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Emotions and spirits online: How inexplicable feelings are made spiritually significant on an internet forum
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Centre for Gender Studies (from 2013).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9916-6179
2014 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

By analysing a Swedish online forum for spiritual development, we show how people draw on emotions as a source of knowledge about the spirit world. We use these results to discuss how the sociology of emotion can shed light on the broader theme of contemporary re-enchantment. The large online forum is open to the Swedish-speaking public. In contrast to other similar forums, it is not confessional or tied to a specific group. Its members express a general, non-dogmatic interest in the foremost experiential side of spirituality. We have analysed all forum posts pertaining to spirits, and interpreted how emotions are expressed, discussed and understood. Our results show that members tend to bring up and discuss emotions perceived as socially responsive, but experienced in apparently non-social situations. These include sensations of presence, fright, being uncomfortable, and of rooms feeling empty or crowded. We suggest that the distinction between affect and emotion, i.e. non-verbalised and socially embedded sensations respectively, can be used to interpret these results. Gender is also shown to be important when deciding who feels what and who can rightly interpret whose emotions. These results may inform academic understandings of the contemporary trend of re-enchantment.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2014.
National Category
Philosophy, Ethics and Religion
Research subject
Gender Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-82927OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-82927DiVA, id: diva2:1529561
Conference
The international and interdisciplinary conference Images of Afterlife, University of Turku, Finland, October 22 - 24, 2014. 
Available from: 2021-02-18 Created: 2021-02-18 Last updated: 2022-12-14Bibliographically approved

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Raivio, Magdalena

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf