Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma is an important contribution to Romani studies and research in anthropology, ethnography, and folklore, especially material culture. Based on long-term fieldwork, Péter Berta conducted multi-sited ethnographic research in Romanian Transylvania, primarily among the Gabor Roma. He tells a fascinating tale of traditional Roma and their intricate relationships with antique prestige items—silver beakers and roofed tankards (the most valuable of which are sold, among Romani brokers, for over a million US dollars, yet worth, among European antique marketeers, only fractions of these amounts). Berta views the multi-layered workings of Romani life through the lens of material culture as he examines how beakers and tankards inform Romani ethnic, social, cultural, political, and economic identity. He challenges the dominant narrative on Roma in Western academic discourse and media that focuses on marginalization, deprivation, and powerlessness. “Being Gabor,” Berta argues, is not centered on...
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Book Review|
July 01 2022
Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma
Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma
. By Péter Berta. (Toronto
: University of Toronto Press
, 2019
. Pp. xviii + 372, list of illustrations, foreword, acknowledgments, notes, references, index.)Journal of American Folklore (2022) 135 (537): 346–348.
Citation
Margaret H. Beissinger; Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma. Journal of American Folklore 1 July 2022; 135 (537): 346–348. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/15351882.135.537.07
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