Culture in Action: A Discursive Approach

The overall aim of this chapter is to discuss an approach to studying culture by drawing on the project of remembering and reconciliation from a discursive psychology perspective. I demonstrate discourse analysis from research using a case of the Anglo-Japanese reconciliation. I provide a brief overview of the development of discourse analysis and discursive psychology and highlight key philosophical foundations and theoretical assumptions on which discursive psychology and practice of discourse analysis are based. As the examples of discourse analysis, I will demonstrate how culture can be studied as a topic of members' concern. In this view, culture is not a matter of the researcher's concern to handle as a causal factor or independent variable. Discursive psychologists study culture as a resource for the participants. Finally, I will discuss the implication of the discursive approach and its far-reaching challenges for advancing the methodology of studying time-relevant phenomena of people's experience as a matter of duration and transformation.