Where do people feel closest to those they have lost? This article explores how continuing bonds with a deceased person can be rooted in a particular place or places. Some conceptual resources are sketched, namely continuing bonds, place attachment, ancestral places, home, reminder theory, and loss of place. The authors use these concepts to analyze interview material with seven Swedes and five Britons who often thought warmly of the deceased as residing in a particular place and often performing characteristic actions. The destruction of such a place, by contrast, could create a troubling, haunting absence, complicating the deceased's absent-presence.

The concept of social death is commonly used to describe how individuals or groups are condemned to existential homelessness at the outskirts of ordinary, human society. This article, however, explores social death as post-mortem phenomenon in contemporary Sweden. It is well known that lives may be extended beyond the grave through the practices and beliefs of the living, but not all the dead gain a social existence. For various reasons the living may not wish or be able to construe continuing bonds with their deceased, and as a consequence the deceased disappear from social life. Depending on the circumstances, this could be painful to or a relief for the living. It may also go unnoticed. Based on both individual and group interviews, this article investigates why some face post-mortem social death and others do not, and what shades of post-mortem social death there might be. 

Afterlife-ontology and the making of continuing bonds

This presentation explores the co-construction of after life-ontology by mediums and people turning to mediums, particularly ontology which facilitate for the making of continuing bonds. By extension, the questions addressed taps into larger discussions about re-enchantment, spirituality and relationships with the dead, but they are at the same time related to intimacy, meaning and intelligibility. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews as well as conversations found on sites where after life-issues are discussed. Themes examined include experiences of the deceased as still present, imagery of the afterlife in terms of space, temporality, agents and agency, and perceptions of the possibilities to interact. The overall purpose of the presentation is to show how different ontological notions and on-going negotiations about how, where and why the deceased continue to exist result in variations when it comes to the enactment of continuing bonds. Continuing bonds are usually investigated as features of everyday life, most notably in the form of experiences of the dead as somehow present, but also as constituted by various memorialization practices. These bonds may be a way of preserving life as they know it for the living, but they can also fill other existential needs. Although continuing bonds have been explored in the context of mediumship and spiritualism before, the interest here taken in ontological elements such as agency, space and interaction enable for a more thorough investigation of what sort of continuing bonds can be developed. The interest in co-construction, i.e. how notions and imageries are shaped (and challenged) collectively, also adds to the analytical scope.      

(PhD) Annika Jonsson, Dep. of Social and Psychological Studies, Karlstad University. annika.jonsson@kau.se

(Prof.) Lars Aronsson, Dep. of human geography, media and communication, Karlstad University. lars.aronsson@kau.se

This dissertation investigates heterosexed reality as an ongoing accomplishment by the members at a workplace. Observations were carried out sporadically for two years at a museum. During this period twelve formal interviews, fifteen informal interviews, three formal group interviews and three informal group interviews were also conducted. The study rests on an ethnomethodological understanding of how reality and order is achieved by actors in interaction through the use of ethnomethods, such as common sense. Order is produced in a number of situations and it is situations, as locations of shared practices, which are primarily focused.

It is concluded that the members try to, in different ways, realise the museum as a nice place. The concept of straight-framing is introduced to describe one of the pleasure procedures performed by the members in order to generate good mood, solidarity and familiarity in everyday working life. To successfully straight-frame situations, the members must utilise the heterosexual matrix and produce themselves and others as intelligibly sexed beings, belonging to either the category women or men, and as relatable to people of the other sex in couple-like and/or sexualised (explicitly or implicitly) ways. Three different forms of straight-framing are distinguished; direct, mock direct and indirect.

The members also routinely realise the museum as a nice place by creating a discourse of political correctness. The easiest way to produce and use this discourse appears to be to talk about gender equality. In conversations about gender equality women and men are commonsensically turned into a standardised relational pair and this is referred to as the body count routine. While the body count routine makes the issue of gender equality intelligible for the members and enables them to come across as politically competent, it also provides them with an opportunity to organise the working units at the museum. Sex-mixed units can be placed above non-mixed in a moral hierarchy.