The Parish Choir Movement and Generational Festivals in Romania’s Socialist Period: New Community Festivities in Transylvania’s Gheorgheni (Gyergyó) Region
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Among the post-1945 East European socialist regimes, Romania and Poland were the only countries where the Catholic Church—despite government interventions, controls, and bans—managed to play a significant social and political role in community life. This case study provides an ethnographic description of the parish choir movement and graduating class reunions, called “generational festivals” in Hungarian, in the Gheorgheni (Hu: Gyergyó) region in the 1970s and 1980s. The gatherings will be analyzed in the context of everyday life, the socialist system’s distinctive shortage economy, and official limits on religious activity that characterized the era. I will first describe the world of parish choir festivals, including the outside (official government) pressures that shaped the festivals by forcing organizers to make accommodations. In my descriptions of the choir festivals, I highlight ways in which participants exploited opportunities to engage in Catholic rituals as “informal” practices despite the government’s official ban on public religious ceremonies. I will also reconstruct and describe the most important features of these socialist-era festivals.
Source: Journal of Global Catholicism
Author: Eszter Kovács
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4313648573