Expanding dialogical analysis across (sub-)cultural backgrounds

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a diagram as a tool for analysing empirical data concerning the issue of difference of subcultural backgrounds and worldviews in the dialogue and its implications to the psychological practice in social work. From a theoretical view on dialogical and cultural psychology, we will trace the roots of selected contemporary dialogical and social representation theories and elaborate on it how distinct subcultures of interlocutors can produce misunderstandings when the professional interprets the utterance of the other. Focusing the social pedagogic practice, we will approach dialogues between people that belong to different cultural contexts as instances of the challenges in the communication, i.e. pedagogues and adolescents, doctors and patients, people belonging to different societies, etc. We argue that the theoretical approach presented and discussed here is part of a general understanding of communication processes, showing that despite mutual understanding will never be fully achieved in a dialogical situation, the possibility of sharing meanings and senses depends on the effort to take into consideration the worldview of the other in the background of what is presently uttered.

Keywords

Dialogue otherness worldview social work intercultural relationships cultural background

Introduction

The ideas elaborated in this paper departed from our practical work in very distinct sociocultural and institutionalised situations: the context of the interethnic dialogue of psychologists with Amerindians communities in Brazil – in the Amerindian Support Network, a service headquartered at the Institute of Psychology (University of São Paulo) – and the context of the Social Work in Denmark – a service researched by the University of Aalborg. Psychological work with people in the communities and with people at institutions evidence challenges in the communication. This leads us to reflect on how different degrees of non-sharing of worldviews guide personal trajectories of construction of meanings and senses between the interlocutors. Communities are not the same as institutions; nevertheless, we argue that the challenges we have faced belong to a same general issue that inheres all human communication and concern all those who are attentive to the concrete experience with the others, the issue of otherness. This issue will be approached in the paper from a twofold focus, one epistemological, concerning the dialogical psychology, and the other practical–empirical. It is not presenting a meticulous empirical study nor an exhaustive theoretical article but rather a hybrid where excerpts from empirical data are used in a dialogue with theories in order to develop a diagram that can support analysis of empirical data in future projects.

The notion of diagram refers to the elaboration of a dynamic map that shows a set of tensions we recognise in concrete situated experiences, addressing tendencies in the semiotic process, therefore, it is not a model nor an abstract representation of a general rule similarly repeated in all cases.

A selective approach on worldviews in the dialogue

Bakhtin (1986) proposes that the difference between the exact sciences and human sciences is related to the way we approach the referent of an intended knowledge. The exact sciences presuppose a subject that cognise and explain the object, and the referent is not allowed to reply, contest or agree with the subject, its perspective is suppressed. Although ‘any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived and cognized as a thing’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 161), in the human sciences something different happens when the subjective condition of the other is considered relevant, because the other confronts the knower with his/her perspective. We have then distinct subjects facing a referent in the dialogue from different – convergent, divergent, parallel, indifferent – perspectives.

Such dialogical situation that considers the other as a subject converges with what Cornejo (2008, p. 174) identifies as the minimal communicative situation in the core of pragmatic theories of language ‘the anthropological situation where meaning construals emerge, crystallizes, and are permanently modified’. On one hand, as empirical persons with the others in the world, our existence as subjects and objects is concomitant. On the other hand, the things and people around us exist as such because they are impregnated by meanings transmitted by the others, and they can be taken as subjects or as mediating the relation between subjects, depending on the perspective of the interlocutor, but always culturally situated.

The sociocultural perspective of each person singularly cultivated in a cultural ground reinforces the impossibility of an absolute monologism (Linell, 2009) in the psychosocial interactions. Bakhtin (1986) associates the efforts to make a monological discourse with the authoritarian perspective that does not allow the negotiation of meanings and senses. On one hand, these authoritarian discourses are actively crystallised through to the construction of imposed barriers to become fixed, hardly able to be changed or reframed in the dialogue with the perspectives of the others about a topic of reference. On the other hand, the dialogical communicative situation is, at some extent, structured with open-ended possibilities of action that make viable and restrict the possibilities of discursive manifestation.

The dialogical approach on communication presupposes a sort of architecture of the intersubjectivity that restricts and allows some semiotic sharing of senses about what is uttered (Rommetveit, 1979). Gestures, intonations, the rhythm of the speech, the sequence of words in the composition of a statement; the answerability of the person in relation to its past experiences and expected future are all part of such architecture. The dialogical semiotic of Bakhtin (1986) also concerns what the speech is addressing, that is as the speaker is an active subject, he/she has intentions and goals when producing an utterance. The statement is a link in the chain of the previous utterances; it answers/confronts the previous utterances based on the ideological orientation as the purposeful horizon of the act of communicating something.

