Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma (Anthropological Horizons) - Softcover

Berta, Péter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487520409 ISBN 13: 9781487520403

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487520409
• ISBN 13: 9781487520403
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390