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THE CULTURE OF SHORTAGE

DURING STATE-SOCIALISM:CONSUMPTION PRACTICES INA ROMANIAN VILLAGE IN THE1980sLiviu Chelcea

Versi on of record first publis hed: 09 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Liviu Chelcea (2002): THE CULTURE OF SHORTAGE DURINGSTATE-SOCIALISM: CONSUMPTION PRACTICES IN A ROMANIAN VILLAGE IN THE1980s, Cultural Studies, 16:1, 16-43

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Abstract

This article argues that the situation of shortage that characterized statesocialist societies for long periods of their existence could inform in

meaningful ways the theory on consumption produced about non-socialistsettings. Unlike the political economy studies of consumption during state-socialism that focus on social relations, this article assumes a more limitedde nition of consumption that focuses on objects and practices. Using datafrom a village in Romania whose inhabitants were engaged, in largenumbers, in shopping across the Hungarian–Romanian border, the tribu-lations of obtaining consumer goods are described. The scarcity of suchgoods led to practices such as hoarding, rationing, intensive recycling andextensive repairs. This ethnographic case suggests that the dimension of transportation – extremely complicated by border surveillance – should be taken into account in broad de nitions of consumption.

Keywords

consumption; shortage; Eastern Europe; socialism; Romania, state

AS I G N I F I C A N T amount of literature exists about the way production,distribution, and consumption have been organized during state socialism.

Some of the themes used in the ethnographies of secondary economies and

Liviu Chelcea

THE CULTURE OF SHORTAGE

DURING STATE-SOCIALISM:

CONSUMPTION PRACTICES IN A

ROMANIAN VILLAGE IN THE 1980s

C U LT U RA L S T U D I E S 1 6 ( 1 ) 2 0 0 2 , 1 6 – 4 3

Cultural StudiesISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502380110075243

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consumption practices in socialist societies address issues that have been centralin particular classical debates in anthropology. These include, among others,forms of distribution and exchange (Polanyi, 1957; Mauss, 1967; various aspectof Marx s work), inequality, and patron-client relations.

In this paper I argue that the shortage that characterized many moments of state socialism and its cultural dimensions might enrich the literature onexchange and especially on consumption produced about non-socialist settingsin meaningful ways. Thus, my rst aim is to describe the strategies used forcoping with the shortage existing at the macro level: the inability to move goodsover long distances, the long periods of time spent queuing, and the use of theirsocial connections and privileges to circumvent such constraints. This led to the

intriguing situation in which the state run stores and supermarkets in Romaniawere empty, but many people had things that were virtually absent from storeshelves. There is a consistent literature dealing with the secondary economiesunder socialism and I use some of this in order to describe the effort of the popu-lation to participate in consumption.

The second aim of this article is to describe the consumption of scarce con-sumer goods as a set of cultural practicesrather than social relations. The prac-tices associated with consumption (Campbell, 1995: 102) during this period

resembled pre-welfare state working class consumption or war-time consump-tion practices in Western countries, more than present consumption practices incapitalist countries. Following Daniel Miller (1995b: 16), I organize the descrip-tion of such practices around the concept of a culture of shortage.

The rst part of this article is a review of the existing anthropological litera-ture on consumption during state socialism. I argue that existing studies arestructured around social relations existing in the realm of secondary economiesand that much could be gained by a shift in focus to consumption as practice. Thesecond part of the article is more descriptive than the rst. I enumerate thestrategies used by these villagers in order to obtain goods from abroad. Many of the strategies they used have been described by other ethnographies dealing withdistribution and consumption during state socialism. For this reason, I choose tofocus on two niches that were peculiar to this village, namely small-scale bordertrade and the transnational networks that included German villagers who emi-grated to the former German Federal Republic. In the nal part of the article, Iturn to the practices of consumption rather than the way goods were (unof -cially) distributed, attempting to work through the notion of the culture of short-age. The underlying question in addressing this notion has to do with what wecan learn about consumption in general by looking at the practices that shortageforced people to adopt.

T H E C U LT U R E O F S H O RTAG E 1 7

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The relative predominance of political economy oversymbolic approaches to the study of consumption inethnographies of state socialism

In the last two decades, the issue of consumption was pushed, or at least adver-tised, as something that should be closer to mainstream anthropology. This effortwas based on the critiques of the Marxist framework that situated production,rather than consumption as the dominant concern (Appadurai, 1986; Miller,1995a). Arjun Appadurai situates this theoretical shift in the context of JeanBaudrillard s critique of the way nineteenth-century thought portrayed societiesas only having production (Appadurai, 1986: 8–9). He argues that increasedattention should be paid to the ‘total trajectory from production, throughexchange/distribution, to consumption (Appadurai, 1986: 13). An equallyimportant motivation for this shift was the increasing dissatisfaction amongstscholars with dichotomies that separated groups between economy/society onthe one hand and those who had culture on the other. For Appadurai, the focuson consumption represents ‘efforts to restore the cultural dimension to societiesthat are too often represented simply as economies writ large, and to restore thecalculative dimension to societies that are too often simply portrayed as solidarity

writ small (Appadurai, 1986: 12).According to James Carrier and Josiah Heyman (1995) there are two mainparadigms that engage the literature on consumption in non-socialist settings. Onthe one hand, there is the concern with the consumption power and the con-sumers position within a particular system of inequality. The main issue to beresearched in this type of inquiry is the relation between class and consumption.This leads to questions about household reproduction, class politics and level of income or connections. On the other hand, there is the concern with the semi-otic and symbolic aspects of consumption. Goods within one category (e.g. soda)are seen as potentially interchangeable. Thus, the choice of products resides inclassi catory or patterning schemes, which translate into ‘culture , lifestyle, orgroup identity. The important relation here is that between status and con-sumption, while the topics of interest are style, identity politics, and the ways inwhich meaning is produced by advertisers or consumers. It is this second bodyof literature that argues, sometimes redundantly, against conceptions of con-sumption as false consciousness and consumers as passive. Consumption is takento be a social, relational and active intervention in the world of goods, rather thanan individual activity of choosing objects (Pels, 1996: 96).

While this intellectual concern might re ect the consumerist and af uentcontext of Western countries, in socialist countries, political and economicarrangements have made the situation ofshortagea legitimate focus for re ection.Much of the consistent literature dealing with shortage (Verdery, 1991; Kornai1992) comes from a political economy perspective. Thus, Katherine Verdery(1991; 1999) has emphasized the redistributive character of the socialist state,

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but also the importance of the horizontal informal relations articulated on theseredistributive bureaucracies for reproduction of everyday life.The practices fromsecondary economies have received much attention in many ethnographies of East European countries. In addition to the literature produced by Hungariansociologists and Western anthropologists on the issue of secondary economies,Caroline Humphrey (1999: 9) proposed the concept of ‘manipulable resources ,which meant a ‘surplus to the obligatory delivery plan [not] taken into accountof cially . These played an important role under socialism, as they were used inthe informal agreements and power relations between management and labour.This surplus, not to be distributed according to ideology, created the ‘smuggleror the ‘speculator as the primary mover of objects in scarcity situations.

While this literature addresses effectively the social relations created by pro-duction (Verdery, 1991; Lampland, 1995; Humphrey, 1999) and the distributionof goods through vertical and horizontal exchanges (Verdery, 1991; Ledeneva,1998; Humphrey, 1999; Berdahl, 1999), there is less discussion about the natureof consumption during socialism. Semiotic and symbolic approaches are lesspresent; thus, not much has been written about the possession of these goods asa unique activity, rather than merely the endpoint of production and distribution.

