Remembering the Leu Encounters with Money and Memory in Post-communist, Accession-era Romania

ALYSSA GROSSMAN

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Volume 23, No. 1 (2014): 121-142 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/ajec.2014.230107 ISSN 1755-2923 (Print) 1755-2931 (Online)

ABSTRACT

This article approaches money as the object of a particular type of remembrance work occurring in present-day, post-communist Bucharest. Since the 1989 revolution, the Romanian leu has changed numerous times in appearance and value. Piecing together observa- tions from over a decade of fieldwork in Bucharest, I evaluate every- day behaviours and conversations surrounding these changes, and examine how the leu has been implicated in subjective, highly charged encounters closely bound to the workings of memory. The leu’s fluc- tuating terminology, along with its material and imagerial variations over time have triggered poignant associations and recollections that often remain unspoken, embedded in unseen realms of the mind. By emphasising the leu’s role as an everyday artefact and its connections to processes of ‘communicative’ memory, I point to the present-day climate in Bucharest as one where perceptions of the leu’s multiple forms and manifestations reveal strong ambivalences towards current accession-era values, as well as deep uncertainties about Romania’s ‘European’ future.

KEYWORDS

everyday life, material culture, memory studies, money, post- communism, Romania

Introduction

Since the fall of Romanian communism in 1989, there have been radical fluctuations in the appearance and value of the country’s currency (leu — singular, or lei — plural). These changes, as well as impassioned discourses and behaviours connected to money, somewhat unexpectedly situate the leu within contemporary practices of post-communist recollection. This article proposes that material, imagerial and discursive forms of Romanian money, in the years following the 1989 revolution, have been deeply entangled in highly emotional processes of memory. These processes became more evident to me as a researcher in 2005, when significant alterations to the leu’s physical appearance, linguistic designation and denominational form came into effect, and also during the EU accession-era climate two years later, when Romanians’ hopes and anxieties about the future were stirred by the prospect of joining a new ‘economic community’ on 1 January 2007.

Building upon the Keynesian notion that money is both substance and idea (Hart 2005: 10; Irving 2010), and the argument that it is inextricable from social and personal relationships (Gilbert 2005: 370; Hart 1999: 233; 2005: 8), I investigate money not merely as an economic phenomenon, but as a conceptual and literal object provoking impassioned interpersonal exchanges. Looking beyond descriptions of money as producing objective relationships, possessing quantitative, abstract qualities (cf. Simmel 1978 [1907]), or representing merely ‘the value of things without the things themselves’ (ibid., cited in Ingham 2004: 64), I examine ethnographically how the leu functions as a politically, historically and culturally contingent artefact closely bound up with the workings of memory.

Fluctuations

Until the 1989 revolution, the Romanian leu had been relatively stable. During communism, the formal economy had been regulated by the state, and most prices remained the same for decades. The period immediately following the revolution was characterised by drastic price fluctuations. With the rise of interest rates and the end of government price controls on basic goods, the leu became devalued, and extreme inflation soon followed (see Verdery 1995: 637). In a matter of months, banknotes in denominations of tens and hundreds gave way to those in thousands and millions, featuring five hundred, one thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, and one million-lei bills. One leu consisted of 100 bani [the plural of ban, meaning ‘coin’], though after 1989, bani were no longer worth enough to warrant being in circulation. While exchange rates became more consistent during the early 2000s, the buying power of foreign currency dropped significantly between 2003 and 2006, due to rising domestic prices. In 2005, partly to solve the problem of having to pay for certain items with huge bricks of cash, it was decided that four zeroes would be eliminated from the leu’s denominational units.

The new lei were officially called both ‘lei’ and ‘RON’ (Romanian New lei), but usually referred to in casual conversation as ‘lei’. Denominations of one, five, ten, fifty and one hundred RON replaced the ten thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, five hundred thou- sand and one million-lei banknotes. Five, ten and fifty-bani coins were minted to replace the old five hundred, one thousand and five thou- sand-lei bills (which also had existed as lei coins). New two hundred and five hundred RON bills corresponded to the old amounts of two and five million lei, which previously had not existed as single banknotes.

The new notes were made of polymer instead of paper, but they retained much of their former iconography. They were slightly smaller than the previous bills, designed to match the size of Euro banknotes in order to keep machine processing simpler once Romania joined the Euro zone.

