Overview
- Based on original ethnographic and qualitative data collection.
- Helps students understand abstract concepts such as value, reciprocity, social time.
- Explores how people experienced consumption and daily life under socialism.
Part of the book series: Consumption and Public Life (CUCO)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book examines postsocialist transformations reflected in urban middle-class domestic spaces and in museums dedicated to socialism in Romania. It focuses on the significance and circulation of porcelain and crystal sets and ornaments during late socialism and after 1989, following the experiences of consumers, workers in the glassware and porcelain industry, and artists. By tracing the values and temporalities embedded in materiality, the book sheds light on how objects shape daily life in a time of cultural, economic, and social change. Drawing on ethnographic research, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the ambiguous relation between the middle-class and the socialist state, using materiality and consumption to shed light on contradictions between aspirations and resources and between official discourses and everyday practices. The book reveals changes in practices of display, gift exchange, and barter, in the perception and use of time, as well as in gender and inter-generational relations.
This work will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and cultural historians, especially researchers interested in consumption, material culture, postsocialism, the anthropology of value and gift, the study of social time, practices of the middle-class, and the history of consumption in Eastern Europe.
Reviews
“With this study Maria Cristache successfully explains and sheds light on the peculiar means of material culture such as important changes and transformations that occurred in Romanian society during a complex historical period. With an elegant writing style and clear logic of argumentation, Christache provides valuable insights into complicated matters.” (Piera Mazzaglia, KULT_online - Review Journal for the Study of Culture, Issue 67, May, 2023)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Maria Cristache completed her PhD in sociology at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany, and was a member of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Domesticity on Display
Book Subtitle: Romanian Middle-Class Material Culture from Late Socialism to Today
Authors: Maria Cristache
Series Title: Consumption and Public Life
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78783-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-78782-0Published: 24 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-78785-1Published: 25 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-78783-7Published: 23 October 2021
Series ISSN: 2947-8227
Series E-ISSN: 2947-8235
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 211
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociology of Culture, Consumer Behavior, Cultural Studies, Social Anthropology