From Storeroom to Stage: Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore

By Alexandra Urdea

Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning by examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789201048

Alexandra Urdea

Alexandra Urdea is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include material culture, heritage and museum studies, and mobility studies.

Book preview

1

FRAMING THE OBJECT

Theoretical Landmarks

Museum artefacts can open the door to a wealth of connections and possible biographical trajectories. The collection hosted by the Horniman was more than ‘textiles’, ‘pottery’ or ‘costume’ – the categories of materials used by modern museums to classify objects. They were connected to labels, to documentation, to archived exhibition plans, to letters sent across the Iron Curtain that had enabled the objects’ journey to the Horniman Museum. They were also made up of links to previous owners and makers, to the villages where they had been made, and to similar objects that had been made at the same time or not long after.

These relations are an intimate part of the object. Yet, unlike the glazing on a pot or the thread decorating a shirt, they are not always visible and not always known about. For Thomas (2016) a collection is, in fact, a set of relationships, and he argues against ‘the naturalism of the collection’ – the idea that collections are sets of finite physical objects. ‘Though collections are made up of works and things, and might therefore seem susceptible to precise enumeration and definition, in a deeper and truer sense they are also made up, like nations or communities, of relations’ (Thomas 2016, 74). Within the museum, there are relationships between all of the objects held in store, between the objects and their documentation, or their image on the online archive; but equally, each object is also linked to others held in different museums, often in different countries. Thomas uses the analogy of the collection and the nation, to talk about a ‘diaspora’ of objects – for instance the totality of Romanian folk artefacts held by museums around the world (2016, 76). One can never know the composition of the complete collection, at ‘home’ and in the ‘diaspora’, but this wide distribution does not impinge on the object’s identity. Thomas is particularly interested in the relationships that ensue once it has been ‘discovered’ that objects in different places are related, and argues that repatriation of objects is not always what previous owners might expect (Thomas 2016, 70).

Indeed, when travelling to different sites in Romania and discussing the artefacts at the Horniman with various interlocutors, the question of who owned the objects in storage rarely came up. For my interviewees, there was no ‘loss’ associated with the collection being in store in a museum in south London, and it did not make the objects any less Romanian (or more British). Neither was their collection from the site of origin (the villages) considered a loss – after all, as ‘folk objects’, their supply was meant to be continuous. But while not all objects ‘want’ to return to their place of origin, it is also true that where they are kept and displayed entails a particular way of understanding world geographies.

Paramount to deconstructing these imagined geographies is unearthing ‘latent or potential’ relations to other objects. Thomas goes on to argue that, in a similar way to a relationship between two people (such as cousins who did not know of one another’s existence), the unknown relationship between objects and places (or objects and people) ‘might as well not exist, but it does nevertheless’, and once unearthed, it can alter one’s life, or the significance of an object. This perspective on objects resonates with Marilyn Strathern’s argument against seeing the individual as a bounded entity (and society is a bounded group of individuals) – after all, who someone is depends on how they relate to somebody else. She proposes, therefore, that the research enquiry should not start from the study of the individual, but from that of the relationship (Strathern 1989, 55).

This book treats material culture in a similar way. Rather than start with the presumption of the object and the collection as bounded entities, I chose to focus on relationships: what an object is depends on how it is engaged with and emplaced in particular settings. At times, ‘the collection’ may seem incidental to the journey, the story told or the relationship under scrutiny. Yet the objects’ absence from certain parts of the book is not to diminish their importance. On the contrary, it is meant to present the reader with the complex relationships that objects are made of, and with the variety of settings they are linked to. Following Latour, the collection emerges as a hybrid of objects, ideologies and practices, connecting different places across modern history.

The Value of the Object

Objects change character and value in different settings. Nicholas Thomas’s emphasis on ‘the mutability of things in recontextualization’ (1991, 28) and on the importance of museums as places of historical and cultural entanglement has inspired some of the projects taken on by museums in Britain, in which the places where objects first emerged are revisited.

