Book shows how family, culture shape personal stories

The new book "The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture" (Oxford University Press) combines theory, research, examples and personal anecdotes to convey a message: The stories we remember and tell about ourselves are conditioned by one's time and culture. The book traces the developmental, social, cultural and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of our personal past and of our family and community. Integrating prominent themes in research and everyday life, it covers such topics as parent-child conversations about the past, the history of autobiography, cultural conceptions of success versus failure, visual perspectives in memory, cultural differences in event segmentation, the cultural significance of "silence" and the research frontier of new technologies, among many others. "This is the first book to analyze how the form, structure and content of memories reveal the role of culture in autobiography," said author Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology. "The autobiographical self is formed in and shaped by the process of family storytelling, which is situated in a specific cultural and historical context," Wang said. "By analyzing parent-child conversations about personal memories in both East Asian and Western cultures, we find that family-reminiscing across cultures serves different functions in defining the self, maintaining social bonding, regulating emotion and directing behavior," said Wang, who also serves as the director of the Social Cognition Development Laboratory at Cornell and as the associate director of the East Asia Program at Cornell.