Nationhood at Work: An Ethnography of Workplaces in Montreal and Brussels 9783839445624

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Dave Poitras Nationhood at Work

Cultures of Society  | Volume 35

Dave Poitras (Dr. phil.), born in 1985, obtained his PhD in sociology within the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces” at the University of Trier, Germany. His research project included several stays abroad at the collaborating Université de Montréal as well as in Brussels for fieldwork activities. His research interests are nationalism, everyday life, migration as well as diversity.

Dave Poitras

Nationhood at Work An Ethnography of Workplaces in Montreal and Brussels

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4562-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4562-4 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839445624

Content Preface | 9 Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels | 13

S ection 1 F ive W ork T asks and T hree M odes of O perating N ationhood Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession: The Work Task Dynamic Operating upon Nationhood | 37 1.1. Cultivating Nationhood: Writing and Publishing for the Nation | 39 Vignette 1: The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Split | 41 Vignette 2: Philip’s Counterfactual Exercise | 43 1.1.1 On the Making of Knowledge and Cultural Productions | 53 1.1.1.1 Philip’s Life Story | 53 1.1.1.2 Philip’s Niche in the Field of Cultural Production: Offering English-language Books about Quebec | 61 1.1.2 Navigating through Bi-Ethnicity with a Cause for Quebec and its Sovereignty: Knowledge and Cultural Production Beyond Two Solitudes | 67 1.2 A Nationalist Dynamic: When the Work of a Lifetime Operates upon Nationhood | 72 1.3 Epilogue: Working for a Popular Soap Opera: Cultivating Nationhood without an Identifiable Nationalist Motive | 75

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies: The Work Task Dynamic Operating with Nationhood | 81 2.1 Nationhood as Context for Staging Public Figures: Sharing Knowledge as a Teacher and Communicating Information as a Journalist | 82

2.1.1 The Bias Towards Nationhood-Related Topics: Education, Journalism, and Methodological Nationalism | 89 2.1.2 Properly Fulfilling Tasks: Elaborating National Contexts | 91 2.2 Doing Business with Nationhood: A Representative, a Manager, a Seller, and a Technician in National Markets | 94 2.2.1 Nationhood as Knowledge for Promoting and Selling… | 95 Vignette 3: The Québécois Cola  | 105 2.2.2 … And Promoting and Selling with Nationhood | 108 2.2.3 National Products and Services: The Bias of National Markets | 115 2.2.4 The Elaboration of Business Plans: Nationhood-Related Knowledge and References as Levers | 116 2.3 An Acknowledged Dynamic: Operating with Nationhood for the Sake of Convenience | 119

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines: The Work Task Dynamic Operated by Nationhood | 125 3.1 Mapping Land with Nationhood: Routine Practices of a Veterinarian and an Environmental Technician | 126 3.1.1 Reifying Space as National: Power, Landscapes, and Routine Practices | 137 3.1.2 From Territorial Matters to Linguistic Issues | 140 3.2 Compliance with Languages: A Nurse’s and a Human Resources Employee’s Practices of Accommodating Bilingualism | 141 3.2.1 Workplaces and Linguistic Practices | 156 3.2.1.1 Linguistic Legislation and Bilingualism: Employees Addressing Impositions on the Work Floor | 157 3.2.1.2 Hierarchy and Provider-Customer Relations: Employees Addressing Work-Related Positions | 160 3.2.2 From Complying to Reifying Languages and Linguistic Dualities: Resisting Prescriptions and Accommodating Practices | 161 3.3 A Concealed Dynamic: Work Tasks Operated by Nationhood through Routines | 163

S ection 2 T he U nquestionabilit y of a W orld D ivided into N ations Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations: The Everyday Significance of Living in a World of Nations | 169 4.1 Lived Nationhood: Back to the Research Design | 169 4.1.1 Nationhood as Part of Activities: Moving beyond the Category Nation | 172 4.1.2 Investigating Lived Nationhood in a Defined Environment: Constructing a Cohesive Frame of Reference | 177 4.2 Three Work Task Dynamics: Three Modes of Operating Nationhood | 180 4.2.1 Doing Nationhood: An Implicit Way of Acting | 185 4.2.2 Making Nations: Legitimizing Elements as National | 190

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels: A Model Particular to Bi-Ethnonational Milieus | 199 5.1 The Banality of Bi-Ethnicity: Acknowledgements, Confrontations, Collaborations, and Negotiations | 201 5.2 The Hegemony of Bi-Ethnicity in Montreal and Brussels: A Shared Experience of Nationhood | 209

