bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Alternativa röster
Authors: Nordberg Karin
Published: October 2024

Actual changes of the programme tables on Swedish Radio have reduced women's programmes by half of its emission time, at the same time as news broadcasting continues to expand. Fresh statistics show that women's representation in news programmes during the last two years has broken an earlier upward moving trend. According to the masculine profile of news logic, the author asks what the meaning of these policy changes might be in gender terms, and how programming should be organized to promote women's voices and interests in the media. With examples from three programmes — "Housewife hour" in the 1940:s, "Radio Ellen" in the 1980:s and "Freja" in the 2000:s — female strategies of resistance and rhetorics are presented and discussed, and related to different theoretical gender aspects. More research is needed, though, to judge the effects of the strategies and the relevance of the theories.
Bleck och den aktiva kroppen
Authors: Gunnarsson Jenny
Published: October 2024

The feminist struggle has during all its three waves, as they are commonly referred to as, to a great extent been about the ability for women to live their bodies in different and more emancipated ways. Just like Mary Wollstonecraft already in the late eighteenth century did, the Swedish feminist fanzines of today raise this question. This article discusses the ways in which this is done in Bleck, a feminist magazine that started out as a non-commercial fanzine in the late nineties. Bleck has from its early issues on criticized inequalities between men and women in sports. Both representations of female athletes in the media and economic injustice between men and women within grassroots as well as elite sports have been discussed in the magazine.
The main analytical tool for this article is representation in its two meanings — aesthetic representation and political representation — and the interdependent relationship between the two. The concept of aesthetic representation is used to understand the ways in which Bleck condemns representations of female athletes in the mainstream media for being sexist, and the ways in which Bleck creates counter representations that can be said to function as feminist role models. The concept of political representation is used to analyze how Bleck, while doing the above, makes "herself" what can be called a political representative, or a spokeswoman, for other women.
Offerkastet som gårdagens och morgondagens källa för skuld, sorg och skadeprevention
Authors: Lundälv Jörgen
Published: October 2024

Concepts such as victim-blaming, grief and injury prevention have become important in our risk society. To remember victims in traffic accidents (e.g. injury events in traffic environments), family members and members from the victim's social network, put flowers, photography, decoration, candle wax at the scene of the accident. If mass media reported this signs from the traffic environments when the injury prevention should be better in the future. The aim of this article is to discuss some perspectives of the scene of accident as a place and source of blame, grief but also injury prevention.
En neongrön pushup
Authors: Frisell Ellburg Ann
Published: October 2024

This anthropological study of working conditions in the Swedish fashion industry shows that fashion models think of modelling both as an opportunity and as a risk. Risk taking is construed around the risk of losing one's respectability when engaging in photo jobs that are seen as undignified. The respectability of a job is based on the status of a particular magazine and photographer as well as on its imagined readers. For the female models, it is important not to expose certain body parts, mainly breasts and genitals, since this would risk classifying them as "centrefold novels". Keeping up borders of this kind is however shown to be difficult. To illustrate how fragile the borders of respectability can be, I describe a situation where a young model, Mette, does a non paid photo job for a car magazine aimed at heterosexual men. With this example, I want to show the meaning of a neon green push up bra for Mettes way of keeping her self respect and her professional borders. At the same time, keeping one's respectability isn't always compatible with making a living through modelling. When stretching the borders of respectability help making a career, the models sometimes renegotiate these borders.
Kläder som andas, kroppar som formges
Authors: Petersson Magdalena
Published: October 2024

The aim of this article is to discuss hos the body is constructed in relation to the way it is dressed, particularly how the fit body is constructed through sports fashion. Training consumers have been interviewed about the principles that form the way they dress when they visit their fitness centre, how they combine aesthetics and function and what parts of their bodies they like to expose and conceal. Technological innovations that enhance performances e.g. through breathing fabrics or supporting tops characterise sports fashion and are intertwined with perceptions of ideal bodies. The functions of clothes and fabrics are prerequisites for particular training forms and movement of bodies and the article shows that the informants think of their training as dependent upon "technological support" from fashion. Special attention is being paid to Lycra for its abilities to get bodies into shape and its role in constructions of gender. With inspiration from Donna Haraway, sports clothes are understood as inseparable from the fit body, and hence make us all into fashion cyborgs.
Maskeraden i S:t Petersburg
Authors: Mörck Magnus
Published: October 2024

The uniform is a form of dress meant to standardize the appearance and express loyalty towards the institution. However, in the case discussed, a reunion of Russian paratroopers in 2003, the situation is more complicated. Using the method of visual ethnography a few tendencies in this masquerade are outlined in relation to theories of critical masculinity and history of fashion. Some participants chose to emphasise a warrior-like look, while others declined authority and discipline by appearing in underwear and refashioning berets to funny sailors' caps.
Pojkflickan, fotbollsflatan och alla andra
Authors: Andreasson Jesper
Published: October 2024

