1 “AS A P EACE -LOVING GLOBAL CITIZEN ”: A R EVIEW OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE R EV. S UN M YUNG M OON by George D. Chryssides (University of Birmingham, U.K.) A paper presented at the CESNUR 2011 International Conference in Danshui, Taiwan. Please do not quote or reproduce without the consent of the author. Identities and autobiographies What makes me the person I am? To think of the self in philosophical terms of minds and bodies does not touch on the distinctiveness of being myself. The real “me”, as distinct from other people, lies in the narratives that I construct for myself. The social psychologist Jerome Bruner describes such narratives of identity as “that swarm of participations that distributes Self across its occasions of use” (Bruner, 1990:122). A biography or an autobiography seeks to give a meaning or identity to someone’s life, and in doing so selects successive parts of a narrative to construct the subject’s identity position. In his article “Narrative and Memory” David Hiles (2007) distinguishes between “bounded” and “unbounded” motifs in a narrative. The former he calls the fabula — the content of the story — and the latter the sjuzet, which is the form, or, as he puts it, the window through which I enable the reader or the listener to see the events within my narrative. Thus, an autobiographer must decide what best sums up his or her true self. Am I the impenitent sinner, the incurable optimist, the mad professor, the innocent victim, the alienated, or maybe some combination of these? These are all “windows” through which the autobiographer might try to reveal his or her life: they are the author’s constructions, and they are “unbounded” — the possibilities are numerous. The content (fabula), by contrast is “bounded” in the sense that my autobiography is fixed by social relationships in which I have actually participated. If I portrayed myself as a war veteran, a ballet dancer, or a brain surgeon, any such “autobiography” would be fictional, since I have not participated in the relationships that would merit such a self-definition. An autobiography might therefore be challenged on two different grounds: one might question the veracity of the material, or one might question whether the author’s identity position is a valid one, and whether there might be other more appropriate ways of viewing the narrator’s life. Whether there is one definitive objective evaluation of one’s life, or whether — as postmodernists would suggest — merely a variety of possible ways of seeing someone’s existence, is a philosophical question which I do not hope to resolve here. What I