Fateful family stories

2022.09.12.

Why do some children dream of ancestors they never had the chance to meet? How can we dream of visiting places we have never been in real life? Ágnes Boreczky, IPPI researcher at ELTE PPK, has just published a book entitled "Families in the Swirl of Time", which seeks answers to these questions by analysing the stories of families through a series of in-depth interviews.

Ágnes Boreczky has been collecting and analysing family narratives for decades, and has a deep knowledge of the literature on the subject over the last half century. In her volume, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transgenerational and transnational family networks that go well beyond nuclear families, and introduces the concept of the extended symbolic family to describe them. One of the questions he is interested in is how the members of the extended family, distant in time, space, culture, social position and a range of other aspects, and more specifically the stories told or not told about them, affect the individual choices and the concrete choices of family members today. Ágnes Boreczky, after a thorough analysis of countless life history interviews on family memory, argues that the narratives of the wider symbolic family, family memory, fundamentally determines the important choices of family members today by setting the framework within which notions of stability, continuity and flexibility are interpreted, thus providing a more limited or more generous capacity for adaptation to a changing world for family members today.

The volume, which summarises research focusing on family narratives, includes a number of original interviews and a special multigenerational account in its entirety.

Ágnes Boreczky's book "Families in the Swirl of Time" is published in English by l'Harmattan in the Metszéspontok series.