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Volume 20, Number 2 

SELLING ONESELF, SELLING THE NATION: TRANSLATING SLOVAKS FOR THE EYES 
OF EUROPE 

Jonathan Larson University of Michigan 

© 2002 Jonathan Larson All Rights Reserved 
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An important element of post-1989 projects of 
“transitioning” Eastern Europe is socialization to 
new, Western-oriented practices and the 
construction of new kinds of persons. Such 
practices might include learning how to consume 
“appropriately” (Berdahl 1999), engaging in new 
forms of political participation (Verdery 1996), 
reorienting how one conducts scientific research 
(Replika: Hungarian Social Science Quarterly 
1996), and taking up new ways of conducting 
business (Wedel 1998). As I intend to 
demonstrate, it also demands particular skills of 
representation, of understanding oneself as a 
certain kind of subject and projecting a 
corresponding appropriate image into 
interactions with others. Moreover, learning such 
skills is as much about resituating one’s national 
identity as it is one’s person.  

In June 2001 I attended a workshop in 
writing curriculum vitaes that a Slovak NGO 
held in the public library of the city of Martin. 
One stated reason for such a session was the new 
economy of post-socialist East Central Europe: 
the existence of new kinds of employers, foreign 
and domestic, and the requirement they allegedly 
have of new linguistic genres for how 
employment seekers should represent themselves 
on the job market. Using tools of linguistic 
anthropology, I will analyze this instruction in 
writing a CV on two semiotic and pragmatic 
levels. First, in the act of representation 
described in this paper, it is supposed to translate 
“Eastern European” personhood into “Western” 
terms. The CV is a textual object that should 
facilitate new practices of the labor market 
particularly through semiosis, representing 
persons and even the nation iconically to diverse 
audiences. However, the construction of new 
individual subjects cannot occur without a 
realignment of the social relations in which those 
subjects are embedded. The CV thus acts in a 
second way of representing those social 
relations. It constructs new kinds of personhood 

through referential, pragmatic, and 
metapragmatic rearrangements of the 
individual’s relations to past events and other 
actors. 

Western-style CVs are supposed to 
“map” and “translate” both Slovak individuals 
and the nation into terms that Western investors 
or Slovak adherents to neo-liberal ideologies can 
comprehend. This act is an important part of 
creating faith and trust, critical components of 
these ideologies. Anthropologist Elizabeth Dunn 
has called the production of other types of texts, 
accounts and audits, “‘rituals of verification,‘ 
tools that produce comfort (for investors, the 
polity, or the market) rather than critique" (Dunn 
1999:43). The nationed-ness of those who 
engage with Slovak CVs is also critical to this 
paper. The new CV, as discursively constructed 
in the workshop, represents a neoliberal 
performance of an embedded nation.  

My claim here is identical to one that 
Michael Kennedy has made about businessmen 
in Poland: their espousal of (neo)liberal ideology 
constructs the nation while it avoids naming it, 
and does so in terms of individual behavior. 
Increased efficiency of individual workplace 
behavior is not only supposed to enrich oneself, 
but also the nation (Kennedy 1999). While in 
this paper I am not able to explore in great depth 
such a link between Slovak attitudes toward 
work and the nation, I can note here that a 
program I viewed on Slovak National Television 
in the summer of 2000 argued in exactly these 
terms. In the discursive case study of this paper, 
marketing oneself is marketing the nation; 
mapping and translating Slovak personhood into 
Western terms helps the individual actor in the 
labor marketplace while it contributes to an 
image of a Slovak nation as mappable, 
translatable, and ultimately worthy of trust in 
investment. I do not have time to go into issues 
of reception and uptake, but point out situated 
terms in which Slovak persons, and the nation, 

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Volume 20, Number 2

are currently constructed discursively in relation 
to Europe, America, and the West. 

The instructor of the workshop, whom I 
will call páni Migašová, opened by citing the 
need for such a session because most secondary 
schools still teach methods of CV writing that 
are old in comparison to developed (“rozvinuté“) 
countries. A first important lesson is that in 
today’s era “everything is based on advertising” 
(všetko je založené na reklame). Her statement 
creates a vocabulary to articulate this new genre. 
This new metalanguage of the CV in Slovakia 
that refers to advertising is one that indexes 
changes in social fields such as business, in 
notions of meritocracy, and in local ideologies of 
language that impart knowledge of English with 
social capital. 

