Paper Short Abstract:

My presentation addresses the contemporary theoretical and methodological frameworks (and the associated challenges) at use by Romanian scholars of ethnology devoted to analyzing ritual and magic practices collected recently.

Paper Abstract:

As part of the almost one-century and a half of folklore and ethnology, Romanian studies of magic and folk religion were strongly under the influence of the paradigm established on one hand by methodological “readings” of the vegetational rituals as treated by Frazer and the hermeneutical ideas of Mircea Eliade on the "religious creativity”, “cosmic Christianity” and “popular theology” of Romanian peasants. Eliade rehabilitated the ritualist theory of Frazer, whose "Golden Bough" is translated into Romanian in 1980. Within the existing communist cultural propaganda, the book is presented to the Romanian public in the preface as the work of a systematic atheist, a Darwin of the humanities, This epistemological longtime trend generated also for this Romanian ritualistically unchanged rural culture a geopolitical destiny connected with the Eastern Church, which implicitly endorsed pagan and syncretic practices and stripped this culture of the chances to being connected to Western civilization and Illuminism.

As some of the Romanian small rural culture is still considered unaligned with Western standards of secularization and rationality of public life, is therefore expected that scholars denounce and reject that longtime paradigm and start from scratch? How do we envisage the existing surviving rituals and superstitions in these emote communities or associated to very conservative professional contexts such as pastoralism in which a magical view of the world is still employed? How do we react faced with "discredited" scholarship of religion?