TY  - CHAP
AB  - Purpose This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.Design/methodology/approach The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.Findings As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.Originality/value This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.
VL  - 34
SN  - 978-1-78441-055-1, 978-1-78441-056-8/0190-1281
DO  - 10.1108/S0190-128120140000034000
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120140000034000
AU  - Berta Péter
PY  - 2014
Y1  - 2014/01/01
TI  - Proprietary Contest, Business Ethics, and Conflict Management: A Multi-Sited Commodity Ethnography
T2  - Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities
T3  - Research in Economic Anthropology
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 31
EP  - 64
Y2  - 2024/04/19
ER  -