Figure 1 Ten thousand old lei (1994)

Figure 2 One new leu (RON) (2005)

The peculiar combination of old and new elements of the RON gave it a paradoxical air of familiarity and novelty, sameness and difference. To some, it was a positive change, signalling a new phase of transition. Amidst rumours that it might still be many years before the Euro would be used, the RON suggested a bit more security for Romania. Replacing dirty, wrinkled, paper bills with clean, smooth, plastic ones and getting rid of extra zeroes seemed like ways of measuring up to countries with more ‘advanced’ currencies. Yet despite such hopes, people also demonstrated reservations about fully embracing their money’s new identity. While nobody overtly challenged the new tender, many people seemed to resist incorporating it wholeheartedly into their daily lives. For several years after the appearance of the RON, they continued to refer to it using the terminology of the old post-communist lei, with its obsolete denominations of thousands and millions, and constantly compared the RON’s purchasing power to the lei that had come before it.

Upon my return to the field in 2006, I was well aware of the sensitive dynamics surrounding money, not from what I had been explicitly told in interviews, but from what I had gathered through my own experiences in Romania over the years. As an American who first travelled there in 1997, returning regularly over the following decade to research post-communist sites and practices of memory work, I had built up my own recollections about the leu, which had changed in appearance and value multiple times since my first visit to the country. My own feelings about handling lei were influenced by my exposure to a repertoire of often highly fraught social interactions stemming from people’s responses to years of unstable prices, fluctuating exchange rates and uncertain salaries, but also to the constantly changing physical nature of the banknotes themselves. It thus became difficult to transcend my own uneasy and conflicted feelings about the leu, or to treat Romanian currency as an impersonal economic unit, divorced from the social and political conditions surrounding its existence. Once I had become aware of my own process of ‘remembering money’ in this post-socialist context, I began to pay more attention to how such patterns played themselves out amongst my interlocutors, whose experiences with the leu spanned a longer and more nuanced history.

Instead of conducting a conventional analysis about Romanian currency as a symbol of national identity, or about the changing economy of the post-socialist sphere, I examine everyday instances where Bucharest residents have handled and talked about their money, revealing intense feelings about the past, present and future. Using examples from my fieldwork in Bucharest over the years, I investigate how the leu’s material changes during the past two decades, the contradictory ways that people have chosen to label it and its impassioned treatments in particular social situations incorporate everyday, ‘communicative’ processes of memory that convey some of the paradoxes and challenges of Romania’s current EU accession-era climate.

Related Literature

Classic analyses of money emphasise its economic and functional properties, reducing it to a store of value, a means of exchange, a method of payment or a unit of account (Gilbert 2005: 258; Ingham 2004: 3). More recent anthropological research rejects utilitarian theories of capitalist economies as rational, impersonal or socially alienating to examine ways that contemporary financial systems may connect individuals and communities. Rather than placing economies within evolutionary frameworks where culturally rich, ‘primitive’ trade networks have given way to the homogenising effects of ‘modern’ economic structures, this work focuses on the finer social, cultural and political gradations of exchange.

Such research includes semiotic studies of money’s ability to shift in meaning and function based on its varied locations through time and space (Carruthers and Espeland 1998; Gilbert 2005; Hart 1999). It moves away from classic comparative studies of ‘hard currency’ to focus on the fluctuating roles of ‘soft currency’ between and within communities (Guyer 2012). It analyses money’s associated material practices as subjective phenomena indexing and shaping the development of class and other social relations (Gilbert 2005; Hart 2005; Lemon 1998; Rogers 2005; Verdery 1995; Zelizer 1998). It examines money’s movements across borders (Green 2009a, 2009b), and its effects upon the production of unequal power relations (see http:// www.eastbordnet.org/events/2009/workshops/WS22009/reports/index.htm). It also explores money’s wider role in the construction and dis- solution of individual, cultural and national identities (Eiss 2002; Helleiner 1998), delving into the relational and qualitative aspects of finance. As Maurer writes (2006: 26), money is not only quantifiable; we must also pay attention to its ‘fictional’ qualities, its ‘metaphorical’ associations and its ‘imaginative’ possibilities.

Yet literature on money’s relationship specifically to memory is still relatively sparse. Hart discusses money as an instrument of collective memory through its ability to carry traces of human interaction (1999: 234). Yet this definition is too focused on group mentalities and ideas of ‘communal identity’ for me to apply to the diverse and contradictory perspectives I encountered in Bucharest. While Eiss describes financial transactions as ‘living archives’ of communities, documenting relationships between people at specific points in time (2002: 295), he does not address how such practices change within a given period, vacillating in their intersections with larger historical and political forces. The extensive research exploring the legacy and social impacts of currency changes (for example, Dodd 2005; Peebles 2011; Wolters 2001) tends to overlook the literal textures of these changes in people’s everyday lives.

