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Abstract: Our research aims to analyze the mechanisms by which the imaginary of communist death (focusing on the perception of cremation as a funerary practice) influence the reception of cremation in contemporary Romania.
From a historical point of view, the strong association between cremation and communism was inappropriate, leading to the wrong idea that such practices were typical to communism. In this regard, the inauguration of Crematorium Cenusa, in 1928, and the decrease of the number of cremations, compared to the interwar period, after the establishment of the communist regime are striking facts. The few Romanian communists that have chosen cremation (Bela Brainer corner of Cenusa) were rather an exception. Nevertheless, after 1990, people started to give communist interpretations to the practice of cremation; therefore a strong belief that the cremation is a communist practice started to emerge.
Once we outline the general framework of cremation in contemporary Romania, we focus on the interaction between communism (as a stigmatisation) and cremation, by investigating this interaction on the social and imaginary level. We discuss some of the major components of the current Romanian death imaginary: the orthodox death, the political death and the death as presented by mass-media. We insist on the orthodox explanations of death and of the bodily value, as basis of the rejection of cremation, on the proliferation of the correlation atheism-communism-cremation and also on the reflection of these issues in post-revolutionary mass-media discourse.
In a nutshell, our study strives to answer to a relatively simple question: why nowadays most of Romanian people assign communist meanings to the practice of cremation.
Keywords: cremation, communism, politics, imaginary, Romanian Orthodox Church, mass-media.
1. Introduction: The State of Cremation in Romania
In the current Western world, cremation represents a way of "disposing of the body" which coexists with burial, as an option which is gaining in popularity1. It is regulated for every state and it is more frequent in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones. From a legal point of view, cremation in contemporary Romania is, like burial, an accepted funerary practice. However, from the point of view of the dominant Orthodox religion, we are dealing with non-recognition of cremation, as a Christian funerary practice, starting with the synods in 1928 and 1933, when religious...