Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

This article sets out from the acknowledgment that paranormal beliefs, practices, and experiences commonly occur in Western populations and are frequently represented in media and popular culture. The author argues that a positive association between these occurrences is often assumed rather than demonstrated. A testable hypothesis is derived using Christopher Partridge's (2004, 2006) claim that occulture acts as a plausibility structure for Western imagination. This hypothesis is tested using data from the Paranormal Sweden (n = 1101) survey, distributed to a national random sample of adult Swedes. Positive associations between occultural contact points and items on paranormal practices and experiences were viewed as evidence supporting the hypothesis. Following results from logistic regressions, I demonstrate that the hypothesis gains support. The other independent variable most affecting the likelihood of familiarity with paranormal practices and experiences was gender, with women being more prone than men to try out paranormal practices and to self-report experiences.

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. 

This article explores conspiracy mentality occurrence in Sweden as part of a 2020 survey of paranormal beliefs, practices, and experiences. Using the idea of a shared sociocultural milieu of alternative views and practices of knowledge as a departure point, the relationship between conspiracy mentality and paranormalism, viewed as instances of cultic, rejected, and stigmatized knowledge, is tested through multivariate regression. As part of the regression model, the effects of other social predictors (e.g. gender, income, and cultural values) are also assessed. A nonparametric analysis further explores the relationship between conspiracy mentality and voting intention. The results of multivariate regression show that the dependent variables only predict conspiracy mentality to a limited extent. Predictors that significantly contribute to predicting conspiracy mentality are gender (being male), higher levels of paranormalism, lower income, conservation as opposed to openness-to-change values, and self- transcendence as opposed to self-enhancement values. Meanwhile, the nonparametric test pointed to distinctly higher conspiracy mentality levels among sympathizers with the right-wing populist party the Sweden Democrats and those who favoured political parties not represented in parliament.