Transitions and Turning Points

Abstract

Keightley and Pickering make a crucial intervention in debates about individual and collective memory by providing an account of what is involved in the changes the human subject undergoes across the vicissitudes of time, and by exploring the complex relations between a subject’s sense of self-identity at various stages in the past and their contemporary sense of selfhood. Their focus is on how selfhood is achieved through the practices and processes of individual and vernacular remembering. The chapter tackles two interconnected questions: how are the differences between past, present and future selves reconciled and made part of the continuous story of a life, and how are these successive selves produced through relations with others? Keightley and Pickering also examine how transitions are handled in time and over time, and how lost opportunities are conceived and evaluated. They use their key concept of the mnemonic imagination in order to address these and related issues.