Existing work that analyses money in post-socialist contexts has been useful for dispelling myths about the ‘evolutionary’ development of communist to capitalist economies (Creed 1995; Humphrey 1995; Platz 1995; Verdery 1993, 1995), and in providing accounts of how perceptions of money and consumption practices may mediate social interactions in periods of transition (Lemon 1998; Pesmen 1995, 1996; Rogers 2005; Smith 2003). Yet such analyses tend to concentrate on the disruptions, instabilities and ‘chaos’ (see Humphrey 2002) brought by post-socialism, emphasising elements such as inflation, pyramid schemes or high-level corruption (see also Musaraj 2011; Verdery 1995). They rarely examine post-socialist money specifically in relation to memory, or focus on its material role in generating emotions about the past, present and future (several exceptions include Abu Ghosh 2011; Pine 2002 and Tulbure 2008).

I attempt here to fill in some of the gaps in this literature, drawing primarily upon my fieldwork in Bucharest between 2006 and 2007. Because of the leu’s fluctuations over time, I also reference other visits to Romania in 1999, 2000, 2005 and 2009. My article takes its reader around Bucharest, revisiting various sites, tracing a map of ‘money events’ and their related memories. The map, however, is not drawn to any particular scale, and it defies chronology by jumping back and forth through time. In this sense, it is less of a cartography than a ‘chorography’, defined by Pearson and Shanks (2001: 64–5) as an attempt to ‘record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual’. Through such ‘deep mapping’ (ibid.) I wish to explore how money may trigger a range of emotional responses, becoming embodied in people’s everyday experiences of post-communist, accession-era Bucharest.

Capturing Communicative Memory

While the leu is not commonly discussed as an object of commemorative attention, I view it as an ordinary artefact embedded in unofficial, ‘communicative’ processes of remembrance work. According to Assmann and Czaplicka (1995), communicative memories are different from ‘cultural’ memories, which are explicitly mobilised in political discourses, commercialised as commodities and brands, materialised in public monuments and museums, or exploited in literary, artistic and academic works. Communicative memories, by contrast, are not always intentionally commemorative; they tend to occur in non-specialised, spontaneous contexts, through jokes or gossip, in waiting rooms, at the dinner table, in passing conversations. Such remembrances about money wove in and out of mundane interactions that I participated in and overheard; they surfaced along the paths I traversed daily throughout the city. Often inadvertently invoked, sometimes only fleetingly acknowledged or recognised as memorial, these references and invocations nonetheless formed a perceptible backdrop of remembrance practices about money in Bucharest residents’ day-to-day lives.

As with many of the examples of communicative memory I encountered, my interlocutors tended to consider money too ordinary and per- haps too close to their daily routines to identify it as memorial. Because of this, my understanding of the links between money and memory stemmed more from indirect observations than planned interviews. Often it was the offhand comments I had jotted down in my field notes, points that did not seem so relevant to my research at the time, which led me to more in-depth considerations. One friend said to me, ‘Our money has no memory whatsoever! It has changed so many times over the last century that at this point, it has nothing to do with what came before it’. But even such perceptions about the absence of memory constitute a set of recollections. The very fact that the leu has gone through so many recent transformations means that any Romanian over the age of ten will likely possess first-hand memories about it. And any understandings of its current significance will necessarily be loaded with associations related to its precarious and shifting past.

The Many Faces of a Banknote

The leu was first issued in 1867, when the three Romanian principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania were struggling to unite during their final years under the Ottoman Empire. From Romania’s recognition as an independent state in 1878, to its territorial expansion and unification in 1918, to its occupation by the Soviets in 1947, and through the subsequent communist and post-communist periods, the leu frequently changed in appearance and value, but continued to be known as the leu, an implicit affirmation of its legacy as Romania’s first and only legitimate national currency. After the 1989 revolution, the changes in the banknotes’ iconographies blatantly announced a different political order, affirming an official break with the communist past and a reconnection to pre-communist Romanian identity and history. Landscapes depicting the socialist emblem of wheat-stalks over a rising sun and other sites of agricultural and industrial production gave way to portraits of Romanian poets, artists and intellectuals, and scenes of monasteries, churches and other national and historic institutions.

