Materializing Difference

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

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
"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. Peter 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 Peter 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
"Peter 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