This article explores how female soccer players experience themselves and their bodies in relation to discourses of gender, sport and heterosexuality. Using interviews and observations the text focuses on a Swedish team that compete in a premier women's league. The findings of the article indicate that the understanding of women's experiences in sport is constructed and constituted predominantly within a hegemonic masculinity. The perspective presented approaches how the female athletes construct themselves as well as what they recon that others make of them, being both female and athletes. The article also addresses how the women negotiate with mythologies of women's sport in relation to their own experiences of being feminine.
"Man måste lära sig reglerna för att kunna bryta mot dem"
Authors: Olofsson Jennie
Published: October 2024

This article focuses on artifacts and how they can be used to legitimate social positions and maintain hegemonic discourses. For about two months I was practicing in a garage outside Umeå and here I studied the use of artifacts and how these materialities worked as an expression for power. Using things for other purposes that they were meant for, and hereby changing their significance, shows how power is operating, and paradoxically that action can be seen as legitimating positions and preserve hierarchies. Studying and participating in the daily work, I also gained a better understanding of my own position and the way I used tools. Several times I was told how to handle wrenches, pair of tongs, nuts and machines, these reprimands encouraged a certain way of working. At the same time, other ways of handling the tools were excluded. Pontus, one of the machinists had also changed the function of some tools. This innovative action shows how significances never is absolute, materialities are subject for constant changes. My wish with this article is to illuminate how this process is taking place.
Manliga mönster och mönstermän
Authors: Tenevall Robert
Published: October 2024

This article raises the question why large numbers of men joined, or showed their support, for a male network against men's violence against women in the northern Swedish town of Piteå. The network, "Piteåuppropet", managed to raise a big sum of money for the local women's shelter, father hundreds of men for various rallies and gained a lot of media attention, locally, nationally and even internationally.
The theoretical framework for the article can be found in the works of two radical thinkers, R. W. Connell and Slajov Žižek. R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity is read with an understanding of hegemony influences by post-structuralist thinkers. This is done to understand how hegemonic masculinity can take on multiple forms in different groups of men.
Slajov Žižek's understanding of Lacan's symptom is used to understand why the image of the "violent man" is needed to maintain the image of the "good" or "normal man". The main purpose with the network weemed to be breaking male silence on violence. However, other forms of male dominance remained unquestioned by "Piteåuppropet", hence maintaining the image of the "violent man" as invariably other.
När popen kom
Authors: Ronström Owe
Published: October 2024

As a part of an intensive production of different pasts, there is today a growing interest in the 1960's. This article examines how pop music hit Visby, a small town in Sweden, in the early 60's. The main questions adressed are about the prerequisites of aesthetic change, and about how the 60's is remembered and represented in pictures, records and narratives today. In Visby, as in most parts of Sweden, pop music represents an aesthetic revolution, where old European popular music forms are replaced by new afro-american styles. The new musical behaviour became associated with urbanity, modernity, rebellion and youth, and coincided with a fast urbanisation and modernisation of Sweden. In the peripheral small town Visby, pop music opened a new window to a bigger world, which brought new youth closer to centers such as Stockholm, Berlin and London. In the narratives told today the early 60's is produced as a positive, innocent period, in strong contrast to present times, which leads to the question of when the 60's actually happened, then or now?
Ett socialt spel ⁠— inte en flykt från den verkliga världen
Authors: Norlén Anne-Christine
Published: October 2024

In this article I discuss interaction on the Internet as a social game, not an escape from reality. A lot of people argue that the experience of confirmation is as real on the net as in face-to-face interaction. I argue that there is an underlying moral issue to the discussions on the use of Internet, as well as those of online games and online interaction. In the media the machine and the technology are often blamed for the online flirting, when in fact they are human behavior and human actions.
Kolaren Olof Jonassons änka
Authors: Berglund-Lake Håkan
Published: October 2024

Human experiences of loss always entail a crisis of control. When we lose a loved one, it strikes our illusion of control and predictability. We are thrown, and the world seems to fall apart. However, this condition is not permanent. Simultaneously, after a loss there is a human driving force to recover the everyday routines and regain mastery over one's life. As an example of this human stratagem, this article deals with the bereavement coping project of a widow in a sawmill community in the turn of the century. In 1903, Anna Jonasson lost her husband in a drowning-accident. Suddenly she was standing alone, without a breadwinner, and as a single parent to seven young children. The article tries to illuminate how she in a social and historical context that delimited her options, yet did something with the given circumstances at hand, with the possibilities within her reach, to cope witht he loss, and to recover the power to govern her own life.
Minnesflöden
Authors: Arvastson Gösta
Published: October 2024

