THE FRIVOLOUS REVOLUTION FAIR/CARNIVAL ELEMENTS OF MĂRŢIŞOR IN UNIVERSITY SQUARE BEFORE AND AFTER 1990
THE FRIVOLOUS REVOLUTION FAIR/CARNIVAL ELEMENTS OF MĂRŢIŞOR IN UNIVERSITY SQUARE BEFORE AND AFTER 1990
Author(s): Florin DumitrescuSubject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Editura Universitatii din Oradea
Keywords: collective memory; urban anthropology; informal market; calendrical ritual; totalitarian regime; tactical frivolity
Summary/Abstract: March 1st, the pre-Christian holiday of Mărțișor, occasioned in the 1980s and 1990s, in certain areas in Bucharest (mostly in University Square) certain endemic cultural developments, which contributed to the creation of a certain specific trade fair spirit. Mărțișor trinkets, festive amulets ritualically presented to women on this occasion, have in time acquired an air of conformity and urban convention. This article follows the way in which, in socialist decades, students' counterculture merged with traditional culture, shifting these artifacts into the grotesque, and turning them into miniature masks in a subversive carnival, if an undeclared one, which undermines both the bourgeois conformity of offering chic brooches and the day-to-day rigidity imposed by the totalitarian regime.
Journal: Analele Universităţii din Oradea. Relaţii Internationale şi Studii Europene (RISE)
- Issue Year: 5/2013
- Issue No: Suppl.
- Page Range: 247-252
- Page Count: 16
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF