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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 new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass” (1972a: 86).

Conduits Versus Inkblots

Michael Reddy’s “The Conduit Metaphor” (1979), a classic of cognitive linguistics neglected by anthropologists, argues that English language descriptions of communication mistakenly portray words as conduits—as little packets of meaning shooting from speaker to hearer. Reddy begins with three typical comments on failed communication:

(1)Try to get your thoughts across better.

(2)None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity.

(3)You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean. (1979: 286)

He points out that each exemplifies what he calls the conduit metaphor.

After all, we do not literally “get thoughts across” when we talk, do we? This sounds like mental telepathy or clairvoyance, and suggests that communication transfers thought processes somehow bodily. Actually, no one receives anyone else’s thoughts directly in their minds when they are using language. Mary’s feelings, in example (2), can be perceived only by Mary; they do not really “come through to us” when she talks. Nor can anyone literally “give you an idea”— since these are locked within the skull and life process of each of us. Surely, then, none of these three expressions is to be taken at face value. Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else’s thoughts—a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to one another, we would have little need for a communication system. (Reddy 1979: 286–87; emphasis in original)

In the appendix to his article, Reddy lists 141 examples of conduit metaphor expressions. He argues, in sum, that our metalanguage—the language we customarily use to talk about language—encourages us to make the absurd assumption that “human communication achieves the physical transfer of thoughts and feelings” (1979: 287).

Reddy proposes an alternative model of communication, which he calls the “toolmakers paradigm” and illustrates with a parable. Each of Reddy’s toolmakers lives in a sealed off compartment of a compound shaped like a wagon wheel (see Figure 1). The compartments are landscaped differently, though all have water, trees, plants, and rocks. The toolmakers can exchange crude diagrams through a device located in the hub of the wheel, but they cannot visit one another, nor can they exchange anything they make. Now suppose a toolmaker invents a useful implement. The problem Reddy poses is how can this toolmaker communicate the invention to another?

Figure 1. The toolmakers’ compound. Adapted from Michael J. Reddy. “The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 293.

Suppose that person A . . . has learned to build a rake and finds he can use it to clear dead leaves and other debris without damaging the living plants. One day person A goes to the hub and draws as best he can three identical sets of instructions for fashioning the rake and drops these sets in the slots for persons B, C, and D. . . . Person A’s environment has a lot of wood in it, which is probably why he has leaves to rake in the first place. Sector B, on the other hand, runs more to rock, and person B uses a lot of rock in his constructions. He finds a piece of wood for the handle, but begins to make the head of the rake out of stone. . . . When B is about halfway finished with the stone rake head, he connects it experimentally to the handle and realizes with a jolt that this thing, whatever it is, is certainly going to be heavy and unwieldy. He ponders its possible uses for a time, and then decides that it must be a tool for digging up small rocks when you clear a field for planting. He marvels at how large and strong a person A must be, and also at what small rocks A has to deal with. B then decides that two large prongs will make the rake both lighter and better suited to unearthing large rocks. (Reddy 1979: 293–94)

B sends instructions to the others for his rock-pick. A makes one—of wood—but finds the thing useless in his rock poor environment. He thinks B has misunderstood him, and sends new detailed instructions for the rake head. B cannot figure out what A’s implement is good for. A and B continue to exchange messages, but they become increasingly frustrated. Finally, A, driven to distraction, sits down angrily, grinding two stones together in his hand—and has an insight. He sends new instructions, using icons for rock and wood; B now understands; the previous instructions all make sense to both toolmakers. A and B “have raised themselves to a new plateau of inference about each other and each other’s environments” (Reddy 1979: 295)—they have achieved intersubjectivity.

We are all, of course, Reddy’s toolmakers; we inhabit disparate, mutually inaccessible subjective universes. We send each other concrete messages in the form of signals (public symbols),⁷ but deciding which to send, and making sense of those received, are complex tasks. Private worlds of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions can be represented only obliquely and must be inferred by others. Our habitual assumption that the exchange of signals equates to the communication of meanings obscures the fact that intersubjectivity is an accomplishment, not a natural consequence of signaling.

