CULTURE-FINLAND: ‘Living Books’ Help Fight Prejudice

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Jun 8 2007 (IPS) - Books cannot talk back to a reader and answer all of their questions. So if one is seeking concrete information on, say, a gay person, the library is perhaps the wrong place to visit.

But the Finnish Youth Cooperation (Allianssi) has a better idea. Instead of a library full of abstract information, it runs a living library made up of real people who can be “borrowed” and who provide instant feedback.

“We believe that discrimination and intolerance in society are based to a great extent on prejudice, and with the living library concept we aim to increase awareness and bring about constructive dialogue between people in order to diminish prejudice, if not remove it altogether,” said Riikka Jalonen, coordinator of the Allianssi campaign “All Different, All Equal”.

The living library concept was demonstrated at the World Village Festival, an annual meeting of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) aimed at informing the general public of their activities, held in late May in the Finnish capital.

In a spacious tent sat a group of people, or “living books” ready to be borrowed, chatting lively with one another and with “readers.”

“All the ‘books’ here represent categories of people who face prejudice in Finnish society, such as immigrants, gays and lesbians or Muslims. The aim of the living library method is to break down such prejudices and give faces to real people,” said Jalonen.

“All the ‘books’ here have been borrowed more than once already, but the immigrant attracts the most ‘readers’,” said Jalonen, adding that “we are constantly busy.”

There is a catalogue of the kinds of “books” available, which also contains a list of common stereotypes about that “book.” Readers go through the catalogue and make their choices from the ones that have not been loaned out.

Each reader is allowed to check out one “book” at a time for only twenty minutes, explained Jalonen. However, extensions are possible if a discussion was left incomplete.

Only one reader can check out a “book,” said Jalonen, in order to maintain equal power relations between the reader and the “book.”

Just as readers must not give shabby treatment to library books, so a “living book” must be returned in good mental and physical condition.

The living library avoids collecting only members of obvious groups, such as cultural or sexual minorities, because the aim is to provide a wider perspective on how different categories of people get pigeonholed in society, said Jalonen.

It thus includes people such as engineers, police officers and priests, who may not face discrimination but are nevertheless stereotyped.

For instance, the typical stereotype of an engineer in Finland is that of a heterosexual man with short hair who knows all about machines and cares little about human beings, has never used public transport and drives a Saab, said Jalonen. He may also never have visited Kallio, a working class neighbourhood in Helsinki.

But it also goes beyond breaking down prejudices and stereotypes, she added.

“Some people come to the library for specific reasons. When a parent suspects that his or her child may be gay or lesbian, they come to the living library to seek out real people with such traits to talk to and acquire a better understanding of what the phenomenon is about,” she told IPS.

“Prejudices and stereotyping make people live in a box, and we would like to help them get out of the box and see what is out there,” she said.

Unlike a conventional library housed in a building with a permanent location, the living library is made up of a network of people spread around the country and occasionally called together in schools or public libraries.

Allianssi coordinates them through an email database and also provides training on the method and on how to “recruit books.”

The first living library was organised at the Roskilde rock music Festival in Denmark in 2000. Since then, the idea has surged in popularity and spread around Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, according to Jalonen.

There are now about 15 living libraries around Finland, which are becoming more and more popular.

A living library was also organised once in Belgium, where it generated enormous interest, said Katleen Van der Straeten, the organiser of the living library in that country and a visitor to the World Village Festival in Finland.

“For the first time, it provided a safe environment for people to ask all the questions they dared not ask about people whom they had little chance of meeting face to face,” she told IPS.

According to Van der Straeten, the Belgium Youth Council is now trying to sell the idea to other youth organisations in that country.

The difficulty in Belgium, however, was to get “interesting people” like asylum-seekers or disabled people to volunteer as “books,” she said.

“The living library concept also helps people face up to their own prejudices, therefore taking the first step towards respect for human rights and valuing people who are different,” she said.