Persons, the ‘Autobiographical Person’ and Cultural Concepts of the Person

Abstract

Autobiographical texts have long been seen, from a micro-level perspective, as evidence of the 'individuality' of the writer, and, from a macro-level perspective, as evidence of the long-term historical development of European or Western individual-oriented society. However, recent research has undertaken to deconstruct this notion, suggesting that 'Western' texts are as deeply embedded in a social world and in social-oriented perspectives as Acknowledgements: This essay is based on earlier work, which is partly expanded here (for titles cf. references under Jancke; Jancke and Ulbrich eds.; Bähr, Burschel and Jancke eds.; Hartmann and Jancke). My thanks are due to Claudia Ulbrich for developing much of this together and for years of discussion, also to the members of the former DFG-Research Group (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-Research Group) 'Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective' for providing a stimulating atmosphere for developing these topics, to Elke Hartmann for inspiring talks on transcultural and transepochal perspectives, to Miriam Nandi for discussing parts of this material and to Jürgen Straub and all those from the Institute for Social Psychology at Ruhr University, Bochum, who responded to an early version of this essay with their perspectives and brought me to rethink and clarify some basic points. Finally, I am especially grateful to Sebastian Kühn, Martin Leutzsch and Dwight Reynolds for giving their comments on this essay and for many salient suggestions-more than I was able to incorporate here for reasons of space and time. Last but not least, I am much obliged to an anonymous reviewer and foremost to Kim Siebenhüner and Sally Church for their comments and incisive questions, to Sally Church especially for improving and clarifying my English language.