Gotland är en av Sveriges äldsta, mest kända och välutvecklade turistdestinationer. I forskningsprojektet ”Hållbara besök” undersöker vi hur Gotland produceras som en attraktiv destination i turistbroschyrer. Turistbroschyrer förstår vi som ett gränssnitt, en aktiv instans som inte bara sprider bilder och föreställningar utan också upprättar positioner, samspelsformer och praktiker, som i sin tur bidrar till att formera besökare, besökta och besöksmål. Vilka slags människor, platser, aktiviteter och bilder presenteras i broschyrerna? Vad lyfts fram och vad finns inte med? Vilka budskap är avsedda, vilka är dolda, underliggande?

 Genom en kombination av folkloristisk genreteori, diskursanalys och normkritiska perspektiv har vi granskat turistbroschyrer från olika gotländska reseföretag och organisationer från 1970-talet fram till idag. Vi har undersökt texter, bilder, relationer mellan text och bild och hur de tillsammans producerar betydelser, blir meningsbärande. Vilka värden, roller och positioner som tillskrivs besökare, besökta och destinationer? I vilka sammanhang och med vilka expressiva former (som färger, motiv, attribut, ord, symboler, stil och affekt) aktiveras ”ön”, ”öbor” och ”besökare” eller ”turister” ut? Hur upprättas positionerna ’besökare’ och öbor i relation till Gotland som besöksmål?

This study focuses on the attitudes of museumgoers toward the exhibition of human remains in modern Swedish museums. More specifically, it deals with how their attitudes toward remains are shaped and informed by museums’ materiality and institutionalized authority, whether they think of remains as humans or objects, as well as how these dead bodies ultimately become culturally meaningful to us who are still alive. Through the use of ethnographic field methods including go-along interviews and participant observation, the behaviors and opinions of museumgoers are recorded. With the help of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology and Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontology, the cultural background against which these attitudes have taken shape is examined. The study shows that museumgoers are generally positive toward the exhibition of human remains in museums—an attitude which is influenced by the history, scientific authority, and carefully designed materiality of the museum. Among the perceived benefits of exhibiting human remains, visitors cite the ability of the remains to arouse their curiosity and serve as links to the past, as well as provide material proof that validates the museum’s claims to knowledge.

However, this positive attitude is dependent on whether the remains are treated and displayed with respect. This call to treat the dead respectfully can be seen as a universal reaction to the ”face-to-face encounter” as described by Emmanuel Levinas, but at the same time, museumgoers’ interpretation of respect is culturally contingent and heavily influenced by contemporary values such as individuality, scientific objectivity, and equality. Furthermore, the perceived need to treat remains respectfully is directly tied to the perceived humanity of the remains. This is in turn dependent on how close the remains are to us in terms of appearance and temporal distance. By focusing on museumgoers instead of professionals, and through using ethnographic fieldwork to note opinions and their cultural backgrounds, this study attempts to add a fresh perspective and new knowledge to what is currently one of the hottest debates in museology: whether remains even belong in museums. Further, by recognizing that no opinion is formed in a vacuum, the narrow question of displaying death can tell us something bigger about the norms and values of Sweden today.

In this article, I present results from recent ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Scandinavian museums, focusing on visitors’ attitudes towards the display of human remains. While the dead body can elicit fear, sorrow, or disgust in other contexts, participant observations show that most visitors seem indifferent to the presence of bodies in museums. Drawing on anthropologist Annemarie Mol’s research on the “multiple” nature of the body, I attribute this indifference to the ability of the museum space to transform the remains from abject corpses into viable museum objects. In line with Media Studies scholar Katherine Goodnow, I see the museum as a genre recognizable to visitors; a genre in which human remains traditionally have a place as objects on display. Through ethnographic examples, I show how upholding this genre determines whether we see remains as belonging in a morgue or mausoleum – or in a museum.

This article applies four different genre labels to an empirical material consisting of responses to qualitative questionnaires on climate change. The basic assumption is that genres shape our understandings of climate change, and accordingly that different genre labels highlight certain features of the texts while obscuring or ignoring others. Beginning with the term survey discourse as a subgenre of climate change narratives, this genre label stresses the underlying narrative structure of the responses, even though they are not narratives in a strict sense. The second term, prophecy or rather the prophetic mode, pinpoints the peculiar double temporality of many responses, resulting in a temporal loop in which the catastrophic future overshadows and partially determines the present while still leaving space for action. The third genre label, apocalypse, is more extreme than the prophetic mode, as its favoured temporality forecloses the possibility of influencing the future in any way. The fourth genre term, polyphonic interior monologue, underlines structural similarities of the responses with the literary interior monologue, and emphasizes their dialogical nature as they acknowledge the existence of other points of view.      

This book deals with folk narratives expressing some of the basic fears of ancient Roman culture. These included, on the one hand, threats to the survival of the family, especially concerning children, pregnant women and to some extent also young men, and, on the other hand, the hidden dangers of the urban environment, especially places such as sewers, cemetaries, crossroads, inns and harbours.

Human existence was precarious in many ways in antiquity: success could swiftly turn into misfortune, health into illness and death, with disastrous consequences for the most important social network in this era, the family. These misfortunes could be difficult to cope with, and adversity, calamity and death had to be made intelligible emotionally. By verbalising fear – in the form of stories of demons, witches, ghosts and wild animals – it could be endowed with a concrete shape.

