Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma offers an account of the social and politicized life of antique silver objects among Gabor Roma, an ethnic population living mostly in the Transylvania region of Romania. It positions theoretical approaches to material culture in direct conversation with ethnicity and politics in order to examine objects and practices appropriated for, and circulated within, specific ethnic and ethnicized contexts and for the purpose of wider, translocal cultural exchange. It eloquently contextualizes practices that have typically indicated difference into grounded histories and traditions—a feat that impresses by its attention to detail, keen insight, and contribution to interethnic understanding, rarely achieved in today’s global climate.
The book is part of the University of Toronto Press’s Anthropological Horizons series, edited by Michael Lambek. The author, Péter Berta, is an honorary research associate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College...
University of California Press