Kaisa Vehkalahti

Enigmatic Objects of Childhood: Narrating Post-War Rural Childhood Through Material Memories

Do you remember your favourite childhood T-shirt? Or the feeling of climbing onto a brand‑new bicycle for the first time? Childhood memories are often closely tied to material objects, which may carry personal significance and trigger processes of remembering. In this presentation, I explore the material world of childhood in the context of oral history. Drawing on life writings depicting rural childhood and youth in post-war Finland, I examine how new materialist perspectives on the agency of objects (Bennett 2010; Frykman & Povrzanović Frykman 2016; Koskinen‑Koivisto 2022) can be combined with narrative and historical analyses of life stories. The life writings offer vivid narratives in which material objects—here approached as biographical objects (Hoskins 1998; De Nardi 2016)—play a key role in directing the flow of the story. Many such objects are ordinary, everyday items, yet the writings also contain rich descriptions of exotic or exceptional objects. I conceptualize these as enigmatic objects of childhood. They reveal a world of enjoyment, imagination, and empowerment, but they may also evoke detailed accounts of physical pain or shame experienced in the process of growing up. At the intersection of imagination, cultural memory, and developmental milestones, these enchanted objects open space for alternative narrative paths within autobiographical writing. In some cases, they allow authors to move beyond the dominant cultural script of hardship and work that is central to Finnish memory culture (Vanha‑Similä & Vehkalahti 2023).

The analysis builds on life writings collected through the My Countryside campaign, organised in 2021 by the research project Rural Generations on the Move. Cultural History of Rural Youth, 1950–2020 (University of Jyväskylä) in collaboration with The Finnish Museum of Agriculture.

Referenced literature

Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press: Durham–London.

Hoskins, Janet (1998). Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York–London.

Koskinen-Koivisto, Eerika (2022). Material Memories: Narrating And Reconstructing Experiences About Displaced Childhood During World War II. Narrative Culture, 9 (1), 109–128.

De Nardi, Sarah (2016). The Poetics of Conflict Experience. Routledge: New York–London.

Povrzanovic Frykman, Maja & Frykman, Jonas (eds. 2016). Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture. Nordic Academic Press: Lund.

Vanha-Similä, Maria & Vehkalahti, Kaisa (2023) Food Memories.

Connecting to Rural Roots through Food in Life Writings by Finnish Women Born in the 1950s. Ethnologia Scandinavica 53, 42-60.

Biography

Vehkalahti is Senior Lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of History and Ethnology. Vehkalahti specializes in the history of childhood, youth, and education; oral history, and qualitative longitudinal studies. Her recent projects have focused on the changing Finnish countryside. Vehkalahti leads a multidisciplinary research group for rural youth funded, e.g., by the Academy of Finland. Vehkalahti is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural History at the universities of Oulu (since 2015) and Lapland (since 2020).