The study deals with the prestige economy of a Transylvanian Roma ethnic subgroup known as the Gabors. It highlights how these Roma construct prestige items and symbols of ethnic identity by de‐ and re‐contextualisation, that is, by commodity fetishism and symbolic re‐creation of silver beakers and tankards purchased from non‐Roma antique dealers, auction houses, museums etc. Focusing on a transitional period of the ‘social history’ of these objects, it analyses how the Gabors attach to them a new cultural identity (elite register of consumption of material goods) and new social identities (symbols of ethnic and patrilineal identity). These processes of ‘symbolic alchemy’ of objects play a significant role in the construction and materialisation of ethnic identity among the Gabors.
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Péter Berta (2009) studied this question.
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