"We can make new history here"

This dissertation investigates how history is produced, what roles it plays, and what forms it takes in four Swedish football clubs – AIK, Djurgårdens IF, Helsingborgs IF and Malmö FF. These clubs all have long rich histories. They were established more than one hundred years ago and represent some of the processes and ways of handling the past that happen in many other contexts.

Katarzyna Herd studies these processes through concepts of ritual, collective memory, narrative, myth, magic, performance and materiality, and discusses possible structures of historical productions. The focus is on how history is produced and performed, played with in a non-academic setting, for example on the stadium stands, a place where everything can be employed to help one’s club, where nothing is sacred, but much is accepted. It is place where people can make history and become history on a weekly basis.

Katarzyna Herd is an ethnologist at Lund University. This is her PhD dissertation.