Paranormal Sweden? : Paranormal beliefs and practices in contemporary Sweden

Sammanfattning: This dissertation aims to study the contemporary occurrence of paranormal beliefs, activities and experiences in Sweden as well as a paraculture of practices dedicated to these issues, with a particular focus on issues of knowledge and authority. The study is placed against the backdrop of academic and popular claims that paranormal beliefs, activities and experiences are not only common but are also on the rise. A quantitative survey targets a representative sample of Swedish adults (n=1101) and assesses the relation between demographic characteristics and paranormal beliefs and practices. The survey is complemented with fieldwork in the form of participant observation and semi-structured interviews in the paraculture. More specifically, settings and organizations related to mediumship, cryptozoology, ghost hunting, parapsychology and ufology are studied as cases of paranormal practice. The data is analyzed in relation to theorizations of occulture and epistemic authority, the latter by combining the concepts of epistemic capital and boundary-work. The findings point to gender (i.e., being female) and the number of recent occultural contact points as the strongest predictors of paranormal beliefs, activities and experiences. In the paraculture, participants are prone to appeal to different strategies of epistemic capital depending on the setting they were recruited from. One notable result is that while most participants and groups relied on counter-epistemic strategies, such strategies are combined with conventional strategies of science-like and traditional strategies of epistemic capital. Paranormal practice, distinctly epistemic, accordingly becomes a case of how knowledge-making on contested and controversial phenomena may take form in light of the tectonic social and cultural shifts implied by modernization.