Editorial: Images of Afterlife

Marja-Liisa Honkasalo (MD, PhD) is the person in charge of The Research Center of Culture and Health at the University of Turku, Finland (see www.utu.fi/ktt). She has published widely on cultural meanings and the experience of illness, death and especially suicide, on the ethics of suffering and on the social and political embeddedness of human agency. Her theoretical interests originate in the ethics of suffering. She has been the principal investigator of several large research projects and currently she leads the interdisciplinary project Mind and the Other (see mindandother.com), that focuses on ‘uncanny’ experience, largely defined as ‘supernatural’ in the contemporary West. Theoretically, these kinds of experiences challenge the boundaries between mind and the world, emotions and rationality, the self and the other and between life and death, which all make visible some central issues important in the understanding of the human mind, its acts and modalities.

Kaarina Koski (PhD) is an adjunct professor (docent) of folklore studies. She works currently at the University of Turku as a lecturer of folkloristics and a postdoctoral researcher in the research project Mind and the Other. In her publications, she has analyzed preindustrial belief legends concerning death, ghosts, graveyards and the Lutheran Church, as well as the theoretical issues of narrativity, genre, cognition and conceptualization. Later she has turned her attention to contemporary phenomena and written about contemporary beliefs and uncanny experiences, as well as participatory internet culture.

Kirsi Kanerva (PhD) is a cultural historian. In her research, she has concentrated on the history of emotions in medieval Iceland and the role of the restless dead in medieval Icelandic saga literature.