The cultural organisation of visions and dreams is the theme of this article. It is about a young teenager and daughter from a farming family who in the 1930s decided to leave home and start a new life. Her name was Hedvig and she was completely focused on a career as a female airline pilot. The first stage of her journey involved time at a loosely organised flying school in the vicinity of Ystad in southern Sweden, led by the aristocrat, Count Douglas Hamilton.
After years of conflict and turbulence she realised that no professional training was in sight. The instructions given to her were improvised, and her role as a combined secretary, chauffeur and mechanic had no future. After years of struggle on the labour market she got a job with a national airline company — the prestigious AB Aerotransport in Malmö with passenger services all over Europe. She gained her private pilot licence in 1935 and at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 relinquished her dreams of conquering the skies and instead became the only female shop steward at the Saab production site in Trollhättan.
Her diary is fascinating and peppered with insights and experiences about her life as a single woman in a masculine world. One of the concepts discussed in the article is streaming modernity; something that mirrors her conviction of being on the move and the feeling of streaming and flowing along with society. The article also highlights the use of diaries in cultural analysis. From a scholarly point of view it has often been argued that diaries are appealing yet subjective presentations of the writer in question. In the article, the view expressed is quite the opposite. This is no ordinary day-to-day story. Instead her diary is an interewining narrative of seberal personal themes. A close reading of it also reveals the accuracy of her experience of constructing a personal world.
Kvällens häftigaste frisyr!
Authors: Nordberg Marie
Published: October 2024

Hair is both biological and cultural and a material for design and pleasure. But hairstyles are also a site of power, used both for inclusion and exclusion. Taking my points of departure in post structural feminism, critical masculinity studies, consumption studies and queer theory I discuss hairstyling both as a regulating power and a pleasure that brings young male Turkish service workers together in an effort to create the most thrilling hairstyle of the night. The creations functions as a brand for the company and force the male employees to create more and more extreme hairstyles. However the hairstyling also creates pleasure and the practice constitutes a homosocial friendship among the workers that helps them cope with the pain of long working hours. In the last part of the article I compare the Turkish service workers' performance with one performance presented in a Swedish Hairstyle Show the same year.
Exkludering som fält — inkludering som uppdrag
Authors: Pripp Oscar
Published: October 2024

Ethnological methods are well suited for exploring and explaining structural discrimination within different kinds of social institutions. The ethnologist has various opportunities to study the mechanisms of exclusion that are difficult to identify on an everyday micro level, and link this empirical level to structures on a macro level. In this article I discuss four different mechanisms of exclusion within the state-financed public culture sector: insufficient knowledge concerning diversity management, recruitment by networks and strong ties, ambiguity and ambivalence. I also discuss in what manner the results of this research can be used to affect the policies of authorities and institutions/departments. Ethnology and aesthetic culture share common ground in hermeneutic, and the article points out the ethnologist as an actor of change and a reflexive pedagogue. This is illustrated by examples of how you can get the principals to set about the results and put them in action.
Att synas eller inte synas?
Authors: Rabo Annika , Salim Degla
Published: October 2024

This article describes, with Stockholm as an example, how Islamic fashion has become increasingly publicly visible in West Europe. We have made interviews focusing on aesthetic preferences and shopping habits and we have conducted wardrobe studies among young Muslim women. Some choose a strategy of conscious visibility and to be visibly Muslim in public space, thus confronting and challenging what they see as the patronizing gaze of mainstream Sweden. But the strategy of others is to be as invisible as possible in order not to draw attention to themselves and their headscarves. The women we have interviewed mainly shop in ordinary Swedish stores and creatively use various garments to combine into fashionable and Islamic look. In the text we also problematize our role as researchers since we have also, in a sense, helped produce Islamic fashion in Sweden by supporting an Islamic fashion catwalk.
Hormoner i folkhemmet
Authors: Nordlund Christer
Published: October 2024

In the current historiography of the early Swedish welfare state the so-called sterilisation programme, which was established in the 1930s in accordance with the premises of racial hygiene, plays a prominent role. The aim of the present essay is to highlight and analyse ideas about what may be looked upon as the counterpart of sterilisation: medical practices in order to cure sterility. Furthermore, the essay explores the connection between such ideas and the population debate of the 1930s and 1940s, when not only voluntarily but also involuntarily childless marriages were considered as a threat against the nation. The analysis is based mainly on articles written by the respected gynaecologist and endocrinologist Axel Westman, who conceptualised sterility as a hormonal imbalance and argued that hormone therapy could be of great significance for the treatment of this diagnosis and thereby for society.
Det vita rummet
Authors: Simonsson Märit
Published: October 2024

