Culture, Self and Time: Prospects for the New Millennium

Abstract

In the course of the 20th century, the themes of culture, self and timetheir definitions, relationships and conditions of emergence-became highly visible and hotly contested. Our intention for this special issue of Culture & Psychology is to draw out and bring under one cover some of the major controversies which attend efforts to delimit and relate these themes, and which we believe to set a particular theoretical stage for the new millennium.We see this enterprise as an interdisciplinary one, and include work from individuals with backgrounds in developmental psychology, social psychology, linguistics, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology. Despite the disciplinary diversity, certain recurrent issues percolate throughout. In particular, each of the contributors is in some way-and, in some cases, in several ways-preoccupied with a sense that the conjunctive relationships between culture, self and time are somehow fundamental to justifying such principal dualities, paradoxes or tensions between opposites as those commonly understood to exist between continuity and transformation, subjectivity and relatedness, and coherence and diversity.Organizationally, we have created three sections reflecting three major temporal contexts of development: the phylogenetic, the ontogenetic and the cultural-historical. Each section includes essays of a Culture & Psychology

Images of Circular Time and Spiral Repetition: The Generative Life Cycle Model

“…Carr (1986) has argued that, unlike physical or objective time, the temporality of human experience and action is structured as narrative. Lightfoot and Lyra (2000) have stressed the importance of looking at human development through three major temporal contexts: the phylogenetic, the ontogenetic and the cultural-historical. We sympathize with these new looks at time:…”

Men, Sport, Spinal Cord Injury and Narrative Time

“…In recent years there are signs of renewed interest in the theme of time (along with that of culture and self) as evidenced in the work of, for example, Flaherty (1993Flaherty ( , 2002, Howard and Hollander (1993). For Alheit (1994 and Lightfoot and Lyra (2000), however, this sociologically significant component of our life remains undervalued and deserving of closer analysis. 4.…”