Reddy’s own argument is an unintentionally telling, paradoxical piece of evidence for the position he espouses. His main point—that we easily fall prey to the illusion that symbols convey meanings—is underscored by an ambiguity that verges on a contradiction. If (as Reddy asserts) symbols do not convey meanings, then wherein lies the power of the conduit metaphor? By pinning the blame for our confusion on what he calls “our language about language,” does not Reddy fall victim to the very model he renounces?⁸ For this metalanguage is not reified thought, a symbol system that smuggles warped ideas into our brains, but an objectification to think with. The problem, as I see it, is not that English speakers are coerced by their language, but rather that conduit metaphors articulate closely with an entrenched way of thinking: evocative symbols and evoked thought seem nicely equilibrated, mutually reinforcing. As Naomi Quinn observes,

Metaphorical systems or productive metaphors typically do not structure understandings de novo. Rather, particular metaphors are selected by speakers, and are favored by these speakers, just because they provide satisfactory mappings onto already existing cultural understandings—that is, because elements and relations between elements in the source domain make a good match with elements and relations among them in the cultural model. (1991: 65)

We process such metaphors more or less automatically: they make immediate sense, because their linguistic components link up readily with existing cultural models, that is, complex, broadly shared meaning systems (D’Andrade 1984; Holland and Quinn 1987).

Such “automatic” concordance between language and thought, while common, is hardly inevitable.⁹ And restructuring thought through language is often difficult. For example, the toolmakers paradigm, an alternative symbolic rendition of communicative events, evokes a way of thinking that vanishes before we can grasp it securely. Focusing now on ideas rather than language, Reddy writes, “I do not claim that we cannot think momentarily in terms of [a nonconduit] model of the communication process. I argue, rather, that that thinking will remain brief, isolated, and fragmentary in the face of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions” (1979: 297–98). Reddy’s own seeming inconsistencies (and the many which, I am sure, the reader will find in this chapter) suggest the difficulties of both toolmaker thinking and its objectification in symbols that can sustain the new understanding.¹⁰ That is, the interaction between mind and symbol is highly unstable: both understandings and symbols tend to revert to the conduit pattern.

The toolmakers paradigm is, unfortunately, a cumbersome symbolic construction. To facilitate nonconduit thinking about communication, let me offer an alternative, more concise trope: the inkblot. Projective tests like the Rorschach, in which people are asked to comment on blotches of ink, evoke meanings on the basis of highly ambiguous stimuli. Because inkblots cannot easily be thought of as conduits, viewing ordinary symbols as if they were inkblots draws our attention to the interface between physical forms assumed to be meaningful (symbols) and the activity of meaning-making by persons.

It may be objected, however, that the synecdoche {inkblot = symbol} is inappropriate: an inkblot, which does not stand for anything in particular and is indeed so designed, seems quite a deviant symbol. What does an inkblot have in common with, say, the dot-dash of Morse code, a symbol that has a precise referent—a “real” symbol?

Although any figure of speech must be used cautiously, I think the inkblot trope jars us out of a deceptive mode of thought. We regard code units—dot-dash, for example—as better symbols than inkblots because conduit thinking easily accommodates an image of communication as the transmission of code units between cryptographs. But this is a travesty of most real-life communication, where symbols are subject to diverse construals (not one) by biographical persons (not machines). The inkblot trope is a provocation that forwards a narrow but crucial claim about all symbols: neither an inkblot nor dot-dash “has” meaning. It is true that those who know Morse code will make a meaning from dot-dash more automatically than they will from an inkblot.¹¹ But such automaticity is the result of prior learning by discrete persons, not a property of the symbols. The inkblot trope underscores the point that meanings arise in interactions between symbols and human minds, whether those symbols be inkblots, dots and dashes, or ordinary symbols that elicit a combination of conventional and idiosyncratic understandings.¹²

To summarize: metaphors are not concepts, words are not thoughts, symbols are not culture. I think Reddy’s chief target is not deceptive language but rather a “misleading and dehumanizing” (1979: 308) commonsense cultural model, conduit thinking, which receives powerful reinforcement not only from conduit language, but also from unconscious perceptions. Because we typically experience words and other symbols as suffused with meaning, we sometimes imagine that our ideas and feelings have come, special delivery, from without. Our automatic processing of much everyday symbolic material provides experiential sustenance for conduit thinking: the world seems to speak for itself. Hence the receiver’s meaning-making, essential to any communicative event, gets little attention in our practices of communicating and understanding and, I shall argue, in our theories of culture, which are thereby distorted in two major respects.

