ABSTRACT
The different aspects relating to dying and death in present-day Romanian society can be discussed from a number of interwoven perspectives. On the one hand, we have the image of a society still in transition as a result of the political change that started in December 1989 when, subsequent to a wider popular movement against the background of acute crisis at all levels, the communist regime led by Nicolae Ceauescu fell and was replaced by a democratic regime. However those who took power represented the pick of the second line of the Romanian Communist party, actually the only ones who could seize power due to lack of opposition; this situation determined the slow evolution of true democratic reforms. Apart from this transformation at the top, we have also had the gradual change of the entire Romanian society. This change resulted in another political regime and a different system of values after the 1990s, which have altered modern-day Romania, not without difficulties and not yet entirely; rather it could be said that in the management of death in Romania, the changes of 1989 produced a series of transformations. On the other hand, there is the specific way in which Romanians experience, express, and accept the reality of death. We can use Vladimir Jankélèvitch’s classical scheme for a third-person analysis of death, in which is “death in general, abstract and anonymous . . . it is problematical, without being mysterious; it is an object like any other, which, described on analysed . . . represents the climax of non-tragic objectivity” (2000). It is research that expresses the material and spiritual conditions of a society (Northcott & Wilson, 2001), a research on discourse, which, centered on death, gives it meaning (Foucault, 1997), being at the same time a speech that an age and a society make about themselves (Vovelle, 1974). It is research based on death and the means of treating this event. This research is an attempt at synthesis, and it allows
the future use of information on dying and death in modern Romania. Consequently, the great advantage of the present analysis may be the possibility of a horizontal as well as a vertical comparison. In a horizontal sense, the benefit of the inquiry is the possibility of the parallelism of dying and death between Romania and other countries; theoretically speaking, it would eventually be able to answer an extremely simple question: Does Romania now present a certain particularity regarding the quantitative and qualitative elements of death? The present death profile reveals, for the Western world at least, a sort of “optimal management” of this circumstance. This means that the place death occupies in discussions and debates appears logical, where all these discussions are nothing but a useful and profitable staging of death. Or, in Patrick Baudry’s opinion, this aspect is the difference between the death discourse of the 1970s and 1980s and the present one (1999). As a result, the above question becomes even clearer: Can we find these elements in present-day Romania? In a vertical sense, the benefit of the present analysis focuses on Romanian society, where the results obtained may become an excellent starting base for a historic investigation of the same theme within the same area. Thus, using a regressive method (Ariès, 1973), which implicitly includes comparisons, a future attempt to delimitate the components and characteristics of a Romanian system of death and of its evolution becomes not only possible but also necessary. Therefore, beginning with the current realities of death in Romania, it will be much easier to understand the past realities of the region with the intention of going deeper into the proposed analysis.