The white room is an exhibition space that has come to be stereotypical in museums and art galleries in the Western world during the 20th century, with white or one-colored walls, paintings hanging in a row at eye-level and with space in-between. Established as an exhibition space in the early 20th century, as a result of the growing interest in the arts, its impact on the viewer and the autonomy of the artists, the room's main function is to emphasize the artworks and enhance the art experience for the viewer by reducing distracting elements, dramatic colors and the number of paintings. The plain design of the room also opens up for the visitors own imagination and has an effect on his/her encounter with the exhibition: the visitor's previous experiences fill the space with meaning beyond mere function.
En folklorist ser på studiet av køn
Authors: Lützen Karin
Published: October 2024

Sexuality is considered to be a social construction, ie. a phenomenon instilled with meaning by the particular culture within whose context it manifests itself. In other words, sexuality is not an immutable essence within the individual, but rather something existing in society. The present article presents an alternative interpretation of why certain women arrange their lives around a lesbian identity. As a rule, such divergent ways of life are considered as having an individual explanation; however, the ethnological researcher can provide a more analytical explanation of such cultural phenomena.
På väg genom New Mexico och Medelpad
Authors: Eyerman Ron , Löfgren Orvar
Published: October 2024

Road movies comprise a film genre with a growing European audience. European film-makers such as Wim Wenders in Germany, Aki Kaurismäki in Finland and Ulf Malmroos and Jon Lindström in Sweden have experimented with what we consider an idea deeply rooted in American culture, as a symbol of freedom and mobility; the road as a metaphor for life itself, implying risk as well as opportunity. Through an analysis of a range of road movies, the article identifies a number of categories as well as destinations "along the road": Badland, Wasteland, Dreamland and Heartland around which to further classify the genre. All these are linked to specifically American themes, as well as to the changing context of political and social criticism in the United States. We conclude that given the "Americanness" of this film genre, it suffers in its translation to cultures, like the Swedish, which have very different notions of freedom and mobility.
Betty Mahmoodys oförklarliga huvudvärk
Authors: Berg Magnus
Published: October 2024

The article is an analysis of Betty Mahmoody's book Not Without My Daughter. The book is related to the oriental discourse in which the West has constructed a picture of the Orient, one discussed mainly by Edward Said. A leading idea is that this discursive Orient is useful in the West: it is used partly to strengthen the feeling in the western world of being select and superior, and partly to work on that which is suppressed and tabooed in western culture itself. Not Without My Daughter can be understood as a myth which answers to a need to deal with the strong ambivalence that permeates the process of individualization and emancipation in late modernity. As such, Not Without My Daughter is useful in three ways: 1. It normalizes the modern life by denormalizing another life. 2. It detaches through doubling that which we would rather not know about in our own culture. 3. It gives us a foundation of meaning with the power to break down the listlessness and confusion of modern life.
Cultural Studies och etnologin
Authors: Ehn Billy
Published: October 2024

In this introduction, the background to the boom in Cultural Studies in the USA is presented. When this field of research, unwilling to define itself as a discipline, was exported from the Birmingham CCCS, it changed its main direction "from class struggle to the politics of pleasure", from the study of lived experience to textual analysis of representations and discourses. In Swedish ethnology one notes a similar development, although fieldwork and ethnographic description still retain their central importance to our way of doing Cultural Studies.
Den kulturella cirkeln
Authors: Öhman Anders
Published: October 2024

In recent years Cultural Studies has spread throughout the world, transforming Departments of Literature into particular Departments of Cultural Studies. In this article I attempt to examine the importance of Cultural Studies through an analysis of my own development as a scholar and teacher. In the beginning of my career in the early eighties, I was attracted to Cultural Studies becaise of its serious treatment of popular culture. The cultural circuit, a cornerstone in the methodology practiced at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, implied a challenging new way in which to study the relationship between texts and culture, focusing on different readings employed by different, lived cultures. However, there's an important link missing in the cultural circuit, namely the historical dimension. In order for Cultural Studies to become the necessary new paradigm for the study of literature, replacing the older humanist and modernist paradigms, it must also take into consideration the historical canonization of culture, focusing its study on high and popular culture, not only on contemporary cultural phenomena and marginalized subcultures. In this way Cultural Studies can challenge not only old paradigms in the study of literature, but in other areas of humanistic and social studies as well.
Luffarturisten och längtan efter det autentiska
Authors: Andersson Erika
Published: October 2024

To travel around the world as a lone tourist — as a "backpacker" or a "vagabond" — for a few months or maybe years, has become like a rite of passage for many young women and men in Sweden. It is a way of transcending the routines of everyday life, to meet the unpredictable and experience the adventures of travelling. It is like a Grand Tour of the 20th century. To see the "real" world, how it "really" is, seems to be an important aspect of this type of tourism. There is a search for the authentic; for "authentic" people and "authentic" places — not yet "destroyed" by the commercial hordes of charter-tourists. This gives backpacking an anti-touristic, anti-commercial and primitivistic character. But paradoxically, this type of tourism has become increasingly institutionalized and commercialized. The aim of this article is to study the paradox of "constructed authenticity" and how it becomes apparent in backpacking. It is further argued that travelling has a ritual, extraordinary and transcendent character which is highlighted in the activity of taking photographs. I'm concluding the article by suggesting that travel photography is a meta-commentary of the tourist experience which calls into question the authenticity of the tourist sight.
Anmälningar och notiser
Authors: Jacobson Maja , Granqvist Raoul
Published: October 2024

