not “have” meanings, their interpretation cannot be the method, or their hidden meaning the object, of anthropological study. Symbols are tokens of communication. They have a truncated, experimental cast: they serve as spurs or invitations to meaning-making. Culture is a set of conceptual and emotional chunks temporarily shared and continually refashioned. In more formal terms, culture consists of intersubjective, mutable patches of feeling-thought closely linked (but not reducible) to public symbolic action.6 This concept of culture emphasizes motivation, practice, and temporality, recognizing in other persons the consciousness and agency that we anthropologists implicitly claim, through our professional performances and everyday actions, for ourselves. It enables analyses of communication in place of interpretations of symbols.
Discourse theorists likewise reject the static, homogeneous notion of meaning often associated with cultural interpretation. But because they lack an interactive view of culture and discourse, studies of discourse, for all their merits, tend to be one-sided, focusing on symbolic production rather than broader communicative processes. In contrast, the communicative approach recommended here permits an account of the interplay between meanings and symbols. Such an approach can, I believe, generate cogent, multifaceted analyses of, for example, the bases and repercussions of political rhetoric, a topic favored by discourse-oriented anthropologists.
The chapter has four parts. I first discuss the conduit model of communication and contrast it with an “inkblot” model. I then identify two ways in which an interpretive concept of culture, grounded as it is in the misleading conduit model, tends to distort anthropological theory and practice. In the third section I offer an alternative analytic framework: a cognitive concept of culture integrated into a nonconduit model of communication. I close with a commentary on Richard Handler’s study of nationalist discourse in Quebec (1988), an exemplary postmodern ethnography. I suggest how a cognitive anthropologist might fruitfully reconceive national identity formation as a complex communicative interaction, thereby recovering the minds lost to current culture theory, and present some thoughts on possible convergences between discursive and cognitive approaches.
A caveat before I begin. Writing on this topic—deep-seated misunderstandings about the nature of communication—is doubly hazardous. First, the argument implicitly turns back on itself; it is, after all, a symbolic objectification in a communicative process. I can only assure the reader that I am not attempting an excessively clever, unstated hall-of-mirrors exercise; there are enough other things to worry about here. Moreover, the available language for making the argument seems compromised; it too readily evokes the common sense I try to question. Hence I am acutely aware that I often stray into the very traps I diagnose. Nevertheless, neither the argument’s unsettling self-reference nor its reliance on compromised language is, I think, necessarily fatal. I hope the contradictions and lapses do not undercut my overriding aim: to evoke a model of communication, still to be fully detailed, that can serve as a more productive point of departure for culture theory than the conduit model. The discussion exemplifies Gregory Bateson’s “loose thinking”—“the building up of a structure on unsure foundations,” to await “the correction to stricter thinking and the substitution of a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass” (1972a: 86).
Conduits Versus Inkblots
Michael Reddy’s “The Conduit Metaphor” (1979), a classic of cognitive linguistics neglected by anthropologists, argues that English language descriptions of communication mistakenly portray words as conduits—as little packets of meaning shooting from speaker to hearer. Reddy begins with three typical comments on failed communication:
(1)Try to get your thoughts across better.
(2)None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity.
(3)You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean. (1979: 286)
He points out that each exemplifies what he calls the conduit metaphor.
After all, we do not literally “get thoughts across” when we talk, do we? This sounds like mental telepathy or clairvoyance, and suggests that communication transfers thought processes somehow bodily. Actually, no one receives anyone else’s thoughts directly in their minds when they are using language. Mary’s feelings, in example (2), can be perceived only by Mary; they do not really “come through to us” when she talks. Nor can anyone literally “give you an idea”— since these are locked within the skull and life process of each of us. Surely, then, none of these three expressions is to be taken at face value. Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else’s thoughts—a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to one another, we would have little need for a communication system. (Reddy 1979: 286–87; emphasis in original)
In the appendix to his article, Reddy lists 141 examples of conduit metaphor expressions. He argues, in sum, that our metalanguage—the language we customarily use to talk about language—encourages us to make the absurd assumption that “human communication achieves the physical transfer of thoughts and feelings” (1979: 287).
Reddy proposes an alternative model of communication, which he calls the “toolmakers paradigm” and illustrates with a parable. Each of Reddy’s toolmakers lives in a sealed off compartment of a compound shaped like a wagon wheel (see Figure 1). The compartments are landscaped differently, though all have water, trees, plants, and rocks. The toolmakers can exchange crude diagrams through a device located in the hub of the wheel, but they cannot visit one another, nor can they exchange anything they make. Now suppose a toolmaker invents a useful implement. The problem Reddy poses is how can this toolmaker communicate the invention to another?
Figure 1. The toolmakers’ compound. Adapted from Michael J. Reddy. “The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 293.
Suppose that person A . . . has learned to build a rake and finds he can use it to clear dead leaves and other debris without damaging the living plants. One day person A goes to the hub and draws as best he can three identical sets of instructions for fashioning the rake and drops these sets in the slots for persons B, C, and D. . . . Person A’s environment has a lot of wood in it, which is probably why he has leaves to rake in the first place. Sector B, on the other hand, runs more to rock, and person B uses a lot of rock in his constructions. He finds a piece of wood for the handle, but begins to make the head of the rake out of stone. . . . When B is about halfway finished with the stone rake head, he connects it experimentally to the handle and realizes with a jolt that this thing, whatever it is, is certainly going to be heavy and unwieldy. He ponders its possible uses for a time, and then decides that it must be a tool for digging up small rocks when you clear a field for planting. He marvels at how large and strong a person A must be, and also at what small rocks A has to deal with. B then decides that two large prongs will make the rake both lighter and better suited to unearthing large rocks. (Reddy 1979: 293–94)
B sends instructions to the others for his rock-pick. A makes one—of wood—but finds the thing useless in his rock poor environment. He thinks B has misunderstood him, and sends new detailed instructions for the rake head. B cannot figure out what A’s implement is good for. A and B continue to exchange messages, but they become increasingly frustrated. Finally, A, driven to distraction, sits down angrily, grinding two stones together in his hand—and has an insight. He sends new instructions, using icons for rock and wood; B now understands; the previous instructions all make sense to both toolmakers. A and B “have raised themselves to a new plateau of inference
