Folklorists have studied festivals, rituals, and celebrations throughout the discipline’s history. They have inscribed these kinds of events in central definitions of folklore within charter documents that lay out the scope of folklore study, and folklorists have continued to contribute to our understanding of a wide range of display events. Alin Rus’s book contributes to this scholarship by focusing on folk drama within festivals and rituals in Romania and Ukraine. He frames his study within scholarship on folk drama, and he enfolds his documentation and analysis primarily within anthropological approaches to peasant studies and scholarship on play as a form of expressive culture. Grounding his approach in peasant studies provides excellent resources for studying social life within small-scale communities, and Rus gives readers useful ways to connect contemporary approaches in peasant studies with folklife studies in the United States as well as earlier European regional ethnology. His use of insights from the study of play also is valuable, and he smoothly integrates this area of scholarship with his research.
The first third of his book is grounded in fieldwork that he completed in the 2010s. Rus completed a range of ethnographic studies of the Moldavian Play of the Goat and Play of the Deer, the Ukrainian Battle with Sticks, and various considerations of mumming in Europe. He provides excellent documentation, analysis, and interpretation of these events, and he offers wider insights into rural dramas and festivals that can be applied to other regional and ethnic cultural traditions. The quality of his research and writing, however, is uneven, and his overall analytical and interpretive commentaries are too speculative, grounded in too many overgeneralizations that cannot be fully supported.
The first two chapters are exemplary portraits of folk drama in two communities. The first is Heleşteni in Romania’s western Moldavia. The second is grounded in his research in Ruginoasa, located in Iași County, Romania. In the first chapter, Rus primarily explores and documents the Play of the Goat and the Play of the Deer. His in-depth descriptions provide vivid and engaging presentations of little-known folk dramas. He provides readers with a fine blend of historical context and contemporary analysis to bring these dramas to life. The documentation of festival and drama in chapter 2 focuses on the Battle with Sticks as well as a consideration of these street battles’ connections to mumming. Whereas the festivities in Heleşteni are enshrined with pride as expressions of local and regional heritage, the ritualized violence in Ruginoasa is perhaps what can be considered dark heritage. The battles can become violent, and local authorities generally avoid promoting these events as part of local heritage.
Rus offers insightful commentary on the cultural dynamics and symbolic meanings associated with folk dramas in both communities. A particularly strong aspect of his interpretation is his focus on the heritagization of more favorable elements of traditional culture and the omission and even erasure of other cultural activities that may present less agreeable and rougher aspects of village festivals. He grounds the battles in a wider cultural and historical context of mock battles and overtly violent dueling. Rus asserts that authorities who neglect these kinds of less-savory aspects of culture contribute to romanticized and even patronizing images of rural life. The critiques contribute to folklorists’ ongoing need to evaluate our own assumptions about the social base of folklore and folklife. A third chapter generalizes on the rural plays through comparisons of the ethnographic insights gleaned from the first chapters. He furthers his analysis with an in-depth consideration of peasant festivals and dramas throughout Europe as he offers interesting insight into deeply held values within these small-scale communities.
This first half of the book is strong and opens new ground for further scholarship. However, the second half of the book does not sustain the promise of Rus’s initial writing. This section offers three more chapters and an afterword. Chapter 4 provides an interesting overview of scholarship on mumming that enhances his analysis of the representation of peasant culture. The fifth chapter attempts to generalize his conclusions in relation to video games and globalization, and the last chapter places the folk dramas within a wider heritage discourse. The afterword offers generalization largely from the theories of language games from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a smattering of postmodernist platitudes sprinkled throughout the theoretical articulations.
Here is where the book suffers some major conceptual and stylistic problems. One of the chapters appears to be a reworking of his dissertation’s literature review. The narrative thread is thin, and there is not a strong and cohesive discussion of the intellectual history that ties this review into larger themes in his writing. Other sections often involve a review of points from a wide variety of writers, but there are so many disparate sources that many of the references feel simply dropped in without sufficient exposition and development. Along with his discussion of scholarship in anthropology, he also reviews writing by folklorists. There are major problems with his presentation of folklore scholarship on folk drama in general and mumming in particular. Notably, he doesn’t fully consider major works by Henry Glassie, Ray Cashman, and other folklorists who look specifically at mumming. He also displays a limited and dated generalized concept of folklore studies. He characterizes folklorists as having antiquarian orientations, and he provides little attention to current theories of performance and festival, ritual, and celebration that could have greatly benefited his own research.
Another major problem is first evident in numerous typographical and mechanical errors. While the minor glitches emerging in early chapters can be excused, the writing becomes harder to read in later chapters. Major problems with grammar affect how he makes some of his main points. Unclear references and even sentence fragments obscure what he is arguing. Even better copy editing and more careful proofreading, however, could not fully remedy another problem. Namely, he attempts to bring postmodernist discourse into his discussion of globalism within his conclusions. Ideas from both these camps have some potential for his consideration of folk dramas, but there are major conceptual challenges in making this kind of juxtaposition. He simply asserts that the folk dramas have gone global, but there is no evidence that these plays have any exposure near a level of global consumption. Rather, the viewing of these plays on internet sites is highly localized as the dissemination is limited due to linguistic barriers and little awareness that these folk dramas even exist. Compounding the problem of his limited discussion of what globalism even means is his vague idea of postmodernism. He does ask readers to consider some pomo themes such as the blurring of boundaries between folk and popular culture as well as the destabilization of cultural conventions, but there are major elements of postmodernism that simply do not square with his ideas about globalism. For example, that postmodernism rejects totalizing discourse.
Nevertheless, Rus demarcates clearly defined historical eras and he juxtaposes the global with the local. The problems that I have alluded to are perhaps excusable if readers ground themselves in the postmodernist trope of irony, but Rus needs to clarify his terms. His discussion of globalism is an unwarranted totalizing discourse, and many of his conclusions sketch out universal themes that also are antithetical to postmodernism. His interest in how mass and social media affect local display events has a lot of potential, and he offers interesting points to consider. However, the lack of clarity in his writing, and his jumbled presentation of scholarship generally obscures rather than elucidates many of his generalizations. Whereas the first half of the book is an excellent documentation and consideration of fascinating cultural traditions, readers will need to selectively mine some challenging prose to determine the value of his conclusions.
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[Review length: 1285 words • Review posted on February 12, 2025]