Calus

Fülszöveg

CALUS
Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual
Gail Kligman
With a Foreword by Mircea Eliade
Despite Romania's rapid industrialization and the establishment of a communist regime, the CSlu§, a fertility and healing rite of the country's agrarian south, is still performed. Both the ritual and the sociocultural order have changed—but not entirely. Gail Kligman's analysis of the Calu§ is a study of ritual action and social action in the context of modernization and secularization.
Kligman presents an engaging and rich description of the Calu§, its participants, ritual healing, plays, and dances. The deeper levels of cultural meanings are explored by analyzing the inversion of the sociocultural order that occurs in ritual performance. This, Kligman shows, facilitates the confrontation of existential crises and their resolutions. These are the eternal problems not meaningfully addressed by the state ideology devised to bring about the development of the "new man" in communist... Tovább

Fülszöveg

CALUS
Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual
Gail Kligman
With a Foreword by Mircea Eliade
Despite Romania's rapid industrialization and the establishment of a communist regime, the CSlu§, a fertility and healing rite of the country's agrarian south, is still performed. Both the ritual and the sociocultural order have changed—but not entirely. Gail Kligman's analysis of the Calu§ is a study of ritual action and social action in the context of modernization and secularization.
Kligman presents an engaging and rich description of the Calu§, its participants, ritual healing, plays, and dances. The deeper levels of cultural meanings are explored by analyzing the inversion of the sociocultural order that occurs in ritual performance. This, Kligman shows, facilitates the confrontation of existential crises and their resolutions. These are the eternal problems not meaningfully addressed by the state ideology devised to bring about the development of the "new man" in communist society.
(Continued on back flap)
The rich data presented constitute a significant contribution to knowledge of ritual in general and, in particular, to that of contemporary Eastern Europe, on which the ethnographic literature is scant. Kligman's interpretation is informed by symbolic anthropology as well as structuralist and psychoanalytic thought. However, the analysis is always clearly distinct from the data. Her sensitive treatment of Calu§ will be important for scholars of ritual, anthropology, the history of religions, folklore, peasant studies, and Eastern Europe.
GAIL KLIGMAN is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
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