Distortions

The First Distortion: Displacing the Natives

For cognitive linguists such as Reddy, symbols are public, concrete objectifications. Meanings, on the other hand, are networks of knowledge accessed or evoked, but not conveyed, by symbols. Such linguists propose a shift from extensional to intensional theories of meaning (D’Andrade 1990: 123). Extensional theories look for reference—for correspondences between words or other symbols and things in the world. If meaning is reference, the mind can be a black box; an account of meaning need not concern itself with cognition. By contrast, intensional theories focus on the sense that symbols have for natives. Intensional semantics insists that what things mean depends fundamentally on what and how people think, not on direct links between signs and referents or on features of language per se.

Because intension mediates between symbol and meaning, communication among toolmakers is a clumsy business; the visiting anthropologist’s job is doubly difficult. It has been tempting for us to collect the messages, which are, after all, readily accessible, discover systematic relationships among them, and present an interpretation. Virtuoso readings of symbols and rituals by informed, sensitive observers well steeped in the local culture—for example, Geertz’s Balinese cockfight (1973a), Victor Turner’s Ndembu milk tree (1967), and David Schneider’s American kinship (1968)—have been highly influential in the elaboration of Anglo-American culture theory. Other readers of cultural “texts” use more formal schemes, drawn from literary criticism, semiotics, structuralism and so on, as keys to unlock the meanings hidden within public symbols. Whether through cultural savvy or formal cryptography, interpretation aims to reveal deeper and more compelling messages hidden beneath an enigmatic or misleading “textual” surface of physical movements, objects, or words.¹³

The social world in which anthropologists immerse themselves is not, however, a set of boxes within boxes with a treasure (or, perhaps, only more boxes¹⁴) at the center. It is people doing things. Communication, rightfully a prime focus of anthropological inquiry, is a social and intrapsychic practice. It cannot be boiled down to a key, a set of meanings “conveyed” or “embodied in” symbols. Indeed, conceiving social and intrapsychic life as a disembodied text rather than a temporal flow makes the anthropologist, not the native, the meaning-maker. The communicative exchanges of the natives among themselves recede into the background, frozen through conduit thinking into the symbols from which the anthropologist generates his or her meanings. The anthropologist’s performance of code cracking occupies center stage; the dramas of natives’ lives, reduced to inert text, become a mere backdrop to the show.

All this is not to deny that the anthropologist, like the native, is an agent who makes meanings: ethnographic meaning-making is a prime task of our fieldwork and writing. But it is precisely natives’ dramas that we should feature in our ethnographies. We cannot do so without a responsible account of their meanings—an intensional account that is the product not of textual interpretation but of an engaged science.¹⁵ The issue of fidelity cannot be sidestepped. The object of cultural research is not to clarify a text but to infer as best one can the subjective worlds of other people, meaning-makers in their own right living complex, thoughtful, and emotion-filled lives.

The project makes some people uneasy. Much recent criticism of anthropology is predicated on the notion that cultural accounts are invasions, acts of imperious (or imperial) disrespect. Ethnography is in this view a genre of authoritarian “fiction” passed off as univocal truth (Clifford 1986, 1988; Tyler 1986; see also Geertz 1988).¹⁶ There is some sting in the accusations. Unquestionably, an anthropologist’s account is never transparent, always fashioned; it can be insensitive, disrespectful, or collaborative with imperial power; it can arrogantly lay claim to truth, violating the first principle of science, which is that any proposition is tentative. But why should provisional formulations of another’s subjective experience be thought of as intrinsically authoritarian or invasive?¹⁷ One could instead consider such formulations as respectful experiments in human imagination, for respect can equally well be viewed as a mode of interpersonal engagement that seeks to discover or cultivate in oneself hitherto unknown, unsuspected empathies or correspondences with others. That such correspondences can never be fully achieved; that they always bear the imprint of one’s own confusions, cultural biases, and idiosyncrasies; that power is an element of the relationships that bring them to light (as it is of all relationships); and that our own objectifications (ethnographic texts) elicit myriad, divergent meanings in readers are not arguments for abandoning ethnography. To the contrary, the very difficulty of stretching imagination and sensibility, all too apparent in the self-absorbed, blinkered nature of so many human transactions, is what makes ethnography compelling.

