China Sets and Crystal Cups: An Empirical Study of the Chaniging Meaning of Domestic Objects in Post Socialist Romania

Through this research, I aim at following post-socialist social and cultural transformations in Romania by looking at changes in the production and consumption of domestic objects. Namely, I am looking at how objects have been and are produced, distributed, circulated, purchased, preserved, used and discarded in order to follow the changes in social and cultural relations in Romania. The domestic objects that are at the core of my research are mainly porcelain and crystal table sets and ornaments still found in people’s homes that were produced and acquired during socialist times in Romania.  More specifically, the main research questions that I plan to answer are: What gives value to these objects? How has their value changed over the past decades? What does the mechanism of value attribution and the changes into this assessment process say about larger scale values of Romanian families?

In order to fulfil my objectives I am conducting fieldwork in Romania where I explore the perspectives of several relevant actors in the field. A first group is that of the consumers and for this I am continuing the research I did for my MA thesis and interviewing and observing families formed in the last decades of socialism. This part of fieldwork is taking place in Targoviste, a small town close to Bucharest, the capital city. The observation and interviews are conducted in the homes of my informants. I am also looking at the difference between generations by interviewing members of a second generation, who established their households after the fall of the regime. The second group I am focusing on is that of the producers from the glassware and porcelain factories that were successful during communism and vendors from the former and current glassware and porcelain stores. For this I already conducted fieldwork in the autumn of 2013 in two towns from Romania: Medias, where there is the glassware factory Vitrometan and Alba Iulia, at the porcelain factory Apulum.

The conceptual framework through which I am looking at these empirical observations consists of theories of material culture and consumption, with a focus on the domestic sphere and the sociology of taste and of sociological theories of time. With the aid of these theoretical tools I aim to bring a contribution on the research done on consumer culture in socialism, mainly by discussing the role of objects in the process of differentiation between groups and the use of objects in processes of imitation, such as working class imitation of bourgeois aesthetics. I also intend to analyze how the changing significance and use of these objects points to changes in perceptions of time from socialism until today.