Bogdan Neagota, Carnival in Mountainside Banat

FIELDWORK REPORTS AND SYNTHESES
REF/JEF, 1–2, p. 147–168, Bucureşti, 2012
FĂŞANC – THE CARNIVAL IN THE MOUNTAINSIDE
BANAT: HISTORICAL-RELIGIOUS AND
ETHNOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS
BOGDAN NEAGOTA
ABSTRACT
European folk cultures have had a ‘subordinate’ existence, particularly long and
remarkably substantial. Official policies surrounding them varied widely. What I do
aim at is to retrieve units for understanding the contribution of popular cultures to the
European heritage of identities. Among the identity resources of present-day Europe,
the popular cultures of Medieval and Modern Europe, partly prolonged, regionally and
locally, into present, hold much consistency, primarily through deep inter-textual
stratification, as well as through privileging structures of continuity. It would
nonetheless be methodologically wrong to address popular culture in isolation, as if it
were a buried treasure (reliquarium), a living-fossil cave survival, severed from and in
contrast with official culture, that is, the culture of elites. On the contrary, it is more
likely that popular culture functioned organically, through genuine integrative
hermeneutic networks, trying to incorporate the inputs of institutional culture,
translating them, with a sui generis hermeneutics, into vernacular language, and
integrating them in regional semiotic. Because popular culture always worked by
adaptation and inclusion, not by exclusion, while still preserving some sort of autonomy
regarding the official social-cultural establishment. In order to emphasize the popular
culture, from the perspective of its subsequent ceremoniality, I chose a ceremonial
complex, charged by magical-religious ideologies nowadays more or less concealed,
but rooted in archaic historical-religious circumstances, and beholding enough efficient
adaptive mechanisms to modernity, to be visible throughout contemporary Europe: the
Carnivals from Banat, with their complex diachronic inter-textual stratigraphies and
mechanisms of adaptation to the present reality (politics, social-economical reality,
mass-media etc.). My analyses are based on anthropological fieldwork done in this
region (21 villages) since 2007.
Keywords: Făşanc / fashing, carnival, carnivalization, Shrovetide (Lăsata secului),
popular religiosity, mask, masquerade.
HISTORICAL-RELIGIOUS CONSIDERATIONS
This paper represents just the work phase of a large research project, based
on a multifarious epistemological perspective (ethno-anthropological and
historical-religious), bringing forth a hypothesis that me and my fellows have

Bogdan Neagota 2 148
launched during our field research: the carnivalisation as a main tendency of the
rural communities’ ceremonial life.
The ethno-anthropological level was first aimed at by the ethnographic
descriptions of some masquerades from Romanian rural areas: the Shrovetide
(Lăsata secului) carnival complex from the Banat mountain region (field research
done in 2007-2011), the New Year carnival from Central Moldavia (monitored in
2005, 2007-2010), and the Romanian types of charivari1 (field research started in
2003). In fact, calendric and family ceremonials (wedding and funerals) also have a
carnival side, such as the satyrical verses of a dialogical structure.
On the historical-religious level, I called in the carnivals atested in the rural
Europe of the Mediterranean Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this context, I
make use of the historical-religious methodology as a channel for exploring long-
concealed archaic strata, otherwise unnoticed by the modern eye. Passed through
anthropological-historical and historical-religious analyses, these ceremonials work
as finest seismographs, best for understanding the mental horizons that prolong the
religious history of Europe.
First, however, I have to make some observations which might emphasize my
epistemic situs in the midst of such approaches. The most profound structures of
continuity across Europe’s religious history are to be best found at the level of folk
cultures, with their whole body of subsequent religiosity2. European folk cultures, as
well as their religious expressions, named with the standard idiom of ‘popular
religions’ – a formulation in obvious connection with official religions, social-
politically (etc., etc.) dominant – have had a ‘subaltern’ existence,3 particularly long
and remarkably consistent. Official policies surrounding them varied widely, with
every new episteme and every new society. Although it is not among the aims of this
paper to re-write the history of popular cultures and religions in the Europe of the last
millennia, what I do aim at is to retrieve and emphasize units of understanding the
contribution of popular cultures to the European heritage of identities. No doubt,
among the various identity resources of present-day Europe (Archaic and Classical
Antiquity, Judeo-Christian Late Antiquity, extra-European cultures etc.), the folk
1 This ceremonial, called strigarea peste sat (the call over the village), is performed on
different calendric moments. I mention here only: the New Year Day in Sălaj region (Vili-vili), the
Shrovetide on Mureş Valley, Central Transylvania and Mountainside Banat (Alimori, Silita etc.), the
Saint George Day, on Someş Valley (strigatu din coastă).
