Toward a Semiotic Analysis
of Ethnicity in Québec
Originally prepared for
Institut Québécois de Recherche sur la Culture
and published in
Questions de Culture 2: Migrations et Communautés Culturelles,
edited and revised)
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
leedrummond@msn.com
Introduction
This essay explores, in a rather tentative fashion, some of the theoretical
questions raised in the study of ethnicity, or ethnic identity, in Québec. Much of what
I have to say here is couched in terms of a proposal, for my main argument is that,
despite all that has been said and written on the popular topic of Québécois identity, a
systematic analysis has yet to be done.
The systematic analysis is lacking for two reasons:
First, discussions of Québécois ethnicity tend to be literary or ideological and
to exclude an ethnographic perspective: intelligentsia and politicians generate a
voluminous discourse on the meaning or significance of Québécois ethnic identity,
while the ideas ordinary men and women have on the topic are not methodically
solicited and analyzed to any extent. Ethnographic research is urgently needed to
document the nature and extent of perceived ethnic boundaries in the rapidly changing
multiethnic society of Québec. The unacceptable alternative is to assume that we
already know what ethnic identity entails and can comfortably
leave the matter with our journalists, novelists and politicians to elaborate.
Second, any discussion of ethnic identity in Québec — whether in the popular
press, the National Assembly, or academic journals — rests on (usually) implicit
theoretical models of ethnicity which are, in my view, inadequate. Certainly to the
extent that those models are implicit, i.e., unexamined, they are inadequate. In the
course of this essay I hope to show that they are also inadequate as theory, since
cultural or semiotic analysis is a necessary but missing element of a theoretically
adequate account of ethnicity.
Basically, a cultural or semiotic analysis aims to identify the meanings invested
in any social phenomenon (whether a building, a suit of clothes, a marriage ceremony,
or words in a language) by persons involved in that phenomenon, and to demonstrate
how those meanings are organized with respect to one another. I realize that this
definition may seem rather vague, but it should serve to introduce the approach. It
may also serve to contrast cultural or semiotic analysis with two approaches that are
prevalent in discussions of ethnic identity in Québec. These are the Marxian, or class
analysis, approach and the folkloric, or what might be called “essentialist,” approach..
The intellectual climate in contemporary Québec renders ethnic identity an
intractable and ambivalent concept. The main source of this conceptual difficulty is
the peculiar combination of Marxism and nationalism which characterizes much
discussion of ethnic identity by scholars and popular writers alike. I say “peculiar”
because the two ideologies are starkly incompatible when applied to an analysis of
ethnicity. Since a Marxian perspective rests on the causal determinacy of class as that
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institution is worked out in social relations of production, it is uncomfortable with any
assertion that an altogether different type of relation — based on ascribed or innate
ethnic identity — could be equal to or more important than class in describing the
workings of a society. Hence the interminable stream of academic articles which
dissect the “relation between class and ethnicity.” And, in the case of those articles
pursuing a line of Marxian analysis, there is the inevitable conclusion that ethnic
divisions serve merely to mask class antagonisms — suprastructural forms disguising
infrastructural realities.
From a cultural or semiotic perspective, the problem with this line of reasoning
is that it throws out the baby with the bathwater: If one wants to know how and why
others divide their social world into “our group” and “their group” — “We” and
“They” — it seems a hollow, insufficient answer to be told that people are really doing
something else entirely when they employ and act on ethnic stereotypes. Quite simply,
Marxian analysis is based on the existence of universal categories of persons —
workers, bourgeoisie, capitalist masters — which do not respect lines of ethnic
cleavage or national and provincial boundaries. A textile worker, plumber, and
stockbroker in Québec are, in any orthodox Marxian view, much like their counterparts
in Ontario, British Columbia, the United States, or Europe. Hence the dilemma of the
nationalist, Marxist intellectual in Québec. Asserting the priority of la nation or le
peuple as the embodiment of le fait français contradicts a class analysis position
which pays little attention to the fact that, for example, the textile worker speaks
Portuguese, the plumber French, and the stockbroker English. How these discordant
strains of thought are to be reconciled is one of the primary questions facing Québec
thinkers today.
