Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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studies of persons who attach unusual, elaborate, compelling meanings to banal items. Like inkblots, ordinary symbols routinely evoke powerful and diverse personal meanings that lie well outside cultural understandings.23
A comparison of Reddy and Langacker also illuminates issues of cultural temporality. Langacker’s conventionalized symbols are historically given, whereas Reddy’s improvised symbols seem ahistorical. The propagation of language over time is a complex and far from automatic process, but for individual actors at a given moment the words exchanged are recognizable communicative gestures and the meanings evoked by those words are partially intersubjective. The contrived situation of Reddy’s toolmakers, who circulate only slightly conventionalized “inkblots,” differs radically. Historical time does not exist: the focus is on the present communicative event. Intersubjectivity is minimal. Reddy’s premises are intentionally unrealistic; they serve his discussion of the problematics of intersubjectivity, stressing difficulties in real-time communication.
But there is room for a synthesis. Our stock of symbols—words, rituals, physical signs—is, from the perspective of living persons, a social inheritance. Some of the meanings people learn to attach to those symbols— the cultural component of idioverses—are intersubjective. In real time communication, such intersubjective meanings are relatively fixed, that is, reliably elicited as a consequence of common learning. But they are supplemented, at times even overshadowed, by private, biographically salient meanings. Hence, culture-in-the-short-run can seem an immutable, weighty legacy or a drop in a sea of unique and often powerful private meanings. In the medium or long run, intersubjective meanings themselves change, although such changes are hard to identify from available symbolic evidence, a point I explore further in the following chapter. Cultural anthropology does better with microcosmic, short-run analyses because the necessary fieldwork brings us into close contact with living persons: we can explore real-time communication rather than just tokens, the collective representations that those who study macrocosmic and historical events tend to think of as social level conduits of meaning.
Foucault’s sweeping macroethnographies of historical changes in categories of Western thought (e.g., 1977, 1990 [1976]) have inspired a sizable anthropological literature, sometimes called postmodern or poststructuralist, that includes both critiques of the discipline and a growing body of ethnographies. In such studies, the analytic concept “culture,” a staple of both interpretive and cognitive studies, is displaced by “discourse.” This is more than a stylistic move: the notion of discourse “is meant to refuse the distinction between ideas and practices or text and world that the culture concept too readily encourages” (Abu-Lughod 1991: 147). Discourses are not, precisely speaking, conduits, and ethnographies of discourse are notable for their attention to the making of meaning. Nevertheless I will argue that discourse approaches, like the interpretivism they self-consciously reject, rest substantially upon and propagate certain conduit assumptions.
Recovering Lost Minds
Discourse Versus Culture
The discourse perspective has undeniable merits. Such studies examine meaning-making as a historical process. Discourse theorists distinguish themselves from interpretive anthropologists by their attention to diversity, temporality, and practice. Moreover, they have taken special heed of political issues, especially the constraining and oppressive social consequences of the historical production of meaning. Such concern, though not absent, has not always been prominent in either interpretive or psychological anthropology.
Unfortunately, however, I think that discourse analysts, despite their criticism of the reification of culture in interpretive studies, do not themselves break free of reifying assumptions of the conduit model. A review of ethnographies of discourse is obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, but an exemplary study, Richard Handler’s Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (1988), offers insights into some strengths and weaknesses of the approach.
Handler’s beautifully written book has the hallmarks of the postmodern new wave of critical 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