Paper Short Abstract:

Sexual folklore has always been problematic and embarrassing for those ethnological discourses that were trying to construct national identity, build the nation or feed religious piety. Since it is old, omnipresent and upsettingly lively, the disciplinary management of sexual lore involved huge efforts to hide/ re-write/ omit or suppress what has been considered unprintable and unworthy . This paper focuses on three moments in the history of the Romanian national ethnology, when the efforts to deal with the presence of popular erotica took a conceptual / theoretical turn.

Paper Abstract:

Sexual folklore has always been problematic and embarrassing for those ethnological discourses that were trying to construct national identity, build the nation or feed religious piety. Since it is old, omnipresent and upsettingly lively, the disciplinary management of sexual lore involved huge efforts to hide/ re-write/ omit or suppress what has been considered unprintable and unworthy . This paper focuses on three moments in the history of the Romanian national ethnology, when the efforts to deal with the presence of popular erotica took a conceptual / theoretical turn.

This paper analyses and contextualizes the writings of Ion Diaconu, Ovidiu Bîrlea and Petru Caraman, three of the most important figures of the XX Romanian national ethnology. While the first attempts to produce a psychoanalytical defense of sexual lore, the second – writing during Ceausescu's regime – does that by emphasizing its hermetic character and its noble primitive functions. Petru Caraman, the third figure summoned in this talk, writing also in the communist context, recovers “folk pornology” by emphasizing its role in the erosion of the magical dimension of old folk imprecations, thus playing a part in the production of a secular popular mind.