What I have called the folkloric, or “essentialist,” approach to ethnicity
contrasts with both Marxian and semiotic perspectives. The approach is essentialist in
that it regards ethnic groups as discrete, bounded social units possessing qualities or
traits that are inherently and distinctively part of their identity. Thus the Greeks, for
example, are essentially Greek in that they possess a distinct language, mannerisms,
customs, foods, religious beliefs, and so on. The student of ethnicity who adopts this
perspective becomes a collector and compiler of these exotica. Like a traditional
folklorist, he is interested in ferreting out bits and pieces of custom that can be
classified as “truly” Greek. As a corollary to this search, he avoids and rejects
customs, speech acts, etc. which he regards as foreign introductions. Obviously, Greek
immigrant communities will be found to possess an abundance of these
“contaminated” traits; hence the folkloric analyst must reject much of his data as
acculturated, non-Greek material. This approach is inadequate for an analysis of
ethnicity in Québec because it insists on fossilizing what is a vibrant, ever-changing
reality of intense interethnic relations in the Montréal metropolitan area. An
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essentialist position reduces a complex and mercurial population to the status of a
museum exhibit — a fixed set of items to be inspected, labeled, and displayed.
The cultural or semiotic approach I recommend here takes as its subject matter
precisely the material the essentialist approach rejects. Being Greek, Québécois,
English or whatever is an interactive and creative process. Ethnic identity is not a
label one wears, it is a persona one constructs in the course of living among and
thinking about a diverse assortment of fellow citizens (all of whom, of course, are
busily constructing their own personae on the same basis). The task for the analyst
then becomes to identify what people regard as meaningful aspects of their basic ethnic
selves. This, in a nutshell, is what a semiotic approach proposes.
In what follows I present a somewhat more focused account of the theoretical
background and literature. On the basis of that review, I go on in the next section to
outline steps for an empirical investigation of ethnicity in Québec. The proposed
semiotic analysis emphasizes what I term the intersystem or cultural continuum of
ethnic identity. The application of those terms should become clear in the course of
the following discussion. Finally, I offer what are little more than educated guesses
about the intersystemic properties of ethnicity in Québec. I emphasize the provisional
nature of this section because the kind of research required to substantiate my observations has not, to my knowledge, been carried out.
Theoretical Background of the Study
The concept of ethnicity, with its broad connotations of social and cultural
identity, has become a prominent topic in anthropological discussions of the past ten
years. There are a number of factors involved in this upsurge of interest in what has
been termed the “new ethnicity” (Bennett 1973), but perhaps the most consequential
one consists in a fundamental rethinking of the subject matter of anthropology. As the
comparative study of mankind, the discipline has drawn much of its vigor — and made
some of its most profound contributions — from the premise that it is possible to
identify discrete entities called “societies” or “cultures,” each with its peculiar set of
institutions that are integrated to form a distinct whole, pattern, or structure. This
holistic conception of culture is certainly a natural, even morally and aesthetically
satisfying, way of thinking about human diversity: differences between individuals of
different cultures can be traced to their participation in exclusive systems of living and
thinking. Individual, society, and culture are united in a unique whole, an ethos and
eidos that at once constitute and legitimize experience.
A major difficulty with this powerful metaphor of culture arose when, in the
1930s, anthropologists began to grapple systematically with the phenomenon of social
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change. The apparent disintegration of North American Indian societies following
Euro-American colonization prompted theorists to develop concepts of “culture
contact” and “acculturation.” These ideas salvaged, for the time being, the holistic
conception of culture by portraying change as the result of operations like those
described in classical mechanics: discrete, solid bodies bump up against one another,
producing changes in their mass and direction. This model may be marginally useful
today in a very limited number of cases involving recent and dramatic contacts
between formerly isolated groups. However, much of the world’s population — and
everyone in the Western Hemisphere — lives in societies that are the product of
centuries of population movement and intermixture. “Contacts” among Native
American, European, African and other groups have occurred so often and over such a
long period that it is usually an impossible, and pointless, task to determine who got
which custom from whom.
