Staging Citizenship. Ioana Szeman

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       Figure 1.2. Kelderar Rom on the left and Rudara selling wooden household objects (right); in the background the stand of the Kelderara, and a television reporter. Roma Fair, Romanian Peasant Museum, October 2002 (photo by Ioana Szeman).

      On the right-hand side, placed more marginally and with fewer visitors, several women dressed in subdued colours and dark scarves were selling garments that looked nothing like the Kelderara outfits and seemed identical to the peasant garb exhibited within the museum: white shirts, long white gowns with coloured embroidery, dark scarves and so on. The asking prices for these items did not exceed €20 each. Across from these women, woodcarvers wearing dark trousers and coats and black hats were selling wooden spoons, bowls and pots (see Figure 1.2). Unlike the Kelderara, these participants did not conform to popular depictions of Roma. I identified them from the official brochure as possibly Rudara.

      The live demonstrations at the fair were part of the Programme of Revaluing Traditional Roma Crafts, which brought ‘traditional’ crafts and craftspeople to the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. The fair brochure identified the live demonstrations as a first stage in a larger programme designed to adapt traditional Roma crafts to the demands of the market economy and ‘improve tools, working techniques and product development’ (Roma Fair Guide 2002, 1) – a possible survival strategy, and an avenue for the development of the larger Roma community: ‘Furthermore, the utilitarian character of these crafts could undergo a shift, in the sense of acquiring an artistic character endowed with an ethnic marker, and thus become a form of reassessment of Roma cultural heritage and an affirmation of Roma identity’ (Roma Fair Guide, 2002, 2). The brochure listed the following occupations, with illustrations: blacksmiths, coppersmiths (Kelderara), silver- and goldsmiths, welders, woodcarvers (Rudara), brick makers, tanners, comb makers, brush makers, bear handlers, horse traders (Lovara), fiddlers and magicians. The fair itself featured coppersmiths, silversmiths, woodcarvers, magicians and fiddlers.

      I asked one of the woodcarvers about his occupation and showed him the brochure. He told me that he was not really a Rom, but welcomed the opportunity to sell his work at the fair. I asked one of the women selling the peasant-style costumes about the shirts, skirts and gowns on display in front of her. She said that she was a Rudari, not a Romni or Ţiganca, and that she had inherited the clothes, but she was not sad about putting them up for sale as long as she made good money from them. She said that if she told people she was a Rudari, few would understand who she was; and rather than risk being taken for a Ţigancă, she preferred to be mistaken for a Romanian peasant.

      Economic differences among the participants were reflected not only in their attitudes towards Roma identification, but also in their self-confidence and market knowledge. The common denominator ‘Roma’ covered multiple groups that engaged in the so-called traditional occupations listed in the brochure. The presentation of the live demonstrations as part of a fair with merchandise for sale favoured some occupations and Roma groups over others. The simple garments of the Rudara failed to live up to expectations of authenticity and attracted less visitor attention. Kelderara showed the most distinctive features that ‘branded best’ in relation to the commodification of ethnicity in neoliberal capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Indeed, Kelderara metonymically replace the common denominator ‘Roma’ in popular perceptions: their costumes and artefacts are the most recognizable and most cited in other instances of identity commodification, from Gypsy soaps to music and ethnic chic. At the fair the Kelderara clothing underwent the shift mentioned in the brochure, from utilitarian objects to artworks, and sold successfully – not simply as ethnic ‘Roma’ markers, but as ethnicity itself.

      The Kelderara artefacts and products that enjoyed the most success at the fair became ethnocapital, a means of both self-construction and sustenance (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Whereas visitors inside the museum had to wait to reach the museum shop to purchase merchandise, at the fair they could buy directly from the stalls. This process, which combined recognition as a minority with consumption in the marketplace, reflected identity formation processes during post-socialism. Heritage represents culture named and projected into the past, and simultaneously the past congealed into culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 149). This understanding of culture equally pervaded social programmes that sought to revive the utilitarian character of traditional occupations along with training for other types of income-generating activities, as I show in Chapter 3.

      The Roma themselves are absent from official histories in Romania, and for them the past is veiled by their construction as living in a continuous present, without care or concern for the past. Recognizable, lucrative stereotypes facilitate the continued forgetting of Roma history. As the Comaroffs show, ‘identity, from this vantage, resides in recognition from significant others, but the type of recognition, specifically, expressed in consumer desire’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 10). The incorporation of Roma culture as ethnocapital through its most recognizable and distinctive aspects has not only responded to market demand, but has also become compatible with ethnic nationalism in Romania through commodification.

      Offered temporary shelter inside and outside the museum, which told the story of the ethnic nation and its folklore, the fair exceeded national paradigms. Both indoor and outdoor events at the fair were temporarily hosted by the ‘archive’, represented by the museum itself – from which the Roma had been excluded, even while elements of Roma culture had been appropriated. The place of the museum was anchored in hegemonic narratives supported by the state, whereas the fair was a temporary space.² For those who cared to listen and pay attention to the contradictions in the ostensibly seamless narrative of the museum, the fair wrote minor history by combining the archive and the repertoire, using archival evidence of Roma history while foregrounding the living cultures of diverse Roma.

      The Rudara objects and costumes were less successful in the marketplace than the Kelderara because the Rudara artefacts looked similar to the Romanian peasant outfits displayed inside the museum. While the museum’s hosting of the fair emphasized the distinction between what was inside (the Romanian peasants and their traditions) and what was outside (the Roma and their occupations and costumes), the Rudara disrupted this clear separation dictated by normative monoethnic performativity, and made apparent the arbitrariness of official definitions of the Romanian folk versus Roma culture. The display of almost identical items inside the museum and outside at the fair, under different denominations and prices, was thus a strong statement about the similarities between some Roma (such as Rudara) and Romanian peasants, and about the processes of cohabitation and mutual influence over centuries. Rather than inserting a rupture between Romanian peasants and Roma craftspeople in the guise of Self and Other, the Rudara and their costumes suggested a continuum along which different ethnic identities could be placed and contextually self-identified, СКАЧАТЬ