Жизнените преходи като праксеологическа нагласа: методологически контексти и аналитични интерпретации
Life transitions as a praxeological attitude: theoretical and methodological contests

Author(s): Stoyka Penkova
Subject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure
Published by: Пловдивски университет »Паисий Хилендарски«
Keywords: life transitions; life history; praxeological perspective; ethno-methodology
Summary/Abstract: In trying to resolve the theoretical and methodological problem in which traditional approaches of analyzing life histories become entangled, the praxeological perspective here proposed puts a different emphasis, making explicit the ways in which life transitions are ‘done’ in the course of our practices and social interactions as an effect and manifestation of local membership and categorizations. The thesis here is that life transitions are constructed and constituted in the ways in which agents speak of them describe, negotiate, legitimate or deny them by discur- sive, institutional and everyday practices. Methodologically this means that when- ever someone ‘does’ a life transition, they in fact invent, create, construct etc. their own history of life which in its essence is neither a pre-given or a rationally ordered sequence of events obeying to an inherent telos of this history but something that is constructed and constituted in the course of life itself, more precisely of living together. To defend my thesis, I will first dwell on the critique of ‘biographical illusion’ of Bourdieu by which he questions the notion of ‘life history’ as a linear, ordered, logically connected sequence of events and transitions. As a next step, I will demonstrate that the question of the praxeological attitude toward life transitions is not merely ontological and/or epistemological but, rather, socioanalytical and methodological. My goal is not to propose a summarizing model of life transitions in general but, rather, to mark the different aspects of institutional, discursive and individual practices as the theoretical and methodological background of the empirical cases explored in the collective monograph, in which the diverse forms of life transitions become full of life, i.e. become charged with time and are lived.

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