Sotalapsien paikka(tunne)

Abstrakti

During the war years in Finland (from 1939 to 1945)
around 70 000–80 000 Finnish children were sent
to foster families in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
The years abroad had an enormous effect on these
children’s sense of belonging to community and
place. In this article I focus on the sense of place
among Finnish war children. Sense of place develops
through lived experiences of spatiality, particularly of
everyday places. In war children’s case several forced
displacements created fractions in experiencing spatiality
and everyday places. To capture the multidimensionality
of experiential place, I utilise theoretical
discussions of politics of place and geography of
khora. In other words, I discuss how sense of place
is formed through conscious and unconscious processes.
Jacques Derrida’s one interpretation of khora
is a half-way-place, which is midway between space
and time. I suggest that the unconscious processes
of war children’s sense of place can be partly viewed
as a half-way-place. Empirically, my aim is to trace the
secondary impressions of khora‘s half-way-place.