The observation by sociologists that ethnic groups in U.S. society tended
toward assimilation — that ethnicity took a back seat to class interests and nationalism
— underlay the dominant sociological perspectives in this country until at least the
1960s (see Fishman 1975: 35-38). Both Parsonian and Marxian paradigms regarded
ethnic affiliation as part of an anachronistic order due to be replaced by the
universalistic standards of industrial society. Extensions of this process were seen in
the rapid nationalization of European colonies following World War II — what had
been collections of tribal peoples under a colonial power were apparently being
transformed into nations,, with all the modernistic connotations that word implied.
Theoretical debate over the past ten or fifteen years has involved a process of
unlearning the doctrine of increasing universalism, both at home and abroad. The civil
rights movement and the continuing emergence of “minorities” has stimulated
discussion of Canada and the United States as pluralistic societies. And the intensity
of ethnic sentiment in the new nations has awakened social scientists to the
tenuousness of their earlier views on nationalism, as Wendell Bell succinctly notes:
But primordial groups have frequently conflicted with the emergent
nationality of new states — or even the existing nationality of old states
— for the domination of individuals’ highest loyalty and provide
alternative ways of organizing and identifying. Sometimes they are
smaller in scale than the state itself and promote separatist tendencies,
sometimes they are larger and promote a sense of political dismemberment and a desire for unification on a larger scale based on
primordial ties such as the cases of pan-Arabism, greater Somalism, or
pan-Africanism.
Yet the relationships between nationalism and ethnicity are complex.
There is the rare instance where the boundaries of the state are nearly
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coterminous with the boundaries defined by ethnicity or race, although
the absolutely perfect fit may exist nowhere even among the old states.
More characteristically, ethnicity and race, even while competing with
the emergent nation, have sometimes become redefined on a larger
scale than before as a result of nation-building activities. (1974: 288)
The rash of substantial publications on ethnicity that have appeared in just the
past few years [representative are Brewer and Campbell (1976), de Vos and
Romanucci-Ross (1976), and Glazer and Moynihan (1975)] and, perhaps even more
significant, the number of circulating typescripts, attest to the concept’s importance for
modern social theory. While it would be foolhardy to attempt to chart the course of
theory here, one fruitful line of inquiry focuses on the notion of a society as an
inherently interethnic system or cultural continuum [Brathwaite (1971); R. T. Smith
(1976); Drunmond (1975)]. According to this perspective, the “essence” of a culture is
not its coherence, but the system of shared differences which its members recognize.
Those differences, moreover, are often articulated in terms of ethnic categories: soand-so-does such-and-such, or we do such-and-such to so-and-so, because he is an
__________. Social action and thought within a cultural continuum are thus
systematic elaborations of perceived intergroup similarities and differences, a set of
discordances.
Whatever theoretical line one takes, however, it is difficult to dispute the
significance ethnicity has in the modern world. For reasons that are still largely
undetermined, people insist on viewing their lives as bound up in the careers of
distinctive groups, and on defining membership in a particular group as the bedrock of
social belonging.
In proposing a cultural analysis of ethnicity, the intimation is that such studies
are present in insufficient number in the existing literature. This is precisely the case;
even the recent spate of studies of ethnicity has left the cultural aspect of the subject
virtually unexplored. [For exceptions or partial exceptions, see Alexander (1976);
Smith (1976); Drunmond (1981); Schwartz (1976); Fishman (1976)]
Contemporary ethnic studies in the United States developed largely from a
social problems orientation. Given the integrative postulates of Parsonian theory,
assertions of particularistic, ethnic affiliation were regarded as breaches in the normal
order, and particularly so since “ethnics” in the U. S. were associated from the
beginning with social deviance. In practice, this theoretical orientation led to the
formulation of research problems in terms of “race relations” and “minority issues.” In
a few cases (a notable early example being Glazer and Moynihan (1963)) the premise
of integration was questioned, but for the most part the overriding problem in the
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previous literature was not whether, but when ethnic differences would disappear in
modern, performance-oriented society.
