This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious ‘affair’ in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

This book analyzes the impact of abusive regimes of power on women’s lives and on their self-expression through close readings of life writing by women in communist Romania. In particular, it examines the forms of agency and privacy available to women under totalitarianism and the modes of relationships in which their lives were embedded. The self-expression and self-reflexive processes that are to be found in the body of Romanian women’s autobiographical writings this study presents create complex private narratives that underpin the creative development of inclusive memories of the past through shared responsibility and shared agency. At the same time, however, the way these private, personal narratives intertwined with collective and official historical narratives exemplifies the multidimensional nature of privacy as well as the radical redefinition of agency in this period. This book argues for a broader understanding of the narratives of the communist past, one that reflects the complexity of individual and social interactions and allows a deep exploration of the interconnected relations between memory, trauma, nostalgia, agency, and privacy.

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.

The Porous Museum examines questions of museum practice, aesthetics and politics through a focused study of The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. The museum has functioned successively as a museum of art, a communist museum, the headquarters of the communist secret police, and a museum of folk art. Gabriela Nicolescu traces the museum's spectacular biography and follows the transformation of its practices and aesthetics through three very different political regimes in the 20th and early 21st century: monarchist, socialist and post-socialist. Nicolescu's fascinating study starts with a focus on a dumped and smashed statue of the revolutionary figureheads Marx, Engels and Lenin in the museum's rear yard as an expression of the complicated journey of modern Romania. She considers questions of recycling and rupture, with some exhibits and practices carried over from one regime to another, whilst others have been discarded in favour of the completely new. Through this process, the museum can been seen as a microcosm of the wider nation state and the ways in which the past is remembered or rejected. The interdependency of politics, ethics and aesthetics that Nicolescu terms 'porosity' is an attribute of museums all over the world. Applying original anthropological research to key ethnographic museums in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, the book moves beyond regional and media stereotypes by arguing for the influence of local oral histories on national history.

This book analyzes two Romanian villages – 2 Mai and Vama Veche – as spaces of relative freedom during the last decades of socialist rule. This microhistorical study refutes simplistic views of the communist past which focus on political figures and events, and instead explores ordinary people and everyday life. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it considers a broad range of sources, including official Communist Party documents, secret police files, personal memoirs, oral history interviews, ethnographic films, songs, and artistic performances. This book intertwines three narrative threads: that of the visitors (mainly members of the Romanian intelligentsia, young people, and hippies); that of the local inhabitants; and that of 'authority' (local and central state agents actively engaged in surveillance and supervision). In doing so, it interrogates the spectrum of consent/dissent and resistance/collaboration hitherto neglected in scholarship.

Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.

Based on extensive ethnographic research, this collection uses a variety of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to examine some of the many subcultures and new religious movements that have emerged in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism.

Ion Vianu: The trap of history