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.
"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 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
"[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
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