Recension av: Fred Davis: Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Edward W. Said: Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994.
Lilla Aktuellts förkrympta världsbild
Authors: Ålund Aleksandra
Published: October 2024

The treatment of immigrants, crime and violence in the massmedia seems generally to exclude many significant aspects of the crime-related social context, most palpably concerning the conditions under which immigrant youth spend their adolescence. The reality and causal relations which are made manifest in the media concerning crime and youngsters with immigrant backgrounds are based upon presuppositions and simplified assumptions about cultural conflict and an inherited cultural baggage, inevitably leading to culture clash and ciolent and criminal behaviour. The present study argues that the context for violent acts and criminality are socio-culturally determined and thereby must be analyzed in a complex manner in relation to concrete, extant conditions.
Främlingskap och det främmande: Bodybuilding, kön och identitet
Authors: Johansson Thomas
Published: October 2024

The subject of this article is the construction of gender identities. When discussing this subject we are also focusing on the construction of specific bodies. The modern individual is not only experimenting with his or her identity, but also with his or her body. The construction of the "perfect" body involves questions concerning gender identity: what should the perfect male and the perfect female body look like? What is the relationship between muscles and gender? In order to study changes as well as stable patterns in gender identity I have focused on a particular milieu, where bodies are formed and shaped: the gym. The main part of this study focuses on the male versus the female bodybuilders. Whereas the male bodybuilder is interpreted in terms of desperate attempts to cling to an archetypical male identity, the female bodybuilder is taken as an example of what actually happens when individuals develop bodies which become a threat towards the gender order. The female bodybuilder is discussed in terms of the abject, and changes in the more general way of apprehending gender. Female bodybuilders clearly contest ordinary conceptions regarding masculinity and femininity. However, they also indicate more general changes in the way we view the relation between male and female bodies.
Den förtrollade zonen
Authors: Gustafsson Lotten
Published: October 2024

In the Swedish small town Visby, one week a year is dedicated to a temporary reconstruction of the city's envisioned past. A major aim of those who plan the so called Medieval week is to offer authentic and sensous experiences of life in Visby in the middle age. To achieve this goal visitors are encouraged to dress up in historical costumes and act in historical roles. How does one get hundreds of strangers to take part not only in the game itself, but also in the control of it? This article uses the playtheory of Gregory Bateson to examine the strategies used to create a mutual and distinct playframe. During Medieval week the game is safeguarded by setting limits in two directions. Awareness of the make-believe must not threaten involvement — but neither may the involvement threaten reality.
Anmälningar och notiser
Authors: Jönsson Lars-Eric , Kullgren Carina , Lundgren Anna Sofia
Published: October 2024

Recension av: Susanne Lundin & Lynn Åkesson: Kroppens tid. Om samspelet mellan kropp, identitet och samhälle. Stockholm, Natur & Kultur, 1996.
Flemming Røgilds: Stemmer i et grænseland. En bro mellem unge invandrere og danskere? Köpenhamn, Politisk revy, 1995.
Dorte Marie Søndergaard: Tegnet på kroppen. Køn: Koder og Konstruktioner blandt unge voksne i Akademia. København, Museum Tusculanums Forlag, Københavns Universitet, 1996.
"Gammpojkar" ⁠— kropp och maskulinitet i heterosexualitetens periferi
Authors: Nilsson Bo
Published: October 2024

In this article the relation between body and the masculine identities expressed among older bachelors in Norrland are discussed. As the cultural landscape surrounding the bachelors is characterized by the ideal of the nuclear family as well as a compulsory heterosexuality, these men find themselves on the margins of heterosexuality. This position on the outskirts has brought a heightened sensitivity to how masculinity "should" be articulated, and to a great extent the old bachelors have secured their understanding of their male selves in the body's capacity for work. A body in working order functions as a kind of anchor for masculinity, a foundation which makes possible a stable identity. However, this faith in the body also involves certain risks. In the event of decisive occurences in life, "fateful moments", in which the body is deformed in one way or another, the bachelors are forced to reassess their understanding of themselves, their life routines, and their relations to the surrounding world. The body can, in other words, function as both the preservative and the transformative in masculine identity.
Att arbeta "svart och vitt"
Authors: Forstorp Per-Anders
Published: October 2024