A recent ethnography dealing with consumption is Daphne Berdhal s work

in Eastern Germany right before and after the moments of uni cation. Berdahlexplicitly states that her intention is ‘to explore the nature of social relations andinequalities established through exchange in the second economy under social-ism (Berdhal, 1999: 118). Like other scholars of socialism (Sampson, 1986),Berdahl notices that the acquisition of commodities in East Germany is not onlya matter of consumption ( nancial) power, but rather a matter of social capital(connections). This raises the question of the nature of the objects circulatingduring socialism through the connections and the secondary economies thatsurrounded the state distribution system. Were these gifts or were these com-modities? The literature on gifts (Mauss, 1967) emphasizes the personalizednature of exchange within which gifts are given and received. Gift exchangeinvolves mutual obligation, a process that reproduces social relations.The mirrorimage of gift exchange is commodity production and circulation. Commoditycirculation is highly impersonal, does not entail any obligation and has no timelag. It is an anonymous exchange, within which the identity of the participants,their relation to those objects and the biography of the objects do not matter.

Berdahl points out several times that during socialism the process of acquir-ing connections was more important than money. This personalized nature of exchange seems to situate the scarce goods for which one needed connections atsome distance from the ideal type of commodity. Not only was the exchange per-sonalized, but also the identity of the participants was important. In order toacquire goods at least one person had to be a part of the estates of administrationresponsible for the appropriation and later redistribution of value createdthrough labour. At the same time, the acquisition of goods was not gift exchange


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because it involved a nancial transaction. Moreover, what was transacted wasnot necessarily objects but sometimes access to the redistributive bureaucracies(Ledeneva, 1998). This in-betweenness of goods distributed by the state duringsocialism was described as an ‘economy of favors by Alena Ledeneva (1998),another anthropologist who has addressed the issue of consumption under social-ism. The process through which goods were distributed was the phenomena of blat, which refers to the ‘exchange of “favors of access” in conditions of shortage(Ledeneva, 1998). The phenomena of mutual exchanges, both horizontal andvertical that formed an important part of life under socialism is not somethingnew in the literature on socialism, but I think it highlights the theoretical poten-tial of shortage situations.

What one does not get, however, from Ledeneva s description and mostother works on secondary economies is analysis of the cultural practices that sur-rounded these hard to get objects. We do not learn how shortage in uenced theconsumption regime of those objects. In other words, there is an implicit assump-tion in her work that once one acquired goods through the secondary economy,s/he would consume them in the same way as they would be consumed in anaf uent environment. It seems to me that these objects, due to their intrinsicscarcity in socialism, acquired other meanings than they would have had in an

af uent situation. Goods that would have been commodities in a market economyacquired the features of gifts or rarities. Sometimes they transcended the com-modity-gift dichotomy by the inclusion of additional dimensions such as alien-ability–inalienability,1 as sometimes they were withdrawn from circulation.

Such ethnographic descriptions point to the particular cultural and econ-omic practices that surrounded shortage and consumption during socialism. It isin this direction that I channel the discussion that follows. It will limit the rangeof inquiry to what Berdhal and others see as luxury or Western goods (Berdhal,1999: 124).2

Berdhal talks about some peculiarities of consumption during socialism.These include some phenomena that might have looked irrational in an af uenteconomy. One of them is hoarding: ‘[it] was a regular practice in households(Berdhal, 1999: 121).3 She gives the example of a woman who was hoardingenough ham to feed a whole reunion for her son. She also points to recycling asa feature that drew her attention: ‘because of the scarcity of most consumergoods, it was not uncommon or considered rude to recycle gifts (Berdhal, 1999:122). She also mentions the Chiquita labels displayed on the TV-sets and the bumper stickers of different Western mass commodities, but she does not offerany speci c interpretation of it, except that it was in display that these goodsacquired importance (Berdhal, 1999: 124).

It seems to me that Berdahl s implicit de nition of consumption (she doesnot provide an analytical one) is in some ways limited. There are other dimen-sions of consumption that she did not include in her description of the ethno-graphic situation.4 Daniel Miller (1995b: 16) advanced the term ofsocialist culture


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of shortagewithout further elaborating. I will adopt a wider de nition of con-sumption in order to get to some of its features. Colin Campbell suggested thefollowing de nition of consumption:‘the selection, purchase, use, maintenance,repair and disposal of any product or service (Campbell, 1995: 102). I suspectsome dimensions such as use, maintenance, repair, or disposal of object acquireda special meaning and intensity in the shortage context. I will turn to the descrip-tion of these practices in the third part of the essay. The examples are quitesimilar to those described by Ina Markel (1998) for East Germany, but myapproach is more ethnographic. The examples I use come from one villagesituated on the Romanian-Hungarian border, where I attempted to capture theexperience of the 1980s when shortage was at its worst.5

The present population of Sintana consists of a demographically old and con-tracting German community, Romanians and Roma/Gypsies (1000/8500/2500persons). For the purpose of the present study, it is worth mentioning threecharacteristics of the village. First, since the end of the 1960s, the Germansstarted to leave for Germany. This meant the beginning of the ‘unmaking of theGerman community6 from Sintana, although the most decisive steps in thisdirection took place after 1989, when the majority of this population left forgood. Legislation adopted in 1983 encouraged families coming from other parts

of Romania to move into the houses of the Germans that emigrated. A largenumber of the German immigrants kept returning to Sintana, maintaining manyof their kinship and neighbourhood relations. This circulation of persons between Germany and the village meant also an intense circulation of goods andfavours.

Second, like many other villages from Romania situated close to industrialcentres, Sintana s labour force had a dual structure before 1989. It consistedmainly of peasant-workers, with the men travelling in the morning to their indus-trial workplaces and working in the afternoon on their household subsistenceplot. Women usually worked for the State Agricultural Farm and for the collec-tive agricultural farm. This dual household income had two important conse-quences. On the one hand, it allowed villagers to create and maintain goodconnections with the persons from the nearby large city able to obtain scarceconsumer goods through the black market. On the other hand, the genderdivision of labour in the village in uenced the structure of acquisition of con-sumer goods. While the majority of the men were commuting between thevillage and the industrial plants of the county capital, thus having a strict sched-ules, women were mainly engaged in agricultural activities. Thus women hadmore free time, directly dependent upon the seasonal nature of agriculture.During the 1980s, the relative freedom with their time allowed women to engagein trader tourism activities.


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Sintana trader-tourists’ context: weak state,bureaucrats and smuggling

Socialist economies have never been very generous supplying consumer goods ascompared with the capitalist ones. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980sdifferent regimes from Eastern Europe approached the question of consumptiondifferently. Romania did not share the path of Hungary or Poland that allowedfor some limited existence of market. Despite the fact that during the 1960sdétentethe Romanian State encouraged consumption, throughout the 1970s andmainly during the 1980s, the supply of goods and services reached a critical situ-ation.

The 1980s in Romania were a period of generalized shortage and it is gener-ally remembered as a dark period of recent history. The state imposed strict regu-lations on the quantity of food to be consumed.7 In 1981, food rationing wasintroduced for basic goods such as bread (300 g/day), oil or sugar, but also of meat. In addition, from January 1982 on, the state limited the electric power dis-tributed to the population. Very often the electric power was cut off several timesa day without any prior warnings, for periods ranging from a few minutes toseveral hours. People were urged not to use ‘refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and

other household appliances (Sha r, 1985: 118). Instead, they were asked to‘store food outside during winter time, to refrain from using elevators andcentral heating (Sha r, 1985: 118). These measures aiming to reduce demandwere accompanied by mass media and public advertisement of situations andindividual cases involving waste or ‘over consumption of electric power orwater.