2 It is about the value represented by popular religion and religiosity in the formation of
contemporary European identity, respectively by the role of folk cultures in the building up of this
communal social-cultural space. Mircea Eliade advocated the necessity of des-regionalization of the
religious history of Europe by a double strategy: on the one hand, opening it towards extra-European
archaic cultures, and on the other hand, creating an aperture towards European popular cultures;
which implied, as a sine qua non condition, the epistemological porosity of the science of religions
towards the ethno-anthropology of rural Europe, i.e. the valuation of folklore materials as ‘authentic
religious documents’ (Eliade 1980/1991: 39-40, 57; cf. Eliade 1983/1988: 232-247).
3 In the terms of Cirese 1973.

3 The Făşanc Carnival in the Mountainside Banat 149
cultures of Medieval and Modern Europe, partly prolonged, regionally and locally
profiled into present, hold much consistency, primarily through a deep inter-textual
stratification, as well as through privileging structures of continuity. Consequently, I
do affirm that the structures of continuity between the different epistemata having
constituted the diachrony of the European space must be looked for inside the layers
of rural popular cultures. The great paradigm shifts took place within the hegemonic
cultures, institutionalized in the social-political, military, and economic sense, and
less within the rural, conservatory and de-centralized societies.
For example, during Late Antiquity, the religious revolution produced by the
imposition of Christianity as state religion has mainly affected the urban societies
and the institutionalized religious cults, which had previously benefited from the
Roman state’s support. In the same time, the domestic magical-religious cults,
specific to rural customary societies, showed an amazing longevity and vitality that
lasted up to modern times, forcing the local churches to elaborate acculturating
strategies and, on the long term, adaptive mechanisms. The border between ‘popular
religion’ and ‘official religion’ was more than flexible, both fields assuming the
morpho-dynamics of a mobile statu-quo. Beyond the polemics of Christian Late-
Antique and Medieval intellectual elites with the local expressions of popular
religion, which were full of ‘superstition’ and pagan residues, local parishioners had
to draw up modus vivendi strategies with the rural subdued societies; while the
attitude of the Church, both in the East and in the Catholic West, had been of tacit
acceptance of de facto reality, as well as of identification of any hermeneutic
mechanisms able to convert pagan cultural realities to Christianity, or at best, capable
of synthesis and slow neutralization of blatantly pagan beliefs and practices. This had
been until late the situation in the post-Byzantine landmass, with its institutionally
less potent churches, but just as well in the Catholic space, at least until the Counter-
Reform, when, due to critiques from the Protestant block the church’s attitude
became sharper, raising significantly the acculturating pressure over popular religion.
In this context, the Council of Trent marked a real nodus in the attitude of the Catolic
Church toward the various forms of the popular religion.
It would nonetheless be methodologically wrong to address popular religion
in isolation, as if it were a buried treasure (reliquarium), a ‘living-fossil’ cave
survival, severed from ‘official religion’, that is, the religion of elites, with whom it
might have self-defined itself by polemics and opposition. On the contrary, it is
more likely that popular religion functioned organically and undreground, through
genuine integrative hermeneutic networks, trying to incorporate the inputs coming
from the institutional religion, translating them (with a sui generis hermeneutics),
into vernacular language and integrating them in the semiotic systems specific to
local popular cultures. Because popular religion always worked by systems of
adaptation and inclusion, not by exclusion mechanisms, while still preserving some
sort of autonomy regarding the official theological-political establishment. That is

Bogdan Neagota 4 150
why some researchers prefer to speak about popular Catholicism4 or about popular
Orthodoxy, depending on the social-cultural reference space, and not about
‘popular religion’ (terms that hold evident ideological connotations).