Marková (2003) takes into account the dialogism of Bakhtin in order to discuss how social representations are dynamically transformed through the negotiation of meanings in the society. The social representation is considered a co-authored composition that emerges in the social field of the interlocutors and it is represented in a triadic model, based on Moscovici (cf. 2003) similar to that discussed by Cornejo (2008). Besides, both Linell (2009) and Zittoun (2006) expand such triadic models including a third dimension, referring to the participation of the social others, the culture as a grounding of the dialogical situation (see Figure 1). Linell (2009) and Zittoun (2006) propose the image of a prism including as a dimension of the triadic model the social others, which for us also refers to the extraverbal situation of the dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense.

Figure 1.

Dialogical prism of the relation between two persons.

The notions of extraverbal situation and speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986) guide the understanding on how the personal style of communication is not purely subjective but at the same time that the mutual understanding is not given by a structural analysis of the content of the speech. This can be the shared spatial horizon of the interlocutors as they observe it, their common knowledge and comprehension of the situation and their common evaluation of the situation (cf. Bakhtin, 1986). Then we understand the extraverbal situation as a field of interobjectivity based on the cultural symbolism of those who are in relation at certain concrete lived moment.

The social field is phenomenologically constructed by many others including those who are not face to face in the communicative situation. Our contemporaries, ancestors and future generations (Berger & Luckmann, 1971) constitute the field of social others that structures the interobjective situation from where the person is able to understand the communicative messages of the others and expose its proper perspective in the communicative situation. The notion of interobjectivity (Latour, 1996) refers to the set of objects created in the history of societies that guide, constrain and channelise humans actions (Valsiner, 2007). Social representation is a class of these objects that are dynamically negotiated and resignified from distinct perspectives similarly to other facets of reality that are contemporarily made and become objective in a sociocultural process of co-authorship. Therefore, a social representation is not only a commonly shared social knowledge but concerns ‘creating, evaluating and understanding change and stability’ (Markova, 2003, p. 4):

Social knowledge is knowledge in communication and knowledge in action. There can be no social knowledge unless formed, maintained, diffused and transformed within society, either between individuals or between individuals and groups, sub groups and cultures. Social knowledge is about the dynamics of stability and change. (p. 4)

Concepts and social representations, as social knowledge, are co-constructed in conjunctive and disjunctive social chains of people in dialogue about something; besides, the extraverbal sense of our material world of things also take part in the interobjective creative process, guiding, constraining and channelising the communicative process. As culture’s symbolism articulates subjective connotations and consensual denotations about the world, theirs and others (Boesch, 1991), people and their objects resist to the free reorganisation of meanings, they repose some symbolism with which they were cultivated and guiding future generations through it (cf. Freitas & Guimarães, 2013; 2015). Therefore, the extraverbal situation can be largely shared in a sociocultural field but, since it is heterogeneous (cf. Valsiner, 2007), we will always notice some level of discrepancy between people in the same culture and we have been observing that the gap can be largely increased between people cultivated in very distinct cultural fields (see below).

The gaps in the apprehension of the extraverbal situation and in the trajectories of semiotic elaboration based on the cultural symbolism challenge the possibilities of sharing in the institutional and intercultural communication as we will show in the empirical situations presented and discussed in the following sections of this paper. As we mentioned in the ‘Introduction’ section, the empirical examples are meant as means for developing the theoretical and empirical diagram. We only discuss some aspects of the cases that can be useful in this connection leaving other interesting topics that could be analysed further aside.

The pedagogue and the adolescent in an institution for residential care in Denmark

These empirical cases were collected by one of the authors at an institution for residential care for adolescents with behavioural or personal problems run by the social authorities in Denmark. As the adolescents are often placed against their will and want to live by themselves, there are different perspectives and interests which could appear in their dialogues with the staff. The data were collected especially focused on the possible influence of these different worldviews and interests on the dialogue and the possible misunderstandings it might create.

