Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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And people’s apparently unformed, inarticulate, or inconsistent musings and pronouncements can be points of entry into cultural models, constellations of widely shared ideas. In my own fieldwork on cultural models (Linger 1992: 255–61) I found that a person’s seemingly facile initial response often opened up, in the course of patient interviewing, into an elaborate conceptual scheme. A passionate emphasis on local birth as a criterion for group membership, for example, need not be taken as simply an obsession with essence; implicated in such a claim may be not only complicated notions of blood relationship, but also theories of human development, emotional temperament, aesthetic sensibility, and so on. Handler’s abbreviated discussion does not resolve the empirical question about possible shared schemas of Québécois identity; the evidence presented draws mostly on public texts and public events rather than on interview material of the kind preferred by meaning system researchers.27
Leaving such questions aside, suppose we accept Handler’s conclusion that people “in Quebec” worry a lot about discovering signs of their distinctiveness (“bounded cultural objects”), caring little about exactly what bounded cultural objects their intellectuals construct. Handler proposes that, in these respects, people “in Quebec” are pretty much like modern people everywhere. The “discourse of modern science and modern common sense,” he writes, is one of “individuated units” envisioned as “naturally occurring entities” (Handler 1988: 189). One such individuated unit is the “nation.” People “in Quebec,” it would seem, are motivated to an assertion of irreducible identity—of nationhood—by virtue of their immersion in a modernity obsessed with identity and difference.
Here Handler departs from his usually sure-handed, empirically grounded delineation of local particularities. I would not quarrel with the notion that identity everywhere tends to be socially (and psychologically) problematic, but the hypothesis that an urge to irreducible identity grips the modern world seems difficult to sustain empirically. Notwithstanding nationalist fissuring in Yugoslavia and Big Sur seminars to discover “your inner hero,” counterexamples—ethnic proliferation in premodern New Guinea, moribund national movements, and persons indifferent to who they “really” are—come easily to mind. Even “in Quebec,” as Handler points out, not everyone is a nationalist. The modern-urge-to-irreducible-identity hypothesis, in short, seems too sweeping. We are left to wonder why a national quest emerges “in Quebec” but not everywhere, and among some people “in Quebec” but not others—questions that cannot be answered, I would suggest, without attention to both sociopolitical factors and cognitive specificities.
If one of these specificities is that many people “in Quebec” are unusually obsessed with irreducible identity and unusually indifferent to identity substance, some extremely interesting questions arise. Such a cultural model (for is it not exactly that, a shared ideational complex?) valorizes boundaries of the self but not, or only in a derivative manner, images or features of the self. What could motivate such a remarkable cultural configuration?28 Why would the assertion of a national boundary, irrespective of its content, become the focus of so much anxiety? What kinds of political discourse engage persons who think and feel this way, and how do they respond? Again, such investigations could hardly proceed without a detailed account of local meaning systems.
These are questions about who the natives are—about not the spoken, but the spoken-to of elite political rhetoric. National identity is, surely, as much based in cultural understandings as it is emergent from public discourse. Handler’s analysis seems preoccupied with symbolic productions rather than how people make meanings from, and respond to, those symbolic productions. He does an outstanding job of presenting and interpreting discourses, but in the end we see only half of a communicative process.
Of course, psychological anthropologists have been inclined to offer the other half—meaning systems ripe for instantiation, lost in interior space. I do not see any impediment in principle, however, to a productive rapprochement between discursive and cognitive approaches, that is, to an integrated vision focused squarely on a culturally, socially, and temporally situated analysis of communication.29 Such a perspective is foreclosed equally by analyses of public discourses suspended in a cultural vacuum and by analyses of meaning systems suspended in a social vacuum.
The Inescapable Paradox
I have argued that because symbols do not “have” meanings and because so-called symbol systems are not autonomous structures, symbolic interpretations should be treated with caution. Conduit thinking confers illusory plausibility on theories that overestimate the power of society and culture to dictate meaning, underestimate individual variability and agency, and portray symbols as highly coercive collective representations.
To argue against interpretation as the goal of cultural analysis is not to throw cultural analysis out the window, for culture, an intersubjective phenomenon, is part and parcel of human communication. We need, in short, renewed theory-building across the frontier dividing symbols from thoughts and feelings. Our best chance at such theory-building is, I believe, establishment of a dialogue between those who wish to theorize about minds and persons without isolating them from society and history, and those who wish to theorize about macrosocial phenomena without dehumanizing them.30 The project is certainly daunting. It must inevitably confront anthropology’s most enduring and mind-bending paradox: the inescapable fact that, to paraphrase with a twist Geertz’s paraphrase of Weber, we are suspended in webs of meaning that we our-selves keep spinning.
Chapter 2
Missing Persons
The Problem of Missing Persons
History and anthropology continue to edge closer to each other. Culture, the anthropologist’s stock in trade, has become an indispensable component of historians’ accounts. For their part, anthropologists increasingly emphasize cultural change. Attuned to cultural relativism, they have readily made the further leap into historical relativism. One might say that both disciplines are trying to free themselves from ethno-and tempocentrism.
I endorse this effort, but I have reservations about the widespread tendency to elide considerations of biography, consciousness, and personal agency from analyses of meaning. This erasure—the Problem of Missing Persons—afflicts both history and, less forgivably, my own discipline of anthropology. It is associated, I have argued, with the near-dominance achieved by interpretive and post-interpretive (discursive) approaches to the study of meaning. Those approaches explicitly or, more often, implicitly equate public representations with subjectivities.
The interpretation of public representations has become a privileged method of cultural analysis. The appeal of the method, which treats such representations as texts, is evident. For anthropologists, it permits the inference of subjective patterns from concrete, readily observable, highly public material such as cockfights, naming practices, and shadow plays (Geertz 1973c). Moreover, interpretation provides a single method applicable to both past and present. Its utility is, if anything, stronger