SGIS 4067

In 2008, Romania completed its EU accession. Since then, there have been a number of events in Romanian high-level politics, that centered debates on ritual magic - including presidential candidates accusing each other of winning elections through the use of occult (2009, 2010) and various law projects intended to formalize and tax ritual magic (2011).

The talk will focus on the ways in which Urban elites in Romania, an EU member state, negotiate their seemingly conflicting identities as administrators of a secular form of government on the one side, and clients of practitioners of magic, on the other side. What are the roles of discursively assigned to the occult and the secular and how can we deconstruct them to make sense of why people choose or dismiss religious identities and practices?

 Talk given by Alexandra Cotofana. Alexandra Cotofana is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Topically, her interests focus on definitions of the secular, secondary economies, ontologies and modernities of others.

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