People tend to share their experiences and to relate them to other people’s experiences. In these social processes, people recognize similarities between their experiences and this, in turn, creates feelings of sameness and peerness based on the assumption of having experienced something together or having experienced a ‘same’ thing. Starting with this simple observation, we claim that there emerge overlapping, complex and historically determined communities of identification, that is, communities of experience.
Ville Kivimäki, Antti Malinen and Ville Vuolanto, Tampere University
While researchers from HEX, the Centre of Excellence for History of Experience at Tampere University focus on history, we jump forward from their framing of the concept of ‘communities of experience’ to riff on the rich potentials of shared memory journeys as a means to build ties of kinship and community.
There is no word in English that resembles the Finnish concept of muistitieto; it translates as memory knowledge but that barely scratches the surface of the notion of lived experience and living history captured by the Finnish word.
Historian and oral history scholar Rachel F. Seidman wrote on making sense of muistitieto, given that Finnish was a spoken language and the Finnish culture an oral one until very recently. From Dr Seidman’s post:
The word they use to refer to both these written reminiscences and oral history interviews is muistitieto, which translates to memory knowledge, or recollected knowledge (whereas the literal translation for what we call oral history would be suullinen historia). In her article about oral history in the Nordic Baltic countries of Finland, Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia, Anne Heimo writes that the advantage of muistitieto is that it highlights the “nature” of the source—that is, the individualized memories of living people—rather than focusing on whether those are passed down in oral or written form.
Rachel F. Seidman
Read Dr. Seidman’s blog for her own challenges with the use of the word in Finland and the fact that it is used to describe tangible artefacts in the form of written narratives as well as the oral living memory of the people writing it. English separates oral history – the spoken word and all its nuances of tone and cadence – from memoirs or diaries or other written or captured formats. However, she adds:
As an American oral historian, I still don’t quite understand treating these invaluable documents as “the same” as oral history interviews—for one thing, I don’t think that does justice to the “co-created” nature of oral history interviews—the way that oral histories are very much created by two people meeting in real time, in a particular moment, together. The results are shaped not only by the questions asked by the interviewer and the responses of the interviewee; but also by the assumptions both parties make about each other; the communication across lines of race, class, gender, education, region, age; even the “chemistry” or lack of it between the two people involved.
All of these factors shape oral history narratives in ways that make them seem quite different from what might happen when a person sits at her kitchen table to write down her memories of a particular place or event for an imagined audience, with the hopes of winning a competition. Nor does grouping these two forms together address the orality of oral history audio—what we can learn from the pauses, emotion, pace, or intensity of the spoken words. But while I might not call it the same thing, I definitely agree that these written narratives are rich documents full of important lessons to be learned….
Rachel F. Seidman
Be that as it may, the beauty of our own work at Ymmärrys ry is that we are artists and designers; creative practitioners with the unspoken license to transcend the limitations of academic definitions and disciplinary boundaries. The outcomes of our work may not even be in written or recorded form – it could be a collage or a painting or a collectively made quilt. The point of collaborative co-creation of the shared muistitieto experience is for strengthening community, cohesion, and shared understanding.
