Performing Hospitality in Moldova: Ambiguous, Alternative, and Undeveloped Models of National Identity

Abstract

This paper examines performances of hospitality in everyday life to explore the lived experience of “being Moldovan”. National identity in Moldova can only be understood by reference to the peculiarities of history—to the presence of a neighbouring kin-state (Romania), a multiethnic population, Soviet ideology, and successive efforts at nation-building. The instabilities, contradictions, and ambiguities of national identity are also experienced and interpreted, as they are regularly performed in informal and formal settings. The “hospitality” of Moldovans—performed daily through linguistic code-switching, in practices of buying and selling, in life-cycle celebrations such as weddings, and in the official greeting and welcoming of dignitaries and visiting delegations by folk-costumed performers—is, paradoxically, an important site of this experience of ambiguity. The same set of practices both renders its performers “masters of their own houses”, while at the same time revealing the limits of the metaphor.

Keywords:

• Hospitality
• Performance
• Nation-Building
• Republic of Moldova

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on field research conducted in the several projects between 2001 and 2010, which were variously supported by the Individual Research and Exchange Board, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the National Endowment for the Humanities in coordination with the American Councils for International Education, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Additional data and concrete suggestions for improving the text have come from Virgiliu Bîrlădeanu, Varvara Buzilă, Ludmila Cojocaru, Rozita Dimova, Stephen Gudeman, Julian Welch, and an anonymous reviewer. I am grateful for the support of these individuals and the several institutions which supported the research. Responsibility for the arguments and opinions expressed here, however, remains mine alone.

Notes

There are small populations of Gagauz in Bulgaria, Turkey and some other Soviet republics, but they have no “kin-state”.