In what has come to be regarded as a watershed work, Barth (1969) and his
students shifted the emphasis from integration to the actual processes by which groups
maintain separate ethnic identities (but for a contemporary, more comprehensive and
surprisingly little-cited treatise on intergroup relations, see Mason (1970)). Recent
studies [see, for example, the collection of essays in Fitzgerald (1974); Glazer and
Moynihan (1975); and de Vos and Romanucci-Ross (1976)] have for the most part
adhered closely to Barth’s views on the primacy of boundary markers in ethnic
phenomena. Having put aside the integrative premise that ethnic groups are transient
entities, modern social theory is now directing its attention to the perseverance of
ethnic distinctions. The paradigmatic format in most recent studies is how Ethnic
Group A is related to Ethnic Groups B, C, and so on, and the need to understand these
interethnic relations is often particularly acute because they are marked by intense
conflict or uneasy accommodation.
While recent studies represent a considerable advance in the quest to make
ethnicity intelligible, most share a deficiency when examined from the perspective of
cultural analysis. This deficiency consists in largely ignoring the actual content of
ethnic categories and, particularly, the systemic relationships among categories. It is
as if modern social theory, having put aside the notion that ethnic groups are transient
non-entities, has gone to the other extreme and now regards them as givens: intuitively
constituted wholes whose actual symbolic content is a matter of little theoretical
importance. This dramatic reversal, however, bypasses the really crucial problem of
the cultural definition of ethnic belonging. What is an ethnic group, anyway? The first
premise of my proposal is that ethnic distinctions (including national, religious, racial,
and tribal modes of belonging) are cultural productions and need to be examine as such
in order to understand the principles, conscious and unconscious, which regulate actual
behavior.
Contemporary studies which explore boundary phenomena in Group A : Group
B relations involve themselves in a contradiction if they do not attend to the question
of how A and B are put together in the particular cultural system being described.
Without denigrating his significant contribution to contemporary ethnic studies, an
example of this contradiction may be found in de Vos’ article, “Ethnic Pluralism:
Conflict and Accommodation” (1976: 5-41). The author’s announced priorities,
Like Barth, I think that how and why boundaries are maintained, rather
than the cultural content of the separated group, are what one must
examine in the study of ethnic relations. (p. 6),
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are inconsistent with his subsequent definition of “ethnic group” and his distinction
between ethnic and class or caste membership:
An ethnic group is a self-perceived group of people who hold in
common a set of traditions not shared by the others with whom they are
in contact, (p. 9) . . .
Some of the same elements that characterize ethnic membership nay
seem in some societies to characterize lineage group or caste
membership. The subjective definitions differ, however, as do their
functions. A lineage group or caste perceives itself as an interdependent unit of a society, whereas members of an ethnic group cling
to a sense of having been an independent people, in origin at least,
whatever the special role they have collectively come to play in a
pluralistic society. (p. 9, emphasis in text)
The contradiction here consists in rejecting the “cultural content” of ethnic
groups in favor of their boundary phenomena, while recognizing that those groups
cannot be defined apart from their cultural features — since in their very nature they
are “self-perceived” and “subjective.” That ethnic groups are not givens, in any
biological or historical sense, is evidenced by the creation of new ethnic entities — a
North American example being that of “Native American.” Since its emergence the
category has been elaborated culturally so that it now embraces a wealth of
associations and has important political overtones. [For a detailed account of this
process, see Fried (1975)]
Moreover, de Vos’ distinction between ethnic and other kinds of affiliation
would seem to be a matter for empirical investigation: Exactly what are the differences
in “subjective definition” that set a lineage or caste apart from an ethnic group? The
answer to this question requires a cultural analysis of the distinctions people in fact
make, the criteria they use in making them., and the situations in which they are made.
[For exemplary studies of this approach, see Geertz (1976), Schneider (1976), and
Schneider and Smith (1973).]
A more elaborate example of construing ethnic groups as givens rather than
examining their principles of construction is found in the pioneering studies of
ethnocentrism conducted by Levine and Campbell and their students over the past
fifteen years. The two major works In this corpus, Ethnocentrism (Levine and
Campbell (1972) and Ethnocentrism and Intergroup Attitudes (Brewer and Campbell
(1976) represent sophisticated developments in methodological and empirical
approaches to ethnic relations. However, both their “Ethnocentrism Field Manual” and
their trait analysis of East African groups identify the ethnic groups involved before
8
beginning the study. Levine and Campbell, for instance, regard them as discrete
territorial units:
In considering the range of relevant theories, remember that the setting
under consideration is that of the relationships among autonomous
territorial groups and the typical intergroup attitudes of their members.
