a conclusion. “Translocal Communities of Practice and Multi-Sited Ethnographies,” the introduction, begins with “How do objects mediate human relationships?” (p. 3)—a question that drives the entire volume and is convincingly (and painstakingly) answered in the hundreds of pages that follow. Part 1, “Negotiating and Materializing Difference and Belonging,” provides a discussion of the social and political underpinnings of Gabor society. It explores how the prestige economy, rooted in beakers and tankards, embraces a complex Romani-centered consumer subculture. Overall, these vessels have the symbolic power to determine individual and family standing, affecting social hierarchies and belonging within the community. Part 2, “Contesting Consumer Subcultures: Interethnic Trade, Fake Authenticity, and Classification Struggles,” introduces the Cărhar Roma, who likewise inhabit Transylvania and trade prestige items with the Gabors, bringing into relief rivalries and fraudulent transactions as intra-ethnic Romani tensions are played out. Berta also explores how the status of previous owners of antique vessels informs their value when sold. These objects are vested with phenomenal subjective power based, as he maintains, on appreciations of their symbolic and material worth. “Multi-Sited Commodity Ethnographies,” Part 3, furnishes “biographies” of a beaker and a tankard, vivid examples of the anthropology of things-in-motion. Berta's Conclusion, “The Post-Socialist Consumer Revolution and the Shifting Meanings of Prestige Goods,” is an intriguing account of the post-socialist decline of the prestige economy. He contrasts the older generation of Gabor Roma—with their deeply embedded, almost religious, regard for prestige vessels (that formerly functioned as “invisible” possessions of extraordinary value within the highly monitored socialist economy)—with Roma who came of age after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Younger Roma now question the validity of sacrificing enormous sums of money for antique objects for which there is little practical use, instead of investing in contemporary cachet (especially houses and cars) that far more tangibly benefits their families. This has generated “a new, post-socialist symbolic repertoire of wealth accumulation and representation” (pp. 306–7) and calls into question long-held Gabor assumptions and the very meaning of the traditional beaker-and-tankard-centered prestige economy.As a monograph that documents the role of material culture in a traditional Romani community, Materializing Difference is clearly relevant to the field of folklore. Moreover, beakers and tankards as “institutions” among the Gabors animate other genres of interest to students of both Romani culture and folklore: the norms and customs embedded in life-cycle events and the repertoire of songs that symbolically express the power of prestige goods. Betrothals and marriages are highly ritualistic events among many Transylvanian Roma. They entail early-age nuptials, marriage alliances and payments, and tests of bridal virginity, among other things. Prestige items are closely linked to the folklore of weddings and especially the elaborate marital agreements that are negotiated among the Gabors. Funerals are also important community events, and a man's postmortem standing is directly related to his stash of antique vessels, which his sons inherit. Thus, prestige objects also form part of the discourse of death rites. Particularly telling are the traditional songs that are performed at these life-cycle commemorations. Metaphorical formulaic language, or what Berta calls “linguistic indirectness” (p. 17), forms the core of the songs, where not only horses and carts represent precious beakers and tankards, but an entire lexicon of well-known tropes depicts individuals and families and their status as informed by the prestige goods in their possession.Despite the breadth and depth of Berta's ethnographic and theoretical findings, they really concern only the role of prestige items in the post-socialist and—by virtue of the older Roma in the community—socialist years. A historical perspective that pre-dates the Communist regime (1944–1989) is not offered. Were prestige vessels part of the networks of Gabor (and Cǎrhar) identity and a representation of the pre-Communist past? A fuller treatment of the historical context would provide a useful frame and surely enhance Berta's more contemporary readings. Moreover, while the volume is admittedly about both Gabor prestige goods and, accordingly, Gabor men and their world, the lack of any real female perspective is conspicuous. The profoundly patriarchal world of the Gabors paired with Berta's own role as a male ethnographer may have precluded, at least in part, any significant coverage on the position of women in this “system.” But the question still remains: Do women have any role at all in the prestige economy, or are they truly entirely tacit? Finally, a comment: Berta weaves in the research of many different scholars yet inexplicably ignores two relevant works: Cătălina Tesăr's dissertation (“‘Women Married Off to Chalices’: Gender, Kinship, and Wealth among Romanian Cortorari Gypsies,” University College London, 2013) on the role of comparable vessels as prestige items in marriage alliances of analogous Transylvanian Roma, and Martin Olivera's substantial monograph, La tradition de l'intégration: Une ethnologie des Roms Gabori dans les années 2000 (Pétra 2012).Materializing Difference will (and already does) appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. It is innovative, accessible, meticulously organized, and brimming with theoretical rigor, nuanced interpretation, and constant references to rich ethnographic fieldwork. Berta does a superb job of demonstrating how objects not only mediate human relationships but also possess potent and influential social and political agency. His opus is a compelling, informative, and moving account and a significant contribution to the study of Romani society and material culture.