The design and imagery of a nation’s currency is often said to pro- mote a sense of popular sovereignty and mutual belonging among its citizens. Helleiner (1998: 1409) has observed that recognisable symbols and figures on notes may encourage ideas of collective tradition and memory among members of a country, fostering the sense that individuals with a shared currency also share social, historical or political experiences. However, Romania’s post-1989 currency did not automatically contribute, as some might argue, to the ‘consolidation’ of national territory, or to the ‘production of national citizens’ in space (cf. Gilbert 2005: 377). Such an assumption fails to account for people’s idiosyncratic or critical feelings towards their own country’s politics. While citizens may recognise their common legacy, they do not all automatically share the same nationalistic sentiments simply because they are familiar with the same icons or emblems on their banknotes and coins. Neither do they unquestioningly accept this official state symbolism, though it may be a ubiquitous part of their daily transactions.

Ştefan (in his mid-thirties), for example, recalled to me how ‘ridiculous’ the early post-revolutionary banknotes had seemed, with their mixture of symbols that only confirmed to him the disorganised politics of the time. Nationalistic illustrations of ancient Dacian and Roman statues were placed alongside depictions of contemporary Romanian landmarks and Orthodox religious sites, along with the pre-communist royal coat of arms that was missing its crown because, as Ştefan explained to me, then-President Iliescu (also a former communist leader) was personally ‘opposed’ to royalist sentiments. Ştefan even seemed embarrassed that his country’s banknotes had contained such a mess of historical and political symbolism. At least among Ştefan and his circle of friends, the iconography of the post-revolutionary money was just as tenuous and uncertain as its rapidly depreciating value; it did not garner unanimous support or trust, or promise an obvious or coherent direction for Romania’s future.

Reading Money

Well into the first decade of the post-communist period, other aspects of the leu’s appearance served as important markers of its identity. During the late 1990s, I quickly discovered how to ‘read’ the material status of money (Lemon 1998: 30). The lei during that era were made of cheap, rough paper that turned very grimy and tended to tear quite easily. I often heard people complaining about the poor quality of the paper, which seemed to be inconsistent with widespread hopes that Romania would soon leave behind its ‘tainted’ communist history and join the ‘modern’ Western free market. Once the notes became too dirty or ragged, shopkeepers would refuse to accept them; if you were stuck with one of these, it could be very difficult to get rid of it.

Through these experiences, I became very conscious (and often anxious) about how my money looked, and whether or not it was ‘good’ enough to be accepted. Even coveted U.S. dollars with marks, creases or torn edges could be rejected at exchange houses. Tellers often scolded me for possessing these, and I learned to bring immaculate dollars with me on future trips from America. The emphasis on the importance of each bill’s appearance defies theories depicting it as a ‘universal commodity ... exchangeable for all others’ (Ingham 2004: 6), or as an item representing value but holding no intrinsic worth (Dominguez 1990: 18). Such responses to the physical qualities of both foreign and local notes demonstrate how money in Romania was not always perceived as equal to its exchange value — its worth was often subjective and socially influenced.

These perceptions were part of a broader repertoire of shifting memories and expectations about Romania’s conflicted and uncertain place in the global sphere. In 1999, a special two thousand-lei note was issued to commemorate that year’s solar eclipse, which had been visible from certain parts of Romania. The notes were made of polymer (the first plastic lei to appear), and were a pretty, sky-blue colour, containing a transparent window illustrating the solar system and the path of the eclipse across the country.

Figure 3 Plastic note: two thousand lei (1999)

These bills were issued in a limited number, and had a distinctive feel. While they were accepted everywhere as legal tender, many people preferred to save them as souvenirs. The scarcity of these notes, their unique, appealing appearance and the fact that they were plastic and therefore more resistant to damage than the other existing lei made them special. Their iconography combining a global phenomenon (the solar eclipse) with nationalistic overtones (its line of visibility from one end of Romanian territory to the other), lent these banknotes an air of authority, cosmopolitanism and promise. They were somehow futuristic, a taste of other, perhaps better, things to come.

Calculations and Denominations

In the summer of 2005, posters appeared throughout Romania, announcing the arrival of the RON. They featured diagrams indicating which new bills would be equivalent to the old ones, stating: ‘Everything will be simplified as of July 2005’. On 1 July 2005, the new notes and coins would enter into circulation. Between 1 March 2005 and 30 June 2006, shops could list prices in both old and new lei. Until 31 December 2006, both types of currency would be legally accepted. On 1 January 2007, the day Romania officially joined the EU, only the RON would be valid.

The posters claimed simplification. In reality, everything became more complicated. The new RON was theoretically equal in value to its immediate predecessors, as everything was to be uniformly reduced by four decimal places. This quantitative equivalency, however, was not played out in practice. As Maurer observes (2006: 23), money is often thought to represent straightforwardly quantifiable amounts, but numbers them- selves are all too often ‘ineffable’. While old lei and RON were technically equivalent, recalculating to the RON involved significant mental recalibrations that provoked memories about the leu’s previous values, destabilising its present-day significance. These fractured conceptions about its worth then impacted the actual prices of commodities themselves.

