Adriana Teodorescu, Pentru cine ard flăcările, domnule Şerboianu? O perspectivă inedită asupra cremaţiunii din România
For Whom the Flames Burn, Mister Şerboianu? A Unique Perspective upon Cremation in Romania
In contemporary Romania cremation is a neglected research theme, while in the everyday life tends to be a taboo subject. If postmodernism began to abandon the cultural paradigm of forbidden death, by increasingly displaying death in mass-media, this is not the case for cremation, not in Romania, where the dominant Orthodox Church considers cremation to be a sin and where the popular beliefs on cremation are anchored exclusively in negative representations. The present research aims at analysing the writings dedicated to various aspects of cremation of the inter-war orthodox priest Calinic I. Popp Şerboianu, underlining his efforts in pointing out the connections between cremation and the essence (not the practices or the common perceptions) of orthodoxism. There are three main dimensions of Şerboianu’s cremationist discourse: the critique of the Romanian Orthodox tradition, the deconstruction of popular representations of cremation and the (re)construction of a positive imaginary of cremation. The paper concludes with the cultural relevance of Şerboianu’s cremationist discourse.
Keywords: Calinic I. Popp Şerboianu, cremation, orthodoxism, representation, deconstruction, imaginary
- Berger, Peter L.; Luckmann, Thomas, Construirea socială a realităţii. Tratat de sociologia cunoaşterii (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge), traducere din limba engleză de Alex. Butucelea, Editura Art, Bucureşti, (2008 [1966])
- Durand, Gilbert, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (The Anthropological Structures of The Imaginary), Dunod, 2006 [1960]
- Durand, Gilbert, Fondaments et perspectives d’une philosophie de l’imaginaire, in Religiologiques (Foundations and Perspectives of an Imaginary’s Philosophy) , 1, printemps, 1990.
- Rotar, Marius, Eternitate prin cenuşă: O istorie a crematoriilor şi incinerărilor umane în România secolelor XIX-XXI (Eternity through Ashes. A History of Crematoria and Human Cremation in XIX-XX Century Romania), Institutul European, Iaşi, 2011
- Rotar, Marius, The Mask of The Red Death: the Evil Politics of Cremation in Romania in December 1989, in Mortality, 15, 1, 2010, pp. 1-17
- Şerboianu, Calinic I. Popp, Cremaţiunea şi religia creştină (Cremation and Christian Religion), ediţie îngrijită, selecţia textelor şi studiu introductiv de Marius Rotar, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2012
- Wehr, Kathryn, The Orthodox Bioethics of Cremation, 2010, http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/view/wehr-the-orthodox-bioethics-of-cremation, last consulted in 11.03.2013
