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A wooden cross in Stala that was put up after an accident at a sharp bend in the road in 1997. Photo by Anders Gustavsson (2004).
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Life is normally expected to proceed through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. What happens then if death occurs at some earlier phase of life and not at a far distant time in people’s everyday lives? This will most often be a sudden and unexpected death. How do the nearest family, friends and acquaintances of the deceased cope with this? Ho...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... that I photographed after an ac- cident in Hälleviksstrand in Orust Mu- nicipality, Bohuslän in January 1998, disappeared after a period of about three months. Another cross in Stala, in Orust, that was set up after an acci- dent at a sharp bend in the road in Oc- tober 1997 still stands and is regularly decorated with plastic flowers (Fig. 3). This cross is very conspicuous and eas- ily observable. The memory of a fatal accident and a warning of the dangers in traffic are indeed combined in this example. The cross therefore will retain its significance for wayfarers in years to come, not just in the months immediately following the ...
Citations
... The growing emphasis on individual characteristics similar to New Age ways of thinking has obviously contributed to this trend. I have also observed a similar trend in attitudes towards people who have suddenly died as a result of accidents, murder or manslaughter [21]. ...
One of my research projects examines pictorial symbols and epitaphs on gravestones in Norway and Sweden. The focus has been on the 1990s and the 2000s. The choice of this period is motivated by the fact that new national burial laws were adopted in both countries in the early 1990s. These laws provided the next of kin with the possibility of choosing memorial symbols and inscriptions more freely than had previously been the case. To judge from the data under study, individual symbols have gained popularity, especially in Sweden, while Norway has been more faithful to earlier traditions of a collective character; moreover, secular motifs are more manifest on the gravestones in Sweden than in Norway. Another research project analyses memorial websites on the Internet related to persons who have died in recent years. The all-inclusive issue in these studies concerns mourners’ expressions of their emotions and beliefs regarding the deceased person’s afterlife, that is, beliefs in after-death existence. Belief in the deceased being somewhere in heaven is common. Belief in angels is also a popular concept in memorial websites. Moreover, in Sweden, this includes deceased pets as well. The previously strictly observed distinction between humans and pets has become indiscernible in Sweden. Norwegian practice, however, remains critical towards this type of “humanlike characterization”. In Norway, memorial websites for the deceased are generally associated with more traditional Christian concepts than are similar sites in Sweden. By contrast, in Sweden, one observes a kind of diffuse religiosity reminiscent of New Age ways of thinking, according to which the individual plays the central role, and glorification of afterlife existence prevails. Secularization, that is, a decline in the influence of traditional forms of religious experience, is conspicuously more prominent in Sweden. Within the project on memorial websites, I have performed a special study of memorials of persons who have committed suicide. In Norway, differences between suicide and deaths by other causes are conceived in an entirely different manner than on memorial websites in Sweden. There, the contrast between suicide and other forms of death has been increasingly wiped out. Norway has preserved earlier mortuary traditions to a greater extent, and no notions of a bright afterlife, or of angels, are to be found in connection with suicides.
... Les traditions sont donc constamment appelées à se renouveler et à s'insérer dans les nouveaux contextes. (Gustavsson, 2008) Le deuil ne fait pas exception à la règle et même si nos actions demeurent teintées de notre héritage culturel, le développement technologique nous permet de vivre ce processus à notre rythme, de façon à correspondre à notre personnalité, notre perception de la mort et parfois même à l'encontre des prescriptions culturelles. Le numérique permet donc, en quelque sorte, un support à la carte en cours de deuil. ...
... Les gens peuvent aussi exprimer leur peine en publiant des billets et des statuts par leurs comptes personnels de médias sociaux ou encore sur des sites Web dédiés à aider les gens qui souffrent de la perte d'un être cher. Cette démonstration des sentiments qui se fait seule à l'arrière d'un ordinateur encouragerait une expérience individuelle plutôt que commune dans l'expérience du deuil (Gustavsson, 2008). Ainsi, le numérique ne supplanterait pas le support social et l'expérience collective dans l'environnement physique, mais il les accompagnerait, parfois pour les renforcer et parfois pour s'exprimer d'une façon plus privée, plus personnelle. ...
Le patrimoine numérique, le Web et la mort © 2012 par Jacynthe Touchette. Ce travail a été réalisé à l'EBSI, Université de Montréal, dans le cadre du cours SCI6850 – Recherche individuelle donné au trimestre d'hiver 2012 par Christine Dufour (remis le 21 avril 2012).