Receptarea și imaginea yogăi în lexicografia românească (II)
The reception and image of yoga in Romanian lexicography (II)

Summary/Abstract: The first part of this paper gave an overall and detailed survey of the reception and image of yoga in various types of Romanian dictionaries (linguistic, encyclopaedic, specialised, etc.). The second part is devoted to a focused discussion of the dictionaries on religion published during the Communist era.As in the first part, three words, with their derivatives, have been taken into consideration: „fakir”, „yoga”, and „tantra”. The dictionaries discussed here offer – even more than those considered previously – ample material for a discussion of the impact of political contexts on understanding yoga and the interpretative patterns which survive political eras. They illustrate three different theoretical paradigms of approaching religion under Socialism. While „religiology” and „general mythology” were understood as Marxist approaches to the religious phenomenon, and thus ideologically subordinated to scientific atheism, the „materialistic-scientific and humanist-revolutionary education” (a name coined in order to replace the older „scientific-atheistic education”) was conceived as a practical, pedagogical extension of scientific atheism. All of these dictionaries were published late, in the ’80s, and only one – devoted to „general mythology” – was destined for mass consumption. The reasons for which the Party ideologists considered that such dictionaries are not a desirable item of anti-religious propaganda has to be clarified by further inquiry, especially through archival research.

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