The idea that an objectification of someone else’s thought is substantially an act of aggression and domination—that words have something like direct physical force—seems strongly tinged with conduit thinking. In this view words are missiles of conceptual imperialism. The tendency to attribute great power to symbols, which are, after all, tokens of communication produced, manipulated, and given meaning by human beings, contributes to a second common distortion in culture theory.

The Second Distortion: Reifying (Deifying?) Culture

From at least the time of Durkheim (1964 [1895]) both sociology and anthropology have considered “culture”—collective representations, rituals, symbols, discourses, what have you—a powerful, even coercive, force on human thought and behavior. The conduit model dovetails nicely with top-down theorizing that strongly privileges social facts. It makes such theorizing good to think, lending it commonsense plausibility in the face of significant contrary evidence suggesting that knowledge is learned imperfectly, erratically, and variably by individual human organisms, and that such learning is not just a passive process. Children, for example, enter the world with no cultural knowledge whatsoever; they eventually become, after a long and arduous passage, imperfectly enculturated, quirky adults.¹⁸ The irregular, unpredictable, and discontinuous aspects of cultural “acquisition” and “transmission” seem apparent; any “fax theory” of cultural reproduction is patently inadequate (Strauss 1992: 9–10). Adult learning of culture, an exhilarating, painful experience familiar to all ethnographers, offers similar puzzles. Psychological anthropologists have perhaps paid too little attention to how ethnographers learn something of other cultures, but they have been right to draw attention, in studies of socialization, enculturation, and education, to traversal of the boundary between public and private, between symbol and meaning, in an effort to understand how natives come to fashion their points of view.

Interpretive ethnographies, on the other hand, seek powerful collective structures of meaning, congealed in public symbols, within which persons live out (often beyond the ethnography’s field of vision) their unique lives. Culture, a thoroughly social phenomenon, is divorced from, and trumps, psychology. Persons are constrained by culture but culture is in all significant respects independent of psychological or biological factors specific to persons.Consider the approach of our most persuasive, complex, and influential interpretive anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, probably best known for his claim, forcefully presented in essays dating from the 1950s to the present, that symbols, rituals, and performances can be read as texts (e.g., 1973a), with the anthropologist as literary critic (1973f: 9). Even in his earlier, more Parsonian papers such as “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966, Geertz expresses strong reservations about the utility of psychology for ethnographic analysis:

Symbols . . . are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs. To undertake the study of cultural activity—activity in which symbolism forms the positive content—is thus not to abandon social analysis for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology, or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander there forever in a haze of “Cognitions,” “Affections,” “Conations,” and other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture. (Geertz 1973e: 91)

Stated briefly, a symbol is a “vehicle for a conception” (1973e: 91)—a conduit. “Systems of symbols” (90), or “culture patterns” (92), embody those conceptions—their meanings. Such systems, it is claimed, are amenable to analysis, at the “level” of culture; their interrelated meanings can be read without excursions into the marshes of psychology.¹⁹

To objectify Geertz’s work as I have above is, of course, somewhat unfair. In perusing The Interpretation of Cultures (1973c), I was struck by the fact that I could have selected passages that seem consonant with my own cognitive argument. I second Geertz’s characterization of anthropology as an imaginative science, his impulse toward comparative theorizing, and his insistence on the embeddedness of meaning in the flow of social life. Consider also his assertion, in the same early essay cited above, that symbols “have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves” (1973e: 93; emphasis added). This is toolmaker discourse, as is Geertz’s vivid claim that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” (1973f: 5).

