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Within the next site, a huge still expanding commercial area, fakes are a tiny part of the merchandise. Since its opening in the mid 1990s, "Europa" market has become part and parcel of everyday life in Romania, substantially contributing to the local material world. I also paid attention to the ethnic interactions that shape the market experience. This almost illegal site is a battleground on which economic interests of Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Roma and Romanian groups collide. I took into account the way visitors and non-visitors represent it, as "Europa"/Europe to be left behind.
I am now exploring the third field site, Istanbul, gathering ethnographic material that allows me to compare the fake brands production and circulation and the genuine brands production and circulation, and, thus, to nuance the way IPR laws clearly divide material world into fakes and originals. Moreover, I am looking at the life trajectories that make people enter the trade, and how the trade shapes their lives. Ironically, the Romanian consumers' reasons for complain about their clothes are the Turkish producers' tricks for making the business more profitable (i.e. fast loosing colours, at one side of the commodity chain; using a lesser quantity of pigments, at the other side).
In brief, in all this places, willy-nilly, I try to steal glimpses of the underbelly that supports the visible and the acknowledged. For fake goods are revealing themselves as a means to transport people from one experience to another.
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