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
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.
"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
"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
"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
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