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Abstract
This article considers how curricula vitae (C. V.s) reflect and contribute to the social and political conditions of their production. Working with observations of a 2001 workshop in Slovakia on how to write a new style of C. V. and with the related style of life chronicles from personnel files in socialist Czechoslovakia, I argue that this genre's social effects in different economic orders might arise from how authors couple or decouple the referent of a text to other actors in time and space. One ideology that I observed in the workshop encouraged shifts in notions of evidence. Such shifts, I argue, might be furthering the ideological work of creating new forms of personhood and inequality that underlie Slovakia's ‘transition’ to capitalism. Post-socialist C.V.s and socialist life chronicles appear to rise out of different graphic ideologies that govern how actors see themselves as social subjects.
Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by the Ford Foundation and by the International Institute of the University of Michigan's Ford Seminar in Social Sciences and Area Studies. Minor additional collection of secondary materials was done while on fieldwork under a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays grant. I would like to thank the following persons (in chronological order) for feedback and encouragement: Terry Woronov; Alaina Lemon and participants in the seminar ‘Monographs in the Ethnography of Speaking,’ Fall 2001 at the University of Michigan; participants at the 2002 Soyuz Symposium in Postsocialist Cultural Studies at the University of Michigan and at the 2002 Michicagoan Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago (especially discussant Judith Irvine); Elizabeth Dunn; Bonnie McElhinny and Elizabeth Keating; Edward Murphy and Chandra Bhimull; two anonymous reviewers for Ethnos and Nils Bu-bandt; and John Thiels and Deborah Michaels.
Notes
1. One Czech source whom I cite later in the article (Šiklová Citation2005) appears to refer to a životopis when the author writes of one's ‘biography’ This Latin phrase for ‘course of one's life or career’ also demonstrates the polyvalency. Michael Silverstein has pointed out to me that prose vita (or what I am calling ‘life chronicles’) were not unique to socialist Czechoslovakia, but have had their uses in personal files in the U.S.
2. A further example of this double standard is how several subjects of former socialist Czechoslovakia have characterized to me the joining of professional organizations as ‘opportunism.’ In the workshop that I describe, the instructor called it demonstrating interest in one's career.
3. I thank Andrea Gonová for setting up the opportunity to observe this workshop, and the instructor and participants for agreeing to my presence in it. My reconstruction of what transpired is from fieldnotes.
4. I was unable to follow up with participants, including the instructor, because soon after the event I returned to the U.S. On subsequent visits to Slovakia I have not been able to follow up with the instructor, who was based in a town that I do not frequent. I did arrange one meeting at her office, but an unforeseen event called her away. I spoke for about an hour with a colleague of hers instead.
5. An earlier reader found my use of the Slovak ‘pani’ (written with a lower-case ‘p’) to be condescending. My use of the title equivalent of ‘Mrs.’ in my pseudonym for the instructor follows from Slovak address practices where I had addressed her with the Slovak title and her last name. Slovaks often introduce themselves with just a last name.
6. I thank one anonymous reader for pointing out to me this more general tendency, such as in newspapers like USA Today.
7. The most public of Slovak linguists, Jozef Mistrík, author of multiple editions of authoritative works on stylistics, listed ‘economy and rationalization of the process of comprehension’ as one ideal of style (1979). The example of the socialist era c.v. however, shows how such ideas did not manifest themselves in the same forms.
8. While the workshop and brochure encouraged the use of ‘active verbs,’ the syntactic examples given in Slovak are phrases of nouns of process with corresponding objects. This shift is not my oversight. Such grammatical constructions reflect Slovak preferences over American ones in using nouns instead of verbs for ‘active’ phrasing. A secondary school teacher with whom I spoke after the session (and who did not attend the workshop) disputed the notion that use of active verbs to present oneself in a c.v. is new; she claimed that it also existed under socialism.
9. The Czech and Slovak Republics split from Czechoslovakia in 1993. Although some significant differences between the two parts of the former country existed in everyday life under socialism, the kinds of documents that people needed and the range of ways that people related to those documents were to my knowledge identical.
10. Sources estimate that into the early 1970s between a half and three-quarters of a million people were purged from their workplaces as politically unreliable (Kaplan Citation1993; Mlynárik Citation1996). The population at the time was less than fifteen million.
11. I have not been able to determine how much this structure of a c.v. was new to socialism or was inherited, as with many practices of writing and documentation, from previous political and economic regimes.
12. Šiklová reports that occasional workplace visits by representatives of a District Committee of the Communist Party also verified answers. She adds that a question on the questionnaire regarding the events of 1968–69 replaced earlier questions on attitudes toward World War II, events in Hungary in 1956, and so on.
13. My description of vita under socialism is based on having seen three: multiple versions for two Czechs spanning fifteen years, and a single one for a Slovak. I thank a U.S. scholar whom I shall leave anonymous for sharing with me the sample vita and corresponding documents that are included in this paper, and that were given to her for unconditional use in her research. I have sought to eliminate information that could identify the individuals concerned. Conversations with Zdenka Brodská and Mary Hrabik-Samal were extremely helpful for this portion of the paper. Slovak corroboration comes from conversations with three informants of different professional backgrounds (business, education, and public transportation), and the observation that the form of the c.v. that I describe here is identical with ones published in Slovak language arts textbooks from the period. I thank these friends kindly for their conversations with me.
14. This right was also an obligation: it came with a supposition that anyone not employed was leeching off the labor of others. Not having an employer listed in one's personal documents could raise eyebrows and provoke trouble in interactions with police such as when pulled over for speeding (Janouch Citation1990).
15. Another issue that I do not explore here for what kind of shift was taking place is local attitudes regarding modesty, which I would distinguish from attitudes of ‘accounting for oneself.’ At a level of national discourse on the nature of ‘Slovaks’ and ‘Slovakia's’ place in the world, many educators I have met and pundits I have read accuse their compatriots of second-guessing, ‘who am I to assert this?’ I point this out to problematize further a unified binary of ‘socialist’ and ‘capitalist’ mindsets.
16. This quality is not so different from one question on the socialist era dotazník. It asked something to the effect of: ‘are there any constructive (budovatel’ ské) innovations you have contributed?'
17. Various lustration campaigns have taken place sporadically since the fall of socialism.
18. Compare, once again, the East German job interviews recounted by Peter Auer.
19. One could argue that the more general ways that new Slovak laws make some information accessible and other protected demands certain skills in following and interpreting the law, another form of social capital.