The policy of the Medieval Catholic Church toward the rural calendaristic
ceremoniality was ambiguous.5 A bulk of the ceremonial practices was christianized
through hermeneutic mechanisms of reinterpretation (interpretatio Christiana), and
through their integration in christianized calendric syntaxes6. In the case of the folk
masquerades (vegetal and animal masks), the too evident pagan substratum made it
impossible the inclusion of these customs within the Christian calendar, and therefore,
in the Catholic social-cultural contexts, they were isolated and expelled into the
ceremonial framework of the Carnival before Lent, the superlative expression of the
popular culture of laughter.7 Therefore, within the Catholic popular cultures, the
vegetal or animal masquerade was given calendaristic asylum in the week preceding
the Lent, while within the popular cultures of the post-Byzantine space the
carnavalesque masking was tolerated by local Orthodox churches more often along the
year calendar (the interval between St. Nicholas and Epiphany, and the week before
Lent), even at the risk of a double ceremonial performance: the one of the priest, and,
independently, that of the masked characters (which is the case of spring feasts – St.
George, Ascension, and Whitsun). The carnavalisation was, in fact, one of the most
efficient methods of the Church for the deritualization and desemantisation of some
archaic magical-religious practices; thus, these rituals passed from a religious gravitas
(from the point of view of religious prestige) to the popular culture of risus (laughter),
4 De Martino 1959 and 1975; Charuty 2001: 359-385.
5 Cf. Grimaldi 1994.
6 For example, the bovine processions, attested in different yet not too distant cultural spaces: in
Transylvania (The Adorned Ox/Boul Împănat on Whitsunday and Midsummer’s Day), in Moldavia (the
ceremonial oxen plough), Central and Southern Italy (approx. 90 local patron-saints’ feasts, among
which 60 still active), in Sardinia, in Sicily (patron-saints feasts), within the whole Alpine range
(Viehscheid and Almatrieb in Bavarian Allgäu and in Austrian Tyrol, Desarpa in alpine Italy and
Desalpe in francophone Alps), and in the South of France – all morphologically related, but integrated
within various calendar syntaxes (spring calendrical feasts – Whitsuntide and Midsummer, and local
patron-saint feasts). In this particular cases, observing the social-cultural and confessional contexts are a
must in understanding the modalities in which institutions belonging to the dominant ecclesial culture
monitored ceremonial expressions of popular religion, appropriated them, and integrated them within
Christianized calendaristic ceremonial syntaxes. From this point of view, we can speak of ceremonial
processions with bovines, which follow the archaic pattern of augural caroling (as it is for the Adorned
Ox/Boul Împănat in Transylvania), and where the parish priest has no role whatsoever; and of
processions in which the bovines are associated to the cult of Virgin Mary (la Madonna della Neve a
Bacugno di Posta, la Madonna di Costantinopoli a Portocannone, la Madonna della Pietà a Rocca di
Mezzo, la Madonna Assunta a Valentano) and of local patron-saints (San Zopito a Loreto Aprutino,
Sant’Urbano a Bucchianico, San Pardo a Larino, Il Bov Fint a Offida, la ss. Croce a Pastena),
represented in statuaria in the shape of antique lectisternae (Spitilli 2011). Or, in some cases,
‘Christianization’ and integration of old animal processions into Christian processional syntaxes (rural,
semi-urban and urban) is recent enough, dating back no earlier than the Counter-Reform; this is the case
of the Whitsun Ox/il Bue di San Zopito from Loreto Aprutino, Pescara province (Spitilli 2004).
7 Bahtin 1974.

5 The Făşanc Carnival in the Mountainside Banat 151
through intensifying and emphasizing the carnival constituent of each serious feast.
This processus of carnavalization of pagan ceremoniality continued also in the rural
societies of modern Europe, as a corolar of the secularization.
