Telling Absence

Telling Absence This book concerns feminist sociological analysis of war loss and its consequences as experienced and told by Finnish Karelian war widows of World War 2. Over 400,000 refugees from this ceded South-Eastern area were permanently resettled elsewhere in Finland. Seriousness, generosity and humour prevailed when the war widows told about their lives as patterned with hardship and change. A participatory and dialogical approach has characterised the encounters with the widows, drawing on the work of Dorothy Smith, Alfred Schütz and Liz Stanley. A key theoretical theme is that of war's times', a conceptual term which highlights the widows' tellings as an ongoing archive of war, inclusive of wartime events, to living with the consequences of war ever since the war started, right up until now. This work is a rhizome of connected questions: What is war? What is time? How to tell? And above all, how do I know about telling? Or how may I claim to know altogether? Thus this work has developed in two directions, one towards trying to understand loss and the other towards reflexive thinking about knowledge in and of itself.