Biography

Bogdan Neagota is historian of religions and ethnologist/anthropologist, associate professor (senior lecturer) at the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures from the “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, where is giving courses of Latin literature, history of ancient religions, folklore & ethno-anthropology. He is also co-founder (in collaboration with Ileana Benga, researcher at the Institute of Folklore Archive, Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca) of an ethno-antropological group (starting from 2004), Orma Sodalitas Anthropologica, with a large archive (audio and visual ethnographic materials), covering field researches made by B. Neagota, I. Benga and their collaborators in the last 18 years, especially in rural areas from Romania, Italy, Serbia and Ukraine (www.orma.ro). Its research topics covers different aspects of the popular cultures, from the oral narrative traditions to the seasonal and family ceremoniality, popular religiosity (magic, daemonology, folk piety, pilgrimages etc.). His publications (https://ubbcluj.academia.edu/NeagotaBogdan) focuse on various levels of the oral cultures, like mechanisms of fictionalisation in folk narratives, life stories, winter and spring seasonal ceremoniality from rural regions, carnivals, trance and extatic experiences in the Romanian peasant society, popular magic, the peasant cult of Holy Virgin and its pilgrimages in Transcarpathia, Transylvania and Banat regions, the funeral rural culture and the rites of passage, Romanian folklore studies, theory of religions, Roman religion and culture. As historian of religions, he is using historical-religious methodology as a vessel for exploring long-concealed archaic strata, otherwise unnoticed by modern eye. His papers aim to reveal this subalternal culture, proving that 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 religiosity.