Abstract
Berta, in this meticulous and sensitive ethnography of a relatively privileged group of Gabor Roma who trade in silver beakers and tankards in Transylvania, explores a number of topics: how material possessions come to mediate community relations and how commodities communicate prestige. In addition, he traces through the beakers the myriad identities of their owners and the ‘lives’ of the beakers themselves. The silver drinking vessels themselves are unremarkable – outside the Roma world they would have a much lower monetary exchange value. However, so important have they become to Roma in negotiating relative status that these objects now have so much meaning invested in them that they will never be sold to non-Roma. An entire second-hand ‘patina’ consumer subculture is thus built around them, and their pedigree and provenance take on community-level significance. Fascinatingly, these sometimes aesthetically unprepossessing pieces can fetch hundreds of thousands of Euros because of their community provenance alone. Thus in a memorable case, Berta describes a tankard’s inspection by a broker, who enquires about the current owner-smuggler’s recent prison term and related financial debts. The seller ends up paying a broker fee of 20,000 German Marks (then worth US$9000) to the Gabor intermediary who sets out to find a buyer with sufficient ‘political ambitions’ within the community to buy the tankard. The broker also serves to increase the trust of potential buyers, but also the prestige associated with the transaction. Berta describes the trade longitudinally – tracing how post-communist transformations after 1989 affected the Gabor Roma’s relationship to consumption, circulation, and the objects themselves.
The book contains three sections and 13 chapters. The first part on ‘negotiating and materializing difference and belonging’ covers the Gabor’s prestige economy in the tankards, their reproduction as prestige objects where they are de- and re-contextualized from the European antiques market. The production of patina, the politics of brokerage and the political face-work involved are covered. In acquiring a beaker from outside the Roma community, the object’s past is erased and enormous significance is then invested in the material properties of the beaker itself – its ‘patina’. Part two focuses on how Roma created a consumer subculture somewhat at odds with the circulation of tankards in the European antiques market. Part three reflects more widely on the author’s project – on the multisitedness of the ethnographic material and its partly biographical method relating to the ‘life’ of a beaker, one example of which Berta follows from 2000 to 2007, but which itself had been circulating since the 1930s. In addition, this section expands on the meaning of the beakers to discuss how they relate to marriage politics, and business ethics within Roma communities. Interestingly, the longer the career of a beaker, the easier it is for different interlocutors to ‘agree’ in their debate on the relative value of the object: the increasing number of exchanges elevates its ‘ranking’ in the community.
The conclusion returns to a discussion of the case within the context of post-socialist consumption and the changes in meanings connected to particular goods and exchange practices. By putting the trade in the context of the changing wider political economy in Romania as it transforms from socialism to post-socialism, Berta is careful to avoid the traps of orientalizing practices and identities. Why do the Gabor put so much effort into the system of exchange and prestige generation connected to the objects studied? One answer is that the tankards facilitate transformation of economic capital accrued by elite Roma during the economic transition of post-communism into social capital – and thus marriage alliances and the tankards naturally become linked. This is in contrast to a key motor of the trade in the past which was as a form of resistance against the state economy under socialism. However, now the most important aspect is related to the tankards as a means for individuals and community groups to develop a multifaceted identity – and this includes an attempt among the mainly older owners to maintain a prestige economy associated with the socialist period against the face of economic, social and cultural disruption. The objects bear the weight of politics within the community as trophies and representations of various difference. Further, beakers and tankards are increasingly ethnicized goods (including in facilitating differentiation of Gabor from other Roma groups – notably the Cărhar). Finally the silver objects are the most expensive category of consumer goods possessed in these communities and thus are interpreted as symbols of economic success and prosperity.
Berta provides an engaging description of this peculiar and unique system of trade and exchange. The subculture is oriented around the shared understanding of ‘patina’ and the trade itself is, according to Berta, an ‘invisible ink’ marking shared ethnic identity. His theoretical approach relies largely on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of methodological fetishism – that the meaning of objects is not just connected to their circulation but requires returning attention to the things themselves in order to avoid excessive sociologization of transactions. This requires what Severin Fowles calls an ‘object ethnography’ and how the object makes the people, rather than how people make the thing. This in turn leads to the natural adoption of a ‘biographical method’ – tracing the ‘life’ of the object as it travels and develops its own socially constructed biography and, in the case of the tankards, a ‘career’ where the object acts at weddings, in prestige exchanges, as representing morality and social prosperity, and so on. The book is on the long side, and occasionally the amount of detail and strings of academic citation are excessive. Nonetheless, the work is very well researched and represents something of a landmark in material culture studies and its intersection with communities of practice and ethnic identity. Discussion is grounded in relevant consumer and consumption studies literature, along with forays into the anthropological works on post-socialism – in particular the prominent role of the informal, or underground economies – of which prestige exchange is a part and which therefore provides a link between socialist and post-socialist periods.