Antropologie în arhive?

În căutare de obiecte strălucitoare în România, Marea Britanie şi Filipine

prelegere susţinută de Gabriela Nicolescu, University College Cork, Ireland

The vast storehouses of the secret police archives contain millions of files on individuals and organisations monitored by the state. But more than that, these archives preserved many thousands of the images and items that the state confiscated from individuals and groups with the aim of deleting them: publications, photographs and the ephemera of religious life: a hidden repository of religious art.

Many religious communities, but especially religious minorities, experienced repression in the twentieth century under both fascism and communism. The aim of Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: ‘Hidden Galleries’ in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (European Research Council project no. 677355) is to retrieve examples of this visual and literary material from the archives in order to shed fresh light on the role played by local and minority religious groups in challenging the hegemonic order through their creative artistic and cultural production. Their visual and literary creative responses to authoritarian rule have remained concealed in kilometers of secret files; our project aims to bring back visibility to these materials. As part of our aim to reverse the deletion of these materials, the project team has also created a digital archive, which represents an important resource for both scholars and the public.

This project constitutes the first comparative research on the archives from the perspective of the history and anthropology of religion in the region and it draws attention to the heretofore unexplored creative agency of religious movements under fascism and communism. The project also explores the various visual representational practices employed by the secret police as part of their aim to incriminate and delete religious communities. Finally, in the contemporary context, it explores the significance of these movements in the formation of religious pluralism, the ongoing controversies over state regulation of minority religions, the question of cultural patrimony of confiscated materials and the question of intolerance towards religious minorities.