The Psychology of Time-Travel: Ambivalent Identity in Stories of Cross-Cultural Contact

This paper explores how the temporal disjunction established in the production of narrative affords a way of managing the tension between competing demands for accountability in settings where the issue of cultural difference features as a participant concern. Specifically, in speculating upon the nature of cultural variation and cross-cultural contact, interview participants employ narrative accounts to manage the tension between the demand to formulate their concerns in an impartial and unprejudiced fashion on the one hand while displaying an appreciation of and sensitivity to cultural difference on the other. Such interactional work is considered for its theoretical significance to recent developments in discursive psychology. The deployment of narrative is therefore examined for how it relates to the situated production of social scientific investigation itself as a form of social activity in which speakers manage the reflexive implications of their own participation in an undertaking where knowledge of cultural difference is worked up as the outcome of the situated activity in which they are engaged.{Narrative, Discursive Psychology, Culture, Identity, Reflexivity)