CHRIS MCCOLLUM
Ph.D., Department of Anthropology
Duke University
Project title: "Children's Stories and the
Making of the Self"
Building on my research on how middle class Americans incorporate
the cultural myth of romantic love into their life-stories, I will
examine American family storytelling practices in middle-class families.
I will be looking in particular at the communicative practices through
which cultural understandings of the self and the life-course are
internalized by children, gradually shaping the way they see themselves
and their world. The following questions will guide this investigation:
- How do children learn to organize their autobiographical data
in ways that are consistent with the culturally valued attributes
of the independent self?
- How do those portions of experience that contradict this
idealized self-representation become unstable in personal
narratives, never being structured or elaborated in consciousness?
- In what ways are personal storytelling conventions organized
around ritualistic patterns of action and talk?
- How do these frames provide structure and meaning for
children's personal narratives?
"Early Precursors
of Work-Family Tension: A Psychodynamic Study of Socialization"
(Working Paper 010-02) April 2002
Christopher McCollum
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