CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Cojocaru, Olga |
|---|---|
| Title | "You shout out loud that Christmas is on 25th even if you are an atheist" The coexistence of the old and the new calendar styles in Moldova |
| Summary | Lately a growing number of people in Moldova - an overwhelmingly religious country– began to celebrate Christmas according to the new style calendar despite the firm Church dissent and assign various justifications to this practice, either religious or essentially secular. This research inquires into the phenomenon one might entitle “duplicated Christmas”, in which social, cultural, economic and politic factors seem to interweave. This exploratory endeavor looks into the variety of discursive representations Moldovans have about this duplicated holiday in contraposition with the ecclesiastical stance. I argue in this thesis that the temporal dislocation of Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar is significantly related with (1) the growing church disengagement in Moldova and (2) European aspirations of the pro-Romanian citizens as a form of contestation of the Moldovan statehood and soviet past. The Christmas date is showcased as a temporal point normatively imbued through which the pressing force of tradition can be problematized and the postsocialist evolution of the relationship between church and modern state. This thesis concludes also that, considering the firm insertion of secularist influences against the backdrop of the persistent normative pressure exerted by certain (religious) traditions, the difference between liturgical and civil/social time tends to be blurred and for the sake of convenience, there is growing will to uniformize these two timescapes. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Dafinger, Andreas |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/cojocaru_olga.pdf |
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