The deaths of Marcus and Noel-childhood friends of the author-is the point of departure for this essay. The author uses the concept of an autopsy-both the actual autopsies performed on her friends after their deaths and an autopsy as a metaphor for dismantling the author's own memories of her two dead friends. The aim of the essay is to show rather than tell how self-identity and memory become reshaped through the experience of loss. It is empirically based on ethnographic interviews with friends and relatives of Marcus and Noel and on autoethnographic field notes. The idea of autopsy records as being rather poetic has inspired a method of writing in which creativity interacts with empirical descriptions. The knowledge engendered by the experience of loss and grief in this autoethnographic project has altered the previous beliefs and memories of the author and added layers of sorrow, aggression, and misery. The knowledge the author now possesses has changed her perceptions of the past. The essay could be read as if it were an autopsy of the author's own life, experiences, relationships, and emotions. It contributes to the knowledge on death, grief, and friendship by evoking reflection in its readers about their own lives, experiences, emotions, and relationships. The two dead friends depicted in the essay were people who now live in the memories of the friends and relatives they left behind. This common human experience transcends the individual subjects who were the author's friends.

The article is a two-part piece where the first part is a narratively written composition of interview excerpts, and the second part is a theoretical and methodological reflection about this way of writing. The narrative of the first part consists of extracts from in-depth interviews conducted within the framework of an ethnological and autoethnographical research project examining grief, friendship and kinship in the wake of the deaths of two of the authors childhood friends – Marcus and Noel. The potential of the ethnographic material is explored as text by compiling it in an entirely new manner, where multiple voices are condensed into a single narrative. The point of departure is sociologist Carolyn Ellis’ ideas on co-constructed narratives and autoethnographic texts as jointly authored. The writing method is also inspired by author Svetlana Alexievich and her way of facilitating a focus on specific details of human experience from a larger empirical material. The intention is that the whole should appear to be greater than the sum of its parts. The common narrative is something new, something singular, something greater than could be conveyed by any one of the interviews, or interviewees, alone. The result is a narrative of death, grief, friendship, parenthood and kinship. About how masculinity can be intersected by the lines of class, place, mental illness and substance abuse. In the text, those who grieve for Marcus and Noel are not alone – in the text they stand together as part of a heterogeneous collective with many voices.

I den här boken medverkar lärare och forskare som på olika sätt adresserar något eller flera av orden frihet, politik och systerskap. En rad vetenskapliga essäer ger bland annat läsaren inblick i alpackors skapande av systerlig gemenskap tillsammans med människor, systerskap som politiskt begrepp, frågor om forskares ansvar, akademiskt systerskap, skrivande som feministisk gemenskap, post-migranters erfarenheter och identitetsskapande samt mycket annat. Detta är en vänbok till Beatriz Lindqvist, professor i etnologi, och texterna har därför funnit inspiration i hennes person och forskargärning.

Beatriz Lindqvist har varit en drivande person i uppbyggnaden av etnologiämnet på Södertörns högskola. Hon har även haft ett stort engagemang i lärarutbildningen, såväl genom deltagande i råd och undervisning som genom hennes förskoleinriktade forskning.