DESIRE MACHINES — A Romanian Love Charms Database de Sanda GOLOPENTIA

DESCRIERE

Sanda GOLOPENTIA

Desire Machines. A Romanian Love Charms Database

Editura Spandugino, 2025

Seria de autor SANDA GOLOPENTIA

Extras/ Overview

The Romanian Love Charms Database (RLCD) is (a) small database (b) focused on a severely restricted domain of folk magic; (c) initialy meant as a publishing tool; and (d) currently developed for its potential to enhance research on live (non-autonomous) texts – that is, texts that maintain a direct connection with the biography of their users. It is small inasmuch as, even if it were to incorporate later on – as I hope it will – love charms from a number of other cultures, the relevant inventory for each culture would hardly go beyond a few hundred items. It is a focused database, since, even if it will contain many tipes of documents other than love charms, the latter will have a clearly different and auxiliary status with respect to the former (wich represent the core of the RLCD). The Romanian Love Charms Database instrumented the preparation of the camera-ready copy of the present volume, by making it possible to control an unusually intricate (and – what is more important – bilingual) corpus for editing and typesetting purposes. Is it a database meant for research, inasmuch as, by simply subjecting several hundred love charm items to rigorously homogeneous formal treatment, it renders visible unexpected structural relationships that have not been studied before in anthropology, folklore, or cultural semiotics, but are worth exploring for both theoretical and methodological reasons.