The Wedding of the Dead

The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania by Gail Kligman explores how life-cycle rituals—weddings, funerals, and the symbolic “death-weddings” of the young unmarried dead—both express and reshape community life in Maramureș, an isolated region of northern Transylvania. Moving far beyond the gothic myth of Dracula, Kligman situates ritual within the historical and political upheavals of twentieth-century Romania, from Habsburg rule to socialist centralization. Drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork, she reconstructs how villagers use ritual action and ritual poetry to interpret life, death, gender, and social identity, while also negotiating their subordination to state power. Through laments, shouted couplets, and ritualized exchanges, these communities make sense of upheaval, loss, and desire, turning the fragility of everyday existence into shared, enduring meaning.

The book traces in detail how these rites mediate the tensions between continuity and change, religion and ideology, local autonomy and national appropriation. Weddings reaffirm kinship and exchange, funerals stage relations between the living and the dead, and the nupta mortului—the “wedding of the dead”—renders untimely death intelligible by ritualizing it as marriage. Kligman shows how oral poetics in these rituals constitute a collective language of both conformity and critique, offering villagers a veiled arena to voice social tensions even under censorship. At the same time, she illuminates how state folklorization of ritual traditions turned peasant life into symbolic capital for Romanian nationalism. Richly interdisciplinary, The Wedding of the Dead brings anthropology, history, and literary analysis together to reveal ritual as a powerful medium through which communities continually renegotiate identity, gender, and mortality. It is an essential study for readers interested in Eastern Europe, folklore, religion, and the politics of culture.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.