Ambiguous Transparency: Resume Fetishism in a Slovak Workshop

Author: Larson, Jonathan

Source: Ethnos, Volume 73, Number 2, June 2008 , pp. 189-216(28)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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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.

Keywords: Capitalism; Eastern Europe; writing; ideology; personhood

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141840802180363

Affiliations: 1: Miami University of Ohio, USA

Publication date: 2008-06-01

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