The RON’s reduction of zeroes made it necessary to create new banknotes worth more than one million lei, the highest bill under the previous system, as this amount (one hundred RON) would be too small for dealing with large-scale payments. With the introduction of two hundred- and five hundred-RON notes (equivalent to two and five million old lei), the idea of one hundred RON (one million old lei) was mentally depreciated, because it was no longer the most valuable banknote. The mere existence of the larger bills suggested the possibility of spending more money, even though most people could not literally do so. With the combined effect of the loss of the denominations of ‘millions’ and ‘thousands,’ as well as the appearance of a RON note worth five times more than the previously largest lei note, individuals became more at ease with the idea of handling larger sums of money. Yet due to memories of its higher purchasing power in the early 2000s, one hundred RON (one million old lei) continued to be treated as if it were a very large amount, as the thought of spending what used to be ‘a million’ still seemed prohibitive. Even when prices and salaries were significantly higher than they had been only a few years earlier, and one hundred RON did not go nearly as far as it used to, people referred to this note as ‘one million’, as if it carried the same weight as it had before, even though in practice it clearly did not.

At the other end of the spectrum, the shift to using RON eliminated the need for the smallest units previously in circulation. Because the reduction of zeroes would have turned one thousand old lei into 0.10 RON, which was not substantial enough to print as a note, the old one thousand-lei bill became a ten-bani coin. The five hundred-lei coin, which still had some practical value in the older post-communist system, turned into a virtually worthless five-bani coin, and the one hundred-lei coin became a useless one-ban coin. The result was that many low-range goods jumped many times in price because their equivalent in the new terms seemed ridiculously small. Whereas bus tickets had previously cost around twenty-five hundred lei, the RON equivalent of this would have been twenty-five bani, a seemingly insignificant amount. A bunch of dill or parsley sold at the outdoor market, which once cost a thousand lei, would have translated into a mere ten bani under the new system, also inconsistent with other prices at the time. Consequently, items such as bus tickets and parsley generally shot up to the equivalent of the new smallest banknote — one RON — even though mathematically, one RON was the equivalent of ten thousand old lei, which previously would have been an exorbitant price for such items. While salaries rose only slightly, low-end prices thus could increase tenfold, simply because the change in the number of zeroes meant that the smallest new banknote was now worth ten times more than the smallest old one.

This plurality of meanings in Romania’s currency prompted stories and anecdotes about its changes over time. Throughout the next few years, the RON continued to be evaluated in relation to its remembered counterparts. The latest polymer notes made the once ‘new’ post-communist paper lei suddenly seem ‘old’. Yet while people talked favourably about the RON as being more ‘modern’ than the earlier post-communist lei, in 2005 they still regarded it as unpredictable, having low purchasing power, and carrying the potential for further price rises in the future. These uncertainties made the older leu seem more familiar and even more reliable in retrospect, even though throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it had been disparaged and treated with suspicion. Simmel’s ‘ideal world’ (Ingham 2004: 66) where money would attain a ‘neutral’ position agreed upon and maintained by a social community, with commodities’ values reflecting these preferences, was nowhere in sight.

The Language of Money

Just as money can be read as a symbolic referent, a social system and a material practice (Gilbert 2005: 361), its discursive patterns also must be considered. After the RON appeared in 2005, people continued to use the terminology of the old leu, with its denominations of ‘thou- sands’ and ‘millions’, even when they were paying with RON. For example, people would often refer to the sum of their ten-RON purchase as ‘one hundred thousand’, knowing full well that no thousands were to be seen and that they would be paying with a ten-RON note. Because this language was inconsistent, actual amounts of money could only be determined in context.

In 2006, when both versions of lei were still in circulation, the discourse was very much in flux. Cashiers would either tell you the total price in old lei, stating the amount in thousands and expecting you to make the calculation of removing four zeroes to pay in new lei, or they would state the price in old lei, but without the word ‘thousand’, so you could not be certain whether the price was in old or new lei. At that point, I was not yet ‘fluent’ in the new money or the rules for addressing it. In my field notes from August 2006, I described one of my first supermarket transactions after the RON had entered into circulation:

The other day I bought some water and yogurt and juice at the corner shop. The cashier rang it up and told me, ‘Eighty-three.’ So I took eighty- three RON out of my wallet and handed it to her. She looked shocked. ‘No, no, no!’ she said to me, and gave me back most of the bills. I had actually given her the equivalent of eight hundred and thirty thousand old lei, ten times as much as I should have. Then I realised that when she said ‘eighty-three,’ she actually meant eighty-three thousand old lei, but she just hadn’t explicitly followed up with the ‘thousand.’ She had been using the old terminology in a new way. And the amount she was conveying to me was actually equal to eight new lei and thirty bani.

