Dialogical Self Analysis

The dialogical self is a very useful concept for the analysis of the multiple identifications of individuals in multicultural circumstances that are so characteristic of the contemporary era of globalisation. It complements the dynamic conception of culture that has emerged in anthropology in recent decades, while it has a number of advantages over the traditional concept of identity. This article discusses the development of the concept of culture in anthropology as well as the parallel debate about the notion of cultural identity in anthropology in order to demonstrate that the notion of the dialogical self to some extent overcomes the difficulties with the concept of identity in the analysis of the dialogical interaction between different

The fragmentation of the nation-state in the global era is to a large extent caused by migration. Contemporary movements of labour are fundamentally different from those in the past, both in terms of quantity and quality. Some five million people cross national borders each year, and they are on the move not only in search of employment, but also for a whole range of other reasons, including cultural reasons associated with differences in lifestyle as represented in and disseminated by multiple global media

(“Screens,” 2002). The scale and diversity of migrations are therefore not only unprecedented, but their consequences are more far-reaching as well. Transnational migration is not only complicating culture and cultural relationships within the nationstate, but the rise of the multicultural society that is associated with it is simultaneously having fundamental implications for the self of individual migrants and all their relations at home and abroad. In this context, a dialogical perspective on the self

The concept of self, however, is alien to the toolbox of most cultural anthropologists. Apart from a small number of cognitive anthropologists, mainly in the United States, most anthropologists interested in individual interpretations and representations of culture tend to use the concept of identity, and, formerly, the notion of personality. In this paper, now, I will argue that anthropologists are badly in need of a multidimensional concept of self in order to tackle the increasingly dynamic nature of cultural processes, and the manner in which they reflect the constitution of culture within the self of individual actors. I will do so partly by reflecting on the outdated concept of personality, but mainly by discussing the drawbacks of the concept of identity for the analysis of complex cultural relationships and their consequences for the self. At the same time, however, I will argue that the psychological theory of the dialogical self may benefit from anthropological analyses of cultural processes, that will not only raise new questions, but to some extent also provide new answers to