Anders Gustavsson

University of Oslo · Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages

During the last two years of Covid pandemic we have seen the issues related to digitalization, Open Access, and Open Data (meaning open access to research results and research data) become more salient. Scientists have been unable to access archives and libraries in person, or to meet colleagues and students in physical meetings in the form of semi...

The all-inclusive issue in studies of memorial websites on the internet concerns how mourners express their emotions and concepts of belief regarding a deceased person’s afterlife. The living believe that their ultimate contact with the deceased will occur after their own death. In Sweden, this also applies to deceased pets. Memorial websites to th...

The aim is primarily to study the material and social life of people, as well as their world view, with qualitative methods and with a historical perspective up to the present.

Cultural science

In this paper I present my reflections and experiences from decades of ethnological research until now. Auto-ethnography means that researchers use their personal experiences in a self-reflexive way in the ethnographic research process both regarding data collection and analysis. The aim is that researchers in this way may better understand and int...

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 choosi...

Memorial websites on the Internet constitute a new form for expressing grief and for remembering deceased relatives and friends. In my sample of memorial websites, I have studied those that are open to the public. Such memorial sites have had an explosive development during the 2000s. The messages become a virtual, social meeting place by giving mo...

Diaries can provide a micro-perspective on people’s way of life andthe world of conceptualization in a local society, and also on the changes that took place in the years that the diaries were written. This can be considered micro-history. While conducting fieldwork for the research project “Cultural contacts in Bohuslän’s coastal rural communities...

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...

This paper demonstrates that sight and hearing have played the most important roles in the Protestant regions of Scandinavia. In many instances, the phenomena linked to sight and hearing have been maintained for long periods of time, and new phenomena have come into existence in other respects. Revivalist movements have wavered between maintenance...

Thesis--Lund. Summary in German. Bibliography: p. 314-338.