(1972: 23)
This proviso has the effect of recasting the holistic concept of culture, making
“ethnic group” carry the intellectual baggage formerly borne by “society” or “culture.”
If taken literally, it also puts out of reach precisely those interethnic phenomena that
are of the most compelling interest: multiethnic societies whose citizens maintain their
ethnic affiliations in the context of daily and intense relations with members of other
ethnic groups.
Brewer and Campbell (1976) base their intricate statistical analysis of East
African intergroup attitudes on an interview format which presupposes the existence of
well-known ethnic groups:
First, each group was named and the respondent was asked to provide
two salient characteristics; second, each trait of interest was named, and
the respondent asked to specify the group that it characterized most.
The interview items in detail [include] . . .
1) Would you willingly agree to work with a _________________ ?
2) Would you willingly agree to have a ______________ as a
neighbor in your house? (p. 10-11)
The problem is knowing how to fill in the blanks. Ethnic distinctions that appear
sound to the investigator may strike a hollow note with the respondent, whose ethnic
lexicon — and cultural reality — are arranged differently. Ethnic categories used in
everyday life are not self-evident to an outsider, and their application may elude even
an investigator who has reviewed the ethnographic literature. What, for example, is
generally known about békés in Martinique, “redlegs” in Barbados, buvianders in
Guyana, or zambos in Venezuela? Without a substantive account of the distinctions
involved in such categories, that is, without a cultural analysis of the meanings
invested in the concept of ethnicity in specific contexts, it would be impossible even to
begin to make sense of the kind of questions in Brewer and Campbell’s survey.
Recent studies of linguistic and, cultural creolization processes [Hymes (1971);
Bickerton (1975); Drunmond (981)] suggest the intriguing possibility that ethnic
groups in a multiethnic society are not discrete units, but shifting continua. According
to this view, the assumption of: [one person = one ethnic identity] which underlies the
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studies reviewed above has to make way for the possibility that a given individual may
hold various identities, depending on the situation at the moment. Correspondingly,
ethnic ascription Is not so much a process of referential labeling (A is an X) as
selecting and implementing particular diacritical markers of social belonging —
specifying which individual characteristics are to count in a given situation. Bickerton
(1975) has argued that speakers of Guyanese Creole routinely handle disparate
grammatical rules, switching back and forth as socio-linguistic circumstances dictate.
A cultural or semiotic analysis of ethnicity can profitably pursue the analogy that
citizens of other multiethnic societies, such as Québec, hold and assign ethnic identities
within a range or continuum, according to an incompletely articulated but analytically
specifiable set of principles. It would be the task of semiotic analysis to implement a
research design to identify principles of ethnic ascription operating in the continuum of
Québec society.
Statement of Research Problems
A cultural analysis of ethnicity in the multiethnic milieu of Québec should
address itself to the following questions.
1) What are the actual ethnic categories in use?
Answering this question involves eliciting fairly exhaustive lexica of the ethnic
terms used in everyday life. Rather than rely on a pre-established view of which ethnic
groups are which, the investigator must devise a means of systematically identifying
those ethnic categories that are salient for interviewees.
2) Which criteria are used in making ethnic distinctions?
In keeping with the aim of identifying salient categories, it is important to
record the features respondents spontaneously cite in classifying the ethnicity of others.
Such features typically include speech or language, physical appearance, dress or
costume, religion, customs, and others.
3) How are ethnic categories elaborated, or grounded, in terms of other
cultural features?
