Collective Identities

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of collective experiences and categorizations of children living today in western societies. The question is translated by cultural analysis into the search for commonalities that children express in their thoughts, emotions and actions. The thoughts that follow are linked together by reference to the works of Karl Mannheim. The starting point is Mannheim’s concept of generation. It differs from the sociostructural concept of generation, which examines how the generational order of society — the oppositional positioning of children and adults — is (re)produced. Mannheim’s sociocultural approach considers, embedded in a wider concern to explain social and cultural change, generations as consisting of cohorts born at approximately the same time in a specific area of the world. It stresses that shared experience, values and attitudes are formed through the perception and processing of that world. It assumes that the members of generations retain these patterns their whole lives long. Since the key notion in this chapter is collective identities, not generation, reference is also made for interpretational purposes to those works that were posthumously published. They provide insights into Mannheim’s understanding of collective phenomena and demonstrate his conceptualization of a fundamental sociality, the medium within which individuals are able to constitute themselves. The key focus here is on Mannheim’s concept of ‘conjunctive experiential space’ and on the significance he attached to pre-reflexive, ‘atheoretical’ knowledge.