It took me a bit of time to realise that there was some logic to the apparent disorder. Prices under ten RON (or one hundred thousand old lei) often would be conveyed in denominations of old lei, but without the word ‘thousand’. For example, if a cashier told you ‘seven’, that meant seven thousand old lei, even though one might easily think that it meant seven RON. You would have to add three zeroes to the cashier’s amount to arrive at the implicit ‘seven thousand’, and then remove four of them to calculate the equivalent of 0.70 RON, or seventy bani. Prices over ten RON often would be indicated in denominations of old lei, but include the word ‘thousand’ after the amount, making the translation to RON a more straightforward process of sim- ply removing four zeroes. But when the price was less than one RON, it would be stated in denominations of old lei with the word ‘thousand’ included, even though the reference was to bani, rather than lei. As lower-end prices had shot up so drastically, it would be easy to assume that ‘five thousand’ meant five RON (fifty thousand old lei), but it actually meant five thousand old lei, which in RON would be fifty bani.

During and after the official transition to RON, it was impossible to engage in financial transactions that did not involve memory, as all purchases entailed these elaborate calculations and comparisons. The tangle of zeroes was often too much for my brain to handle, and some- times I would be reduced to desperately holding out a fistful of bills to cashiers, trusting that they would select the appropriate amount. I frequently observed others doing the same, particularly elderly people who seemed utterly overwhelmed by the situation. For several years after the introduction of the RON into Romania’s market, the dis- course around financial transactions remained messy and unclear, evoking irritation, annoyance and bewilderment as to how to deter- mine correct amounts and communicate them to others. It was not unusual to see restaurant menus with two sets of price lists: those in old lei, as well as their equivalent in RON, nicknamed ‘difficult’ or ‘heavy’ lei [lei grei], a word-play referencing not only the complicated economics, but also the logistical and social difficulties in coming to terms with it. Towards the end of 2007, even when the old lei were safely out of circulation, it was still common for people to refer to prices using the obsolete denominations. By 2009, most cashiers were stating prices in the new denominations, though I still occasionally would hear references to ‘thousands’ and ‘millions’.

Why was it that even four years after these changes, so many Romanians still referred to prices using the leu’s earlier (post-communist) denominations? As several people pointed out to me, it should have been easier to switch back to pre-1989 denominations, since ‘thousands’ and ‘millions’ were used only during the fifteen years following the revolution, while ‘tens’ and ‘hundreds’ had been the norm during the previous forty-five years. People’s reluctant linguistic adjustments may have been partly due to the complicated mathematical calculations, but they also may have been linked to a widespread uncertainty about the new RON, whose appearance had made the cost of living more expensive while salary levels remained more or less the same. Even as Romania was embracing potential opportunities as a member of the EU, the continued excessive prices and inaccessibility of certain idealised living standards meant that the RON failed to ease people’s financial worries about the future. By retaining the language associated with the earlier post-communist lei, people invoked unspoken memories of the 1990s, when prices were lower and there was still a sense of idealism and hope that Romania’s ties with Europe and the West would bring prosperity and security (see ‘Romania Starts to Rebuild’ 1997).

The Great Change Crisis

With the many different forms of lei and RON that I handled during the late 1990s and 2000s, I regularly encountered problems when I did not have the exact change required for my purchases. Even in places where one would not expect a shortage of change, small notes and coins were either extremely scarce, or cashiers simply did not want to relinquish them to customers. I frequently found myself in situations where the vendor was not able (or willing) to break the bills I wanted to use, even when these bills were small, because there was ‘no change’ to give in return. If a shop happened to be short on coins, you might be given a stick of gum, some sweets, or a couple of Paracetamol as a substitute. Sometimes you might walk away with no change at all. It seemed that shopkeepers would rather lose the business than be responsible for finding the change themselves.

