Surviving Time: The Persistence of Identity in This Culture and That

This account is all about how young persons of different cultural stripes work to keep their identities in good repair. Rank-and-file Euro-American adolescents are shown to be steeped in a standard brew of essentialist thought. By contrast, ‘First Nations’ youth commonly adopt a more narrative approach to the problem by weaving together the various threads of their lives into some culturally available fabric. Beyond exploring the relation between the breakdown of such diverse self-warranting practices and youth suicide, the present essay works to bring out possible parallels between such alternative conceptions of personal persistence and various accounts of selfhood and timeconsciousness evident in the course of recent intellectual history.