The pedagogues working at the place have regular talks with the adolescents where they consider their daily life and their progress and possibilities for moving out from the institution to live by themselves. This particular dialogue is taking place between adolescent Rita and her primary pedagogue Kristian. Rita is 17 years old and has been living at the place for three years. She started at a new school approximately a month ago and is going to move to a rented room to start living by herself within a few weeks. The institution will follow her and supply with guidance, meetings, etc. and Rita will always be welcome to visit the institution.

The dialogue was recorded and the researcher observed the dialogue. Immediately after the dialogue the researcher interviewed first the adolescent and then the pedagogue shortly about how the dialogue turned out and why they acted as they did. The researcher observed that the pedagogue was more nervously talkative than the adolescent both before, during and in the interview after their dialogue, where the adolescent was quite calm and talked openly to the researcher.

Analysis of the dialogue

The general pattern of the dialogue showed different interests and goals of the participants. The pedagogue Kristian was very concerned that Rita, the girl should realise she would have problems from time to time when living by herself and would need help. In this he focused on clarifying her reactional pattern when she got problems or felt lonely. He wanted her to seek help at the institution when problems arose. Rita, on the other hand, was very anxious that if she admitted too many problems and worries the staff might change their mind and decide she could not leave the institution and she felt a need to collaborate enough to avoid this. This made her very careful when talking about problems and what actually worried her about living by herself. She also tried to avoid too many agreements which would limit her freedom once she moved to live by herself.

The following excerpts from the conversation and the following interviews are selected to illustrate some special points in the dialogue.

Dialogue part 1:

Kristian: And you come here. And we can see you and talk – we can still have some talks …

Rita: Yes. How about visits and such? I mean – are you coming down to visit me once a week or how ….?

K: Yes

R: Is it once a day or how?

K: We have not decided on that yet

K: In the beginning I will come quite often

R: Yes.

Interview with R right after dialogue:

Interviewer: And then you asked “How about visits?” If they would come to visit you.

Rita: Yes. It’s because I don’t want them to come

I: You want to be by yourself?

R: I want to be by myself. I prefer, if I want to see them and talk and … then I can come here

I: Yes

R: Because I think it will be very superficial … now they come … and then because they come you know you have to drink coffee and then you have to talk of how things are going and such … I am not sure I can manage that once a week

R: Not with these people. Here I talk of small topics of which you cannot make a coffee party

I: Mhm

R: Because I don’t feel like it

I: Mhm

R: But he doesn’t know

Interpretation

In the dialogue Rita’s question on visits could be interpreted as a wish for and positive attitude towards visits, which actually was the impression of the researcher observing the dialogue. In the interview after the dialogue she asserts that she actually wanted to avoid agreements on visits and preferred that she came to the institution if she wanted to talk to them. If she had problems she would not see them as her first choice for help.

In the next excerpt Rita and the pedagogue talk about her relations to the other students in her class.

Dialogue part 2:

R: Well no … I don’t know. I just think as time goes by the closer I will be with them and eh … then I will daily be with them after school and make homework and cook and clean and … well I think I will have enough to do. I don’t think I will be bored.

K: but there are no adults to talk with you. This is one of the things I am worried about when you move by yourself – the loneliness

R: But some of the girls they also know I live here at <the institution> and am moving by myself. And I have told them – that is why Christine (another student in her class) is still living at home. We share a lot about the fear of living by yourself for the first time ….

Interview with R right after dialogue:

I: Yes. A little later you talk about … I think K. says he is a little worried that you will be lonely down there, and you talk about friends from school – some of them talk about living alone

R: Yes

I: Is it so that you are a little nervous when you move away from home?

R: Yes

I: Have you been talking about it?

R: Well in school … or here?

I: No in school with friends I think

R: Yes we have. But they also said they had a fear of being … being lonely because you know you are very much alone … so several others had it like that. And this is the reason that one of them still lives by her parents … but she is doing fine at home … so I know she knows how I feel about it … That is why I told K. this is why they ask me in … if I want to join them. Because they know how they would be if they should live in an apartment and they know you quickly can be lonely … So yes I think they understand me

Analysis

In the dialogue with Kristian, Rita tries to argue that she will not be lonely but together with her fellow students since they know the problem of being lonely. She will rely on them for help but Kristian is worried because there are no adults to ask. In the interview afterwards Rita gets a little quiet when asked about thoughts on being lonely and again she argues by help from her friends. It seems she is actually worried about being lonely but does not want to admit it to Kristian.

Some of the points of analysis could be summed up in a table 1.

Table 1.

Dialogue analysis.