This study is part of a project focusing on the study of forms of "moral discourse" in contemporary Scandinavian society. In this paper I will discuss the complex interplay of the different meanings of black and white, the colours of work, class, ethnicity and morality, by means of analyzing excerpts from a radio talk show devoted to these issues. We will look further at the role of the different interactors and specifically at the role of the producers in administrating talk, morality and moral dilemmas in discursive space. The point of departure is a limited set of data. It is relevant to ask the following questions: How is the topic of "black maids" discussed in public media in Sweden? How does the problem become a "moral" problem in the first place? In what way is the audience invited to participate in the media debate and what are the conditions for their participation in discursive space?
Malaria Urbana
Authors: Lennartsson Rebecka
Published: October 2024

I intend my dissertation Malaria Urbana to be a genealogical study of prostitution as a social and cultural construction and of the prostituted woman as a category. Using a constructivist perspective I aim to trace those forces, willpowers and conceptions that have made possible not only the phenomenon of prostitution itself, but also the classifications of it. By focusing on the production of knowledge and its connections on the expression of power, I would like to deconstruct established truths about sexuality, morality and given conditions for a dualistic understanding of sex. However, I also hope to elucidate the individual's possibilities for resistance. Through the representations of the woman who prostitutes herself and her own narratives, I thus aim to write a history of modernity. The background and framework for the dissertation is Stockholm, as the ever-changing urban arena where modernity ccontinually reinscribes itself and where power and resistance find both physical and reflected expressions.
Moskéer i Sverige
Authors: Karlsson Pia
Published: October 2024

The muslim group in Sweden is, despite its internal heterogenity, now consolidated. This is visualized by, among other things, the building of mosques in a distinct "muslim" style. So far there are only four of these mosques in Sweden, including the Ahmadiyya Chapel in Gothenburg, but building permits have been granted in several other places and more applications are reviewing consideration. To those in the vicinity, the plans cause various reactions charged with varying degrees of emotion. Presented in this article are a number of "themes" that recur in written opposition to mosques not only in Sweden, but also in the rest of Western Europe. In these the mosques are depicted as a threat to e.g. the local environment, democracy and the Swedish/christian cultural heritage. The author of the article discusses whether such expressions should merely be regarded as discursive or if it is possible for an ethnologist to respond also to that which does not immediately present itself as written or oral. Taking both the intimately entwined perspectives into consideration paves the way for a more varied analysis of how reactions to a planned mosque are expressed by people in the environs, and which factors on a local, national and international elvel affect the emergency as well as the shaping of these expressions.
Cultural Studies och populärkulturens politik
Authors: Lundgren Britta
Published: October 2024

The article deals with a few of the topics and concepts that over the last five years have been debated in the Cultural Studies journal. These are, for example, popular culture and its contextualization, the use of the term articulation and the question of the responsibility of intellectuals. In the discussion on these, the author draws comparisons to Lawrence Grossberg's article in this issue of Kulturella Perspektiv. Lundgren also discusses the ways of writing "academese" and whether Cultural Studies represents an intellectual practice for the initiated alone.
Kroppssamhället ⁠— om genetikens metaforer
Authors: Ideland Malin
Published: October 2024

Genetics is becoming more and more topical in our everyday lives. Every other day new results from research are presented, often through the mass media. But the laws of genetics are complicated. The mass media, however, help make them culturally manageable. One way this is done, is through metaphorical descriptions.
The metaphors are taken from our everyday life, our everyday surroundings. The body is often described as a factory, the cells as computers, genes as people, and the immune system as a defence against invaders in the form of e.g. a virus. The metaphors govern how we perceive of our bodies. The metaphors govern how we perceive our own body, which the American anthropologist Emily Martin shows in her book Flexible Bodies (1994).
Genetics and other natural science disciplines are nowadays considered to have the preferential right of interpretation in explaining man and his qualities. Our culture is often described as based on biology, and the individual's genetic disposition as deterministic. But as the body and its genes are described as a flexible community, it ought no to be perceived as determined by fate, but rather as susceptible to influence. In other words, biology and culture influence each other. What can be considered cultural qualities may be explained biologically, and biology is explained culturally.
Om flickors inflytande i skolan
Authors: Öhrn Elisabeth
Published: October 2024

Drawing upon a study of gender, power and resistance in grade nine, this paper focuses on girls' attempts to exert influence in school. Previous research usually describes such behaviour as more frequent among boys. In the class described here however, girls are those acting openly in order to have an influence and pursue their principles. The result point to the girls' small group interaction as vital to these collective actions. Contrary to some studies which point to the small group practice as more or less detrimental to collective actions it seems here to be the very basis of the girls' activities.
Könskoreografi och symboliskt våld i skolan
Authors: Berge Britt-Marie
Published: October 2024

