Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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monographs on culturally defined groups. That is, what ideological work do we do by focusing our work on “Japanese,” “Brazilians,” or “Japanese Brazilians”? Is it not the case that we ethnicize the people so designated, perhaps well beyond what their own experience will bear, and by extension ethnicize the world by implying that group categories and their associated putative cultures are paramount? Here—and, I now realize, elsewhere in the body of work presented here—I am endorsing an accelerating move to a new kind of anthropology, one that gives due weight to people’s experience and recognizes that public categories and representational approaches often hide both “intracultural” variation and “cross-cultural” convergences. My own ethnographic practice has increasingly sought out such anti-culturalist crevices, which on closer inspection open out into vast new universes of anthropological possibility.
Part I
Meanings
Chapter 1
Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?
One Anthropologist’s Point of View
For most cultural anthropologists, the “native’s point of view” remains the paramount object of ethnographic research. Nevertheless, interpretive and psychological anthropologists have come to envision the object differently. Positions on both sides of this blurry divide are varied and complex, but a sketch of ideal types is a useful point of departure.1 By and large, interpretive, or symbolic, anthropologists tend to look at the human situation from the top down, or outside in. Culture makes people: the native’s point of view is overwhelmingly a cultural product, the subjective imprint of a collective symbol system. A revisionist wing of interpretive anthropology, sometimes associated with postmodernism or poststructuralism, asserts that public discourses constitute multiple subjectivities, or subjective fragments, within native society. In contrast, psychological anthropologists are more likely to take a bottom up, or inside out perspective. The focus shifts to personal experience. A native’s point of view, the ideational precipitate of a singular life trajectory, is a compound of culture—ideas and feelings shared with others—and idiosyncratic elements. That is, people (not just anthropologists) inhabit subjective worlds that are in some ways similar and in others incredibly diverse. To varying degrees, psychological anthropologists also emphasize that people are conscious agents who continually rework personal meanings and sometimes, through communication with one another, culture itself.2
My sympathy for the psychological side of this idealized debate is strongly rooted in theoretical considerations advanced below. Nevertheless, this chapter is not an unqualified defense of psychological anthropology. An appealing feature of postmodern (or discourse) approaches is their willingness to address volatile political and social questions—a willingness exhibited by our predecessors Boas, Mead, Benedict, and Bateson, but only sporadically evidenced in contemporary psychologically oriented ethnographies.3 We psychological anthropologists should not abandon our long-standing, productive concerns with the subtleties of learning, thinking, and motivation; inattention to such matters is a signal weakness of interpretive approaches. But psychological anthropology has much to contribute to ongoing, intense debates among our colleagues about power, identity, cultural politics, and anthropological knowledge. Moreover, in engaging such debates we open new theoretical perspectives for cultural anthropology as a whole.
This chapter presents a critique of anthropological knowledge from a cognitive perspective. It identifies a major conceptual predilection, or bias, within cultural anthropology’s interpretive and neointerpretive mainstream; defends a cognitive theory of culture sensible to the intricacies of communication; and calls for psychological anthropology to broaden its compass. The argument, in a nutshell, runs as follows. The linguist Michael Reddy (1979) suggests that English speakers share a cognitive model of communication that induces us to imagine, despite the absurdity of such a notion, that symbols are packages of meanings transmitted from senders to receivers.4 This “conduit” model, I argue, makes the interpretation of symbols (the unpacking of meanings) seem a reasonable anthropological enterprise. But cultural analysis should not be imagined as code-breaking, however seductive such an approach may be and however obvious it may seem. The meanings do not inhere in the symbol; they arise in communicative events. Because interpretive accounts mistakenly invest language or other public symbols with meaning, they provide flat versions of culture that obscure important social and intrapsychic processes. By collapsing communication into a symbol/meaning package such accounts transmute life into text, effacing the agency of the natives, detemporalizing the flow of human interactions, and imbuing culture—disembodied symbols—with too much power. I argue, in short, that the conduit model of communication lends interpretive analyses commonsense credibility, with unfortunate theoretical and ethnographic consequences.
I advocate a contrasting viewpoint founded on meaning-systems approaches in cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics.5 Such approaches locate meanings in minds rather than symbols. Because symbols—texts, objects, totems, performances, rituals—do 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