In the political economy of socialist Romania, Sintana villagers enjoyed aspecial situation. There were several strategies and opportunities available to thevillagers for coping with the macro level shortage. I will list some of them andthen I will focus on the trader-tourism activity. First, there were the Yugoslavcitizens coming to sell clothes, shoes, jeans, electronic watches, cigarettes orfood in the county capital.They were coming by bus and their presence was quiteregular. A young worker who was commuting to Arad for work before 1989 saidthat: ‘the kind of market that exists now existed before with the tacit acknow-ledgement of the authorities (UK male, 30). Second, workers and engineers fromSintana who were employees of the Arad train-cars factory and worked tem-porarily in Egypt, Greece, and Syria brought goods with them. They wereallowed to bring back a fair amount of luggage and were selling a large quantityof the goods they were bringing.

A third strategy was the independent production of goods/services thatwere supposed to be provided by the state distribution system. For instance, ayoung man who was the DJ of the local Disco House in the 1980s said that ‘therewere pirate studios, just like now which were selling tapes (UK male, 30). Alsopeople owned installations for producing spirits, although this was illegal.8


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Fourth, another resource useful for obtaining scarce consumer goods was havinggood connections, such as relatives and friends in high administrative or politicalpositions.9 This practice is well known and became a standard reference whentalking about socialism.

The other two opportunities that I am aware of, and which received lessattention in the literature dealing with Eastern Europe, are going to be the focusof this paper. First, there was the small-scale border trade within Hungary.10 Themain advantage of trading in Hungary was to bring industrially processed food.Second, there were the gifts and hard currency that the Germans who immi-grated to Germany were sent or brought with them to their families in Sintana.This offered the possibility of obtaining electronic goods, mainly colour TVs and

kitchen appliances. The Germans were also selling food items, but they weremore attractive for the former aspect.All the opportunities listed above were alike in the sense that in order to take

advantage of them, individuals had to deal with the state. The last two were dis-tinctive from the others in respect to the goods that were distributed throughthem.

Small-scale traf c to Hungary

Small-scale traf c (micul tra c in Romanian) emerged as a mass practice for thepopulation of Sintana in the late 1970s when the crisis of consumer goods wasworsening. This opportunity existed since the 1960s, as long as the villagersremember, but no one that I talked with remembers if people practised it.Instead, they remember that in the 1950s, it was the Hungarians coming downto buy things from Romania that were missing from Hungary. They also said thatin the 1970s Hungarians were coming to Romania to sell things that were notnecessarily missing in Romania, but were of better quality. Since the second half of the 1970s, as the situation became worse and worse, villagers started to takeadvantage of this opportunity.

Small-scale traf c (henceforth SST) was a ‘privilege granted for the inhabi-tants of the villages closer than 20 km to the border.11 It was the Romanian social-ist equivalent of post-1989 ‘trader-tourism :‘travelling across borders for buyingand selling things in open air markets, having their merchandise [carried] as per-sonal belongings (Konstantinov, 1996: 762). Trader-tourism to Hungary duringsocialism was an independent activity of accumulation and management of scarceresources. In this section I will describe who was actually using this privilege,how villagers were using it, a typical trip and trader-tourists experience inHungary.

Every inhabitant of these villages was potentially entitled to the privilege;however, actual bene ciaries were much less numerous. SST allowed villagers toexit the country to Hungary, where they were allowed to travel inside a 30 Km(about 14 miles) strip within Hungary, but they were asked to report to Sintana


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Police within 24 hours after their exit. They could exit Romania just 12 times ayear. The sum of money they could have exchanged per exit was about 1/8 of the average monthly wage in the 1980s.

The procedure for obtaining the SST privilege was relatively simple. The vil-lagers were supposed to submit an application to the local police and within20–30 days s/he received it. Those who received it were supposed to renew itannually. As simple as this procedure was, the privilege was not equally distrib-uted among the population of the village. The rst category of persons excludedfrom this were the Germans, who formed, as a matter of fact, about half of thevillage population in the 1980s. State administration feared correctly that theymight leave the country permanently. On the side of the state bureaucrats,risking

the escape of a German ethnic meant risking the loss of about 8000–20000 DM($5000–$12000), which was the typical bribing rate for an exit visa to Germany.A policeman from Sintana said that his team was very much criticised every timea German was leaving the country for Hungary. The same denial of the exit rightwas practised toward the Romanians married to Germans. On the side of Germans, there were not too many claims because they were afraid that any ghtwith the authorities might jeopardise their chances to obtain the papers neces-sary in order to immigrate to Germany.

On an individual basis, there were denials of this privilege for members of the administration and political elite of the village. A person with a high position before 1989 said that every application was reviewed by a political police of cer.Applicants were required to report if they had relatives abroad and positiveanswers usually decreased the chances to obtain the passport. Also the few peoplewho were known to have gossiped or protested in different ways against thepolitical and economic situation were less likely to be granted the passport. Avillager formulated and justi ed the restriction in moral terms: ‘one had to beserious in order to get the passport (Z family).

One may ask, however, who actually applied for the passport. Aside fromthe SST granting limitations, not everybody was interested. I tried to obtain someestimations of the percentage of people engaged in it, but nobody could say forsure.12 For the poorer families of the village, SST was a luxury that could not beafforded because they could not accumulate the initial amount of money neces-sary to start the trader-activity. According to the people that I talked to, it usuallywas families with an average standard of living who were practising it. Somebodytold me that another reason for villagers not applying for SST was that they werescared about the possibility that if they travelled to Hungary, the Police mightinterrogate them. Also, people who had cars were more likely to ask for the pass-port because they could move easily and with lower costs since they shared theexpenses with other villagers eager to travel.

In the beginning, the villagers were quite happy about this privilege, but afterseveral trips it was regarded as normal. Compared to other regions of Romania,their situation was much better. For instance, if I may add a personal note, even


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though I lived in the capital city, I only became acquainted with some of the goodsthey said they had easy access to (such as brand-name jeans or ‘original Coca-Cola products) after the penetration of Western goods in early 1990. What wasnormal for people in this part of Romania was very much envied in other regions.

The social contract between the bureaucrats and the trader-tourists

Although there were many restrictions pertaining to the length of the trip,number of exits per year and the quantity traded, one can conceptualize an infor-mal social contract between the authorities and the trader-tourists. It consistedof rewarding the bureaucrats for their tacit acknowledgement of practices that

exceeded limitations imposed upon trader-tourist activity. The rewards offered by trader-tourists were of two types: those for individuals and those for insti-tutions.

Individual gains or bribes were a well-known practice of socialism and werede nitely an important ingredient of trader-tourism. Most people I talked toexited the country more often than it was allowed, even if authorities were awareof this.13 Bringing goods back from Hungary valuing more than 250 lei/exit – the usual situation for the vast majority of the trader-tourists – created the

impetus for negotiations with the bureaucrats (both local ones and the borderof cers). Many bribes consisted of a German package of half a kilogram of coffeeor a package of brand name cigarettes. Different degrees of control and of indif-ference had different prices. For instance, even if one s papers were in accordwith of cial regulations, but s/he wanted not to be controlled at the border, asmall gift to the of cer usually solved the problem. Also, there were cases when border of cers did not even stamp the passports of trader-tourists exitingRomania.

