Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T14:03:53.495Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Identity and Voices: A Language-Dialogical Take

from Part II - New Perspectives and Challenges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2021

Michael Bamberg
Affiliation:
Clark University, Massachusetts
Carolin Demuth
Affiliation:
Aalborg University, Denmark
Meike Watzlawik
Affiliation:
Sigmund Freud University, Berlin
Get access

Summary

Like a broad array of core notions in human and social sciences, identity is reformulated with regard to a general anti-Cartesianism. This leads to shifting reified entities to processes and results in a fundamental opening to dynamic plurality and to contextualizing any phenomenon. This shift can be read as a theoretical and as a societal shift in dominant industrialized countries, but it can also be used as a critique of traditional Western individualism that colonizes through psychological science what is otherwise done through markets and symbolic meanings of things, actions, and persons. In this reading, the term “identity” crystallizes the ideology of individualism. Thus, this chapter uses a nonindividualistic, performative-dialogic approach emphasizing the concrete experience of “languaging.” It broaches two issues emerging through processuality: How can we theorize continuity and coherence within change? How do we articulate the social and the individual to each other? Dialogism framing language and self builds the ground for developing identity as a process occurring in a field of mediated activities generated and shaped by language activities deployed onto that field. This process displays a call-and-reply dynamic of crossing and blending voices. An example illustrates this dynamic, highlighting identity as being called by voices of different types. Finally, the two issues are offered an answer by deconstructing the assumptions of sameness and homogeneity and shifting towards heterogeneity, plurality, and dialogicality that are contained by centripetal and centrifugal forces: identity is an interim, even fragile, stage that continues through the dynamic of call-and-reply of speaking voices.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149168.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated and edited by Emerson, C.. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (originally published 1929).Google Scholar
Bamberg, M. (2004). Form and functions of “slut bashing” in male identity constructions in 15-year-olds. Human Development, 47(6), 331353.Google Scholar
Baquet, D, (2017). Highlights from Dean Baquet’s interview with Jay-Z at the New York Times on September 29, 2017. Retrieved April 26, 2021, from www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/29/t-magazine/jay-z-dean-baquet-interview.html.Google Scholar
Bentgen, N. (2017). Jay-Z and Dean Baquet, in conversation (11/29/2017). Retrieved April 26, 2021, from www.nytimes.com/video/t-magazine/100000005574909/jayz-interview.html.Google Scholar
Bertau, M.-C. (2008). Voice: A pathway as “social contact to oneself.” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 42(1), 92113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertau, M.-C. (2013). Voices of others unto the self, voices of others in the self. Polyphony as means and resource for constructing and reconstructing social reality. In Liégeois, A., Corveleyn, J., Riemslagh, M., & Burggraeve, R. (Eds.), “After You!” Dialogical Ethics and the Pastoral Counselling Process (pp. 3765). Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Bertau, M.-C. (2014). Exploring language as the “in-between.” Theory & Psychology, 24(4), 524541.Google Scholar
Bertau, M.-C. & Karsten, A. (2018). Reconsidering interiorization: Self moving across language spacetimes. New Ideas in Psychology, 49, 717.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertau, M.-C. & Klee, M. (2016, September 7–9). Co-positioning in the self. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on the Dialogical Self, Lublin, Poland.Google Scholar
Brubaker, R. & Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond “identity.” Theory and Society, 29(1), 147.Google Scholar
Castarède, M. F. & Konopczynski, G. (Eds.). (2005). Au commencement était la voix. Ramonville Saint-Agne: Érès.Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Barth-Weingarten, D. (2011). A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT2. Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 12, 151.Google Scholar
Erikson, E. H. (1994). Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York, NY: Norton (originally published 1968).Google Scholar
Gadamer, H.-G. (1977). Man and language. In Gadamer, H.-G., Philosophical Hermeneutics, translated and edited by Linge, D. E. (pp. 5968). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (originally published 1966).Google Scholar
Gergen, K. J. (2009). Dialogue as collaborative action. Journal für Psychologie, 17(2), 119.Google Scholar
Gleason, Ph. (1983). Identifying identity: A semantic history. Journal of American History, 69(4), 910931.Google Scholar
Gratier, M. & Bertau, M.-C. (2012). Polyphony: A vivid source of self and symbol. In Bertau, M.-C., Gonçalves, M. M., & Raggatt, P. T. F. (Eds.), Dialogic Formations. Investigations into the Origins and Development of the Dialogical Self (pp. 85119). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.Google Scholar
Grossen, M. & Salazar Orvig, A. (2011). Third parties’ voices in a therapeutic interview. Text & Talk, 31(1), 5371.Google Scholar
Hammack, P. L. (2008). Narrative and the cultural psychology of identity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12, 222247.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hermans, H. J. M. (2001). The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology, 7(3), 243281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Humboldt, W. von. (1999). On Language. On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, edited by Lonsonsky, M., translated by Heath, P.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (originally published 1830–1835).Google Scholar
Jakubinskij, L. P. (1979). On verbal dialogue, translated by Knox, J. E. & Barna, L.. Dispositio, 4(11–12), 321336 (originally published 1923).Google Scholar
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. New York, NY: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.Google Scholar
Markus, H. R. & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224253.Google Scholar
O’Connor, T. (1989). Cultural voice and strategies for multicultural education. Journal of Education, 171(2), 5774.Google Scholar
Osbeck, L. M. & Nersessian, N. J. (2017). Epistemic identities in interdisciplinary science. Perspectives on Science, 25(2), 226260.Google Scholar
Richardson, F. C. (2011). A hermeneutic perspective on dialogical psychology. Culture & Psychology, 17(4), 462472.Google Scholar
Schmicking, D. (2003). Hören und Klang. [Hearing and sound] Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.Google Scholar
Seibt, J. (2018). Process philosophy. In Zalta, E. N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]. Retrieved April 26, 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/process-philosophy/.Google Scholar
Spitz, R. (1945). Hospitalism: An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 5374.Google Scholar
Tannen, D. (2007). Talking Voices. Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vološinov, V. N. (1986). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, edited and translated by Matejka, L. & Titunik, I. R.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (originally published 1929).Google Scholar
Vygotsky, L. S. (1999). Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior. In Veresov, N. (Ed.), Undiscovered Vygotsky. Etudes on the Pre-history of Cultural-Historical Psychology (pp. 256281). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (originally published 1925).Google Scholar
Yasnitsky, A., van der Veer, R., & Ferrari, M. (Eds.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×