The socialist sacred: atheism, religion, and mass culture in Romania, 1948-1989

Drawing on new archival sources, official publications, and oral histories, I challenge the self-portrayal of socialist civilizations as scientific, secular, and the "other" of everything religious. Between 1948 and 1989, the Romanian communist regime sought to disenchant believers with a scientific, materialist worldview. Yet, it likewise strove to imbue citizens' lives with socialist sacred meaning. My work demonstrates that we cannot understand late socialism’s contradictory drive for rationalization and re-enchantment without examining how elites produced knowledge about atheism and lived religion. This dissertation analyzes elite interactions with believers and the Central Committee from 1948, when transforming religiosity emerged as a party priority, to the end of the socialist era. My chapters focus on science popularizers, preservationists, sociologists, and folklorists in institutions of cultural administration and research newly created to manage socialist beliefs and behavior. These elites shaped the place of religion and atheism in Romanian society while competing for resources within the centralized structure of the Party-State. Their voices mattered because they engaged believers for whom national and religious belonging coincided. Elites also provided specialized knowledge for party organs committed to achieve convergence between ideology and citizens’ subjectivity. This dissertation combines approaches from cultural history, anthropology, and sociology to reveal key sites of conceptual labor and expert power within purportedly monolithic party-states. I also historicize the re-composition of lived religion by examining how religious majorities and minorities engaged with a socialist ideology that competed to provide overarching meaning to individual and collective life. On a broader scale, my work provides a comparative history of atheism in Eastern Europe by de-centering the Soviet Union and illuminates the socialist experiment as part of a global modernity, inherently defined by a tense yet interdependent relationship between disenchantment and sacralization

The Chromophore Structures of the Pr States in Plant and Bacterial Phytochromes

The resonance Raman spectra of the Pr state of the N-terminal 65-kDa fragment of plant phytochrome phyA have been measured and analyzed in terms of the configuration and conformation of the tetrapyrroles methine bridges. Spectra were obtained from phyA adducts reconstituted with the natural chromophore phytochromobilin as well as phycocyanobilin and its isotopomers labeled at the terminal methine bridges through 13C/12C and D/H substitution. Upon comparing the resonance Raman spectra of the various phyA adducts, it was possible to identify the bands that originate from normal modes dominated by the stretching coordinates of the terminal methine bridges A-B and C-D. Quantum chemical calculations of the isolated tetrapyrroles reveal that these modes are sensitive indicators for the methine bridge configuration and conformation. For all phyA adducts, the experimental spectra of Pr including this marker band region are well reproduced by the calculated spectra obtained for the ZZZasa configuration. In contrast, there are substantial discrepancies between the experimental spectra and the spectra calculated for the ZZZssa configuration, which has been previously shown to be the chromophore geometry in the Pr state of the bacterial, biliverdin-binding phytochrome from Deinococcus radiodurans (Wagner, J. R., J. S. Brunzelle, K. T. Forest, R. D. Vierstra. 2005. Nature. 438:325–331). The results of this work, therefore, suggest that plant and bacterial (biliverdin-binding) phytochromes exhibit different structures in the parent state although the mechanism of the photoinduced reaction cycle may be quite similar