Perhaps less known than the individual bribes are the institutional gains fromtrader-tourism. For the relative freedom granted to the villagers, the bureaucratswere attempting to gain something for their institutions as well. As a former localtop bureaucrat told me, when people would come to the village hall to extendtheir border permits, he would use this opportunity to have them sign contractsto sell to the state some quota of their domestic agricultural production.14

Some villagers said that when the trader-tourists went to the Police to renewtheir passports, they ‘knew that the Police were poorly equipped with pens andpaper, so they would make small gifts. The same went for the former chief accountant of the village. When people would ask him for something, they would bring paper and pens from Hungary for the Finance Section of the Village Hall.


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Three types of trader-tourists

One could distribute the villagers according to the particular ways of using theopportunities offered by SST into three types: household-oriented trader-tourists, pro t-oriented trader-tourists and leisure-seeking trader-tourists.

A. The largest group was that of people practising trader-tourism for theneeds of their respective households, i.e. to buy things missing in Romania, butnot necessarily to resell them. Most people that I talked to said that about nineout of ten trader-tourists travelled to Hungary in order to compensate for theshortages of different consumer goods needed for the household, such as butteror coffee. A young woman who was a trader-tourist in the 1980s said ‘it was few

who were doing it for money. You were usually bringing it for your family (FCfemale, 29 years). The same woman said ‘there were some who were doing busi-ness out of this.They were traveling all the time back and forth between Hungaryand Romania. But not [my family]. I was going once half a year or once a year, Iwas not going all the time. We went there when we needed something (FNfemale, 29 years)

An interesting aspect of the household oriented trader-tourism was that thevast majority of them were women.This is to be explained, as I mentioned above,

by the fact that the women from Sintana were the main work force for the Agri-cultural State Farm, and thus had a more exible schedule than the men workingin the industrial plants. Freedom in the planning of the trip was very importantsince it depended on getting the merchandise to be sold in Hungary in time, theavailability of transportation (train or car) or even the shifts of the borderof cers. The division of labour in households where women were taking care of the food and children was one more factor pushing them toward this activity.One needs to mention that these were usually women above thirty- ve. A youngwoman who was a teen in the 1980s, but who traded together with her mothersaid ‘it was elder women who was going there, less the younger, usually above40. You know, when you were younger you felt bad to go to market to sell things.But older women were more courageous, more outspoken, they were moreexperienced (LN female, 29).

A typical trip involved preparations for about a week in advance and buyingthings from state distribution or stealing them from state factories. Then thetrader-tourists, most often women, talked to their relatives, neighbours andfriends, who were also women, to see if they were available to join them or if they needed something from Hungary. It was very common that trader-touristswould ask each other for help in bringing something from Hungary. Most often,it was relatives, but also neighbours who would order products before the tripand pay upon the return of the trader-tourist.15

Most often, trader-tourists were travelling in small groups, from two to vepersons both to and from Hungary. Once they had arrived at the market placesin Hungary, they would separate and sell their merchandise. Then each would


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shop individually in the food supermarkets. Then they would meet either at thetrain station, or at the personal car in which they came.16

What would the trader-tourists sell in Hungary? The simple answer is thingssimilar to those existing in Hungary, but cheaper. The potential market consistedof persons from Hungary earning an average salary. One villager told me that ‘itwas goods which were cheaper here that were selling best in Hungary. The richHungarians were shopping at their nice stores, not in the marketplace (FGfemale, 56). A young woman said that she always sold her merchandise there because they were very cheap. When I asked her if this was so because theproducts she sold there were missing, she said that:‘the Romanians were sellingvery, very cheap, they were new products . . . the Hungarians liked this (LN

female, 30). There were several categories of goods: glasses, mugs, plates,house-hold water equipment; industrially produced china and handmade decorations;underwear, handkerchiefs, brasses, bed sheets, furniture, owers and nuts.

There were two possibilities for obtaining these Romanian goods in order tosell them, both of which involved the state as a producer. The rst was simply to buy them from the state distribution network with or without special con-nections and the second was to steal from the state. As I describe below, in bothcases Janos Kornai s insights regarding the seller s market apply well: ‘there is

buyers competition for the seller s favour, or more precisely, willingness to sell[. . .] the buyer tries to atter the seller and win his or her favour (Kornai,1992: 248).

For the products missing in Romania, but nevertheless produced either forexport or in limited quantities, trader-tourists had special relations and networkswith the actual producer, the state. Most often it was a special link with the fac-tories or with the distribution apparatus (village stores for example) based onkinship or exchange relations. Selected trader-tourists were informed by thestate-employed shopkeepers whenever some scarce consumer goods were aboutto arrive at the store. The very next day, the entire quantity would be bought out by the trader-tourists. For instance, even if the local store had an agreement witha sportswear factory from a Romanian city (Piatra Neamt), most of them weresold in the local market in Gyula, through the movement of the trader-tourists.

The second was stealing from the state, either from industrial plants or fromstate agricultural farms. For instance, a woman who was a professional trader-tourist would sell the items (towels and underwear items) that her husband stolefrom the factory that produced them. Her husband told me that there was a tightcompetition among the villagers for meeting someone working at the factory(himself included), who could provide these goods. Also aside from the limitedsupply of goods, the weak character of the socialist state allowed employees tosteal from the factory or from the agricultural farm.17 I believe the followingepisode described to me by a former top manager of the Collective AgriculturalFarm, is relevant. There were huge ower green houses belonging to the Collec-tive Agricultural Farm from Sintana. The people working there were stealing


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owers from Sintana in order to sell them in Hungary. The chief was aware of this and he did not try to stop them, although he didn t encourage it.

Once obtained and transported, these goods were sold in the market placesin the villages and cities near the Hungarian border.18 Villagers most often men-tioned Gyula, Lokoshaza, Bekecsaba, Ketegyhaza, Mehkerek.Some said that theywent to these villages anytime they needed something. Another woman told methat ‘I told my husband and Oana and Maria [their children] that Christmas iscoming and we need some orange juice, some coffee and . . . you know how itis. We dressed up and next Sunday we jumped into the car and went to the marketin Gyula to buy them (SV female, 48). Indeed some would go just on specialoccasions such as Christmas, Easter or birthdays.

The pro t-oriented trader-tourists travelled to Hungary at least once everytwo weeks due to informal negotiations with the state bureaucrats. The membersof this category were very few in number, most people that I talked to, includ-ing a policeman and two former top bureaucrats from the village said that thesewere no more than twenty out of thousands of tourists who practiced trader-tourism. They were also predominantly women. Most people, including thePolice, knew who they were. They were similar to what Yulian Kostantinov(1996) describes in his article and to the professional trader-tourists who

emerged after 1989 in Romania and in other countries of the region.Leisure seeking trader-tourists consisted of those covering tourism costs(considered as leisure time) through some trade. One woman told me that shesold goods in Gyula only to get reimbursed for her expenses (travel costs, minorself-gifts in Gyula and so on). After she sold them, she would go to see the cityand spend some time in a bar. A young man who went to Hungary just a fewtimes said:

The curiosity was deep. What do you see there, how is it? People werecurious. And when they were starting to tell you that you enter in a super-market and you can see everything, while in ours it was only pasta, veg-etables cans, tomato pasta . . . you wanted to go there to see for yourself.