The myriad possibilities of meanings and interpretation conferred on an object depend on a variety of factors, such as the material that the object is made of, the dynamics of social values, the people (or institutions) that come into contact with the object, and the level of authority they hold (Keane 2005). When it comes to museum artefacts, value is at the heart of the debates they generate. We can unpick what makes an object valuable by looking at the connections it has to particular spheres of cultural production – ultimately, to other objects and people.

The concept of ‘regimes of value’ coined by Appadurai (1986), which is thought to ‘account for the constant transcendence of cultural boundaries’ (1986, 15), opened the door for the questioning of the objective and unchanging character of things. Appadurai’s study aims to debunk the myth of a boundary between commodities and gifts, and show that objects flow from one state to the other. Yet his theory does not always help to explain why the distinction exists and why it is maintained in everyday life.

A commodity is defined by alienation, which means that not only does it circulate as it is bought and sold, but that its exchange value effaces the labour put into making the object. A gift is also an object that circulates but, by contrast, it assumes an organic integration into the fabric of social structures (Mauss 1925). A gift does not conceal social relations, but actively forges them. However, these qualities are not intrinsic to the object: it can be a gift one moment and an alienable commodity the next. Moreover, the movement of objects is not solely dependent on their status and value as commodity and gift. Weiner’s notion of ‘inalienability’ brings out the importance of objects that are instead preserved – be that in a woman’s dowry or in the stores of a museum; because of the high value they acquire while kept, they also trigger the need to exchange, and form a web of social relations (Weiner 1992). For instance, a blouse from the region of Argeş, now in the Horniman collection, has passed from being an inalienable object, when it was made and worn in the village, to, perhaps, being a gift (to a daughter, a goddaughter or a sister), to being a commodity when it was bought by the museum specialists in 1955 in Bucharest, to then becoming part of a collection that constituted a gift, and from there to becoming inalienable, stored and looked after by the Horniman staff. Throughout these transactions, keeping and looking after the object is crucial to its value. Even inalienable things can become available for circulation (Myers 2001).

The capacity of the object to perform in a specific way ‘over the course of its travels is not an inherent property of objects, but requires human efforts and interactions to sustain’ (Keane 2001, 75). Value, we could argue, is produced through labour, whether it is put into making objects, or into creating and maintaining relationships. Seen this way, where gifts and commodities differ is in the particular kind of labour that produces their value (Graeber 2001) and in the effort made to sustain their character.

Objects are socially embedded, and are therefore caught up in social hierarchies. Often possessions are used to demonstrate (or conceal) social status. An object’s value, therefore, depends on where we find it. Bourdieu’s notion of ‘spheres of cultural production’ integrates objects in specific settings, helping to show how certain aesthetic categories exclude types of material culture and people from the public domain of art (Bourdieu 1984, 1993). Things and people are intimately connected to particular fields of production. Although these fields of cultural production can overlap, the way in which things are evaluated in each of them is different. Folk items and the folk idiom have the power to reveal the distinctions between different spheres of cultural production. The ‘folk object’ symbolizes a stable value that has been used to reify nationalism, and acts as a landmark in times of change or of crisis. But the spheres of cultural production in which we find the ‘folk’ idiom are, as I will show, in a state of constant reorganization, taking into account the experience of socialism and post-socialism, and the reassessment of material culture in Romania.

Ultimately, the category that an object falls into, and the value ascribed to it, references the particular relationship between people and things. This relationship has been central to the material culture debate: are objects a platform for signs onto which people inscribe meaning? Or do they have their own agency, determining people’s actions? Bakhtin’s literary theory of dialogism offers a way to think about material culture as a threshold, a form that allows for social encounter and formation of identity and alterity in a dialogic process (Bakhtin 2010). Dialogic forms allow for a constant re-signification of things and meanings, with all the inherent tensions and contradictions that this process entails.

Dialogism, through the constant negotiation of the value and usage of objects, is at the core of this book. More than in the case of any other objects, however, folk dress, which I focus on, has also been claimed by the monologic discourse of the state, not once, but throughout the national history of Romania. At the same time these clothes have been subjected to rules of propriety in the villages where they were made. To this we can add the intimate processes of making and wearing the clothes, of transmitting and remembering the past through them. The material traces embedded in dress makes it even more difficult to inscribe one single meaning onto