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Accepted Paper
Lady of the forest or ghost of the lake? Renewed and lost relations
to a haunted landscape
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius
(Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
A decade after the largest forest fire in Sweden in modern times people, plants and animals have begun to return to the transformed area. In line with regrowth and renewal of landscape relations; I follow the ritual and narrative recall of a local forest spirit/historical memory/ghost.
Paper long abstract
The largest forest fire in Sweden in modern times took place in Northern Västmanland in 2014. To many it became a wake-up call to the dangers of global warming and large-scale forestry. Roughly a decade after the event plants, people and other animals slowly return to a landscape, dramatically transformed. Specific and curated sites have come to serve as destinations for shared mourning or reconciliation with climate change. While many visitors follow “the loss and recovery of nature” in the vast burned area locals may hold specific memories and lingering relations to landscapes as significant nature-cultures.
This paper discusses the roles of narrative and ritual in local restoration of relations to haunted geologies (cf Bubandt 2017). Expanding Jane Bennetts (2010) definition of ecology as “the places we live” the analysis seeks to include the possible company and comfort of both the more-than-human and the more-than-dead in local attempts to address and recall specific ghosts and other supernatural presences.