Magdalena Crăciun. Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe. Materializing Culture Series. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. vi + 170 pp. $130.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85785-450-6; $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-85785-451-3.
Reviewed by Narcis Tulbure (Bucharest University of Economic Studies)
Published on H-Romania (September, 2015)
Commissioned by R. Chris Davis (Lone Star College - Kingwood)
An Anthropology of the “Good Enough”: Materiality and Authenticity in the Periphery of Europe
For anyone having lived in Romania during the post-socialist period, Magdalena Crăciun’s Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe makes for entertaining and meaningful reading. Engaging in evermore diverse forms of consumption, dealing with increasing numbers of commodities, and constantly having to discern among elusive qualities, brands, and fashions, a person in post-socialist Romania constantly had to learn to navigate an expanding universe of objects as a mundane way of affirming individual and group identity, irrespective of age, class, gender, or other demographic traits. Crăciun gives those who are culturally intimate with the region a way to make sense of such experiences. To those interested in Romanian studies, this ethnography offers the chance to become familiar with one of the most conspicuous arenas of everyday practices, as well as to understand the contribution Eastern European anthropology can make to studies in material culture.
This book proposes an ethnographic analysis of the ways brands, imitations, and “legally fake” garments mediate a sense of authenticity among producers, distributors, and consumers of such objects. Crăciun’s central claim is that, contrary to romantic and modernist discourses on authenticity, the consumption of acknowledgedly inauthentic objects allows the articulation of authentic selves. It is a sort of “authenticity writ small” lived in the periphery of Europe, one that invalidates the thesis that this region is the site of mimesis. Crăciun’s informants maintain a “good enough” relationship to authenticity that, while not the “unobtainable ideal” of romantic philosophers, is nevertheless a way of living truthfully to how the world is, rather than to how it is imagined (p. 147).
The book operates with the concept of the “legally fake,” that is, objects that are either fraudulently produced or are inauthentic copies of branded commodities that infringe on the intellectual property rights of the big players in the fashion industry (p. 1). Although all of Crăciun’s informants engage in the production, sale, or purchase of “legally fake” garments, the local criteria for the classification of objects circulating in the (in)formal economy she studied are more diverse. Thus, objects are not simply fakes; rather, they range from excess production and defective items obtained at the manufacturing sites of global companies, to garments of similar quality produced with the same technology but not authorized by the big companies, to poorer quality products merely imitating authentic clothes. A range of sensory criteria and experience-based forms of knowledge are employed for spontaneous evaluations and classifications of the objects traded at different sites along the distribution chain. Consequently, the material qualities of the garments on display are more important for Crăciun’s discussion partners than the legalistic criteria for the classification of goods, and “the significance of brand is related not to brand, but to the attendant materiality that accompanies the brand” (p. 102).
The book begins and ends symmetrically with two, very well-written ethnographic vignettes that form the introduction and conclusion, which describe the daily routines, such as ways of organizing activities among the bazaar shops, workshops, and various warehouses; the multiple interactions with clients and business partners; and the way of thinking about the commerce in fake-branded garments, as demonstrated by the author’s key informant in Istanbul. While mainly indebted theoretically to Daniel Miller’s approach to material culture, and methodologically to Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of things-in-motion, Crăciun engages with broad literature on brands, fashion, materiality, and authenticity elaborated in anthropology, philosophy, legal studies, and political economy; these sources are very well reviewed in the second chapter, “Fake Brands,” in which she offers a rich conceptual ground for the subsequent ethnographic sections of the book. The third chapter, “The Elusiveness of Inauthenticity, The Materiality of Brands: Fake Branded Garments in Turkey,” offers a genuine ethnography of the production and distribution of legally fake garments at various locations in Turkey. Arguably the best chapter of the book, it presents the strongly evocative portraits of several producers and vendors of imitations in Turkey. While most of them seem to have been drawn into this business by chance, all of them work hard to invest with meaning the economic activities in which they are engaged.
The excellent political economy of the fake branded goods is completed in the fourth chapter, “The Elusiveness of Inauthenticity, The Materiality of Brands: Fake Branded Garments in Romania.” Here, the author realizes an ethnographic analysis of the Europa open-air market and of the Red Dragon Megashop on the outskirts of Bucharest, where the biggest market of fake garments in Romania is located. Romanian consumers of imitations interact with shopkeepers of Chinese, Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Roma, and Romanian origin to create rich taxonomies of products reflective of the bundles of material qualities that each of them possesses. Three evocative portraits are used to illustrate the social significance of brands, the dialectics between authentic and fake, and the practical choices made by Romanian consumers who try to articulate their authentic selves through the consumption of inauthentic commodities. These dialectics of identity become central in the fifth chapter, “Inauthentic Objects, Authentic Selves,” in which Turkish shopkeepers and Romanian customers find meaning and positive moral qualities in the production and consumption of “half fakes” or “good quality imitations,” seen in opposition to falsification, theft, or impersonation. Key to understanding this distinction is a local notion of sincerity, understood as “being true to one’s self as a way of being true to others,” through which much of the anxiety of (self)deception is dispelled (p. 106). Although the site of the book’s central arguments and of some of the most convincing ethnographic examples, this chapter tends to agglomerate various eclectic perspectives and becomes, at times, harder to read than the rest of the book.
Some things could have been further researched and elaborated. Thus, although following the trajectory of counterfeit objects from the Turkish workshops to the Romanian consumers is a notable ethnographic effort, no attention is paid to the reconfiguration of the Romanian textile industry during the post-socialist period and the unauthorized copies of famous brands produced locally. Also, with the exception of Russia, there is no mention of other countries where the output of Turkish workshops floods the market with fakes. Furthermore, comparisons between fake branded garments and other unauthorized products (from pirated CDs and illegally downloaded software to poor replicas of electronic objects and aftermarket auto parts), or between the selling of imitations and second-hand clothes, would have facilitated a better situation of this case study within a more encompassing political economy of authenticity. Finally, the book is premised on the opposition between the formalism of the legal discourse and the ambiguities of material practices. However, law is also made of a diversity of material practices and artifacts. While the anthropologist is right that the material traits of (in)authenticity are often found outside the things themselves (for instance, in the retail facilities, tags and wrapping bags, or advertising materials), attention to the accompanying legal/accounting documents (bills, receipts, trade documents, inventories, proofs of payment, account statements, or unaccounted cash) would broaden the analysis to include other types of artifacts and categories of fakes, all key resources in the trials of authenticity to which production lots are often subjected.
Material Culture and Authenticity is a valuable addition to the field of material culture and a welcome contribution to Romanian studies. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork in Istanbul, Bucharest, and a small provincial town in southern Romania, Crăciun has published one of the few genuinely multi-sited ethnographies of Romania. Highly informative, ethnographically sensitive, and theoretically sophisticated, this book is indispensable reading for the emerging anthropology in and of Romania.
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Citation:
Narcis Tulbure. Review of Crăciun, Magdalena, Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe.
H-Romania, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41917
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