Worldview	Rita	Kristian
Focus	Freedom possibilitiesFuture	ProblemsHistory
Problems	Avoid interference from institutionHave a backup	LonelinessManage her moneyHandle troubles
Time perspective	Short – concrete	Longer – general
Support	Friends	Adults/pedagogue

The influence of different interests on the development of a conversation can be understood in the dialogical terms as the ideological dimension of every speech, since the utterance is always an answer in the chain of previous uttered voices and address another answer from the interlocutor, i.e. the answerability in the dialogue. The excerpt selected here is about a moment when Rita does not want to talk openly on fear of being lonely and other worries because she is afraid of this leading to postponing her move to live by herself. Likewise different temporalities, or time perspectives, appear in the process of communication as when Kristian seeks to avoid problems in the future by foreseeing them and Rita focuses more on the possibilities of freedom appearing when moving to live by herself. She knows troubles will appear but does not bother before they do.

In this dialogue another point seems to be at play too because there are some implicit but different presuppositions. Kristian presents a clear expectation that if adolescents as Rita need support they have to contact adults to get it and his way of facing problems is to anticipate them and take care to avoid them. On these two themes Rita, on the other hand, quite as clearly sees her classmates as the place to seek support and she knows troubles will appear but since you cannot know in advance which troubles, you might as well wait and face them when they turn up. For Rita living by herself is primarily a question of freedom from interference by adults and since she has been living at an institution for three years she is tired of adults/pedagogues who again and again remind her of problems, to think ahead of the present situation, etc. This can be understood as an example of the tendency in adolescence to turn away from parents and family and towards friends for both social reference, knowledge and support, which again can be seen as a change in worldview.

Stated as a general theme they have different perspectives or worldviews on certain points which are touched upon in their dialogue and these different worldviews guide distinct semiotic elaborations of the experience and disturb the mutual understanding of each other and thereby the collaboration. Besides other effects in this case it hinders Kristian to help Rita with her real worry about probably being lonely when she lives by herself.

The prisms of dialogue

This paper started with the dialogical notion of a communicative situation analysed with a triadic model in which the other and the Self negotiate meanings about something, a social knowledge or an object of social representation that is, therefore, co-authored. We introduced the model of a prism taken from Linell (2009) and Zittoun (2014) as tool to analyse part of the dialogue but we observe that there are aspects of the empirical findings that this diagram does not account for demanding a further development of the prism, turning it into a dynamic map or diagram of tendencies in the semiotic trajectory of the dialogue. The adolescent and the pedagogue have different ‘others’ or different extraverbal situations that guide their evaluation of the concrete lived relation with the other as when Rita and Kristian have different understandings of whom to go to for ‘support’. They are based on distinct worldviews, interobjectively constructed with whom they share a layer of the cultural field, as references to the understanding of their present situation and therefore influence their acts in the dialogue. To include this layer of otherness in the prism we propose the following diagram.

Each partner in the dialogue has their own more or less different ‘others’, worldviews, perspectives, grounding their referents and understandings in the dialogue. Considering the excerpt presented above, Kristian does not perceive Rita’s worries or, if he does, he is not able to establish collaboration because he does not follow her semiotic guidance which is from a slightly different worldview. This makes him verbalise topics to collaborate on in a way, which blocks the collaboration with Rita. For Kristian having problems and a need for support automatically implies contact with an adult and since Rita looks forward to freedom from interference of adults as an important part of living by herself this is excluded or at least reduced to a minimum and only when she wants to search for it. In her worldview support is obtained preferably from friends. If they should establish collaboration Kristian should know of the premises in her worldview and instead discuss how she could get support from her friends – not from him.

Problems with a dialogue not leading to collaboration can, as mentioned, be because of different perspectives that are also related to different interests concerning the outcomes of the relationship. We consider that this expansion of the dialogical prism is fruitful in a further use to help professionals of caring to realise and maybe overcome misunderstandings and other challenges in the communicative situation. We include below other examples in which this sort of expansion can be useful.

The expanded prism in diverse sociocultural situations

In the following we will sketch how the expanded prism can be applied in other contexts where dialogues between (sub-) cultures take place.