My friends and acquaintances also regularly experienced such behaviour; yet none of them could explain to me the logic behind it. Humphrey (2002: 67) describes nearly identical practices in post-Soviet Moscow as small-scale rackets serving to dismantle and simultaneously rebuild aspects of Soviet society in the chaos of transition. Peek and Kasprzak (2012) have recently reported on large-scale thefts of chewing gum from U.K. retail shops by Romanian ‘organised criminal gangs’, enabling many shopkeepers in Romania to use the gum as change instead of currency. Several of my friends told me they made a point of carrying around small change to avoid these situations, but since I was not always so prepared, often I would be forced to leave the items I wanted to buy, and walk up and down the street asking neighbouring shopkeepers to break a fifty thousand-lei (five RON) or one hundred thousand-lei (ten RON) bill (equivalent to two and four U.S. dollars in 2007). In these cases, money simply ceased to function as money, the ‘promissory note’ that it legally was. Defying Simmel’s theory that money’s purchasing capacity stems from an overarching trust in its theoretical value (Ingham 2004: 74), here was the bizarre situation where too much money had no value at all, leaving its possessor powerless.

The heated emotions surrounding these types of interactions challenge Simmel’s claim that monetary transactions lead to relationships of ‘sheer objectivity’, where ‘the personality of those involved appears wholly indifferent in spite of mutual dependency’ (Simmel 1978 [1907], quoted in Poggi 1993: 66). Such expectations of ‘proper’ shop behaviour indicate present-day practices of communicative memory actively at work. In 2007, for example, I would regularly go to a certain shop in my neighbourhood to buy bottled water, exchanging my two empty glass bottles for two full ones, which cost seventy bani each. For a few weeks in a row, when I would pay with a one-leu note and a fifty-bani coin, the shop had no ten-bani coins to give back to me. For three weeks I walked away without my change. When it happened again, I told the cashier, ‘This is the fourth time you haven’t given me my ten bani back, so next time I am going to just pay you one leu for both bottles of water’. Instead of apologising or agreeing with me, the woman told me sternly, ‘It’s also your responsibility to bring correct change. You can’t expect us to have so many coins when all the customers come in without the proper amount of money’. I replied, ‘Yes, but what happens to all of those coins that you never give back to your customers?’ She then fished a ten-bani coin out of her own purse and begrudgingly gave it to me.

It was not that I was concerned about losing my ten bani, worth around four U.S. cents, but rather that I wished to make a point about not wanting to submit to these petty profiteering practices. While such a perspective undoubtedly points towards my American, capitalist upbringing, where ‘the customer is always right’, it also highlights the way in which business transactions in Bucharest could evoke tense memories about social relationships between consumers and providers of goods during communist times. As Verdery explains (1991: 423), the socialist rationale was for the bureaucratic apparatus to maintain maximum control over the supply of goods, rather than the capitalist aim of managing demand and profit. Shopkeepers, as intermediaries to the state distribution system, came to wield enormous power because of their control over these supplies.

In such instances, the shopkeeper’s authority replaced the state authority traditionally responsible for fulfilling the promise of money’s value (see Ingham 2004: 76). As many people recounted to me, during communism, Romanian shopkeepers were in a higher class (in terms of income level, as well as social and material ‘possibilities’) than trained professionals such as engineers or economists. Auto mechanics would fix shopkeepers’ cars for free; doctors would give them preferential treatment, all for the sake of maintaining relations with those who had the keys to goods that were constantly in shortage. Any personal connections with shopkeepers could give an ordinary citizen the chance to acquire a little extra of whatever was available, or to access commodities that were difficult to find. As my friends described, such relationships of dependency forced them into assuming attitudes of deference and subservience as customers, which fanned the shopkeepers’ displays of superiority and self-importance. Echoes of these roles could be seen to persist in financial transactions years later, in many post-communist countries (Humphrey 2002: 46; Musaraj 2011: 100). Humphrey (2002: 45) analyses similar dynamics in post-Soviet Moscow shops as continuations of power imbalances produced by the unreliable communist system of allocating goods. The sense of absolute power that shopkeepers still held over customers, she argues, was less about ‘corrupt’ or ‘immoral’ practices, and more related to memories of the ‘articulation of socio-political hierarchies’ of the people who constituted ‘the state’ during the Soviet era (ibid.: 146).

While similar social dynamics in Bucharest may have been linked to ‘leftover’ communist-era relationships, other factors also likely influenced their occurrence there. In these instances, monetary transactions — specifically the lack of small change — served as a medium through which memories of power imbalances could be re-enacted and re-experienced. Recollections of banknotes’ greater relative values during the early post-communist years additionally may have contributed to the cashiers’ stern reluctance to break notes that until recently had been considered large and difficult to use. Such practices of communicative memory point to how certain purchasing habits and attitudes from the recent communist past could cling subtly yet tenaciously to people’s impressions and anticipations about the future, but also signal the underlying ambivalences that many Romanians felt regarding their new foothold in the ‘global’ economy.

