Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that Romanian Cortorari's marriages are an arena of tensions between individual's presentism and the achievement of un unchanging continuity, through the replacement of generations.

Paper long abstract:

For the Romanian Gypsy population of Cortorari, the arrangement of marriages is the most salient preoccupation. To live a meaningful life means here arranging the marriage of one's children and living through seeing one's children bringing forth their own children in wedlock, and arranging the latter's marriage(s). Such an achievement is fraught with encumbrances, given that marital bonds are fragile and unstable: they are whimsically fastened and unfastened being subject both to individuals' spontaneous emotions, to their bodily reproductive capacities, and to monetary calculation. In the centre of marriages stand some material items, chalices, which were bequeathed to Cortorari by their forebears. Chalices circulate as family heirlooms, from father to son, and as such they secure permanence and immutability, and deny creative significance to history. Yet chalices also circulate as ceremonial wealth, in this instance being subject to individual claims and assertions and thus pervasive of the immediate and changeable political world. Drawing on ethnography of a marriage and the accompanying flow of a chalice, I argue that Cortorari's marriages epitomize the lived tensions between the life course of the individual and the reproduction of generations, or among immediacy and unchanging continuity, and the way these are articulated with one another.