The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania
Jan 1988 · Studies on the History of Society and Culture Book 4 · Univ of California Press
Ebook
434
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania by Gail Kligman explores how life-cycle rituals—weddings, funerals, and the symbolic "death-weddings" of the young unmarried dead—both express and reshape community life in Maramureș, an isolated region of northern Transylvania. Moving far beyond the gothic myth of Dracula, Kligman situates ritual within the historical and political upheavals of twentieth-century Romania, from Habsburg rule to socialist centralization. Drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork, she reconstructs how villagers use ritual action and ritual poetry to interpret life, death, gender, and social identity, while also negotiating their subordination to state power. Through laments, shouted couplets, and ritualized exchanges, these communities make sense of upheaval, loss, and desire, turning the fragility of everyday existence into shared, enduring meaning. The book traces in detail how these rites mediate the tensions between continuity and change, religion and ideology, local autonomy and national appropriation. Weddings reaffirm kinship and exchange, funerals stage relations between the living and the dead, and the nupta mortului—the "wedding of the dead"—renders untimely death intelligible by ritualizing it as marriage. Kligman shows how oral poetics in these rituals constitute a collective language of both conformity and critique, offering villagers a veiled arena to voice social tensions even under censorship. At the same time, she illuminates how state folklorization of ritual traditions turned peasant life into symbolic capital for Romanian nationalism. Richly interdisciplinary, The Wedding of the Dead brings anthropology, history, and literary analysis together to reveal ritual as a powerful medium through which communities continually renegotiate identity, gender, and mortality. It is an essential study for readers interested in Eastern Europe, folklore, religion, and the politics of culture. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania by Gail Kligman explores how life-cycle rituals—weddings, funerals, and the symbolic "death-weddings" of the young unmarried dead—both express and reshape community life in Maramureș, an isolated region of northern Tran...
Discover more
About the author
Contributor: Gail Kligman Enter the Author Bio(s) here.
Contributor: Gail Kligman Enter the Author Bio(s) here.
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