First, Páni Migašová advertised and 
described the event as a “trening” or 
“workshop,” a new class of educational event 
grounded in neo-liberalism. It is up to the guests 
to “sell themselves” on the job market. One has 
to learn how to “evaluate oneself as a product” 
(zhodnotiť sam seba ako produkt). Everything is 
a competition in which all have an equal chance, 
but only the best are taken. Writing a CV is a 
skill of “advertising” (reklama) and “self-
presentation” (sebapresentácia) that is 
democratically available to all (cf. Benakova 
2000:4). Second, knowledge of English is crucial 
social capital. The“trening“ and its 
corresponding brochure made heavy use of 
English vocabulary even alongside Slovak 
equivalents: “fact sheet,” “job objective,” and 
“cover letter.” More particularly, the brochure 
provided mock CVs in English of Americans in 
Ohio and Connecticut as samples, followed by 
Slovak equivalents. The logic of this 
presentation is clear: one should learn how to 
translate the life experience of a Slovak into 
American or “Western” terms. English catalyzes 
this process. 

This frame of neo-liberalism sets terms 
for a subsequent reconfiguration of Slovakia and 
Slovaks in time and space. Páni Migašová 
advised the group not to write whether one is 
from a “robotnická rodina” (working-class 
family). This reference to an important piece of 
personal data in the socialist era showed how the 
instructor sought to construct the new CV and 
the New Capitalist Man in relation to the past. 
Páni Migašová’s recommendation reflects 
ideologies of the New Labor Order. One’s social 
affiliations of age cohort, place, and family 
background no longer visibly matter on the CV. 
They no longer matter because of how ideologies 

of the transition reorganize space and time in the 
creation of new national bodies and their 
subjects. The world outside of Slovakia does not 
evaluate potential employees by such criteria, 
and that world is the world that Slovakia will 
become. In similar fashion, the instructor 
asserted that “vonku vo svete” (outside in the 
world) one’s education is an on-going process. 
Therefore participants should dedicate space on 
their CVs to education, as “that era is also 
coming to Slovakia” (táto doba pride aj na 
Slovensko). “Outside” or “the West” represents 
an evolutionary point in time that Slovakia is 
soon to reach. This particular construction of 
space also collapses it: as the sample CVs in the 
brochure are all American (courtesy of the Peace 
Corps employee who assisted its construction), 
“outside” and “the West” melts into “America.”  

The form that one uses for the CV also 
figures in this reconfiguration of national space. 
CVs (under socialism as well) contain a pressure 
toward standardization of form to facilitate 
standardized translation of subjects for decisions 
in human resources. Thus, while páni Migašová 
told participants of the workshop that the CV is 
supposed to reflect an individual’s unique 
abilities, the means for the construction of this 
textual representation themselves draw on 
preexisting texts (Bauman and Briggs 1990; 
Silverstein and Urban 1996). Organization of 
information in the CV follows guidelines of 
captions, sequence, and syntactic and lexical 
presentation that others have used and that a 
reader expects to see: these characteristics are 
what make a CV recognizable as a CV. As I have 
already demonstrated, the workshop suggests 
that the text artifacts of the genre of the CV in 
which Slovak authors should embed their own 
textual representations of self are American. 
Thus, Slovaks translate these representations of 
themselves into American textual regimes as 
they are supposed to sort Slovak subjectivities 
into American categories of personhood, in turn 
re-contextualized as “Slovak.” 

The presentation of how to write a CV 
that I discuss here also standardized the national 
and transnational communities of expertise in 
which these texts circulate. The categories that 
the brochure posits as examples of workplaces 
are “administration,” “management,” and 
“communication.” To speak to the community of 
“administration,” one should use in the CV verbs 
such as “monitor,” “lead,” “coordinate,” 
“organize,” and “be in the know.” For 
“management” one should use “coordinate,” 
“direct,” “motivate,” “organize,” and “plan.” The 

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Volume 20, Number 2

construction of these communities based on 
occupational divisions of labor, and the creation 
of labels for the skills that such communities 
desire standardizes networks of labor and 
language use. Neither differences between 
Slovak, American, and “Western” 
administrators, managers, advertising agents, etc. 
are supposed to exist nor are differences among 
them within respective national bodies.  

