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AMBIENTUM BIOETHICA BIOLOGIA CHEMIA DIGITALIA DRAMATICA EDUCATIO ARTIS GYMNAST. ENGINEERING EPHEMERIDES EUROPAEA GEOGRAPHIA GEOLOGIA HISTORIA HISTORIA ARTIUM INFORMATICA IURISPRUDENTIA MATHEMATICA MUSICA NEGOTIA OECONOMICA PHILOLOGIA PHILOSOPHIA PHYSICA POLITICA PSYCHOLOGIA-PAEDAGOGIA SOCIOLOGIA THEOLOGIA CATHOLICA THEOLOGIA CATHOLICA LATIN THEOLOGIA GR.-CATH. VARAD THEOLOGIA ORTHODOXA THEOLOGIA REF. TRANSYLVAN
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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name. |
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STUDIA HISTORIA - Issue no. 1-2 / 2007 | |||||||
Article: |
THE DEATH AS A PROPAGANDISTIC ELEMENT. ASPECTS OF THE FUNERARY RITUAL IN STUDYING THE ROMANIAN COMMUNIST ELITE. Authors: . |
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Abstract: Introduction, aspects of the approaches in the study of the communist funeral ritual. Death has been a delicate subject throughout the human history. Understanding it, and to be more precise, understanding his role in different societies it is as hard today as ever. Even the past, seen as a time of the people who are no longer among us, disappears partially when those people die. What we manage in our endeavors as historians is to recover only bits and pieces, who present one of the images of what that time was. Our work field will never allow a full view over the events where we weren’t direct witnesses, nor the one we can conceal in one of the “realities”, from where they were spawn. With the help of various fields of study which history has to offer, and certainly, using a whole range of compulsory and independent science, from physiology, sociology, to social anthropology, we can make nowadays a more viable image of the past to better understanding the present. Why a history of death, of the obituary, of the official elite image in the communist Romania? What would such an approach offer, especially by using the party newspaper “Scînteia”? And how could a communist funerary ritual be in any way different from any other types seen in the past fifty years? Those are the questions we are trying to answer in this study. First of all, if we made a sociological analysis of the Romanian communist regime, we would notice the placement of the funerary mainly in the public space. This is done as a way to legitimate a self obtained power, which could not be explained either by the political past of the party – between the two World Wars – nor by the number of members, merely a thousand before the arrival of Soviet forces in Romania. Thus the party needs heroes, models to be identified with by the people, public figures whose support will explain the ruling place of the communist ideology and elite. This is done by commemoration, remembering and reinventing the past. But the regime has another ace which, at least until the late 1970s will be used lavishly. It’s about presenting all types of elite members to create a communist mythology in tone with the real power of the party. If we talk about members of the political leadership or intellectuals devoted to the ideological cause, the so called “road comrades” who get to live and die in the good graces of the party, and whose purpose is related to a sort of political continuity, or even incidental heroes, they are all enlisted after their death to rewrite their own history, and in doing so, to rewrite the party’s history and past, putting without their knowledge a cornerstone to the regime’s mythology. Key words: Romania communism, Funerary Rithuals for the Communist Elites, Death as a Propagandistic Element, wooden language. |
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