Session 4B: Transitions to Adulthood
1st Global Conference
Friday 3rd July – Saturday 5th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Blurred Transitions: Revisiting the Significance of Work and Parenthood for Young Adults in Italy
Valentina Cuzzocrea and Sveva Magaraggia
Dipartimento di Ricerche Economiche e Sociali, Cagliari and Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Almost everywhere in Europe, corresponding to the transformations in modern industrial and post-industrial societies – i.e. the extension of education, the diffusion of birth control devices and the individualisation of social life – transition from youth to adulthood are being prolonged and de-standardised (Cavalli and Galland 1996; White and Wyn 2008). Similarly, a common trend can be identified in terms of disinvestment in welfare measure. This in turn puts pressure on parents and young people, establishing specific models of welfare state (Esping-Andersen 1990). Italy falls in the category of the southern group of welfare states (Ferrera 1996) whose features are low levels of welfare provision and reliance on the family as a form of support.
However, young adults in Italy constitute a case in its own right for a particularly delayed transition to adulthood. Not only scholars (Diamanti 1999) but also national and international press heavily attack them with the accusation that they have lost freshness and potential in public life. The question is then what conditions allow a young Italian to consider himself/herself an adult in the current cultural and social-political scenario.
International sociological literature on life cycle agrees in identifying five thresholds which have to be overcome in order to reach adulthood. Among these, we concentrate on obtaining a stable working position and becoming parent. Findings from our two different research projects (Cuzzocrea 2008, Magaraggia 2008) strongly converge in criticizing the necessity, for the young adults interviewed, to refer to such thresholds. Within a situation of growing contingency (Leccardi and Ruspini 2006), ‘yo-yo’ modalities have been identified (Walther 2006) to interpret transitions which are not only prolonged and destandardised, but also uncertain and reversible. Pushing further in this direction, our interview material suggests to re-conceptualize the intrinsic value of reflexively ‘passing’ turning points to consider oneself fully adult and to problematise adulthood itself as an unquestionable ‘point of arrival’(Kelly 2006).
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Like Fathers, Like Sons: Age Staging and Generational Stumbling Blocks. The Boran Gada Experience
Andrea Nicolas
University of Halle, Germany
In contrast to individual life-course projections, North-east African age organization enables male individuals to pass as a group of age-mates through a defined sequence of age grades. The Gadaa organization of the Boran of Kenya and Ethiopia combines this type of age-staging with a generational mode of recruitment. A son gets introduced to a specific set correlated to that of his father and subsequently changes his status every eight years as a member of his cohort. The son’s set always remains at an equal distance from his father’s set which synchronically “moves”, always some distance ahead, through the same life cycle. Such a filial “bond”, embedded as it is in the group’s socio-political organisation, can have affective values but it can also become a “fetter” on personal decisions and can even cause individual life crises. A son who was born late to an elder, for instance, might, by the time he becomes an adult, already be “too late” for his own (generation set defined) time of marriage. Indeed, the moment a member of the family fails to stick to the rules of timing for legitimate procreation the whole generational chain is brought out of step. Demographic surveys suggest that large numbers of people no longer match the ideal correlation of age and generation set membership, nominally having fallen out of the system and thus becoming deprived of their participatory rights in political life. In spite of this, Gadaa organisation is still very much present among the Boran and is far from “extinction” – this is what we might call the “riddle” of Gadaa.
This article deals with the question of how an institutionalized ageing and procreation “charter” can work as a coherent framework in the face of the erosive forces of fission and individual non-compliance. It further touches on the issue of the creation of “historical generations” named after their famous leaders and remembered by the Boran as subsequent age and generation sets. On a deeper theoretical level, the study raises the question of why at all a society introduces such a highly elaborated and normatively sanctioned way of “collective ageing” and generational streamlining? Is there a need “to be in step” with others?
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