Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the Self, 163–186
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163
TIME, SELF, AND THE OTHER
The Striving Tourist In Ladakh,
North India
A. GILLESPIE Alex Gillespie
What is the relation between the dialogical, or social, self and the goal-
directed self, and how might this relation be theorized? On the one hand
there is a growing body of literature that has established the self as social
and internally differentiated (e.g., Laing, 1960; Rowan & Cooper, 1999),
or to paraphrase Hermans (2002), a “landscape” of I-positions which
have their origin in the social world. On the other hand, the idea that the
self is goal-directed is well established (Burke, 1969; James, 1878/1992;
Wertsch, 1998). While the dialogical self literature draws upon a spatial
metaphor of the self, the striving self literature draws upon a temporal
metaphor of the self. The question is; what are the conceptual linkages
between these two substantial strands of theory in cultural psychology?
How can these two root metaphors, or themata (Holton, 1975), the spatial
and the temporal, be combined? The present chapter contributes to the
integration of these two traditions by showing how concepts relating to
the social and dialogical nature of the self can be extended to account for
CHAPTER 7