The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the church ruin of the abandoned settlement of Övraby in Halmstad, Sweden. This is done from a modern church archaeological point of view based on Jes Wienbergs discussion on how to analyse a church as a part of a society rather than as an entity of its own. As an effect of this the thesis also discuss the settlement history of Övraby. The delimitation of the thesis is Övraby and its closest surroundings. Three issues are raised 1. Is there is a continuity of cult or place of cult from the pre-Christian era. 2. Of what type of character was the settlement? 3. How did the church architecture reflect societal change? The results in this thesis states that there are no concrete findings of cult places from the pre-Christian era which could be said to be connected to Övraby, though there are some aspects of the interior of the church building that might be considered as having been connected to a pre-Christian aristocratic cult. The thesis also states that Övraby was an aristocratic village which with time developed into a city, this aristocratic character of the early settlement is reflected both in profane buildings and on the architecture of the church. The development from village to town the thesis states, can be seen on the church architecture since the church lost many of its aristocratic features of architecture as the settlement developed.

Denna uppsats undersöker hur samma historiska händelse kan ha olika betydelser i film. Idag är människor mer benägna att se en film om en historisk händelse än att läsa en historiebok, och detta innebär att vi måste lära oss att förstå de konventioner som används för att placera historia på film. Historiefilmen kan sägas besitta en palimpsestisk historiskt medvetenhet där lager av fakta och myt smälter samman, hellre än att skiljas åt. Men för att en historisk händelse ska passa in i filmens tidsram måste den bearbetas och detta resulterar i att vissa människor, händelser och rörelser prioriteras, medan andra utesluts. Därför undersöker denna uppsats vad som lagts till / uteslutits och effekterna på sammanhanget och trovärdighet, hur filmen hävdar sin autenticitet, och hur upphovsmannen påverkar trovärdigheten. Analysresultaten av två filmer om den kubanska revolutionen, visar att beroende på vilken del av den historisk händelsen som skildras, skapar filmerna helt olika berättelser med olika budskap. Medan filmen Che-Argentinaren (2008) fungerar som en hyllning av gerillanledaren Che Guevara som Kubas frälsare, visar en vänsterideologi och uttrycker USA förakt, skildrar däremot den andra filmen The Lost City (2005) revolutionens baksida. Den visar en högerideologi, familjevärderingar och USA som frihetens och drömmarnas land. Båda filmerna använder sig av liknande stilistiska strategier för att uppnå illusionen av autenticitet, och filmernas upphovsmän påverkar filmernas trovärdighet i olika grad. Vad jag i uppsatsen till sist menar är att historiefilmen inte bör tas som sanning, utan har en viktig roll som intresseväckare, som förhoppningsvis leder till att åskådaren blir intresserad av att söka sig mer kunskap. / This paper examines how the same historical event can have different meanings in films. Today people are more likely to watch a film about a historical event than to read a history book, and this means that we must learn and understand the conventions used to place history on film. The history film can be said to possess a palimpsetic historical consciousness in which layers of fact and myth come together rather than be separated. But for a historical event to fit within the film's time frame, it must be processed and this results in that certain people, events and movements are given priority, while others are excluded. Therefore, this paper studies what has been added/excluded and the effects on the context and credibility,how the film claims its authenticity, and how the author/filmmakers affects the credibility. The results of the analysis of two films about the Cuban revolution, shows that depending on which part of the historical event depicted, the films create entirely different stories with very different message. While the film Che-Part One (2008) serves as a celebration of the guerrilla fighter Che Guevara as Cuba's savior, according to a leftist ideology and the film is expressing U.S. disdain, the other film The Lost City (2005) however, portrays the revolutions backside, it shows a right-wing ideology, family values and the U.S. as the land of freedom and dreams. Both films use similar stylistic strategies to achieve illusion of authenticity, and the films' creators affect the films credibility in different amounts. What I finally conclude, is that the history film should not be considered as truth, but serve to arouse interest, which will hopefully lead the spectator to seek more knowledge about the historical event.

In this Thesis, from the disciplinary vantage point of English Studies, I explore some of the complex meanings that may be attributed to several forms and practices of South African consumer culture: magazines, malls and themed leisure. While these contemporary cultural 'texts' are often ephemeral, and people's attachments to them fractured, transient or at least ambivalent rather than unproblematic, my argument takes issue with the pessimism that informs much local and international criticism of consumer culture. My Thesis turns to concepts of affect, image, sign and discourse which have become features of current English Studies in order to generate readings of commercial culture more nuanced than the 'hard analyses' favoured by dominant practitioners of 'radical' South African cultural studies. At the same time, though, my analyses have learnt through disparate forms of local cultural study the necessity of grounding textuality in the structures of political economy. By means of manageable yet conceptually-suggestive South African instances, I consider how commodities and commodified experiences - generated in the first instance by the vested interests of Capital and related ideologies - may nevertheless be experienced by people in a plethora of ways not directly tied to the commercially-expedient construct of the 'target audience'. This experiential process entails a rampant volatility typical of a mass-mediated lexicon which challenges boundaries between high and low, formal and unofficial, propriety and the improper. While advertising and promotion, for instance, function as corporate attempts to contain proliferating signifiers and to secure a preferred, 'authorised' meaning for cultural goods or services, it is also the case that consumers themselves, perhaps creatively and certainly in clandestine ways that escape the supposed authorities of either market researcher or academic intelligence, author meanings that rework the limitations of what still tends to be construed within the university as a culture industry at once banal and insidious. The meanings of the contemporary cultures with which I deal, then, are highly mediated and many-layered, rather than constituting the mere surface announcement often imagined by scholars of both literary culture and of media- and cultural studies. The contexts of my Thesis are particular: it was completed in 1998, and has been produced from a university in KwaZulu-Natal by an academic formally trained in English Studies. In some respects, then, the interpretations I offer are narrow: geographically, historically and disciplinarily focussed. Yet in working on South African examples of commoditised forms and practices that derive from metropolitan vectors and have convoluted international genealogies, I have also sought to theorise the shifting interrelations of regional and national, local and global, discipline-specific and interdisciplinary knowledge. Drawing widely on studies into consumer relations - and at apposite points identifying conceptual connections and differences between 'foreign' figures like Michel de Certeau and influential South African thinkers such as Njabulo S. Ndebele - I suggest that for all its shortcomings consumerism needs to be understood as active process rather than as passive effect. My argument implies that such a rethinking of the conventional binaries of production and consumption is appropriate in a South Africa which is gradually giving substance to a democratic social order. Even within a politics premised on the individual, forms of consumption such as magazine reading and shopping need not necessarily be scorned as the selfish, even hedonistic pursuits caricatured by ideological purists: the Thesis seeks to demonstrate that people are at once citizens and consumers, individuals searching after distinctive identity and style as well as desirous of achieving a variety of community inflected bonds. Overall, the commercial culture examined in the Thesis is represented not as inevitably marred by cultural deficiency and degraded value - despite the dissatisfactions, irritations and deferred pleasures which for many of us form at least one facet of consumption - but as an everyday spectacle which is available for symbolic interpretation and aesthetic investment. This investment may be emotional as well as cognitive, sensuous as well as critical, mundane as well as exceptional, since individuals come to commodity culture with a range of longings, dreams, fears and sedimented allegiances. As my readings demonstrate, it is such diversity of response - provisional and elusive rather than predictable and guaranteed - which gives the lie to theories which are 'always-already' premised on the prior inscription and encoding of consumerism as manipulation. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1998.