of the Eurovision machine in order to make a claim about Ukrainian political desire. Thus, the pop star’s body is put on display in what might be called a pop “ritual of sovereignty,” in which Ukraine’s European-facing desires for political sovereignty in line with the values of liberal democracy are expressed through deference and submission (cf. Bernstein 2013b).8
In its tactics, the appropriation of Hutsul elements into this Ukrainian popular music rehearses themes prominent in the scholarly literature on globalization and the world music industry: the reproduction of hegemonic relations between cities and villages (Taylor 1997), the masking of compensation mechanisms (Meintjes 1990; Feld 2000), the denial of modern subjectivity to peoples on the margins of power, and, less cynically, the “intimate entanglement of sounds and bodies in music and dance underpinned at the ideological level by an ‘all out relationism’ and ‘empathetic sociality’” (Stokes 2004, quoting Erlmann 1999, 177). But the interpretation of “Wild Dances” as an attempt to subvert marginalization through strategic auto-exoticism is further complicated by the complaints that were voiced by many of the very people that Ruslana constructed as the Ukrainian subaltern: the villagers of Kosmach and other villages in Hutsulshchyna. For some Hutsuls, the shame of being called “wild” outweighed the fact that Ukraine had won, as many put it, “the attention of Europe.” Segments of the community stereotyped as the “exotic other” attempted to resist the tropes of othering that were thrust upon them through the rhetoric of Ruslana’s press releases and the branding of her product. This attitude exposes a tension predicated on the power of postcolonial representation, here rendered as the wish for affiliation with legitimizing discourses of civilization that are mostly, but not always, opposed to discourses of Wildness. For some Hutsuls, the rejection of Wildness was demarcated strenuously, as an explicit alignment with the sovereign imaginary that desired inclusion in the European Union and that would finally shed the burdens of exoticism that mark Hutsul modernity.
PRIDE, SHAME, AND SHAROVARSHCHYNA
In 2009, I asked Mykhailo Tafiychuk, the patriarch of the Tafiychuk family of musicians, for his opinion on Ruslana’s Eurovision-winning “Wild Dances” as we sat in his kitchen in the isolated Hutsul village of Bukovets’. His initial reply was a shrug. After a pause, he added that he didn’t “understand her jumping around. She behaved badly.” Further, he said, “she really offended us by calling our culture wild.” I asked him what he took this “wildness” (дикість) to mean. He answered that it implies that “we are not smart” and then added, “animals are wild, not people.” At this, his wife Hannusia, who had been quietly sitting by and listening, weighed in, “Ruslana put on some underwear and a Hutsul kozhukh [traditional decorated vest] and danced on television … it was not very nice [гарно].” To the Tafiychuk family, Ruslana’s labeling and selling of her aesthetic as “Hutsul” was taken personally, as an insult and a denigration of their own integrity and sophistication.9
In the months following Ruslana’s ESC victory, some Hutsuls lobbied their local district parliament to censor sales of the Wild Dances disc for their strong objections to the representation of their culture as “wild” in an international arena. Ivan Mykhailovych Zelenchuk, a historian and ethnologist based in the town of Verkhovyna, told me about the misunderstanding and bitterness that local people felt when they saw Ruslana’s representation of the deeply entrenched stereotype of Hutsuls as “wild people”:
FIGURE 1.2 Mykhailo Tafiychuk in his instrument workshop. The unfinished body of a lira, a hurdy-gurdy, is visible in the foreground. Photo by Alison Cartwright Ketz, 2011.
FIGURE 1.3 Father and son demonstrate the sound of newly completed horns in front of their home as other members of the Tafiychuk family look on. The trembita is the elongated horn played by Mykhailo Tafiychuk. Photo by Alison Cartwright Ketz, 2011.
Ruslana harmed us in this regard, because instead of calling them “fiery dances” [запальні танці], she was looking for a word, and someone must have suggested wild [дикі] … if she had called them “Fiery Dances,” she would have hit the mark [попала в точку] and become a national hero. But someone must have suggested—this—“wild” and she went with it—and wild has many meanings, a few different aspects. The word dyki literally means primitive … implies that someone is primitive. People understood in its most direct meaning, and so, there were some incidents … people did not accept it, but then it passed, all of that. (personal communication, January 20, 2009)
A local historian based in the village of Kryvorivnia expressed another view on Ruslana’s impact. He commented on the fact that “wildness” is a pervasive and potentially insidious stereotype of his culture, but that it can be read multiply, as evidenced through varied reactions of Hutsuls to Ruslana’s depiction. (His village, Kryvorivnia, had spearheaded the attempt to boycott the album in Ukraine, expressing outrage at the term “wild” in the album title, though he was not directly involved.) As we talked about trendy representations of Hutsuls in popular music and historical representations in ethnographic studies, he shared a nuanced position: on the one hand, it’s good to raise awareness of our existence; on the other hand, we don’t deserve slander (personal communication, October 19, 2009). Many others voiced such ambivalent reactions, acknowledging that while Ruslana may have raised the profile of Hutsuls internationally and helped stimulate tourism to the region, it came at the price of disgrace and through the reinforcement of negative stereotypes.
While shrugging ambivalence and unfavorable reviews of Ruslana’s chart-topping Wild Dances were common among Hutsuls in many regions of Hutsulshchyna, some evaluated her work more positively. One young Hutsul violinist told me, “Ruslana brought glory to Ukraine” (interview, January 29, 2009). During my fieldwork, many Hutsuls would simply laugh about the dispute, repeating a canonical joke such as, “What is a Hutsul? He is a Ukrainian, but wild!”10
Debate about Wild Dances in Hutsulshchyna arose in many social situations, including the quotidian practice of locals gossiping about each other. On January 7, 2009 (Christmas Day by the Julian Calendar), I trudged through the snow to the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Verkhovyna with my host Oksana, her friend Svitlana, two visiting tourists from Kyiv and Sweden, and my Russian American friend, who had come to visit me. In the two-room Parajanov Museum, located in the humble Hutsul house where the Georgian-born, ethnically Armenian filmmaker lived while directing the internationally acclaimed Soviet-era film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, tour guide Pani Halyna recited her guide’s monologue and then opened the small floor to questions. As the formality of the tour-guide-to-audience relationship relaxed, she shared a story concerning Ruslana and her reception since “Wild Dances” had won Eurovision. Following a devastating flood in the Verkhovyna region, which destroyed many homes in isolated villages in July 2009, Ruslana sent provisions via Hummer and helicopter, and also wanted to stage a concert to “lift the people’s spirits.” The people, however, were not all receptive. Pani Halyna and Oksana discussed:
HALYNA: My godmother [kuma] was involved in the Dyki Tantsi project. Maybe you remember, in the first video [“Znaiu Ya”], there were three ladies, and they’re all standing, and they show their fingers—do you remember? It was a short fragment. And so she came to me and said, “Did you see Pani Marijka on the television?” And I hadn’t seen it yet … She was so offended! Even now when there were the floods, she [Ruslana] loaded up a whole truck with provisions and sent it up to [the village of] Zamagora—
OKSANA: Yes, that’s true—
HALYNA: Okay, I heard all of this from my godmother; I don’t ask these questions myself! [Laughs] And so this lady said, “She made a joke of me to
