Self and Sense of Placelessness
In order to understand war children’s experiences of evacuation in relation to senses of place and self, it is helpful to draw on humanist approaches in geography. Humanist geographers became interested in the experiential nature of place in the early 1970s (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977).
They focused on the existential relations between self and place: what constitutes spatial experience, how people are affected by place, and how place evolves in people’s socio-material relations. In 1976, the geographer Edward Relph wrote the seminal book on Place and Placelessness. For Relph (1976. p. 43), “the essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centres of human existence.” He also stated that “people are their place and a place is its people” (Relph 1976, p. 34). Relph was worried about the assumed disappearance of the distinctiveness of places. He argued that the making of standardized landscapes destroys meaningful places and in the end leads toplacelessness, i.e., place's inability to create senses of belonging and emotional attachment (cf. Casey 2001: thin and thick place). Relph’s strong arguments need to be understood in the context of early critiques of globalization and its effects on localities. In contemporary geographical understandings, place is understood as processual and constantly evolving, but these qualities are not considered a threat to the existence of particularity or intimate relations of the self and the spatial (e.g., Cresswell 2004; Massey 2005).According to Mathis Stock (2000), the essence of place is constructed in a subjective relationship between individuals and a place. “The word subjective signifies the relevance to subjects and not to the particular individual: hence the sense of place may be the same for many people” (Stock 2000, p. 616). Experiences of place are personal, but by nature, the sense of place is intersubjective (Kuusisto- Arponen 2009, p.
549). Sense of place and spatial belonging are created through several mobilities: mobility of people, geographical thought, and imaginative landscapes (Ashworth and Graham 2005). Further, Kevin Hetherington (1997) argues that places are relational and existing in similitude. They should be understood as in the process of being placed in relation to, rather than just being there (Hetherington 1997, p. 188). It is in this constant process of becoming that the sense of place is formed and lived.Whereas there are many visually and narratively communicable aspects of sense of place, some are indeed nonrepresentational, unreflected, and intuitive. Studying relational and constantly changing places is nothing new in geography, but there is still a need to conceptualize and empirically examine the semi-unconscious and nonnarrative elements of bodily experiences of place (Kuusisto-Arponen 2011a, b). The embodied experiences of particular places are personal, but even those have intersubjective meanings that easily evolve into communal identity politics. These affective dimensions and relationships of people and places are crucial in understanding the significance of displacement experiences and the essence of diasporic spaces and practices (e.g., Brah 1996). Thus, placelessness in contemporary geographical thought is not seen as a threat to the existence of the particularity of a place, nor does it mean that a global sense of place cannot exist (on misinterpretations of Relph's book, see Seamon and Sowers 2008). Instead, placelessness is indicative of the existential fractures in the relationship of self and place (Kuusisto-Arponen 2014).
Placelessness is one dimension of experiential place. It is created in conscious and unselfconscious lived experiences of place (Relph 1976, pp. 65-67). Already Relph (1976, pp. 38-39) pointed out that people's rootedness is born out of significant places that evoke affection and care. In the case of forced displacement, this dwelling place of being is profoundly changed and a sense of placelessness appears (Relph 1976, p.
39). Individuals interpret these fractions in spatial belonging as rootlessness. Mindy Fullilove (2004) calls this forceful separation of people and places root shock (Fullilove 1996, 2004). Topological narrations of not belonging are, however, only one aspect of the fractured sense of place (cf. Relph 1976). It is argued here that several non-topographic phenomena and practices exist which clarify the significance of placelessness experiences in people's life course and explain the vagueness of narrated war-related memories.War children experienced several placings (both physical and ontological) during wartime. Leaving the familial environment led to multiple personal negotiations where sites and ties of belonging were sought and newly defined. Several studies have concluded that in a traumatic situation, such as forced displacement or war, children's psychophysical defense mechanisms and coping strategies are activated (e.g., Fernando and Ferrari 2013). These affect children's abilities to recall and to remember traumatic events and might even lead to distortion of autobiographical memories throughout their later life (Meesters et al. 2000). On these occasions, forced displacement has resulted in a spatial trauma (Kuusisto- Arponen 2008). It is argued here that the denial of the existential emotive-spatial relations among war children simultaneously led to losing part of their selfhood and suppressed their place identity from fully developing. This, however, occurred only partially consciously. The contextual and psychological conditions of the development of spatial trauma are discussed in the following section.
4