By adapting a cultural life course perspective, we wish to emphasize the existential dimension of the individual life course lived with others, in a moldable socio-cultural world. We aim at investigating the role of persistent imitation within the cultural life course; in this presentation we analyze interview data from persons, 13 years of age. In the late 18th century James Mark Baldwin introduced the notion of persistent imitation as a basic developmental principle within his theoretical program of ‘genetic developmental science’. Since then, the conceptualization has inspired many developmental thinkers (e.g. Vygotsky, Valsiner) and played an important part in their theory development. Yet, it lives a miserable life in mainstream developmental psychology, where imitation most often is understood as transfer of knowledge and functions by simply copying the other. Such an approach excludes the core attention of Baldwin’s conceptualization towards the personal processes of maintaining and becoming as subjective 18 being. In our presentation we seek to re-construct dynamics of persistent imitation in the course of living and propose a developmental ontology in which engagement, resistance and recognition are fundamental movements in the development and existence of being a person.
By placing persistent imitation within the construction of Cultural Life Course we are attempting to relate the analytical levels of micro-, meso- and ontogenesis.