Therefore, what we have here are various expressions of popular religion,
covering, through such unitary yet particularized local variants, Europe’s religious
history and its so complex diachronic inter-textual stratigraphy,8 attainable through a
regressive ethnology.9 Analyzing folk calendar-round ceremoniality may lead to a deep
understanding of the continuity structures that characterize the popular religiosity.10
A SOCIAL-CULTURAL STRATIGRAPHY OF THE ZĂPOSTIT (SHROVETIDE).
MORPHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE MASQUERADES
During these complex field research periods, achieved individually or teemed
up with experienced researchers (Ileana Benga) and students, we have explored,
inter alia, the occurrence of the carnivalesque practices, both within the context of
confirmed carnivalesque traditions, and within profound, solemn and serious
customs (funeral, wedding, etc.).
In this respect, since 2007 we began scanning, from a visual-ethnological
perspective, the Făşanc from the Banatul Montan (Mountainside Banat), covering
21 settlements situated on different axes that go across Caraş-Severin county: the
Moraviţa Valley11, the Caraş Valley12, the Locvei Mountains13 and Hills of Oraviţa14,
the Danube Valley15, the Almăj Valley16, the Timiş Valley17. These are settlements
8 Caprettini 1992: 22.
9 Vovelle 1998: 252.
10 Cf. Aniño and Lombardi Satriani 1997.
11 Ocna de Fier/ Moraviţa (Moravitza)/Aisenstein 2007 (Mihai Leaha), 2009 (Emil Chitian).
12 Dognecea/Dognatschka (Bergwerk-Dognatschka) 2007 (Bogdan Neagota, Ileana Benga,
Mihai Leaha, Cosmina Timoce, Daniel Mocanu), 2009 (Anamaria Iuga, Vasile Mathe), 2010 (Ioan
Apostu), 2011 (Mihai Leaha, Ioan Apostu); Vodnik 2011 (Adela Ambruşan, Bogdan Neagota);
Nermed/ Neremić (Ileana Benga, Bogdan Neagota); Rafnik/Ravnik 2011 (Bogdan Neagota, Adela
Ambruşan); Goruia: 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Silvestru Petac), 2010 (Bogdan Neagota, Ioan Apostu),
2011 (Bogdan Neagota, Ileana Benga, Adela Ambruşan, Carmen Bălteanu, Emil Chitian); Gârliştea
2009 (Adela Ambruşan); Jitin 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Mihai Leaha, Dan Iepure), 2009 (Bogdan
Neagota, Adela Ambruşan), 2010 (Ioan Apostu), 2011 (Bogdan Neagota, Ileana Benga, Adela
Ambruşan); Greoni 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Mihai Leaha, Dan Iepure); Vărădia 2008 (Dan Iepure);
13 Sasca Română 2008 (Silvestru Petac, Bogdan Neagota), 2009 (Ioana Mureşan, Vlad
Gheorghiţeanu), 2011 (Carmen Bălteanu, Adela Ambruşan); Cărbunari 2008 (Ioana Mureşan), 2011
(Adela Ambruşan); Pădina lui Matei 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Silvestru Petac).
14 Agadici 2009 (Emil Chitian), 2010 (Bogdan Neagota), 2011 (Ioan Apostu, Carmen
Bălteanu); Ciclova Română 2008 (Mihai Leaha, Dan Iepure), 2009 (Adela Ambruşan), 2010 (Bogdan
Neagota), 2011 (Carmen Bălteanu, Ioan Apostu, Ileana Benga, Adela Ambruşan, Bogdan Neagota).
15 Moldova Nouă 2008 (Dan Iepure); Pescari/Coronini 2009 (Bogdan Neagota, Emil Chitian).
16 Eftimie Murgu/Rudăria 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Mihai Leaha), 2009 (Adela Ambruşan);
Prigor 2009 (Adela Ambruşan); Bănia 2009 (Mihai Leaha).
17 Slatina-Timiş 2008 (Bogdan Neagota, Mihai Leaha), 2009 (Mihai Leaha).