From Storeroom to Stage is a quest to understand the value of folk costumes. The start is promising: Alexandra Urdea and her colleague Magda Buchczyk are to participate in the planned 2014 re-exhibition of the collection of Romanian folk clothing and textiles gifted in 1956 to London's Horniman Museum. After about a year of work with the collection, Urdea set out to re-visit some of the villages from which objects had been collected (a quest tried twice by others, in 1981 and 1987). Meanwhile, Buchczyk documented the collection's Romanian and British institutional histories.

Urdea's project is compelling, and for a long time, the reader hopes that its story will be told. The two earlier attempts to revisit the objects’ villages failed mostly because of the highly-controlled travel itineraries that characterized cultural diplomacy and exchange in 1980s socialist Romania. In contrast, Urdea's movements as a citizen in postsocialist Romania were in no way hindered, and she reached her two destinations (one at each end of the Carpathians). Yet, she too abandons the original plan.

This time, the quest failed because social memories are hard to capture. The collection was well documented in terms of technical construction, object name and use, and basic biographical details about owners and makers. Urdea, however, sought stories attached to the objects: narratives about their making, use, and giving up. She also sought cognate objects that had not been accessioned, either because their “value” was different or because they had been made after the 1955 collection drive.

In each of the two villages she visited, Urdea succeeded in locating memories of only one object's original maker. In the first village, she was deterred by women's insistence that she buy things. She stayed much longer in the second village, but gave up the search for “context” of the Horniman objects after she was told that so many people bore the same surname that it would be impossible to locate the original “owner.” Perhaps the search would have been futile in the end. But then again, field research is rarely straightforward, and getting passably reliable information requires persistence and ingenuity. Urdea was also told that no archives existed for the House of Culture, only to have another informant lead her directly to them. Could she have found other routes to the meanings, memories, and value of the Horniman objects?

For a long time, the reader hopes that Urdea will pick up the themes indicated by the location of two owners: a demographic story about collectivization, urbanization, and migration, as well as a political story about remembering and forgetting. Instead, she turns to producing a historical ethnography of “culture” in Vrancea and of “folklore” in houses of culture. When this line is exhausted, she turns to mass media. The turn to historical ethnography is okay, but misses the long-promised and theoretically-buttressed object-stories.

In truth, my heart ached for Urdea as she detailed the refusals of village women to understand her quest; their insistence that she buy; her confusion over how to assign value …. Folklore can be a connoisseur's domain in which the standards of value and authenticity are hardly “objective.” Certainly, the standards are often shrouded in cultural intimacy, and one must join the conversation to understand it. Mrs. Popa (a Romanian ethnographer who visits the Horniman) hints as much: her stories tell of how teams of specialists worked together in the field, museums, and culture systems to carve out “folklore,” define its value, and trace its continuity. A novice folklorist (worse, anthropologist, whose training displaces almost all authority to informants) could hardly be expected to demand and control a sustained discussion of value or memory in a village house.

It is only when Urdea reaches urban recording studios that she gains the guidance and confidence of performers. The result is that Chapter 8 is exciting. Here, we hear the voices of oft-criticized folkloric “star” performers on their own efforts to acquire, mend, re-fashion, and preserve costumes. It turns out that they are not so crass after all, but careful to recognize the value of women's labor and sacrifices across time and space. They tread a fine line between innovation and respect for traditional aesthetic and material conventions. They too work in community, and they are humbled by both academic circles and local communities, even as they are criticized for being prideful. Most importantly, it is the performers who finally use objects to tell Urdea the stories of individual and collective loss that villagers would not or could not articulate.