ABSTRACT
Billig's research program suggests that the social process within which memories are recalled often takes the form of a conversation, even an argument, in which the participants jointly construct "the positions for and against the topics of which they are talking". Billig uncovered this shared ownership over memories in his study of an ordinary family's recall of the British Royal Family. He cites a piece of the family's conversation in which the father's egalitarian critique of the Royal Family's wealth is tempered by his recognition of how the pageantry surrounding them creates many new jobs. Dialogism inverts the prevailing (and probably masculinist) understanding by insisting on the intrinsically shared quality of human experience. Thus dialogism poses a serious challenge to the dominant Western world-view. Dialogism, however, is not a return to the Greeks' entirely public person, nor to several nonWestern cultures' undemocratically communitarian focus.