The article presents a number of occurrences from diverse educational environments. The examples are taken from research data and mirror in a variety of ways the theme: Body and gender in the school. At first sight the examples appeared contradictory and incomprehensible to the researchers. However, with the aid of Sandra Harding's multi-system theory and the concepts gender-choreography and symbolic violence, the complexity and contradictions of the informants' ideas about sex and their actions in different educational contexts are described, analyzed and understood.
Anmälningar och notiser
Authors: Hagström Ylva , Meurling Birgitta , Jönsson Lars-Eric , Berg Magnus
Published: October 2024

Recension av: Georg Drakos: Makt över kropp och hälsa. Om leprasjukas självförståelse i dagens Grekland. Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 1997.
Britta Lundgren, Inger Lövkrona & Lena Martinsson: Åtskilja och förena. Etnologisk forskning om betydelser av kön. Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 1996.
Fredrik Schoug: Intima samhällsvisioner. Sporten mellan minimalism och gigantism. Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 1997.
Aleksandra Ålund: Multikulti-ungdom. Kön, etnicitet, identitet. Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1997.
Nazismen i Sverige
Authors: Berggren Lena
Published: October 2024

When doing scientific research on nazism as a historical and political phenomenon, one ought first attempt to clarify its ideological content. Nazism is a totalitarian, elitist and anti-democratic ideology which has as its absolute foundation a race-ideology where anti-semitism is a very important component. Nazism does, however, differ from the related ideologies fascism and right-wing extremism on some crucial points, one of them being that the latter two are not necessarily based on a race-ideology.
The first Swedish nazi party was established in 1924 and was called the Swedish National Federation of Liberty (Svenska Nationalsocialistiska Frihetsförbundet). This was to be the beginning of a motley history of organisation where different forms of nazi parties as well as fascist and right-wing extremist organisations would flourish in Sweden. The Swedish "national movement" reached its numerical peak in the middle of the 1930's when there was a total of 70 000 members, of which 40 000 belonged to the right-wing extremist National Federation of Sweden (Sveriges Nationella Förbund). The leading Swedish nazi party during the late 30's and the 40's, was NSAP/SSS, also known as the Lindholm Movement. This party was formed in 1933 and had its ideological roots in earlier Swedish nazi and fascist parties, but also in a long-standing native tradition of organized anti-semitism. The party was not closed down until 1950.
Nazismen och läkarna i Tyskland och Sverige
Authors: Högberg Ulf
Published: October 2024

Ideas of socialdarwinism and eugenics in combination with German nationalism and antisemitism paved the way for doctors joining the Nazi party, 45 per cent of all German doctors became party members. In the early 20th century Swedish medicine and medical education were much influenced by German basic and clinical sciences as well as German eugenics. Early Swedish officials opposed the antisemitic German policy of "rassenhygien". Few Swedish doctors were active antagonists to the nazis, although just a small percentage were members in nazi- or nazisympathizing Swedish organisations, but still many of those sympathizers were influential. The moral catastrophe for the Swedish doctors and medical undergraduates was that a majority opposed asylum for jewish doctors escaping Third Reich. The turn towards a humanistic attitude came when Norwegian and Danish jewish doctors fled from the occupation of their countries. The attitude among Swedish doctors and medical students against jewish refugees have during the last years been on the agenda.
Lesbisk kärlek — längtan eller val?
Authors: Ehn Knobblock Inger
Published: October 2024

This article deals with various strategies employed by Swedish lesbians at the end of the seventies in order to explain and defend their sexual preference. The idea of the "obligatory heterosexuality" was called into question by almost all those questioned by the RFSU (National Association for Sexual Information).
Homosexuality was portrayed as being just as normal as heterosexuality by the interviewed women. Being lesbian was considered a conscious choice a woman could make irrespective of her sexual disposition. When one speaks of choosing to become lesbian, then one's yearning for love and need of other women is understood as a conscious strategy which both bestows an affinity with others and also functions as an alternative to the masculinized heterosexual relationship.
Nevertheless, caution is advisable when speaking of a "lesbian choice". Behind the political arguments for lesbianism there dwells something else, whether suitable or not — the love for another woman.
Anmälningar och notiser
Authors: Lundahl Pia , Jönsson Lars-Eric
Published: October 2024

Recension av: Anne-Louise Eriksson (inledning) m.fl. (red.): Könssorter(ing). Forskning om kön och makt. Festskrift till professor Eva Lundgren. Working Papers Series 1. Sociologiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet, 1997.
Karin Johannisson: Kroppens tunna skal. Sex essäer om kropp, historia och kultur. Norstedts, 1997.
Anmälningar
Authors: Lindström Helén , Nordström Marika
Published: October 2024

