The Passage from Youth
to Adulthood
explores a society unanchored from culturally endorsed rites of passage, in
which young people and adults appear to build their identities within a culture
of dependency. Pierluca Birindelli interviewed Italian young adults still
living with their parents, focusing on their relations with the bedroom and the
objects in it. He then analyzed self-narrations and longer autobiographies
written by university students, measuring his impressions against sociological,
psychological, and anthropological literature. Exploring the paradigm of what
he calls “intergenerational collusion,” Birindelli finds fathers failing to act
as adults with the tacit complicity of their sons: both are playing to the same
script, heedless of the common good, the other, and the future. Finally,
integrating the experience of young Americans abroad sparks transcultural
reflections about the concept of play and the authenticity of social
performance.
Reviews
“Pierluca Birindelli has written a
theoretically ambitious study on a very fascinating subject: Italian young people who stay at
home until thirty and longer. Birindelli tells us what these young adults think and how they see
their lives. In doing this he develops new interesting concepts and presents an approach which
combines different methods to reveal the deep roots of the phenomenon and the effects it has on
the young Italians. We literally enter their rooms and their playful existence—both concretely
and theoretically. The book ends in a theory of the Big Game, which opens the way to understand
this Italian specificity. This is a groundbreaking book, which will make waves far outside Italy.”
― J.P. Roos, professor emeritus
of sociology, University of Helsinki, former president of the European
Sociological Association
“The young are the future. This book, which is
a book for young people and for adults, leads us with felicitous sociological
imagination into the world to come with its shadows and its lights.”
― Gianfranco Bettin Lattes,
professor of sociology, University of Florence
“The
Passage from Youth to Adulthood is all about truth, is based on our true
stories, true lives. This book is salt on
the wounds of a disoriented and fragile generation, scared to face a world that has become way more difficult than their
parents’. Pierluca succeeds in being ironic and passionate
at the same time in this original work.”
― Daniele Brunori, now a wine
merchant in Guangzhou, China
Pierluca Birindelli is a docent in sociology at the
University of Helsinki and teaches at Gonzaga University and the International
Studies Institute in Florence. Birindelli has published two books in Italian on
the passage from youth to adulthood, a monograph about self-identity in late
modernity, and articles addressing the themes of individual and collective
identity.
Cite
Birindelli, Pierluca. 2014. The Passage from Youth to Adulthood: Narrative
and Cultural Thresholds. Lenham, MA: University Press of America (Rowman
& Littlefield Group).
