The Politics of After-Life: Religious Conversion among
Lipovenians in Romania.
Sorin Gog, currently affiliated to the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, e-mail: gog@eth.mpg.de
My research takes place in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious
village of Sarichioi, situated in the south-eastern part of Romania.
Old-Orthodox Lipovenians (divided into two antagonistic religious
communities, popovtsi and besopopovtsi) and their eternal rivals,
Orthodox Romanians, have to co-habit the village with the postsocialist emerged community of Lipovenian-Romanian Adventists.
What seems even harder to do is to share the after-life and
cemetery space, where the borderlines between these four
communities become even stronger.
Dead becomes in this multi-religious community an instrument of
safeguarding ethnic and cultural identities. This is achieved through
a series of death related practices and a concrete way of
organizing cemeteries as earthly images of afterlife. Each one of
the dead bodies has a certain conceivable place within the
graveyard. To each one of them there is web of meanings attached
and each one becomes an object of different politics of afterlife.
Fig. 1 One of the five cemeteries in the village of Sarichioi, Romania
My research project focuses on how post-socialism is restructuring
the present-day religious landscape and the symbolic management
of death. I am analyzing this by looking at the different discourses
that surround the dead body and at the way these discourses are
embodied in death related practices and in the organizing of
cemeteries as earthly images of afterlife.
The hypothesis of my research is that the post-socialist pluralization
of life-worlds leads to a generalization of insecurity regarding
traditional life-styles and that this is dealt with in terms of a reelaboration of the meanings of death. Cemeteries by organizing
these meanings of death and after-life as legitimization of specific
ways of living, become micro-worlds that reflect the religious, ethnic
and cultural struggles of the new post-socialist world.
Fig. 3 Funeral procession in Sarichioi, Romania
This way the cemetery can become a powerful micro-world that
legitimizes the real world and in doing this it acts as a mirror of the
social struggles of the new post-socialist world. I am analyzing this
micro-world by focusing on the following lines of research:
How is the dead body, the intimate community of the deceased
person and the death related practices that are embodied in a
cemetery integrated into a meaningful complex? I would like to
explore how this complex lends itself to the different post-socialist
survival strategies in coping with social and religious change and
finally with death.
How is the category of the impure dead body constructed, and what
are the alternative cosmologies of after-life that the post-socialist
religious movements articulate, in face of this exclusion?
Communist atheism managed to impose secularism as a political
medium. After the fall of communism secularism lost its force and
legitimacy in regulating the constrains of the self imposed by the
religious discourse. This made way for a re-enchantment process
and a religious structuring of the practices of the self. The
Romanian society responded differently to this: some social
segments pushed further the rationalization and individualization of
the body and so of the privatization of death interpreted in nonreligious terms. This led to the secularizing of death. Other did the
opposite. How can this be rendered meaningful in terms of a
sociological and anthropological explanation of the emerging postsocialist narratives of self-identity?
Acknowledgement
Fig. 2 The Church symbols that are marking a “good” death and a “correct” burial.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mariecuriesocanth/
This research project has been supported by a Marie
Curie Early Stage Research Training Fellowship of
the European Community’s Sixth Framework Programme under contract number MEST-CT-2005020702 within the project European Partnership for
Qualitative Research Training (Social Anthropology).