Friendship, Sistership and Personal Identity in Early Adolescence
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The chapter seeks to explore the effect of the relationships of friends and sisters on personal identity performance and its linguistic expression in conversational contexts. Drawing upon Aristotle’s definition of friendship an attempt will be made to explicate modern understandings of the two notions pointing to their relevance for personal identity construction and performance. Aristotle’s definition delineates the notion of friendship distinguishing between a genuine friendship and two other forms: one based on mutual usefulness, the other on pleasure. The genuine form of friendship, not being widely accepted in modern societies, seems to be critical for development of personal identity. Modern approaches to identity have been influenced by Cooley’s notion of the looking-glass self.1 Briefly, it means that our actions and behaviours are mirrored back to us through the responses of other people. Seemingly, sistership is easier to define as it involves the kinship relation between a female offspring and the siblings, yet the nature of the bond is far from being simple. Sistership can involve co-operative behaviours and be based on either of the forms of friendship in terms of Aristotle’s definition or else it can involve either competition or resentment where it can be based on animosity or hatred. Still, this relationship appears to play a significant role in identity construction since people are engaged in sistership from early years of life hence sistership looking glass is available much earlier in identity development than the friendship looking glass. Consequently they both appear to exert differential yet complementary influence upon identity construction and performance. In the course of presentation I will elucidate the above-mentioned issues focusing on how the two types of relationships get surfaced in conversations and the way they are realized with linguistic means. Data comprise real-life recorded conversations between three early-teenage girls; two are sisters, the third one is a close friend of the younger sister. The conversations, held in Polish, were transcribed and translated into English.