White man law versus black magic women. Racial and gender entanglements of witchcraft policies in Romania

Abstract

This study focuses on structural discrimination in Romania, based on gender and racial logics. The article analyzes social policies directed at a historically marginalized ethnic group, the Rroma. Racial logics have often been used in colonial encounters or experiences of slavery, where a “witch-enemy” was created to differentiate the white from the non-white, the educated from the uneducated (Perkinson 2004). In investigating important changes in the role of spirituality in Romania, this paper follows the intersections of religion, belief and the secular in public life, legislation and everyday practices. In 2007, Romania completed its accession to the European Union. The EU made demands for more efficient measures against racial discrimination1 (Bale 2013; Schiek, Chege 2008), one of the biggest socio-economic issues of the country. Romania carries a burden of five centuries of Rroma slavery (Kaplan 2016) and the largest WWII Rroma genocide (Gheorghe 2013), equaled only by the silence of the Romanian state surrounding past and present anti-Rroma racial violence. To track historical patterns, the article analyzes contemporary cases of Romanian politicians developing what seems to be racist policies, aimed at a historically marginalized group in Europe. Witchcraft is a productive category to think through global, political and economic insecurities. Panics around the occult symbolize larger cultural anxieties regarding socio-economic changes and indicate a move to challenge an existing order (Mantz 2007).