Another way the new CV semiotically 
and pragmatically reorganizes space and time is 
in terms of more immediate social relations. Páni 
Migašová noted in the attempts of workshop 
participants to construct their own CVs that they 
paid too much attention to “wheres” and 
“whens” and not enough to “whats.” I argue that 
many “whats” of claimed accomplishments 
depend more than “wheres” or “whens” on the 
positionality and cultural background of the 
observer. Making individual, agentive claims 
about “whats” is only possible by erasing the 
social relations that were a part of those events. 
Páni Migašová asked students questions such as 
“what were your responsibilities?” “What 
leading positions have you held?” “Did your 
employer take any of your suggestions?” 
“Everything that you do” can go into your CV, 
including temporary work, clubs, and 
professional associations.  

This career should be linearly mappable 
and predictable. The workshop’s brochure opens 
with a remark of how the CV itself “speaks” like 
an advertisement: “’Invite me to an interview 
because I am worth your investment of time in 
me. On the basis of what I have demonstrated in 
the past, I am a prospective employee for your 
company into the future” (Benakova 2000:4). 
This predictability, of course, turns on notions of 
transparency and human agency, that the 
individual really is representable on paper in her 
own words, and that an individual’s lifecourse is 
subject to acts of will. Thus, one should build 
into the CV a list of tasks approached and 
completed:  

“Recommendation and implementation 
of an educational program for new employees of 
the organization” 

“Creation and introduction of a new 
system of communication for the firm with 
computer networking” (Benakova 2000:13) 

These tasks appear as events isolated in 
time and space from ongoing social processes 
and actors. The separation is a pure heuristic 
(although not posited as such) that is both 
subjective and embedded in specific cultural 
assumptions about individual agency: the 

individual author of the CV makes claims on the 
boundedness and resolution of these tasks that 
only certain notions of factuality can support.  

In sum, the training session constructed 
a new basis for personhood semiotically in a 
variety of ways. First, it grounded the CV as an 
agent of a new era, a meritocratic age in which 
individuals must aggressively sell themselves. 
English is an important resource for translating 
“Eastern” personhood into “Western” terms. The 
new CV makes a break with socialism in content 
and form. It reconfigures in national time and 
space both social relations and the position of the 
individual in social action. It justifies neo-liberal 
ideologies of transparency that claim that 
individuals, and therefore societies, can be 
mapped and translated in standardized, Western 
terms. It thereby seeks to instill both Slovaks and 
Western investors with a faith that Slovakia is in 
fact on a path to joining Europe or the “normal” 
countries. 

These last comments of course beg 
further questions of what is made transparent or 
perhaps obfuscated, to whom, and with what 
consequences. How are current social relations 
and persons really not as represented in the form 
of the CV discussed here and what problems or 
opportunities does this disjuncture present? This 
paper did not consider such questions of 
reception. I have tried instead to locate one 
particular discursive construction of personhood 
and the nation within a broader trend of 
processes in post-socialist Europe. If some 
aspects of this discourse do not sound 
particularly unique to that milieu, that is partly 
my goal. In an anthropological tradition of 
“familiarizing the foreign” and “de-familiarizing 
the familiar,” I seek to throw the analyst’s gaze 
back upon the West, and raise questions of who 
or what constructs the categories that are a model 
for “integrating” Eastern Europe. 

Note 

Thanks to Terry Woronov, Alaina 
Lemon, and the seminar “Monographs in the 
Ethnography of Speaking,” Fall 2001 at the 
University of Michigan for early feedback. The 
author thanks as well the participants of the 
SOYUZ Symposium for their comments, many 
of which helped with work on a longer version 
of this paper that has been submitted for 
publication to the Journal of Linguistic 
Anthropology. The longer version includes 
comparative images of CVs that may be of 
interest to readers of this shorter, conference 
piece. 

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Volume 20, Number 2

References  

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Poetics and performance as critical 
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Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59-
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Dunn, Elizabeth 1999. Accounting for change: 
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Kennedy, Michael D. 1999. The Labilities of 
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Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban 1996. 
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Wedel, Janine R. 1998. Collision and Collusion: 
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