Med krisen som framtidshorisont

Om mötet mellan prepping och pandemin

Abstract

Prepping – a form of crisis preparedness with subcultural undertones – has grown in popularity in Sweden during the 2010s and ‘20s. While the cultural roots of prepping can be traced to a North American context, Swedish prepping culture has in recent years been established through a range of handbooks, blogs, podcasts and social media forums. In practice, prepping is a question of preparing material stores, skills and social relationships that might be useful in an emergency. Using ethnographic interviews as a point of departure, this article discusses how the tensions between imagined and real emergencies inform prepping practices and imaginaries. While the interviewees were accustomed to preparing for a range of eventualities, the covid-19 pandemic turned out to be quite different from the type of crisis they had imagined, which illustrates how collective imaginings may help as well as hinder crisis preparedness.