ethnography. It features discourse analysis, a discussion of the politics of social scientific knowledge, and a topic— constructions of human relatedness—that has long been, and continues to be, a mainstay of critical anthropology. Years ago, David Schneider’s description of American kinship as a symbolic phenomenon (1968) brought into question the utility of “kinship” as a universal category; his subsequent observation that American kinship, religion, and nationality were, from a symbolic anthropologist’s standpoint, much the same sort of thing (1969) suggested that all idioms of relatedness might be, in important respects, culturally specific. But if relatedness could be construed differently in different places, it could also be construed differently at different times; that is, ideas of relatedness could change. With the growing interest in cultural politics in recent decades, studies of relatedness have increasingly focused on the political manipulation of ethnic and national identities, as, notably, in the work of Benedict Anderson (1991), Virginia Domínguez (1989), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983).
Like these authors, Handler stresses the invention of tradition in behalf of manufactured solidarity. He begins his unusually clear, concise analysis by rejecting what he identifies as the reigning concept of culture—an unmistakably interpretive concept:
I began field work in Quebec in 1977 with the intention of constructing a cultural account of Québécois nationalist ideology. Following David Schneider (1968) I sought to explicate the symbols and meanings with which Québécois portray their national identity and allegiance. As research and interpretation progressed I tried to abandon what I increasingly came to see as the reifying implications of Schneider’s approach . . . while continuing to work at the type of symbolic (or “cultural” or “interpretive”) analysis he advocates. In other words, I no longer claim to be able either to present an account of “the” culture or to demonstrate its integration, but will focus instead on cultural objectification in relation to the interpenetration of discourses—that is, on attempts to construct bounded cultural objects, a process that paradoxically demonstrates the absence of such objects. (1988: 14–15; emphasis in original)
Handler gives up his search for an elusive native’s point of view in favor of the examination of a discursive field replete with shifting meanings. But taking issue with interpretive anthropology does not in this case mean relinquishing certain conduit-model assumptions that sustain both positions.
Discourse approaches rely on what Reddy calls the “minor framework” of the conduit metaphor. The minor framework “overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads. . . . Thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist independently of any need for living human beings to think or feel them” (1979: 291).24 The minor framework dispenses with the notion that words have insides, focusing instead on the projection of thoughts and feelings into a zone where, to use now Handler’s language, the discourses interpenetrate.
In short, discourses do not carry meanings from here to there, like conduits; they construct meanings in a contested idea space devoid of human minds. I do not mean to suggest that discourse analysts believe such a preposterous notion: theirs is a highly self-conscious mode of presentation intended to throw certain phenomena into relief.25 But the scheme’s consistency with basic premises of the conduit model works once again to veil the process at the heart of communicative events— meaning-making by persons.
Discourse theorists are right to have reservations about a symbolic concept of culture, but the replacement of “culture” with “discourse” is a step at once too radical and not radical enough. The rejection of a culture concept is too radical because it stems from a false notion that “culture” in anthropology is inevitably a bounded, homogeneous, timeless entity attached to a determinate group and endlessly reproduced in symbolic codifications. Such a depiction of anthropological culture is a caricature. The partial, fluid notion of culture I forward in this chapter is hardly novel within psychological anthropology, and temporal analyses of “unlike frames of interpretation” (1973f: 9) can be found even in canonic thick descriptions, such as Geertz’s report of the Moroccan encounter between Cohen, the sheik, and the French soldiers (1973f). The rejection of an interpretive concept of culture is not radical enough because the substituted concept of discourse is rooted in a modified version of the same conduit model that underwrites interpretive analyses. Why reject a meaning-is-in-the-symbol view of “culture” to replace it with a meaning-is-constructed-by-the-symbol view of “discourse”?
Better to retain the concept of culture—but a cognitive concept of culture integrated with a nonconduit model of communication. This is the perspective from which I offer the following commentary, necessarily compressed, on Handler’s account of Québécois nationalism.
Puzzles of Québécois Identity
For Handler, the stuff of Québécois identity is less a symbol/meaning package à la Geertz or Schneider than an ongoing effect of discourse, a contingent rhetorical product. He argues that Québécois identity is “irreducible,” part and parcel of a modernist claim to “individuated existence” (39). That is, the relation between nation and culture is circular:
To be Québécois one must live in Quebec and live as a Québécois. To live as a Québécois means participating in Québécois culture. In discussing this culture people speak vaguely of traditions, typical ways of behaving, and characteristic modes of conceiving the world; yet specific descriptions of these particularities are the business of the historian, ethnologist, or folklorist. Such academic researches would seem to come after the fact: that is, given the ideological centrality of Québécois culture, it becomes worthwhile to learn about it. But the almost a priori belief in the existence of this culture follows inevitably from the belief that a particular human group, the Québécois nation, exists. The existence of this group is in turn predicated upon the existence of a particular culture. . . . What is crucial is that culture symbolizes individuated existence: the assertion of cultural particularity is another way of proclaiming the existence of a unique collectivity. (Handler 1988: 39)
Briefly stated, elite specialists, including anthropologists, assert that nations and cultures are bounded and that nation and culture are congruent. This expert discourse allies itself with that of Québécois nationalists, for whom the existence of a distinctively Québécois culture is entailed by the existence of the collectivity but the content of Québécois culture is incidental. The specialists are called on to fill the empty vessel of Québécois identity with the cultural substance that validates the collectivity. The book offers ample evidence, drawn from political speeches, nationalist tracts, and government edicts, of “cultural objectification” by politicians, bureaucrats, and the academic and literary entrepreneurs of the culture industry.
The argument is ingenious and provocative, but I think not quite persuasive. That nationalists continually offer redefinitions of “Québécois culture” seems clear; that such redefinitions are launched into a void seems less so. Handler seems to suggest that Québécois political rhetoric works its magic—the conjuring of identity substance—before a credulous audience. That is, people want to “proclaim the existence of a unique collectivity,” which requires a unique culture and identity. They are, therefore, willing and eager to accept as signs of the unique collectivity whatever cultural and identity substances the culture-making elite judges to be distinctive.
But consider the following points.
Can it be that cultural models of Québécois identity—shared identity schemas among people “in Quebec”—are as indefinite as Handler suggests? For one thing, Handler’s Québécois-in-the-street informants do sometimes specify criteria for membership in the nation, as he himself observes (1988: 32–39). The evidence is exceedingly slim. Unlike the public statements of politicians and ideologues, very few private statements of nonelite informants are quoted at length, but people mention, for example, being born
