Gustavsson, Anders: Cultural Studies on Folk Religion in Scandinavia

The present volume opens with a chapter on folk religion as a field of cultural research in Scandinavia. A major portion of my research has been concerned with conditions in the coastal province of Bohuslän in western Sweden, with glimpses of neighbouring areas in Norway.

Popular religiosity has been an important field of research with which I have been concerned since the 1970s. The first effort was my doctoral thesis in 1972 on the churching of women after childbirth in Sweden. In 1982, a “Centre for Research in the Ethnology of Religion” was established in Lund and of which I became the first director. Within the international organization “Society International of Ethnology and Folklore”, a commission was established in 1990 for the study of Folk Religion. I was chosen as its first president. This commission has arranged conferences at intervals of about three years since 1993.

The present volume opens with a chapter on folk religion as a field of cultural research in Scandinavia. A major portion of my research has been concerned with conditions in the coastal province of Bohuslän in western Sweden, with glimpses of neighbouring areas in Norway. In Bohuslän free churches and intra-church revival movements have played an important role since the late 1800s. I have therefore studied different aspects of such movements in some of the chapters. Religious contacts over the national border between Norway and Sweden have also been a subject of research. The most intensive study has focused on the many different aspects of the Pentecostal Movement on the island of Åstol in Bohuslän.


Anders Gustavsson, (1940-), professor of cultural history at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, 1997-2010 and senior professor since 2011. PhD from the University of Lund, 1972, then reader in ethnology at Lund, part time also in Gothenburg and Bergen; professor of ethnology, University of Uppsala, 1987-1997. His research has concerned popular religion, popular movements with emphasis on temperance and revivalistic movements, coastal culture, cultural meetings, tourism, border cultures, rites of passage, gravestone symbolism, memorial internet websites, popular paintings, fieldwork methodology.


Contents

Introduction 7
1 Folk Religion as a Field of Research 9
2 The Role of Religion in Everyday Swedish Folk Life 34
3 A Nineteenth-Century Peasant and Intra-Church Revival Movements in Bohuslän, Sweden 49
4 The Use of the Senses in Religious Revival Movements 66
5 Religious Contacts in Swedish-Norwegian Border Regions 83
6 The Pentecostal Movement in a Local Community in Western Sweden. The Process from a Minority to a Dominant Local Culture 106
7 The Free Friends in a Southern Norwegian Coastal District. A Local Revival Movement as a Minority Culture 159
8 Free-Church Membership and Folk Beliefs. Conflict or Accommodation? 167
9 Rumours and Breaches of Norms in a Mission Congregation 179
10 Mortal Life and Eternity. Conceptions in Different Generations of a Religious Movement compared with a Labour Education Movement 192


ISBN 978-82-7099-696-4, 202 pp., hardcover
Format: 17x24 cm, weight 0,7 kg, year of publication 2012, language: English