Awakenings
Autobiography, Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8046598 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas Degloma (Hunter College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 519-540 |
| Publication date | 2010-08-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Forum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0884-8971 • E-ISSN: 1573-7861 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2010.01194.x |
| OpenAlex | W3143407273 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 39 |
| References cited | 65 |
Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering "truth" in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal-typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a "social geometry" of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of "truth
Autobiographical memory · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Narrative Theory and Analysis
The Sociology of Dilemma in the Case of White Allyship
Forgetting to Remember
Individualized nationalism
Resonant Awakenings
Tell Something About the Pictures
Believing Not Seeing
From Prowar Soldier to Antiwar Activist
Generic Processes in Aligning the Multiple Bases of Identity
Blood, Guts, and Gore Galore
Profaning the Past to Salvage the Present
“I Was Always This Way…”
Narratives of a Dying Woman
Becoming a Psychedelic User
Stories of Non-Becoming
Becoming an Ideologue
Pill epistemology
Critical Autobiography as Research
A biographical nadir
Narrating Genocide
Conversion to Islam
Going Green
The Forum
Memories of War
Transformative Events and Generational Memory
I had to open my eyes”—A narrative approach to studying the process of adult belief change
The Funny Side of Drug Dealing
Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity
Converting to Continuity
Becoming politically discontented
I Was There' and 'It Happened to Me
"The Moroccan "Yizkor Book
Selected bibliography of Memory Studies
The space for culture and cognition
Culture in network breaks
Reasoning Together Through Telling Stories
Collective Memory and Collective Fear
Othering, peaking, populism and moral panics
Deep Transformations
Conceptualising Social Types and Figures
Free spaces
Deciphering violence
Discourse and destruction
The Power of Feelings
Time Maps
Becoming an Ex
Analyzing Narrative Reality
Never Saw It Coming
Interpretive Biography
Anatomy of Criticism
Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma
Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma
Culture in Mind
The Forest of Symbols
The fine line
Tropics of Discourse
The Discovery of Grounded Theory
Morphology of the Folktale
From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age
It Was Like a Fever
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
Self-Made Men
Cultural Trauma
Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
Telling Sexual Stories
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Generally Speaking
Expecting and Accepting
"Transsexuals' Narrative Construction of the "True Self
Collected Papers. Volume I
Zoroastrian Faith
Social marking and the mental coloring of identity
The social construction of reality
The Sociology of Georg Simmel
Generations and Collective Memories
Commemorating a Difficult past
Fate and Agency in Job Loss Narratives
History, Commemoration, and Belief
Illness and Autobiographical Work
Autobiographical Occasions
Autobiographies of Conversion
The 'Traditional date of Zoroaster' explained
From Max Weber
Mind, Self, and Society
After Pomp and Circumstance
The Convert as a Social Type
Religious Conversion and Personal Identity
Victim Narratives and Victim Selves
The Cyber Worlds of Self-Injurers
The Social Logic of 'False Memories
The Rutgers School
Nonhumans in Social Interaction
The Self as a Soliloquy
The Rhetoric of Self-Change
Constructing the Transition to Parenthood
Collective Memory
(Be)Coming Out
Power, Authority, and the Constraint of Belief Systems
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Reference Groups as Perspectives
Free spaces' in collective action
The narrative constitution of identity
| Unique citing works | 39 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,44 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2026 (17) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 38 |