Bilingualism among adolescents in Copenhagen

From the 1987 and until 2006 a group of researchers had the opportunity to collect data on the language development and use among adolescents with a bicultural background in Denmark (Jørgensen, 2008; Lytra & Jørgensen, 2008; Stæhr, 2010). Their parents were immigrants from Turkey who had moved to Denmark for a job and then had settled. The adolescents grew up speaking Turkish at home and with some of their friends and speaking Danish outside home that is in school, around the city and with some of their friends. They were fluent in both languages. In several projects during these years, researchers of language recorded conversations between groups of adolescents who collaborated to solve a task given by the researchers such as creating a collage on a theme from their everyday lives. The conversation included many different topics besides the task but an interesting aspect is their use of shifting from one language to the other. The researchers describe a constant negotiation of identities and positions in the group in relation to societal expectations but also between the adolescents in the group. In these negotiations they primarily used Danish for focusing on the task they had received and worked on but when the conversation was directed towards the negotiation on social positions they often switched to Turkish.

The researchers understand this as a double competence. Cultural values and norms are implied dimensions of a language and these are different in different cultures. This also implies that negotiations of identity and position in a certain direction might be favoured by one language compared to another language. Adolescents who are bilingual therefore might have extra competence since they can shift to the language which serves them best in these negotiations. They not only understand two cultures with different norms and values but they can also use these differences actively when negotiating their identity in a modern society where this is not fixed by traditions. This demands that the partners they negotiate with are also able to appreciate the differences in the languages or in some instances only some of the partners in the conversation should appreciate this since shifting language can also exclude partners from the conversation if they do not manage both languages and cultures.

Connected to the expanded prism and stated in a generalised way, we understand that persons in a dialogue usually have different (sub-)cultural background to draw on. This can be done purposefully with or without conscious awareness depending on how reflected these possibilities are. Here the question of influence of interests on a dialogue is connected to the conceptualisation of different worldviews. Figure 2 which illustrated the possible obstruction of a dialogue by differing worldviews could now be used for illustrating extra possibilities in a dialogue to negotiate and to take care of interests as identity construction or social position. Here different worldviews can be an extra competence and force in these negotiations when you can shift deliberately to the worldview which serves your interests best. This use of the expanded prism as diagram of dialogues can be applied with advantage to dialogues and interactions between subcultures revealing both potential problems and possibilities when different subcultures are involved.

Figure 2.

Dialogical prism of the relation between the non-coincident extraverbal situation of the pedagogue and the adolescent.

Subcultures of professionals

In the communication between medical doctors and patients at a hospital a returning problem is complaints from patients who do not receive the communication and support they want and need. This could be another example of differing worldviews influencing the dialogue.

If a patient has attended examinations at an oncological ward and is now receiving feedback from the doctor on the results there are complaints that the doctor does not inform sufficiently and patients have several questions afterwards which they did not ask at the meeting. If the doctor mentions that they have found a tumour and explain that this tumour seems to be benign and possible to treat then this can in the world of the doctor be a quite neutral statement since tumours are well known part of his everyday work and this one was benign and not threatening. To the patient however with only a lay non-professional knowledge on cancer and tumours, a statement which mentions the term ‘tumour’ could be perceived as the announcement of a catastrophe. Hearing this could make the patient block further information and even though the doctor explains the benign characteristic of the tumour the patient does not hear this and all the relevant questions are not put because of a state of fear for the future. Even though they use homonymous terms their social representations are different. This could also be described as different social representation but the model of the prism further stresses the tight connection between this single social representation and the broader worldview of the participants in the dialogue.

Part of this dilemma is the sensitivity from the doctor towards the emotional state of the patient but in order to train doctors to communicate it could be useful to see how the same term such as ‘tumour’ is perceived and understood differently because the worldview of the doctor and of the patient imply very different meanings and associations to the term. This is then not (only) a question of sensitivity towards other people but also a (sub-) cultural sensitivity towards differences in worldviews and implication for communication in dialogues and remediation could be focusing on augmented feedback techniques rather than a personal development of empathy. Humans construct a meaning by drawing on their worldview especially in exceptional situations.

Different cultures and societies in relation

From the notions of perspectives in the dialogical cultural psychology (cf. Simão, 2010) and in the Amerindian perspectivism, a study from 2007 (cf. Guimarães, 2016) is focusing on an anthropological theory about the ways Amerindian peoples construct knowledge about the sensible reality (Lima, 1996; cf. Viveiros de Castro, 1998). It considers that in this cultural environment each subject has its proper perspective as a sensible reality and considers the perspective of the other as a suprasensible dimension in relation to his/her experience. Therefore, ‘an event that for each subject is unique and truthful is considered from a double perspective, from the self and from the Other’ (Lima, 1996, p. 37).