The argument of this book proceeds from the assumption that the act of narrating stories helps us to make sense of our lives and the world we live in. In narrative, we articulate our emotions, thoughts and opinions, voice our hopes and desires, our anxieties and fears. The therapeutic power of stories lies in their ability to provide a space for reflection on the difficulties and anxieties in life.

The concept of emotional topography is introduced as an analytical tool in studying the relation between space, emotions and time. Certain places were associated with one range of emotions during the day and another at night, such as a cemetary, which at night evoked dread and disgust. Other places, such as for example inns, could evoke a sense of unease regardless of the time of day; they were places where horrendous things might take place, where you risked encountering everything from murderous inn-keepers to werewolves.

Op-ed, 9 August 2006:

While wars elsewhere have grabbed the headlines - most recently in Lebanon and Israel - Africa's longest-running war has been ravaging northern Uganda for 20 years. The conflict has mainly pitted the Ugandan government against a rebel movement called the Lord's Resistance Army...

The Great Recession of 2008 was a singular event in the recent history of Spain. The burst of the real-estate bubble and the massive destruction of jobs it provoked revealed a deep crisis in Spanish capitalism. In Bonavista, unemployment and the resulting inability of working people to pay their mortgages exerted intense pressure on the financial sector to reshape the quotidian life of those affected, resulting in: the subordination of social relations, the labour required to maintain these and their reproduction to the logic of wealth expropriation. In this context, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, PAH) arises as a refuge, where afflicted persons reclaim the primacy of their life projects against the attempted hegemony of the banks.

The collapse of the Spanish real-estate market in 2007-8, and the colossal destruction of jobs it provoked, put an abrupt end to a decade-long model of growth, which was based on the construction and tourism industries as its primary motors as well as on the massive indebtedness of the labouring masses. In the severe economic downturn that ensued, a social conflict appeared: on the one side, the many indebted people forming the movement of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) and, on the other side, the financial industry. This study offers an ethnographic account of the aforementioned conflict as it unfolds in the precarious reality of Barcelona and Santa Coloma de Gramenet, with a particular emphasis on the experience and struggle of the affected persons. The argument advanced is that the main predicament of the debt conflict is the subordination of life processes to the imperatives of financial accumulation; a situation enabled by a specific constellation of forces, involving the successive governments of Spain, the financial elite, the police, and the courts.

The two case studies in this chapter present examples of disaster recovery scenarios from Argentina and Sweden, which give complementary theoretical insights about how social processes of remembering/forgetting and of moralizing around past disasters operate in the post-disaster process of making meaning.

To meet an increasing industrial and urban demand for water in a context of water scarcity in Peru, the state has invested heavily in hydraulic megaprojects to ensure water supply to citizens and corporations. The Majes Siguas Special Project (PEMS) in the Arequipa Region is an example of such a water infrastructure project. While the first stage of PEMS, built in the 1980s, was financed and run by the Peruvian government, the second stage that is currently underway is being co-financed and built by a private transnational consortium that will run the infrastructure for 20 years. This can be understood as a process of temporary commodification of the water infrastructure and places the hydraulic megaproject at the heart of tensions between seeing water infrastructure as public utility and seeing it as private provision. This article asks how this tension between public and private is played out in practice within the hydraulic bureaucracy and examines ethnographically how the Majes Siguas Special Project is made over time by way of the everyday practices of experts. The study finds that these experts anticipate the potential political effects of temporary commodification of water infrastructures to be both a risk and a distinct possibility. The article argues that building, maintaining and managing hydraulic megaprojects are far from straightforward processes, but should instead be understood as open-ended experimental reconfigurations that the hydrocracy deals with through contingent practices of knowledge.

In the summer of 2014 occurred the worst wild fire in modern times in Sweden; a disaster that sparked many reactions in affected areas and in society at large. Mass media reported intensively about the emergency and the area was subject to a lot of “disaster tourism,” both during the emergency and in the following months. Numerous public investigations were commissioned to document and analyse the disaster event and its public management. In addition, many scientific research projects were launched to study the psychological, social and ecological effects of the forest fire. This article is the result of one of these research projects, but while many of them focus on the actual disaster management or the immediate impact, our research aims at understanding the long-term effects of the wildfire in the affected communities. This article analyses how local stakeholders have managed what can be called the disaster afterlife or the post-disaster, referring to the process of community recovery and reconstruction, or, to use a more recent concept, resilience. Our focus is on how personal memories and moral understandings forge the ways in which public officials, who are set to manage risk, experience this process. We apply an inductive approach to analyse our empirical material collected by semi-structured interviews in 2016.

Driven by an increasing industrial and urban demand for water and other economic and political interests, the Peruvian State has invested heavily in water infrastructures. One such infrastructure is the Majes Siguas Special Project in the Department of Arequipa. This megaproject was envisioned already in the early twentieth century to supply the coastland with irrigation water and thereby developing agriculture in this arid region. The first stage of the project was built in the 1970-80’s, but the second stage was not actualised until the 2000s and is still waiting to be built. Based on ethnography from fieldwork in the realm of the megaproject in 2016 and 2017, this article asks what happens when the materialisation of a megaproject is constantly deferred and explores how the promise it entails is sustained over time by analysing the social processes of temporal scale-making.