Jeux d'adolescence et enjeux de société: De l'appropriation du monde à sa transmission. Regard anthropologique sur l'adolescence masculine dans le Québec contemporain
Abstract (summary)
In modern Quebec, male adolescence is most of the time conceived through problems, pathologies, risks and dramatic issues. Bit by bit the teenage span, through toxicomania, schooling drop-out, depression, suicide, risky behaviours, aids, violence, etc. ends up being regarded as a matter of public health.
A bird's eye view of the build up of adolescence in the Western world shows the interest it generates mainly as a subject of studies and preoccupations, how it is intimately linked to historical and socio-political contexts of transition, at the turn of the 20th century, during the after-war and actually at the turn of the 21st century. Anxiety crystallizing upon adolescence induces into a lecture of the major stakes of Western societies during the pivotal periods of their history.
Such an anthropological study conjugating both critical and interpretative analysis, proposes and intertwined approach of young boys' specific teenage period of life. The study is based on a double interest, one helping to understand, "from outside" how and why male adolescence has been pathologized through emerging stakes underlying such a representation; and "from within", the teenage experience itself between age 14 and 17 and the interpretation of it by the teenagers boys.
Based upon and ethnographical research, it was at first through group and then individual interviews, participating observations in various places and social fields, scientific and popular readings, films and documentaries viewing, between 2000 and 2007, that the teenage period from the outside was documented.
Then, the entrance into the teenage world was achieved through collectively produced videos by three teenage groups of boys, from the Eastern Townships in Quebec, between 2004 and 2005. Contents and production process were both considered as points of interest and analysis. These movie data were completed through group interviews and individual encounters with each one of the participants.
The analysis of these teenagers' films and narratives helps perceive and understand the new world appropriation by these boys who grew up through family and social changes of the last decades. Their build up as men and adults takes place within what is available to them, meaningly their physical, human, technological and institutional environment. A major preoccupation for the transmission, the high slakes of which for continuity and changes become a strong challenge within today's Western societies in profound and perpetual mutations, emerges from the intertwined analysis of the overall data.
Indexing (details)
Developmental psychology
0620: Developmental psychology