Conclusions

One afternoon in 2009 I happened to walk past a flea market in the centre of Bucharest, and was surprised to see several stalls featuring collections of banknotes and coins. I spoke with one of the vendors, a 64-year-old man named Marian, who told me that he had been collecting money as a hobby since he was eighteen. He confirmed that it had been illegal to possess foreign currency under Ceaușescu, but explained that if you were a dues-paying member of the official Numismatist club, declaring any new acquisitions to the authorities and pledging not to use the money for functional purposes, you were free to collect whatever you liked.

Marian enthusiastically showed me some of his albums containing Romanian bills dating from the early twentieth century to contemporary times. He was particularly fond of the ones featuring King Mihai’s portrait (the last of this kind had been issued in 1945), and he offered me one for free, along with a one million-lei note from 1947 (a rare period of inflation in the wake of the Second World War). When he saw that I was curious about communist-era money, he gave me five, ten, and fifty-lei notes dating from 1966. He recalled that the average salary during his working lifetime had been 2000 lei per month, and until the revolution there had been ‘no such thing’ as inflation. He explained how prices under Ceaușescu had always been the same, how dependable the economy used to be, and how even though there were not many goods available, everyone had money, employment and a place to live. ‘Today’, he told me, ‘there is everything you could possibly want in the shops, but not enough money to buy it’.

As this example demonstrates, the leu was valued both for aesthetic and social reasons. Talking about his collection awakened Marian’s memories of the political dynamics connected to different generations of lei, and pointed to his uncertainties and dissatisfactions with the current political system. Here was an instance where money transcended its function as a medium of exchange, as well as its quantitative value as a collector’s item. Marian’s gesture of gifting me parts of his collection revealed money’s capacity to play a qualitative and communicational role. Our conversation underlined the leu’s affective qualities, and its potential to provoke memories revealing a mix of emotions about Romania’s past, present and future.

Hart writes (1999: 234) that money’s power stems from its potential to follow human interactions and exchanges, and from its capacity to function as an act of remembering, rather than from its existence as an object in itself. Others have claimed that as cash is increasingly giving way to plastic and electronic forms of payment, money is less palpable now than in the past (Carruthers and Espeland 1998: 1396; Maurer 2005: 100). But I suggest that its presence as a tangible object is partly what lets money so effectively trace these types of interpersonal exchanges. By highlighting perceptions of money’s material and imagerial qualities, I have accessed memories and emotions ordinarily embedded in the invisible realms of the imagination (Irving 2010: 132). I have steered away from discourses portraying money as a cause of social alienation, an item ‘whose only currency is abstractions divorced from real life’ (Brown 1970 [1959]: 211). I have also avoided treating it as a ‘neutral’ symbol merely standing in for value, or creating one-dimensional social relations of credit–debit (Ingham 2004: 63). Instead I have underlined its contingent functions and its potential to connect to multifaceted and sometimes contradictory emotions, associations and recollections.

The leu’s complicated history has made it difficult for Bucharest res- idents to embrace a unified, coherent meaning of the RON — even when it was presented as facilitating a simpler and smoother transition to a ‘European’ future. The communicative memories surrounding Romanians’ present-day dealings with the leu reveal a more nuanced set of views about the country’s current social, political and economic status than much of the commemorative rhetoric dominating the media and other public spheres. As Creed writes (1995), one cannot assume that socialism is automatically associated with concepts of economic limitation, and capitalism with ideas of economic opportunity. People may be at once nostalgic for and critical of the communist past, as well as simultaneously hopeful and sceptical about the post-communist present and future.

By examining communicative aspects of memory production, I have looked beyond how memories are explicitly articulated through recognisable social and cultural narratives, to show how informal recollections spontaneously and continually surface through ordinary interactions and routines. Often hidden in the crevices of everyday life, not always recognised or acknowledged as memorial, these communicative encounters with the leu demonstrate complex feelings about old economic situations, inconsistencies in present-day accession-era values and behaviours, and ambiguous expectations about the future.

Alyssa Grossman is a postdoctoral fellow in Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her current research focuses around everyday sites and practices of memory in post-socialist Romania. As a visual anthropologist, she incorporates audio-visual media and other experimental methodologies into her work. Recent publications include ‘Filming in the Light of Memory’, in Transcultural Montage (eds Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr, Berghahn, 2013), and ‘Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues: Common- sense Experiments in Visual Anthropology’, in Experimental Film and Anthropology (eds Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, Bloomsbury, 2014).

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