The “Market Effect” on the 1990 Romanian Emigration Generation: the Genealogy of a Misunderstanding
The “Market Effect” on the 1990 Romanian Emigration Generation: the Genealogy of a Misunderstanding

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I attempt to link two issues that seem to have no obvious connection: market and commodity, a predominantly economic field, and the ethnographic perspective on Romanian migrants at the beginning of the 1990s. I link these issues by arguing that the Romanian migrants’ experiences and difficulties actually reflect the encounter between a market and non-market situation. I am mainly interested in the way this encounter is lived on an individual basis and the effects on interpersonal relations between those at the arrival destination and those at the departure place. In order to illustrate my point, I refer to discussions on a blog set up by a Romanian immigrant to Canada. The market situation is an exchange-based situation, in which all things have a price because they have in their turn been earned at a price. Those who remained at home did not have the larger exchange picture in mind, but rather a vague imagination of the resourceful West, the engrained idea of needs and the status drive towards conspicuous consumption. For those at home, the émigré to the West was an asset for their status, separated from the value in work or time, for acquiring money. The non-market situation in the departure country obscured the perceived market value and “correct price” of commodities, time and people. This I believe can be considered the root of a misunderstanding. All those entering the market system had to take on its values and expectations, but at the cost of alienation and the loss of a dimension of friendship and social solidarity – with no market exchange value – which could not be recaptured. The lost dimension turned bitter through exposure to the new situation. Something was lost in translation between the two worlds.

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