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

“Péter Berta’s Materializing Difference is a fascinating and theoretically rich ethnography of the life of antique silver beakers and tankards among a group of Roma in Romania. By tracing the meanings, provenance, and value of these objects among families in this ethnic group as well as across boundaries with various other groups, he shows the distinct meaning systems that define Gabor Roma identity and family face. By showing the interplay between the lives of objects and people, Berta also reveals the extent to which the two are entangled with one another.” Russell W. Belk, Schulich School of Business, York University

“Materializing Difference is a fascinating examination of the bundle of relations emergent between and within prestige objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards), second-hand goods and the lives of the Gabor Roma of Transylvania. Outlining the practices and ideologies that shape these relations, Berta provides readers with an insightful ethnographically grounded exploration of consumption, social relations and the politics of difference.” Joshua A. Bell, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

“In our age of over-consumption, there are few questions as pressing as the meaning of all the stuff that fills our lives. Péter Berta’s penetrating analysis will ensure that you rethink how things come to have value — and why that matters. In short, this book is a prestige object you’ll want to possess!” Chip Colwell, Department of Anthropology, Denver Museum of Nature & Science

“Materializing Difference is a very strong ethnographic study that marshals an impressive amount of deep fieldwork. The explanation of the unusual prestige economies of Romanian Roma and the interethnic trade in silver beakers and tankards is particularly fascinating.” Shannon Lee Dawdy, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

“Péter Berta’s ethnography is thick and his theoretical insights are penetrating, clear, and concise. This work is not only a major contribution to Romani Studies, but it also adds significantly to the study of commodities transaction in particular and the symbolic role of material culture in general. The volume will certainly become a landmark in European anthropology for quite some time to come.” Frank J. Korom, Department of Religion, Boston University

“Superbly researched, Péter Berta’s account of the symbolic power of prestige objects among Gabor Roma offers insights into the workings of post-socialist informal economies – a world apart from the Western antique silver markets and yet, surprisingly measurable.” Alena Ledeneva, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

“Materializing Difference is an ethnographic fulfillment of arguments made by Susan Stewart in her classic On Longing. More, it updates those arguments relevant to the ways that identities are sustained today by the affective commitment to crafted objects. Where ethnography goes, and what it can argue, depends more than ever on a noticing and a sustained attentiveness to more than nostalgic attachments to crafted things that track in unsuspected ways what sustains lives in motion, on margins.” George E. Marcus, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

“Materializing Difference is a major contribution to research on consumption, post-socialism, and communities of practice. It is also a significant advance in state-of-the-art research on Roma.” Jeremy Morris, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

“[Materializing Difference] is a detailed and determined account of the social life of antique silver objects among Romanian Roma. As part of the new generation of material culture scholars, Berta follows the pathways and significance of second-hand silver beakers and tankards as prestige objects that intersect the political rivalries, prestige, and personal relations of Gabor Roma. It is a fascinating story, where an ethnic population fashions its own prestige system out of materials that have considerably less value on the European antiques market, but imbue these materials with their own histories and significance in a system of partially restricted circulation. (…) Berta eschews a simple big picture and attends to the complexity of the political lives and agency of prestige objects and their ownership histories. Berta’s knowledge of the diverging literatures of material culture and consumption studies combines with an extraordinary explication of Roma consumer taste and thinking about these objects, the collectors and markets through which they circulate, and the fluidity of these relationships. For those who want to see how to put theory to the test of research, Berta provides an exemplary case.” (An excerpt from the Foreword.) Fred R. Myers, Department of Anthropology, New York University

“Materializing Difference offers a refreshingly delightful, exciting, and informative reading experience for academics across the social sciences and humanities. Anyone who feasts on the calibre of expert storytelling that accompanies the valuation of those objects (’things’) introduced on the Antiques Roadshow will devour this fascinating book. Péter Berta’s quest is to plumb the complexities of the acquisitions and trade of prestige objects in order to tell his story of their mysteries: why they exist and how their existence has contributed to the social and cultural life of those Roma groups intimately engaged in their changing valuations, ownerships, and transfers.” David J. Nemeth, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toledo

“I am pleased to recommend Péter Berta’s Materializing Difference to both scholars of Roma and of material culture. After following his work for several years, I am glad to read this rich and mature analysis of prestige objects among the Gabor Roma of Transylvania, based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork. Berta elegantly analyzes the symbolic and ethnic value of these objects in a mobile network that illuminates current post-socialist issues of consumption, patina, and exchange.” Carol Silverman, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon

"Ornate objects and their baroque biographies come to life in this wonderfully crafted reading of life among people routinely thought to be itinerant and therefore less bound than others by the trappings of material anchors. Not so, we learn, from the pen of a brilliantly practiced ethnographer. Romani worlds are richer for this study."

Bruce Grant, Department of Anthropology, New York University

"In this wonderful book, Péter Berta extends an anthropological tradition, with its roots in Malinowski, that reads circulating objects as generating both politics and status, exemplified by a keen look at the poignant situation of the Roma and a brilliant object-centered ethnography of the painful journey of post-socialist societies such as Romania." Arjun Appadurai, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

"Nuanced, critical and sophisticated in its analysis, Materializing Difference is an exceptional ethnography. Through its fine-grained examination of the entangled trajectories of people and things, it shows how prestige goods are agentive in the social, political and economic lives of the Gabor Roma, and may be said to bring their identity as a distinct community into being." Paul Basu, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS, University of London