Villages on Stage explores the politics of ethnicity, authenticity, and national identity in Moldova’s post-Soviet folkloric movement and elucidates how this movement and its luminaries are engaged in the promotion of Moldova as a “nation of villages.” Cash’s analysis reveals that, despite ethnographers’ and artistic directors’ insistence that their activities are apolitical in nature, folkloric performance and evaluations of traditional authenticity are intimately linked to hotly debated political issues of ethnic belonging and exclusion in contemporary Moldova. However ambivalent the post-Soviet folkloric community may be about national cultural politics, their methods of transforming village traditions to staged performances often “[overlook] key ways in which ethnicity intersects with social relations in villages and with broader patterns of rural-urban relations” (72).

Cash illustrates how the folklore community, through its focus on authenticity, has consistently been involved in the creation and proliferation of models describing and theorizing local forms of cultural diversity that challenge previous Soviet ethnic and cultural policies as well as more recent international discourses on multiculturalism. Moreover, the author illustrates how “current definitions of culture in Moldova provide many principles for exclusion, [but] they provide few principles for inclusion,” highlighting the folklore movement’s general problem of reconciling a national culture with the multiethnic nature of the Moldovan state (162).

Navigating the folklore community’s paradoxical, sometimes self-contradictory treatment of ethnic and national identity in performance as well as Moldova’s complicated political history vis-à-vis ethnicity and national identity, Cash’s analysis guides readers through the subtle and complicated politics of professionalism, representation, and authenticity.

Chapters 2 and 3 provide the political and historical context from which Moldova’s folklore movement emerged in the 1980s. In chapter2, Cash presents a nuanced explanation of Moldova’s historically diverse population, composed of Romanian, Russian, Gagauz, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Roma, and Jewish ethnic groups. She focuses on the ways that past nation-building projects, post-World War II cultural policies, and state organizational structures have constructed Moldovan national identities that vacillate between the inclusion and exclusion of various ethnic groups. This historical overview illustrates the multilayered, multiethnic fabric of national identity from which the post-independence Moldovan state emerged in 1991.

In chapter 3, Cash scrutinizes the effect of the state’s structural organization on folklore ensembles’ activities since the Soviet era. She establishes how state intervention in the Soviet period structurally conditioned folklore ensembles and cadres of “identity personnel” (i.e., ethnographers and artistic directors) and imbued their activities with political and ideological meanings. Despite changes in political ideology, the author argues that legacies of the Soviet state’s cultural institutions continued to circumscribe representations of the Moldovan nation, define old and new performance genres (including popular, folkloric, and after independence.

In three internal chapters of deep ethnographic description, Cash explores the emergence of the folklore movement (mi?carea folcloric?) as a response to Soviet representations of Moldovan culture, and she illustrates how the movement created, performed, and challenged different visions of Moldovan national identity and ethnic diversity. Her insights come from careful analysis of folklore festivals (chapter 4), village-based research conducted by Moldovan ethnographers (chapter 5), and the folklore community’s discursive treatment of two minority traditions (Jewish and Gagauz, chapter 6).

Through an in-depth discussion of the folklore festival circuit and those who partake in it, chapter 4 fleshes out the organizational and individual relationships that composed Moldova’s “folkloric community.” Specifically, she examines the construction and evaluation of authenticity—discursively rooted in the ethnographic authority of the village. I particularly appreciated how she problematized authenticity claims and the politics of ethnographic authority that took place at festivals: by presenting different individual’s (i.e., villagers, ethnographers, ensemble directors, members of the judging panel) assertions of authority regarding authentic village traditions, Cash illustrates for readers the many ways that authenticity and authority are created, evaluated, and—in some cases—denied in arbitrary ways.

Cash considers in chapter 5 the subtle and subconscious ways in which identity personnel have promoted a pro-Romanian vision of Moldovan culture and national identity in their ethnographic and artistic activities. Through a description of two field expeditions she took part in during her research, the author illustrates the process by which ethnographic field materials were collected and transformed into stage performances by folkloric and etno-folcloric ensembles for urban audiences. Cash maintains that these transformations tended to conceal the ethnic and migratory diversity of village life and produced a generic vision of “the village” as a common narrative trope of shared identity that aids in the “production and renewal of ‘village’ memories” among urbanized audiences (135).

In chapter 6, Cash uses extended quotes from formal and informal conversations with Moldovan ethnographers—primarily regarding Jewish and Gagauz traditions—to illustrate how discourses of village authenticity articulate problems of ethnic diversity and national belonging within the “nation of villages.” The author problematizes Moldovan ethnographers’ characterizations of minority traditions as relying on materials adapted from other national cultures (primarily Romanian) and convincingly illustrates how these discourses of cultural borrowing often translated into expectations of political indebtedness with nationalist overtones. Evaluating insiders’ and outsiders’ (i.e., villagers/ethnographers, ethnographers/general public) various access to authority in discussing traditional culture, the author shows how ethnographers’ definitions of culture “[recognize] the existence of other ethnic groups in Moldova but [deny] the existence or legitimacy of non-Romanian cultures in the region” (151).

In her conclusions, the author summarizes her findings and addresses more recent developments in the folklore movement since her initial field research (undertaken 1999-2001), specifically focusing on how the folklore community has been unable to articulate new goals that correspond to social and political changes of the 2000s.

Cash devotes the second half of her concluding chapter to a discussion of authenticity and authority in ethnographic practice. She considers American anthropology’s late-twentieth-century “crisis of representation” through the lens of Moldova’s folklore community and proposes a “critical ethnography of another ethnographic tradition” as one strategy for approaching anthropology’s perennial problems of reflexivity and ethnographic authority. While I found this discussion well-argued and highly interesting, it seemed somewhat out of place in the larger context of the book and may have functioned better as a stand-alone article on anthropological disciplinarity and ethnographic practice.

This is a thoroughly engaging read; however, I would have appreciated more discussion of how music and dance influenced the creation of authenticity in these ensembles. In her discussion of how authenticity is constructed on stage, Cash concentrates on material culture and repertoire selection at festival performances to the exclusion of musicological and choreographic description or analysis that could have helped clarify for readers the subtle differences between folkloric and ethno-folcloric performance genres. Ethnomusicologists and ethno-choreologists will notice this omission, but it did not significantly detract from the author’s larger arguments. Overall, Villages on Stage positively contributes to the ethnographic literature of the Balkans with larger significance for post-socialist studies of Europe focusing on traditional culture and ethnic conflict. It will also be of interest to scholars of nationalism as well as to multiple ethnographic disciplines (primarily anthropology, folklore studies, and cultural studies).

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[Review length: 1146 words • Review posted on June 5, 2014]