Tags: Greenbelt, interviews, Moldova, fieldwork, language, Christianity
Date: 01 September 2007 13:56:23
Yesterday's interview went well. Very well in fact. Two things really are the case when it comes to research in eastern Europe. 1. It's not what you know it's who you know, and 2. The world is a village. Everyone knows everyone. Which is very handy - if you can get your foot in the door with one person, it can open all sorts of other doors. This was a potentially extremely useful contact, so I'm really pleased. We knew a number of the same people in Romania, and she knew a number of people I'd tried (unsuccessfully) to contact in the past.
The trouble with making new contacts though is that there comes a point where you have to say this is enough, I could keep going with this but I have to actually stop and write something now. The thing about my subject being so interesting is that I don't know how to identify that point or be disciplined enough to actually draw a line under it. I still want to keep wandering down all the interesting alleys and side-roads! But I also want to actually stop doing this at some point, hopefully in the next 2 years, so I'm going to have to figure this out somehow!
I did make it up to town for Romanian Language Day. I saw a couple of stages with traditional music and dancing going on, one with a sign proclaiming the prominence of the Romanian Language. Language is a huge political issue here in Moldova. The pro-Romanians on both sides of the border (possibly hankering after reunification) bang on about Romanian. The Romanian speakers who don't want to be linked with Romania bang on about the language being Moldovan, and over many decades there's been all sorts of debates and arguments about the differences between the two (as an outsider, the differences appear to me to be like the differences between UK and American English, but what do I know?). And both groups appear to be intent on annoying the Russians, and Ukrainians for that matter, both of whom are significant minorities here. Some signs are in Romanian and Russian (both are official languages in the country so all the signs on Important Buildings are bi-lingual), others (some street signs for example) are in Romanian in both latin and cyrillic scripts, and whatever the Romanian/Moldovan-promoters say, their accent is very Russian. Sometimes I have to listen very closely and people I've thought were talking in Russian were actually speaking Romanian (a very very different language). Fascinating stuff.
I'm still thinking through Greenbelt stuff. The theme was "Heaven in Ordinary", and yet I had this nagging feeling all through the weekend (starting especially at the Trance Mass) that Ordinary isn't enough. I think that's probably why I howled all the way through the Mass. God's on my case again. Argh.