Imagining self in a changing world – an exploration of "Studies of marriage"
| Abstract |
Subjectivity is what makes a person a unique subject, different from
other persons and her social environment, and distanced enough from
her experience to be able to reflect upon it and create her own
future. In this chapter, I will examine the life of married couples
in a changing country. A country groups many individuals, and
because of its social and political institutions, it constraints
what is possible for people to live or want for themselves. A
marriage is a curious alliance between two lives for an
unpredictable period of time, which strongly canalizes each of the
partners’ lives. However, a person is never reduced to his or her
national history, or the story of his or her marriage: even in the
tighter frame, a person keeps becoming a unique human being. This
chapter is thus a modest attempt to account for the fact that,
within a group of six couples married at the same time and living
in the same societal conditions, each couple grows differently, and
each person becomes absolutely unique… In order to explain the
generation of uniqueness in such constraining forces, my
proposition is to examine people’s imagination of alternatives, and
their personal life philosophies. |
| Keywords |
Imagination, lifecourse, sociocultural psychology, post-communism, personal life philosophies |
| Citation | Zittoun, T. (2017). Imagining self in a changing world – an exploration of "Studies of marriage". In M. Han & C. Cunha (Eds.), The Subjectified and Subjectifying Mind (pp. 85-116). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. |
| Type | Book chapter (English) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Editor | Min Han, Carla Cunha |
| Book title | The Subjectified and Subjectifying Mind |
| Publisher | Information Age Publishing (Charlotte, NC) |
| Pages | 85-116 |
| Series title | Advances in cultural psychology |
| Related project | Imagination |