In addition to recording respondents’ spontaneous classificatory remarks, it is
necessary to elicit their views on ethnic characteristics with a series of focused
questions. These questions will yield comprehensive exegetical accounts of the ethnic
category system, which are crucial data for a cultural analysis. The important point
here is that ethnic categories do not refer exclusively, or even mainly, to differences in
10
physical appearance, but to other cultural markers such as speech, dress, perceived
class differences, family patterns, disposition or public behavior, food preparation,
religion, and sexual preferences. Eliciting respondents’ comments point-by-point for
these items is essential to identifying the cultural elaboration of ethnicity in a
particular ethnographic case. By obtaining focused responses, the procedure also
increases the comparability and quantifiability of data across cases.
4) What are the degrees of contrast among the elements of ethnic category
systems?
In addition to recording ethnic lexica, it is necessary to know how respondents
arrange these lexical items in terms of their similarities and differences, Maximal and
minimal contrast sets should be built: up from respondents’ direct comments on which
groups are most and least: alike. It is important here to determine the extent to which
ethnic mixture is recognized explicitly in the category systems, and the degree of
ideological interest in that phenomenon.
5) How are ethnic distinctions built into accounts of personal experience?
This is an extremely important question, for it gets at the relation between
culture considered as a set of ideas or symbols and as a set of conventional actions.
While the ideational framework of ethnicity is the principal research subject here, an
adequate analysis of that framework involves an investigation of how respondents
describe and interpret their personal experiences with members of other ethnic groups
in a multiethnic society. Respondents should be asked to provide memorable
anecdotes or stories of their personal experiences with members of other ethnic groups.
6) What are the folkloric properties of ethnic category systems?
This question is tied to (3) above, but has a rather different application. An
intriguing feature of ethnic category systems that has not been rigorously explored is
the set of myths, legends, and other folk narratives that explain the origins and present
interconnections of recognized ethnic groups. In a cultural analysis, mythical and
ethnohistorical material of this kind is a primary data source and should be elicited
routinely.
7) What is the relation between an individual’s perception of his own
ethnic identity and his account of his society’s ethnic category system?
The relativistic nature of ethnic ascription in a cultural continuum makes it
indispensable to record each respondent’s estimation of where he, his spouse, their
parents, and their children fit in the framework of categories he describes in the
interview.
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8) Finally, assuming that information on all these points can be assembled,
how is it to be fitted into a comparative study that generates quantified
results?
Ethnic phenomena, to use de Vos’ terms once more, are “self-perceived” and
“subjective,” which necessitates eliciting fairly open responses from respondents. Yet
the material acquired by this means, in the form of lengthy transcripts of taped
interviews, is difficult to quantify and rigorously compare. A cultural analysis that
aims at establishing a comparative framework must therefore employ a methodology
that decreases the difficulty inherent in ordering narrative material.
Concluding Remarks: The Québec Intersystem or Cultural Continuum
Answers to the questions posed above should contribute significantly to our
understanding of the role ethnic identity plays in Québec society. I want to emphasize
that the research program outlined here aims at empirical results; literary works and
political speeches are simply no substitute for knowing what ordinary people believe to
be at stake in claiming and assigning ethnic identity.
In the absence of research results, any generalizations about Québec ethnicity
are tentative in the extreme. Nevertheless, it may be useful to outline the principal
factors which emerge in the course of a semiotic analysis. These are internal
variation, change, intersystem, and cultural continuum.
Internal variation and change are two processes of fundamental importance to
the shaping of Québec society. Change has come in the form of a complete
restructuring of the population, transforming a predominantly rural, clerical society
into an urban, secular one centered around the metropolitan area of Montréal. The
demographic transformation has been accompanied by a profound change in values
regarding the major social institutions of family, sex roles, religion, education,
economy, and politics. These major value shifts confront political and literary figures
with a dilemma: To insist on the distinctive identity of le peuple or la nation is to
invoke a wistful, retrospective vision of the way things were, and not of how they are
today. The source of the dilemma is that there is not a single, distinctive Québec but
several. Contrasting images of Québec culture (rural and clerical vs. urban and
secular) co-exist in our thought and give rise to a complex, ever-shifting discourse in
which one model of identity plays off another. The overall effect of this process is to
make ethnicity in Québec an extraordinarily complex topic.
