In a previous post I wrote about the AFTRS short film Birthday Boy, directed by Sejong Park, in which the boy of the title, Manuk, collects war debris.
I’ve just been reading a fascinating article in the Journal of Material Culture vol 13(1) 2008 by Gabriel Moshenska of University College London (my alma mater) entitled “A Hard Rain: Children’s Shrapnel Collections in the Second World War”. The article indirectly sheds some light on the film and on Manuk’s activities. As part of his research on the archaeology and memory of the Second World War, Moshenska conducted a series of oral history interviews with people who for the most part had been school-age children in Britain at the start of the war. He notes that “In discussions of socializing, play and everyday life in wartime a large number of the interviewees talked about collecting shrapnel from the streets after air-raids and trading the pieces for other fragments or for other toys or collectibles” (p.108). This work indicated to Moshenska that
shrapnel collecting was qualitatively different from other forms of collecting that children of this period routinely engaged in, and that shrapnel collecting might have been above all a coping mechanism, a means for children to control or domesticate the material culture of violence by integrating it into their social practices and thereby negating its violent and alien qualities. It could also be argued that collecting shrapnel was a way for children to feel involved and actively in the world at war on a par with the adults around them. (p.109)
Moshenska cites the work of W Muensterberger (Collecting: An Unruly Passion. Psychological Perspectives Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), noting that Muensterberger argues that “collections are often substitutes for people: distant or absent parents, or general loneliness” (p.112). This is clearly the case for Manuk; the collection provides a link for him to his absent father. The collection is an intimate and tangible part of his war experience and important to his ‘making sense’ of what is happening around him.
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