(MN male, 31 years)

The white-collar family that I mentioned above could be included in thiscategory. They had some Hungarian friends in Gyula and they would visit themfrom time to time. They would sometimes visit them in their house, but mostoften they would drive their car to Gyula ‘to drink a good coffee, to eat a goodgoulash or to bath in the Turkish bathes (Z family).19 For these people, shoppingin Hungary combined the satisfaction of some economic and taste needs with aspecial leisure event, deserving special preparations. Leisure seekers were veryfew compared with the household oriented trader-tourists. This group usuallyincluded villagers who went to Hungary just one or two times a year, who were


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either going there on special occasions only (e.g., Christmas) or who had friendsor relatives in Hungary.

Trader–tourists’ experience in Hungary

The experience in Hungary of the trader-tourists provoked enthusiastic admira-tion for the Hungarians and about what they saw there. The objects of admira-tion were determined by each individual s understanding of the situation inHungary. Most admired the high standard of living and the relative af uence dis-played in the shops. When I asked a high-school trained hairdresser what she feltabout what she saw in Hungary, she said:

How can I say . . . when I saw all that luxury that was there and it was justclose, here in Hungary – there is no big distance from the border . . . Theyhad everything, while we didn t have clothes, we didn t have butter . . .almost no food products . . . we were just bringing everything from there.[. . .] Most were saying:‘God, let it be in Romania stores full of things! .

(AM female, 30 years)

Somebody else said that he was fascinated by the fact that the shelves werefull of things and by their variety. A woman who was a teenager in the 1980s said‘I felt a real pleasure to go to Hungary, I have always liked it. I couldn t wait formy mother to say to go there, to buy things or just to look around (LN female,30). She was also impressed with the hygienic aspect of the food:‘the food storeswere very clean and everything was nicely wrapped in plastic sheets. In Romaniaeven now they touch the salami or the sausages with their bare hands (LNfemale, 30). Another women suggested that the frustration provoked by both thelack of consumer goods and by the poor distribution were the cause of the 1989regime changes:

What was different in Hungary compared with Romania?

I knew that Ceausescu was a hard core Communist and that one cannotmake a move without being caught . . . you were afraid all the time. Of course you were thinking how that close [in Hungary] life is overall easyand here you were like chained. And we didn t resist. . .that s why the[1989] Revolution burst out. [. . . ] I didn t know what we would havedone if the Revolution didn t burst out.

(VC female, 32 years)

The same white-collar family that I mentioned above (Z family) was moreelaborate about that, maybe because they had friends in Gyula and they visitedeach other s houses. They explained the better situation in Hungary by the fact


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that ‘they are more civilized and they made the reforms earlier . They wereespecially impressed by the houses and by the fact that the roads were better.Maybe as a compensation for the fact that they lived in the countryside, they said‘there is the same level of well-being and the same prices in the cities as in thevillages . They admired the households very much because ‘they are not socrowded with gurines, but rather with tasteful ceramics and folklore objects(Z family).

Trader-tourists had few interactions with the Hungarians outside theexchange relations. The people that I talked to said that some Hungarians learneda few Romanian words, like for instance greeting or how to ask for prices. Vil-lagers, in turn, learned to count in Hungarian. They have had pleasant experi-

ences with the Hungarians. For instance, a young woman remembers that whenshe was walking in the park she felt happy that she returned a ball to a kid whomissed it, and that his parents thanked her. When I asked another young womanif she had a special event that she remembers, she said that when she went thereto sell owers, a nice guy came to the vendor next to her and brought ve owersand gave them to her. (CB female, 31 years) All of them saw the Hungarians asmore civilized. A few of them complained that they also experienced a sense of humiliation. This feeling of was provoked by being in an inferior and uncertain

position,20

but sometimes it also had a nationalist overtone.

How did the Hungarians behave towards you?

How could I say . . . I felt like I was begging something. I didn t like this because they were looking down on you, they were saying: ‘These areRomanians, they are backward. Also when you were in the market, youwere begging for them to buy your things . . . it was unpleasant, but youdidn t have other choices.21

(CB female, 31 years)

For the household oriented trader-tourists there was little room for typicaltourist activities, as the trips to Hungary were pretty standardized, and as timeto spend there was limited. However, after selling their merchandise or evenwhile this was going on, they would enjoy themselves with ‘good beer or Coca-Cola. Everybody that I talked to was especially pleased with theKolbaszsausagesand they took advantage of every chance they had to eat them.

After selling their merchandise, usually by the early afternoon, the trader-tourists would shop in the stores and in the food supermarkets. When I askedabout the goods they would bring from Hungary, they described them mainly inutilitarian terms, as ‘things everybody needs and were missing here .22 Mostoften they bought food, coffee, and cocoa. High in demand were oil for cookingand butter, items that were almost entirely missing in that period in Romania.


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They didn t purchase primary food (as some of this was supplied by the localfarm), but rather processed food.

Going to Hungary was not only a matter of seeking supplies, it also becamea status symbol. Other prestige goods were supplied by the networks that endedin Germany.

The Germans of Sintana and the circulation of consumer goods:‘packages’ and electronics

The other method for acquiring consumer goods was by way of the Germanpopulation. They have been ‘useful in two ways: for electronic products and for

receiving the famous mail ‘parcels from Germany. Those Sintana Germans whoalready immigrated to Germany were trying to help their families, and some-times friends, who remained in the village.There were mainly two ways of doingthis. One was to send packages with consumer goods23 or hard currency. Theother way was to bring these items when Germans were coming back. TheGermans thus became a valuable ‘resource in coping with the shortage and theirfriendship was very valued. Many people from the village suggested that theGermans were better off because they were receiving goods from Germany.

Other people suggested that some Romanians maintained regular interactionwith the Germans who did not emigrate for instrumental reasons.While the local German recipients consumed part of the goods, they traded

a large amount with the rest of the German community and with Romanian vil-lagers. They were allowed to receive a package once a month and thus they werequite independent from the shortage existing there.The packages arrived openedto their recipients from Sintana. Every package inside (e.g. coffee) was openedtoo. Although there would be a paper inside where all the items sent were listed,there would be goods missing. Items sent from Germany included cigarettes,coffee, cosmetics, clothing or shoes.

Some of these were traded either through the networks of friends, or in themarketplace in Sintana. Things were a little different when Germans returned toSintana during vacation. They would give small gifts to their Romanian friendssuch as a package of peanuts or coffee, razor blades, objects from commercialpromotions of banks or companies from Germany (pens, wall calendars orlighters). The gifts were more substantial when Germans stayed in Romanianshouses (Romanian legislation stipulated at the time that upon giving up citizen-ship, one had to sell to the state real estate). Another situation when more sub-stantial gifts were offered had to do with the arrangements of support for theelder Germans left there by younger members of the family.

There were two ways in which the Germans could help the Romanians inobtaining electronics such as colour TV sets, refrigerators, microwaves, VCRsand so on. The rst was quite simple: a German acquaintance would come fromGermany directly with the item requested. The one who ordered it paid for it


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and that was it. The second strategy was a little bit more complicated. Typically,a German would return to Sintana in order to see his/her family and would needto exchange DM (the German currency) into Lei (the Romanian currency). Asthe rate offered by the state was miserable and as most Germans were afraid tochange it on the black market, they often preferred to change them with villagersthat they trusted. The population needed the hard currency because in the largecity nearby there were special stores,24 functioning in a hard currency regime,where electronics where sold. The German and the villager would go togetherto these stores, buy the product and then the villager would give the German theequivalent in Romanian currency, at a better rate.