When observing the approximations and distancing between the dialogical theory and the selected anthropological theory about the topic of perspectives in relation, we have noticed that what is being proposed is an understanding about the disjunction of socially constructed realities. This disjunction happens when the social others and the worldview of each interlocutor are radically distinguished to a point where they do not share a common extraverbal situation, which is the basis for a dialogical communication in the Bakhtinian sense, as we discussed above. In these cases, homonymous terms used in the communication assume a complete distinct reference in the terms of objective reality, producing a cultural shock (Wagner, 1981). To face the equivocations that are common in the efforts of translating and understanding the other in such communicative situations some anthropologists are proposing a transductive methodology. This consists in demonstrating the point of discordant exteriority beyond the equivocal homonyms used in the utterances of the interlocutors (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). From these differences in lifeworld a socially shared reality is constructed and once this is revealed and understood it enables restoration of the unsuccessful communication.

A good instance appears in the differentiation Barrera (2016) demonstrated between the Tzotzil and the Western conceptions of person. In the Western cultures the notion of person usually addresses the dualities soul–body, psycho–physiology and individual–collective, which recurrently situates the psychology as the scale tipper between social and natural sciences. For the Mayan people, the notion of person articulates a system of relations based on some untranslatable terms (as ch’ulel, chanul, takopal) that includes the mountains, caves, springs, the general environment, which is the life niche, as part of what is referred when the term person is used. Therefore, we assume that each culture produces some socially shared objective realities that exceed the possibilities of being referred to in other worldviews. These situations are extreme instances of the communicative issue approached in this paper, that is the different degrees of non-sharing guiding personal trajectories of construction of meanings and senses between interlocutors.

Final considerations

In this article we have analysed dialogue as a process of co-construction between partners. In this process they both contribute to establish social representations of phenomenon in their lifeworlds, making the meaning and the senses of what is being uttered concrete in the communicative situation. We have elaborated on the models of a prism which both Linell (2009) and Zittoun (2006, 2014) have developed and applied it in several contexts of dialogues between partners from different cultures, subcultures and positions.

Our discussion of empirical instances demonstrates that the dialogical prism presents some limitations to interpret the utterances solely from the verbal form since the understanding of each other in a conversation can imply very different meanings and senses depending on the worldview of the partners in the dialogue. Some misunderstandings are generated if we do not take into consideration the distinct worldviews of the interlocutors, as an extraverbal dimension that is not fully shared. Each utterance achieves its meaning articulated to the worldview of the person uttering it, so there is always a gap in the communicative process and we only partially approach the other.

This is obvious in dialogue between partners from very different cultures, as we shortly considered in the discussion on the Western and Amerindian conceptions of person. Nevertheless, the focus of this paper is to show that the same process is happening in a smaller scale when we are demanded to understand dialogues between different groups of professionals or between generations in this way. Besides, we also observed that bilingual adolescents are sometimes able to handle the multiplicity of worldviews, demonstrating the competence to consider an event from a double perspective. These observations lead us to reflect on the need to empower people in handling a life which we often will see as split between self and otherness cultures. That is, to improve the possibilities of mutual understanding in dialogues originating in different worldviews it is necessary to go deeply in our considerations on the worldview of the partner, since their utterances cannot be understood without the background on which it is uttered.

This expansion of the prism of dialogue is not encompassing all elements of importance influencing a dialogue. The prisms are static representations that do not indicate the dynamics of meaning reconstruction during the process of dialogue, that is the time perspective is not included and furthermore the question of changing interests should be elaborated more than it presently is. Nevertheless, the aim of this paper is to present and discuss the expanded version of the prism of dialogue as a minor but effective diagram. The diagram helps us to focus on the discrepant trajectories of semiotic elaboration involved in conversations between people with more or even less different cultural backgrounds – the cultural otherness as producing gaps in the communicative situation and demanding efforts of each participant in order to achieve certain degrees of mutual understanding.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Mogens Jensen is associate professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. He has worked and done research within social–pedagogical treatment with vulnerable youth and with qualifying the pedagogues who work in this field.

Danilo S Guimarães is professor at the Institute of Psychology (University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil). He has been working with theoretical and methodological issues concerning the cultural construction of senses, from a semiotic–cultural and constructivist perspective in psychology. His focus of investigation is the process of dialogical multiplication out of tensional boundaries between cultural alterities, psychology and Amerindian peoples.

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