Recension av: Anders Hammarlund: Kulturbrytningar: Musik & politik i Centraleuropa. Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 1999.
Timothy D. Taylor: Global Pop, World Music, World Markets. London/New York: Routledge, 1997.
Erfarenhet som diskurs
Authors: Hertzberg Fredrik
Published: October 2024

The aim of this article is to show that it could be meaningful to analyze the ways in which interviewees use personal experience narratives when they are confronted with research questions that force them to make statements in contested political questions. Is it easier to express values or "points of view" in those narratives than in the form of statements or propositions? Rather than providing any empirical finds or concluding remarks, the article contains a discussion of this analytic "point of entry". The discussion starts in a presentation of my own dissertation work, which aims at describing and analyzing how employers and civil servants in labour offices use ethnic categories and the opposition between Swedes and immigrants in describing unemployment and other problems in the labour market, when they are related to the situation for youth and immigrant descent.
"Den lilla röda stugan invid grinden"
Authors: Strand Karin
Published: October 2024

This article considers the songs of Gösta "Snoddas" Nordgren, and how their lyrical contents relate to his artistic image and to historical contexts. Snoddas became immensely popular in Sweden in the 1950s, a period of extensive social development, urbanisation and modernisation. It is suggested here that his popularity is partly explicable by the effective combination of meanings that the singer and his texts produced. To a great extent his songs articulated variations of nostalgia; descriptions of the simple and natural life in the countryside and in the wilderness, and longing for the rural, original home. Popularly known as a simple, genuine, nature-loving young man, Snoddas' own mode of life gave credibility to his performances of the songs. The concept of nostalgia was clearly productive at that time, and as an artist, man and myth Snoddas became an important popular imagination.
Topografier, klichéer och verkligheter
Authors: Öhman Anders
Published: October 2024

In this essay I discuss literary topography in relation to the notion of reality and to the cliché. I argue that mapping is essential to writing, even if it in literature means to deal with textual topos. J. Hillis Miller has shown in his book Topographies that the relation between literary topography and reality is an almost unsolvable paradox. That is, there is certainly an external terrain outside the text, but it is through the text that this terrain comes into existence. And without a reality outside the text, there wouldn't be any need to continue the search for the right angle to view this reality, and the driving force behind the creative act would be lost.
I then compare two contemporary Swedish authors and their relationship towards topography. The topography in P. O. Enquist's novels is unique and very personal, while the novels of Ulf Lundell are dealing with topos that are widespread and collectively known. But in either way, in order to be meaningsful to their group of readers, respectively, their topos have to be a kind of loci communes — commonplaces — or clichés. This makes it possible to understand the cliché in a better and less pejorative way. All topos are in some way clichés, even if they are aimed at and can only be understood by an exclusive group of readers. This kind of topographic reading of the literary text is also what we meet in the hypertext at the internet.
I går var vi slösare — i dag är vi sparare
Authors: Lindqvist Mats
Published: October 2024

This article is part of an ongoing research programme on The Culture of Late Capitalism in Sweden. A major aim is to study the shift from modernity to postmodernity by cultural analysis of the discourse practices of the market economy. My study shows that a new kind of narrative and how and where economic values are created seems to be shaped under the influence of financial capitalistic dominance. Modern industrial capitalism involved in the production and exchange of commodities with the aim of accumulating a surplus value. Today it seems that economic growth has become a question of individual investment, speculation and calculation. There is a link between the increase of the monetary signifiers independent from the material world and the blurring of the boundary between the real and its representations characteristic of postmodern culture. The referential relation between signs and reality seems to be broken.
Þorramatur
Authors: Gísladóttir Hallgerður
Published: October 2024

Þorramatur is a name that has been given to the kinds of traditional Icelandic food that is served in the midwinterfeasts called Þorrablót (during the old month Þorri) in Iceland. In the fifties, there was an upswing in these feasts and then restaurateurs began using the name Þorramatur when advertising these dishes. Since then, many of the food stuffs that Þorramatur consists of are almost only seen in the supermarket at Þorri month and those who are most rare in other seasons tend to be "more" Þorramatur than the others. This applies to the dishes that are soured in whey, which are getting rare now, especially in towns. But when the denomination Þorramatur was invented, it was rather rare to see these dishes in Þorrablót because at that time they were everyday food in most places. In the last years some new dishes have been added to Þorrablót mostly to satisfy young people that go to Þorrablót but do not like the traditional food.
Svenska folkliga och mediala stereotyper om tyska män och kvinnor
Authors: Genrup Kurt
Published: October 2024

This article deals with Swedish popular and medial stereotypes about German men and women. The stereotypes are unexpectedly(?) negative but are more understandable if we see them as "unchanging structures" with medieval roots.
Medierad kulturforskning
Authors: Jacobsson Roger
Published: October 2024

This article attempts to discuss some aspects of media culture on the basis of book history as a field of research. Focus lies on the text and concerns som semiotical questions.