Another oppor tunity to obtain goods from Germans, more random but also

more pro table occurred often right before one German family was about toemigrate. They were allowed to exit Romania only with a small quantity of per-sonal belongings. Upon hearing that their exit visa was granted, they would tryto leave as soon as possible, thus selling Western goods at very low prices.

The Germans were also important in terms of the information. They brought from Germany advertising catalogues, fashion magazines (the tailors of Sintana would emulate the models included or reproduced there), women smagazines (the hairdressers of Sintana had women s magazines, out of which the

women of Sintana would sometimes choose certain hair styles) and would showvillagers certain new goods:

Did the Germans have many Western goods?

They were displayed in their houses.

. . . and did they show you how the home appliances were working?

Yes, as a neighbour you were asking ‘What is this? and they were showinghow that worked. They were also somehow proud of this.

(MN male, 31 years)

Except for the German journals, direct communication was also a goodchannel for receiving information from outside Romania. When I asked a youngwoman how she learned about appliances, which were not produced or distrib-uted in Romania, she said ‘I knew from my German friends, this was the onlyway to communicate with the others, with Europe (FN female, 31).

The culture of shortage during socialism: theconsumption of scarce goods

In the last part of this paper I will attempt to describe how people used the goodsthey obtained. More precisely, I want to focus on theculture of shortageas a special


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management of consumer goods in households. As mentioned in the beginningof the paper, I am especially interested in the use, maintenance, repair and dis-posal of these objects, because I believe they characterize theculture of shortage best.

Purchasing goods: extensive preparations, travel and incertitude

As I described above, the purchase of basic goods for the trader-tourist was farmore complicated than it is today or than it is in consumer societies. Janos Kornaidescribes shopping in shortage economies as a process, not as a simple act. Hedescribes the process as nding the good right away, queuing, forced substitution

for another product, search, postponement of the search or the abandonment of the purchasing intention (Kornai 1992: 230–34).For the villagers, shopping involved extensive preparations, travel and uncer-

tainty about the availability of goods. It was not only the purchase of goods thatinvolved travel, but sometimes also the purchase of services. A woman told methat the dentist from Sintana told her to go to Beckecsaba (in Hungary) to a medi-cine store to buy some material that was impossible to nd in Romania.

The uncertainty caused by the purchase of goods through trader-tourist

activity was high. Unlike the uncertainty caused by the lack of information typicalfor the East European tourists travelling abroad, Sintana trader-tourists had a lotof information about Hungary, routes, places, prices and so on. Instead, for themthe uncertainty was caused by the fact that the purchase was conditioned by theamount of goods they were able to sell.There were cases when one couldn t buywhat s/he wanted because the market was bad on that particular day. In thesecases they would try to nd some Hungarian willing to store the merchandiseuntil their next trip, or they would leave it in storage at Customs.

Purchasing for trader-tourists involved uncertainty not only about avail-ability, but also about quality. Sometimes they would buy products close to or beyond the expiration date. Sometimes they couldn t control the quality of thegoods or what was inside a package purchased, as they did not speak the lan-guage. For instance, during the late 1970s and early 1980s when Yugoslav trader-tourists were still coming to Arad, there were cases where the content of coffeein instant soup packages was replaced with beans or salt.25 This could not bechecked until later, when one was sure that the police were not around.

The restriction of the purchase of goods by quantity also determined unusualshopping behaviour. For instance, in order to bring more car gasoline fromHungary, many car owners added an extra, most often hidden, gas reservoir totheir car. In another case, an older, apparently peasant women said that there areadvantages to getting older. She said that she could allow herself to stuff items bought in Hungary under her clothes, because the Customs of cers could notsee them; they were no longer interested in the shape of her body. Related tothis, there were also stories of putting on several undergarments. One woman


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said that when she bought clothes for herself, because of the restrictions, shethrew her old clothes into a garbage can in Hungary. These examples, I think,highlight once again the differences between the consumers living in an af uenteconomy and those of the shortage economy.

The use of scarce consumer goods:special situations and rationing

While Janos Kornai describes well the shopping process, he does not go intodetails about the actual consumption of goods, or about the secondary uses of goods. I will refer to these below. Out of the interviews that I did, two interest-ing aspects of the use of consumer goods emerged. First, it turned out that scarce

goods such as those brought from Hungary and those obtained from the Germanswere mainly consumed on special situations such as Christmas, New Year s Eve,Easter, on Birthdays, family visits and so on. Here is an example:

Did you drink coffee before?

Yes there was chicory, from Romania.

Did you consume more chicory or more Jacobs?Oh my God, Jacobs was just for when you were receiving a package. Wewere using it just on special occasions, when we had guests. Also on specialdays.

(FN female, 29 years)

The rationing of Western and scarce goods in general seemed to have beenquite widespread among the villagers. Here are some examples:

If you were bringing a larger quantity at once, how fast were you using it?

One was not consuming it all at once. If I was bringing let s give anexample, ten chocolates because here there was none, you were not eatingchocolate all the time; you were keeping them in a safe place and when youfelt like eating something sweet,you took some.You didn t have plenty likenow. Now there is chocolate in every store.

(FN female, 29 years)

Another woman told me about how her grandparents would ration thesweets that were quite scarce at the time. Her grandmother s drawer would befull of German sweets that she had exchanged for primary food from CAP, brandyand china. However, the little girl received no more than two candies per day.According to her, her grandmother wanted to make sure that they would last


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until she could trade again (usually around Christmas, Easter and in summer).Something similar went for her grandfather. Due to his special connections, hergrandfather was sometimes able to get several boxes of Pepsi-Cola at once, butnot regularly. He would give her just one bottle a day, so that the quantity wouldlast longer (AG female, 30).

The reverse of rationing was over-consumption. The same girl mentionedin the above paragraph, whose aunt came from abroad, once brought her a packof chewing gum. She said that she was so happy that she ate it all. She explainedthis in following way:‘I always received too little, never how much I wanted. Ithink I did this because I was used to receiving only small amounts (AG female,30).

Creative recycling and repair of scarce consumer goods

In addition to their high quality, Western food products were attractive for theirpackaging. Very often after something was consumed, its package would be givenother functions. Packages would be used as decorations in the living room andin the kitchen or for different activities within the household, or simply stored because of their sentimental value. Here is the situation of a young man who told

me that, back in his childhood, he lived on a street inhabited by many Germans:Did you keep or use empty packages for something?

For instance, I remember the package for some rice. And the boxes andempty cans in general. They were nice; ours were very bad looking. They[the Germans] were used to them. But we were using themas furniture inthe kitchen, even if they were empty. It made it look more crowded.

Did you ask for them?

No, they were throwing them away, but not in the normal garbage can, butin the backyard,where every household has it garbageplace. And as we werechildren, we were jumping the walls of the garden to take those packages.

(MN male, 31 years, emphasis added)

Empty packages of fruit juice were often used for inside decorations. If theperson mentioned above displayed the empty packages in the kitchen, somebodyelse said that he used them for the living room, because they didn t have gurinesand other decorations. Empty foreign beer cans or Coca-Cola cans were oftenused for two other purposes. First, they were used as mugs for drinking coffee.Second, they were used as containers on desks for holding pens.

A young woman said,‘I was keeping and storing everything that was foreign,empty beer cans, aluminium chocolate wraps. . . (AG female, 30). She also said


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that she was cutting the nice parts of the chocolate wrapper paper and she wassticking them on the cover of her notebooks or on the refrigerator. When I askedher why she was doing this she said,‘at that time, notebooks were not as nice andcolourful as today, they had ugly colours and I wanted to make them nicer (AGfemale, 30) Chocolate aluminium wraps seemed to have a special value.The samegirl said that after some time when it became obvious that her desire for collect-ing them decreased, she gave them to her mother. Her mother used them forroasting peppers in the oven because at the time aluminium foil was not avail-able in the stores.

