How do objects mediate human relationships, and ethnic relations in particular? This is the question that Péter Berta sets out to explore in this empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated book. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered from a Roma community in Transylvania, Berta explores the value regimes in which two particular objects – silver beakers and roofed tankards – are embedded. These objects are intensely local and intimate, yet their circulation and value cuts across local, regional, and national scale. They are highly valued, commending as much as $400,000 when circulated between different lineages (Berta offers price tags for several dozen transactions). Their circulation and high-status regime largely are invisible to the non-Roma, functioning as an informal ‘market without a marketplace’ (p. 60), yet condensing ethnic, economic, political, gender, and kinship dynamics.
Trilingual and predominantly intermediary traders (p. 6), Gabor Roma are just one subgroup of Roma community in Romania. Gabor Roma are located in Central Transylvania. Men are relatively easy to recognise because of particular black elegant clothing, moustaches, and hats that they wear since they are young. Compared to other Roma populations, who are overrepresented among the lower classes, Gabor Roma have experienced upward social mobility, a fact which allows them to see themselves as ‘aristocracy of the Transylvanian Roma’ (p. 7). Occasionally, Cărhars Roma, another subgroup comes into the picture in some chapters as they are relevant actors in the acquisition of beakers and tankards. One valuable methodological assumption in this book is that Berta does not approach Roma as static, as many lay accounts about them do. Instead of an approach that putatively binds Roma to ‘custom’ and ‘traditions.’ Berta approaches this population and its quest for those valuable objects as entangled in ‘events’ and based on ‘communities of practice’ (p. 11), rather than based on some deep essence.
Berta builds on the anthropological literature on circulation and consumption. ‘Following the thing’ brought Berta to several Gabor Roma communities, some Cărhar Roma, but also to various locations of European antiques markets where beakers and roofed tankards are sold. Berta relies on firsthand accounts gathered through detailed observation, but occasionally, especially in chapter six, he also analyses songs that produce and display the value of these objects. Berta describes the dynamic nature of the value and web of relationships formed around silver beakers and roofed tankards. These objects are entangled in geographic, ethnic, lineage, and gender dynamics. After their purchase on art markets, for instance, these objects are ethnicised by erasing their previous processes of circulation as commodities.
Chapter 1 touches upon Roma politics as articulated around patrilineage prestige and social hierarchies dominated by men. Men own these prestige objects, and the chapter covers the structural positions of political ranks which are generally kinship based, with elderly members enjoying more say in the inter-lineage alliances.
The power of such ‘village leaders’ and lineage leaders was something of an ‘indirect rule’ by the socialist state until the regime change 1990s, as these characters were brokers of state power and state-delivered resources. Roma politics plays out in wealth accumulation. Cars, electronics, large houses, participation in new consumption forms in supermarkets and malls are important, but beakers and tankards are the most prized goods.
Chapter 2 engages the authenticity criteria that surround beakers and tankards. They need to possess what Berta describes as ‘material patina’ – must be made of (old) silver, must be old, have a particular shape, be engraved with certain monarchs and animals – but also have a history of more than two to three Roma owners. Berta offers financial data on the purchase value of such objects, they usually go for a few hundred times the gross average monthly salary in Romania, with one transaction in 2009 going for 1887 times that (pp. 64–65).
Chapter 3 covers the beakers and tankards as ethnic objects through their exit from the ‘antiques’ value regime to an ethnic regime. Berta describes the transformations these objects undergo between value regimes using Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic alchemy’: they undergo some material make-over, are embedded in liminality phases, acquire Roma names, they are said to ‘grow old’ as the time of possession inside community grows as well.
Berta further discusses issues of value making through ‘material patina’ in Chapter 4. Material patina is achieved through altering the stories of ownership history as well as enchanting the figurative engravings of animals and monarchs depicted on beakers and tankards (pp. 110–112). Chapter 5 discusses the nature and actions of brokers, another participant in the life of the circulation of beakers, tankards, and people among the Gabor Roma and their families. They help reduce risk and anxiety associated with these major transactions but also function as creditors, touts, estimators, and experts on issues of authenticity of objects.
The first section of the book closes with Chapter 6, where Berta presents the verbal performance about these objects in different political moments in Roma politics, weddings, betrothals, wakes, funerals, and church gatherings. Beakers and tankards participate in verbal performances which craft recognition, face-work, and lineage politics.
Section two of the book, consisting of four chapter shifts the focus from politics, value creation, and circulation to different scales and topics. Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 discuss other actors who participate in the circulation of these objects. Berta presents the participation of Gabor Roma in antique markets in Hungary, Romania, Germany, and Austria. Antique market actors have slightly different valuation regimes, as Berta explains:
antiques-market participants (antiques dealers, art collectors, and museum curators) do not attribute special significance to the footed beaker shape, are unfamiliar with the category of ‘unexplainable animals’ as a type of decoration, do not share Gabor Roma value preferences with regard to size measured in capacity, and take a different attitude towards minor damages, such as cracks at the lip or a thinning of the material just above the girdle (p. 178).
Issues of authenticity, fraud, strategic classification, and manipulation of ‘symbolic patina’ (i.e. ethnic ownership history of beakers and tankards) are key components of this trade. Cărhars Roma are particularly relevant to these markets and Berta directs the ethnographic gaze to them as well. The third section of the book has three chapters meant as a methodological take-away. Chapter 11 engages with major texts multi-sited ethnographies of commodities, Chapter 12 is an extended case study of the circulation of a beaker, while Chapter 13 follows, also in the extended case study, the circulation of a tankard.
Methodologically, I felt that at times that Berta over-relied on interviews, instead of anchoring the characters that populate the book in specific places and transactions through richer ethnographic moments. The analytic and storytelling strategy of the last two chapters could have been used more extensively in the other chapters as well.
All things considered, Materializing Difference is an in depth, conceptually rich study that speaks to many audiences in social sciences. The book has much to offer to studies of ethnicity, circulation and exchange, consumption, and sociology of arts.