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 in Quebec, speaking French, eating typical foods, sharing a history, manifesting a certain joie de vivre. Taken at face value, these characteristics do seem thin reeds upon which to suspend a concrete sense of identity, and not everyone cites the same criteria. But as Mahmood and Armstrong (1992) point out in their excellent article that first drew my attention to Handler’s book, conceptual commonality can be present even when, as in Quebec, there is verbal disjunction. Such disjunction can have several sources. Based on their own research in Friesland, Mahmood and Armstrong suggest that, despite apparent dissensus, people in Quebec might indeed share a model of Québécois identity—a prototypic rather than a criterial attributes model. Another kind of verbal disagreement surfaces when people express common preoccupations in contradictory ways. That is, they share a quandary rather than a determinate resolution; indeed, the contradictions are often indexes of joint concerns (Linger 1992: ch. 1).26 Might we reconceive identity in terms of a congeries of problems rather than a set of assumed attributes or a prototype?
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