It was not only the empty cans and the residual parts of the consumer objectsthat were turned from garbage into something usable. Sometimes even the

objects themselves were used to make up for something missing. For instance, asindustrially produced air-fresheners were missing, brand name soaps (most often‘FA or ‘REXONA ) were stacked into piles of clothes. The strong scent of thesoaps would keep the clothes smelling fresh.

A good example of recycling, reusing, and repairing is writing utensils. Aneducated adult told me about his pen collection. When his pens ran out of ink,he did not discard them; instead he kept them in a separate box. Some were kept just for their nice exterior, while others were used for their parts. He would take

out some part of a used pen in order to repair others. The potential repair valueseemed to have been an important part of judging the worth of a pen. His daugh-ter said that even now, when her father receives a pen he says ‘if it can be reused,it is good; but if it writes very well, yet it is good only for use once or it cannot be dissembled into parts it is not so good (AG female, 30).

Another example of suchbricolageactivities was described to me by a youngman. He said that he also kept the aluminium wrappers from chocolates broughtfrom Hungary, but he used them for a different purpose. He had a relativeworking at the candy factory in Timisoara (Kandia) and around every Christmashe would receive several pounds of Christmas Tree candies, missing the wrap-pers (because aluminium was scarce). He then used the aluminium wrappers hecollected during the year, wrapping the candies together with his brothers andadding them to the Christmas tree ornaments.

Western consumer goods or anything that resembled their attractive aes-thetics26 had a special affective value for these people. A woman said that whenGermans would return to Sintana, they would bring with them promotionalitems such as lighters, pens or wall calendars. She said that she remembers wellthe calendars of one German BankVolksbank, because she had them for severalyears and especially because they had pictures with cities from Germany andfrom Europe. She didn t throw away one single picture from the calendar, evenwhen the month or the whole year was over.

All these practices of collection display creative re-use of Western objects.The storage and the display of goods representing the ‘West suppressed theoriginal biography of the objects. Collecting them, the villagers ignored their


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primary functions (mass produced, speci c location within the mass culture eldin the West and so on), thus privileging only the original topology (Stewart,1993: 153)27 It did not matter that many pieces collected in the West would have been just garbage, or that some were literally picked up from dumpsters. Vil-lagers personalized these objects through investment in their intrinsic symbolicand geographical value.28

Conclusions: Shortage, consumption andpost-socialism

The 1980s were a period of intense accumulation of means of production andthere was a renewed attention paid to heavy industry by the Romanian State.Compared with the previous two or three decades, this led to a situation of unprecedented scarcity of consumer goods. The aim of the state was to produceresources that could produce more resources, rather than objects that were indemand by the population. Consumer goods did not t this logic of the appar-atus, so the satisfaction of the consumption needs of the population were, for themost part, ignored. As the state apparatus attempted to have the monopoly over

the allocation of resources, one of its main urges was to suppress any activitiesof resource accumulation developing outside of it. Trader–tourists were notproto-capitalists during socialist times, although geographical and capital mobil-ity as well as entrepreneurial spirit are certainly required ingredients.They were,rather, directly dependent upon the weak character of the state, that is its weaknancial constraints, the possibility to steal from the state factories and on theinformal social contract between trader-tourists and bureaucrats.

I have argued that this and similar situations from other socialist countrieswhere vigorous secondary economic activities developed offer a meaningfulcomparison to consumption practices in an af uent consumption environment.Although Janos Kornai does describe the choices faced by a person engaged inthe shopping process,29 he does not describe the personal and household con-sumption of scarce consumer goods. He does mention hoarding, but his analysisignores the symbolic uses of scarce goods, such as rationing, special occasions,affective investment, collecting, recycling and so on. Key elements of the social-ist culture of shortage that I found were uncertainty about the actual purchaseof goods and about the quality of products, propensity to self-impose therationing of food items or to use them just on special occasions. The process of repairing goods that were not easy to nd is interesting as well. Western goodsgained additional value with the creative use of empty packages and wrappers.Many times they were used for something else (e.g., empty beer cans used ascoffee mugs). They were also rede ned as aesthetic objects and displayed inhighly visible places (e.g., in the kitchen next to the window with plates or, lessoften, in the living room in sideboard windows for gurines).


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The fact that people regularly smuggled goods across controlled spaces,inside their clothing, might suggest that a more inclusive de nition of consump-tion would involve the dimension of ‘transportation of goods. For professionalspeculators and average persons involved in informal activities alike, transporta-tion played a decisive role during socialism.

Unlike the anneur -like, browsing consumer of the malls, the socialist con-sumer searched for useful contacts,30 made careful preparations and was hyper-aware of how goods were used. While many goods in capitalist economies aremarketed as sets (in addition to the good one is looking for a number of otherfunctionally or conceptually related items) are suggested, the socialist shortagemade most consumers spontaneousbricoleurs, by forcing them to combine,

recycle, repair and trade goods or parts of them. With the end of state social-ism, those who could afford to abandon shortage practices, have. Such groupsquickly acquired uency in Western consumption. For the less advantaged tem-porary or long term poverty has meant the incapacity to participate in suchactivities and a return to some of the older practices such as trade across bordersand the recycling of goods.

Considered within the larger framework of political and economic inequal-ities in pre-1989 Romania, the situation of the people from Sintana was disadvan-

taged. Those who were privileged did not have to rely on secondary economies but they took advantage of the allocation process. After the end of state social-ism, Romanians started to expand their trade routes to Turkey, Yugoslavia andHungary, often with minor pro ts and maximum risk and effort. Sintana, on theother hand, quickly underwent a process of primitive capital accumulationthrough bureaucratic parasitism on the economy and the banking system.

For the new state capitalist class, the shortage practices – to the extentthat they knew them – quickly became a matter of the past. They rapidlyacquired cultural uency in Western consumption practices (see Berdahl,1999 on this point). For the more sizeable group that started to experienceshort term or chronic poverty, and thus the inability to participate in thespaces reserved for the rich, the 1990s meant a return to shortage practices.

Acknowledgements

Student, PhD program in Anthropology, University of Michigan. This reseachwould not have been carried out without the initiative of ‘Culture with FrontiersResearch Group , created by Anna Wessely and Tibor Dessewfy. I also thankthem for their comments and critiques. The eldwork was made possible byCentral European University Student Research Grant Program of 1997(Budapest). Previous work in this village was possible due to an Open SocietyFoundation Grant in 1995. I have been helped in various ways, and at differentmoments during this research by Marsha Siefert, Sorin Antohi, Katherine


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Verdery, Puiu Latea, Calin Goina, Viorel Anastasoie. Rostas Zoltan also deservesmany thanks.

Notes

1 Moreover, as I will describe below, some Western goods became tokens of value, leaving the space of the polarity gift-commodity.

2 These were by no means the only goods desired by persons living in socialistsocieties. Staples played the key role in the reproduction of household inequal-ity during socialism, too. Unlike Western (and for that matter luxury) goodsthey were not ‘productive : ‘in exchange or display [Western goods] were aform of capital in themselves (Berdhal, 1999: 122). Carrier and Heyman’ssuggestion that ‘we cannot afford to be drawn to study some goods just becauseof style, marketing and subcultural visibility (Carrier and Heyman, 1997: 362)is very appropriate from my point of view. Unfortunately, I do not do this here.