Yet, as Gananath Obeyesekere remarks, “In reading Geertz I see webs everywhere, but never the spider at work” (1990: 285). Like Obeyesekere, we remember not the dialectical relation between symbols and “psychological reality,” but that “culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz 1973f: 12). Geertz’s most influential theoretical formulations and empirical analyses are those based in the conduit model, which portray thinking as public, collective, and culturally singular: the insistence on the “social nature of thought” (1973d: 360); the brilliant, particularistic interpretations of the cockfight, the wajang, and the Balinese naming system. I would suggest that our perceptions of Geertz are distorted not through careless reading, though he is a demanding, subtle writer, but because he himself underplays the inkblot motifs in his writing and because we bring conduit understandings of communication to his work. We catch glimpses of alternative schemes, but Geertz registers most strongly with us when his writing articulates with and reconfirms our commonsense understandings.

Most interpretive anthropology—pick an ethnography off the shelf—is less sensitive and fastidious than Geertz’s. Generally speaking, interpretive studies draw upon and perpetuate the conduit model. When interpretive anthropologists look for meaning, they, like ordinary users of language, look for it in symbols. By assigning meanings to symbols, interpretive anthropology imparts a strongly culturalist bias to human studies. The point is not that a concept of culture is irrelevant to human studies—far from it—but that it must be put in its analytical place.

So Where, and What, Is the Culture?

In rejecting the conduit model, I have also rejected the equation of culture with symbol systems. Culture consists of meanings in people, not meanings in tokens. This formulation, however, presents serious conceptual challenges.

Theodore Schwartz (1978) recounts how, as he contemplated the incredible diversity in opinions offered by the inhabitants of Manus, he found himself asking “Where is the culture?”²⁰ He coined the term “idioverse” to designate a person’s subjective reality. Idioverse is a useful heuristic concept. The toolmakers live in disparate idioverses; attaining correspondence between portions of idioverses is, according to Reddy, the object of communication—and, I would suggest, the origin of culture. Culture, then, refers to the overlap of idioverses among members of a given group at a given moment—the temporary set of their intersubjective conceptual networks. As emphasized above, this intersubjective array is not just a determinant, but also an unfolding product, of the public trade in symbols.

Unlike most culture concepts, which stress conformity and continuity, culture thus defined is partial, multiple, and plastic. Some meanings are noncultural; everyone participates in many discrepant “cultures”; and cultural meanings can and do change. A comparison of Reddy’s work with that of a second cognitive linguist, Ronald Langacker, brings some of these points into sharper focus.

Langacker’s innovative, controversial “cognitive grammar” (1986, 1987, 1991), which unfortunately I can do no more than sketch here, offers a new paradigm for the field of linguistics. Denying that “language is a self-contained system amenable to algorithmic characterization, with sufficient autonomy to be studied in essential isolation from broader cognitive concerns,” Langacker insists that “language is neither self-contained nor describable without essential reference to cognitive processing” (1986: 1). Indeed, he equates meaning with conceptualization rather than, as is usual, with bundles of essential features or sets of truth conditions (1986: 2–3).

Thus lexical items are points of entry into “knowledge [conceptual] systems whose scope is essentially open-ended” (1986: 2). Both the entities comprising this system (concepts) and the relationships among them (perceptual and transformative cognitive processes) are postulated to be real features of the mental world rather than formal semiotic units and operations. That is, words “mean” a conventionalized network of concepts interrelated by various cognitive processes. By implication, the network activated (or accessed) by any lexical item is part of a knowledge system of encyclopedic size.

Like Reddy, Langacker distinguishes between symbol and meaning: for him, symbols activate part of an immense knowledge system located in mind. But Langacker emphasizes congruent rather than idiosyncratic zones of idioverses.²¹ Langacker’s meanings are both cognitive and, because shared, cultural. Such conventionalized meanings—learned, shared meanings that are recognized as shared (Langacker 1987: 62; D’Andrade 1987: 113)—become fixed points of orientation in thought.²² Hence Langacker takes up where Reddy leaves off—after the toolmakers have managed to agree upon meanings. Such consensus meanings need not be accepted as, or felt to be, paramount, but they are inescapable: herein lies culture’s constraining quality.

By contrast, Reddy’s account of toolmaker incomprehension highlights not the symbol’s instantiation of shared conceptual networks but the variability in its construal, the gap of indeterminacy between public symbol and private meaning that reveals culture’s limits. A meaning-system view of culture emphasizes that conventionalized meanings are only part, often a small part, of the story. The clinical literature, of course, is rife with case 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 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 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 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.