The co-occurrence of contrasting images of a society is what I mean by internal
variation. People agree that they are members of a distinctive society, but don’t agree
12
on what that society is. This phenomenon of internal variation has become much more
prominent over the past twenty years or so, as immigrant groups have swelled the
population of Québec. Immigrants whose first language is neither French nor English
accommodate themselves to a new linguistic and social environment in different ways
and at different rates.
Those differences necessarily produce variations in
understanding with respect to what it means to be French, English, Italian, etc. I must
stress this point, for discussions of ethnicity in Québec and Canada too often rest on
one of two contrary and, I think, fallacious assumptions. The immigrant presence —
les autres — is viewed either as something that will gradually diminish until it blends
into a uniformity represented by la nation, or it is celebrated in its own right as “the
Canadian mosaic” and made the basis of an official multiculturalism.
Both positions ignore the important fact that local and immigrant groups
continually modify their conceptions of themselves — their ethnic identities — on the
basis of their interaction with one another. A Portuguese family living on The Main is
quite different from one in the countryside of Portugal. Similarly, a Montréalais and a
rural Québécois may exhibit significant differences in attitude and behavior. And one
source of those differences is that Portuguese and Québécois in Montreal have
fashioned their respective ethnic identities in the context of prolonged and sometimes
intimate contact with one another.
And here we come to a fundamental paradox at the heart of any cultural
analysis of ethnicity. In Montréal and Québec a basic component of proclaiming and
enacting a “Portuguese” identity is le fait français, and correspondingly a basic
component of maintaining a Québécois identity is the continuous presence of les
autres. Establishing an ethnic identity depends on identifying what one is not. The
ethnic Other must be incorporated in one’s own ethnic identity.
It is this reflexive and ever- shifting nature of ethnicity that gives rise to the
concepts of intersystem and cultural continuum. An ethnic intersystem is formed when
individuals enter into conceptual and behavioral negotiations of their respective
identities. In the present example, there are not two separate and discrete identities,
Québécois and Portuguese, which confront one another in a social milieu,, but a single
dynamic intersystem of [Québécois ↔ Portuguese] which creates a system of shared
differences.
I think it likely that research of the sort outlined here will establish that there
are a variety of ways of being Québécois, of being Portuguese, of being English, etc. in
the province of Québec. When those varieties are considered as an interdependent set
they comprise what I have termed a cultural continuum. A particular ethnic identity is
not an inventory of fixed traits (to be Québécois is necessarily and always to be A, B,
C . . .), but a system of often sharply contrasting and inconsistent images, or
stereotypes, of self and other. For example, a Portuguese whose home is Montréal
13
must incorporate some highly disparate images of himself, ranging perhaps from a
peasant villager to an urban factory worker — with all the jumbled economic and
ideological baggage those statuses entail. His ethnic identity can thus be likened to a
set of interacting forces which combine in a kind of vector field. In short, ethnic
identity is the sum of pushes and pulls to which the consciousness is subjected in the
course of knowing itself.
I will close by summarizing my main theme. To proceed successfully, studies
of ethnicity in Québec must take account of the fundamental theoretical issues posed
by the concept of ethnicity. To embark on a study as if everyone agreed on what
ethnic identity involves and all that remains is to fill in the content of particular
identities would lead to seriously flawed results. On the other hand, worthwhile
studies cannot be produced on the basis of theoretical discussions alone. It remains to
apply theoretically adequate research procedures, of the kind proposed here, in an
ethnographic study of ethnicity in Québec.
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List of References
Alexander, Jack
1977 The Culture of Race in Middle-Class Kingston, Jamaica. American
Ethnologist 4: 413-435.
Barth, Fredrik, ed.
1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Bauman, Richard
1972 Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore. In Toward New
Perspectives in Folklore. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman, eds.
Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 31-41.
Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer, eds.
1974 Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Bell, Wendell and Walter E. Freeman, eds.
1974 Ethnicity and Nation-Building. Beverly Hills, California: Sage.
Bennett, John, ed.
1975 The New Ethnicity. 1973 Proceedings of the American Ethnological
Society. St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing House.
Bickerton, Derek
1975 Dynamics of a Creole System. New York and London: Cambridge
University Press.
Brathwaite, Edward
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