3 Katherine Verdery (1991) talks about hoarding as well, but in the context of the production. The managers of state owned companies had to engage in bar-gains with the allocative bureaucracies in order to secure enough raw materi-

als (as a r isk insurance against plan’s unpredictability).4 Of course one cannot know if the persons she interviewed had more ordifferent consumption practices that just those she conveyed. I guess thatshortage behaviour was similar across shortage situations.

5 A short methodological note about this research is necessary. I conducted 28interviews in Sintana for about a month in two periods, April 1997 and April1998. Prior to this research, I have spent almost half a year in the village indifferent periods studying the social history of ethnic relations. For the presentstudy, my subjects could be grouped into three categories: 1) persons from the

former elite of the village: a policeman, an agricultural engineer who was theformer manager of the greenhouses of Sintana, the former chief of the Finan-cial Section of the Village Hall; 2) two pro t-oriented trader-tourists; 3) 14individuals who during the ‘80s were especially active in personal consump-tion, such as the youngsters of that period and teenagers; 4) three families, oneof which was my host family. Besides the formal interviews I had many morecasual conversations with bartenders and their clients, clients of hairdressersfrom Sintana, or people that I managed to talk to at the local market place(held three times a week).

6 See Katherine Verdery, ‘The Umaking of an Ethnic Identity: Transylvania sGermans for a similar situation.

7 Michael Sha rRomania: Politics, Economics and Society: Political Stagnation and Simulated Change(1985: 117–18).

8 There are many similar examples that I know, but not from Sintana. Therewere individuals who were recording movies on videotapes and then eitherselling or renting them.A friend of mine,a former student of the Politechnical


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Institute in Bucharest told me that he was organizing video sessions. He wasrenting the VCR for 500 lei (about one fourth of the average wage before1989) for one night and then he was asking his fellow students for a small fee.The standard schedule and convention was that there were three movies persession: one comedy, one action/horror movie, and one porno movie. At thesame time he was providing additional services such as ‘good cigarettes and beers.Certain books were also rented for money. An interesting example werethe ‘informal cab drivers. These were not sticking any signs on their cars;instead they were picking up their clientele, simply by asking people in thestreets if they needed a ride. Politechnical Institutes, but also Medical Schoolsand other Higher Education institutions who had foreign students (Greece,Arab countries – Iran, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Israel and more seldom Serbs) werea privileged place for nding jeans, T-shirts, sport shoes, silk stockings, ciga-rettes, coffee, cosmetics, hard currency and audio tapes. Student environmenthad a very original and adaptive culture of its own in terms of obtaining scarceconsumer goods.

9 See for instance, the godfathering strategies in one village of Transylvania asdescribed by Kligman (1988: 35–9), where villagers were choosing mainlypersons in high local administrative positions.

10 Internal trade of Western consumer goods was also strong, especially from the

Western regions to the Eastern ones. For example Timisoara and the Westernpart in general was notorious in Romania for the supply of ‘Western as wellas Yugoslav and Hungarian goods. There were people coming from Bucharestor from Moldova, but more often from Oltenia to buy goods from Timisoara.Also there were people specialized in bringing goods (smuggled from Hungaryor Yugoslavia to Arad or Timisoara) to other regions of the country. Internaltrader-tourism, a topic that I nd intriguing in many ways, was not an easyactivity because the Police was inspecting cars quite regularly and one neededto have proper acquisition papers for such goods.

11 Except for the Western border, the south-eastern border with Yugoslavia andBulgaria was also well-known for the opportunities it provided in bringingconsumer goods. The privilege was granted to all the villages situated close tothe borders.

12 Some, however, said that about 20–30% of the population had SST passports.These were just adults. If one takes into account that a trader-tourist wasusually supplying all of his/her family, it becomes clear that it was a massphenomenon.

13 One pro t-oriented trader-tourist both before and after 1989 told me that thepolice knew about him crossing the border regularly once a week. The police-men teased him about this when they were meeting.

14 In 1984, due to the re-centralization measures, the government announced anew program that forced villagers to give up a quota of household producedagricultural goods to the state (cf. Sha r, 1985: 117).

15 This person-to-person distribution of goods was also favoured by the fact thatthey were not allowed to sell foreign goods in the market place. According to


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the legal prescription, many times not respected, the police should have con-scated foreign goods.

16 Unlike the trader-tourists described by Kostantinov, those from Sintana werenot travelling by buses. When they were not travelling by train, they wereusing private cars.

17 This is not to say that workers and administrators were encouraged to steal.There were cases in which they were arrested and sued in court. However,those caught by Police were stealing without the approval of their superiors orsecurity staff.

18 Some, usually those having a car, were venturing further to Szeged, Miscolcor Budapest.

19 They were also shopping while going there, but they emphasized leisure.20 I believe that more people that I talked to had this feeling, but they were

somehow ashamed to talk about this. Moreover, as many of them questionedme at the beginning of the interview or knew in advance that I was studyingin Budapest, they were reluctant to talk about unpleasant experiences inHungary.

21 Petty traders are most of the time despised and are granted low honour. Also,when foreign, they are deemed to represent the whole nation or group thatthey belong to.

22 A woman told me about her embarrassment when the Hungarian borderof cial, discovering that she bought bread from Hungary, said to her ‘You aremissing even bread! .

23 Having relatives or friends abroad was a valuable resource in terms of gettingconsumer goods (although a negative factor in one s chances to move up thepolitical or even professional career) and was not limited to Germans of Romania. There were people all over Romania who received such help. AnnaWessely suggested that this seems to have been a phenomenon spread all overEastern Central Europe.

24 The name of these stores wasSHOP . They were designed for foreign tourists,thus selling mainly Western goods and souvenirs (folk objects, wines, spiritsand so on). For Romanian citizens the access was almost closed, as they werenot allowed to own foreign currency. If they did, they had to deposit it in banks, where the interest rate was negative (–7%), which by itself is yetanother wonder of state-socialism.

25 Somebody that I know, a student during the 1980s, told me a similar story of cheating the buyer. He picked up the empty deodorant containers of brand

name sprays (Fa, Rexonaand so on) from his colleges and he refuelled themwith cheap Romanian deodorant combined with spray for killing the ies thatwas even cheaper. He said that nobody (including cosmeticians) ever guredthat it was a fake, because they were blinded by the brand name.

26 It is interesting that before 1989 the ‘West as apprehended through consumergoods was a much broader cognitive category. For instance, the Turkish con-sumer goods were seen as Western. After 1989, due to the heavy trader-tourism with Turkey and to the in ux of Western consumer goods, as well as


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to the self-Occidentalizing discourse of the Romanian politics, Turkish objects became ‘Balkanic or ‘Arab .

27 Talking about the process of collecting, Stewart (1993: 153) says ‘it ignoresproperties of native history and of topology .

28 The fact that many ‘nice looking empty packages were displayed in the kitchenis not random. This is the usual place of exhibiting an aggressive modernisttechnique (microwaves, coffee machines, mixers and other electric appli-ances). Lacking these, villagers were exhibiting just the sign of the West s‘progress and ‘modernity .

29 In his diagram of the shopping process, he does not mention however the possibility that would-be buyers would travel to other towns or countries were thatgood might be found.

30 Bedahl (1999: 136) makes this point nicely, describing that consumption(especially the moment of purchase), during socialism was intensely social: it‘helped sustain elaborate networks of friends and contacts .

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Escasez en Rumania Etnografia de La Vida en El Socialismo

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