Conclusion | 215 Bibliography | 221

Preface In this book, I investigate nationhood in Montreal and Brussels, two cities that are part of federated entities located in territories “targeted” by nationalistic projects that have arisen in Quebec and Flanders. Advocated by political parties and interest groups, such projects have throughout the last decades led to different undertakings seeking to achieve political sovereignty or obtain greater legislative autonomy from Canada and Belgium, respectively. Examples of major sociopolitical events and public policies arising from such nationalistic endeavors are numerous: the two referendums (1980 and 1995) of the government of the province of Quebec asking its population to obtain the mandate of negotiating its independence from Canada; the ongoing federalization of Belgium since the 1970s ensuing from demands from the two principal linguistic communities of the country, i.e., French speakers and Dutch speakers; the adoption of the Charte de la langue Française (Bill 101) by the government of Quebec in 1977, making French the only official language of the province; and the slow but sure formalization of Dutch as an official language in Belgium, a kingdom founded in 1830 as a unilingual French-language state, which only had its constitution translated into Dutch, the native language of more than half of its population, in 1967. The developments of events and public policies stemming from such nationalist pleas are, however, only of secondary concern in this inquiry. I am primarily interested in exploring the unique contemporary social conditions created by such ongoing nationalist pleas, and in understanding their impact on everyday experiences. I focus less on master national narratives, nationalist discourses, or nationalist actors than on the mundane, unreflective, and banal ways individuals enact and express nationhood in everyday life. Nations, as I understand them, constitute a form of belonging among other forms, such as gender, social classes, generational classification, or confessional affiliations, while nationhood corresponds to the idea of living in a world divided into nations. Understanding the significance of this idea on day-to-day activities is central to my research. Put simply, I investigate nationhood as it is lived in Montreal and Brussels.

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More than the actual nationalist projects conducted on the territories of Montreal and Brussels—and often more broadly associated with Quebec and Flanders, but also, perhaps to a lesser extent, Canada and Belgium—it is what I perceived to be their impact on everyday life that constitutes the starting point of the current investigation. My interest in conducting this investigation first arose from the experience of having lived in the two cities central to the research at hand. Although some of these experiences date from years ago, they have intrigued me ever since I was first aware of them. For example, in a French-language elementary school I attended in one of Brussels’ suburbs, I remember wondering why it was mandatory for me to take a Dutch-language lesson. I barely encountered Dutch in my everyday activities, even when walking in the downtown area or zapping through the television channels and radio stations. In Montreal, in a French-language high school, I recall being disconcerted to learn that students could receive an after-school detention if caught by teachers or monitors speaking English in the schoolyard. Far from being relevant only in language-related issues in the education system, questions regarding national matters involving two ethnonational—or ethnolinguistic— groups spring from other everyday environments. As unique “bi-ethnonational” milieus, both cities still remain loci of intriguing extraordinary and banal encounters wherein nationhood becomes salient in ways that are often difficult to identify. How is nationhood experienced in Montreal and Brussels? While this question is intimately related to my own life story, it also underlies the research problem of my investigation, which is guided by my vocation as a sociologist. In order to understand better how nationhood is experienced in Montreal and Brussels, I first suggest mobilizing the concepts of the sociology of nationalism. Examining the literature of the field, one quickly realizes that the issues raised throughout the decades are conspicuously those of sociology, and of social sciences more broadly. Because nationalism has often been considered an important structure of contemporary societies orchestrated by states, it has been of interest to sociologists since the dawn of the discipline. Over time, it has spurred a rich body of literature. The nation and its various phenomenal manifestations has been prominently examined in most of the sociological traditions since the emergence of the discipline, whether it be from a functional, constructivist, or relational-processual approach; and from macro, meso, or micro-sociological perspectives. The abundance and significance of writings regarding the nation means that researchers are confronted with a considerable number of studies. Tackling the extensive literature on nationalism, varying in its approaches and perspectives as much as in the specificity of the objects under research, is a colossal endeavor. Guided by my research interests, I will in the Introduction of this book situate my research in the field and present the conceptual framework that I

Preface

have elaborated to help me explore how nationhood is experienced in Montreal and Brussels. Because this investigation is based on the observation of individual experiences, I would like to express my gratitude to the men and women whom participated in my research and allowed me to work with them. This study would not have been possible without the help of these informants and the people whom helped me to come into contact with them. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues for their support; a special mention has to go to Professor Martin Endreß and Professor Barbara Thériault as well as their respective research teams. Their contribution to my academic training and work is unmeasurable. I am also indebted towards the International Research Training Group on Diversity and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec for their academic and financial support.

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Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

The historian and philosopher Ernest Renan is one of the first scholars to define the nation in an abstract sense. At a conference in 1882, he asks: What is a nation? He defines the nation as a modern historical construction. It has emerged, according to him, in conjunction with converging facts that prompted a significant number of individuals to wish to live together under specific conditions while sustaining both the idea of a common past and foreseeable future objectives. For this idea to be successful, he notes, the nation must be a daily plebiscite (Renan, 2012 [1882]). In spite of this somehow romanticized view on the matter, Renan raises an issue that was not properly addressed within the field of nationalism before the end of the next century: its everyday aspect. Indeed, most investigations of nationalism and its various phenomena throughout the 20th century have focused on macrosociological issues such as the emergence of the nation as a product of modernity (Gellner, 1964; 1983; 1991; Anderson, 2006 [1991]; Kedourie, 1961) and its pre-modern origins (Smith, 1987; 1991; 1998; Hutchinson, 1987). Only in the 1990s did a meso and micro-sociological turn take place, echoing back to Renan’s position that regardless of how a nation came into being, its existence rests on everyday plebiscites. It is in this subfield of the sociology of nationalism, everyday nationhood studies, that my research is anchored and to which it contributes. Rogers Brubaker’s investigation, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (2006), which he conducted in collaboration with Margit Feischmidt, Jon E. Fox, and Liana Grancea, remains up to this day one of the most complete works on the salience of nationhood in everyday life. It is not only a remarkable empirical investigation; it is also theoretically innovative. In Cluj, a Romanian town inhabited by “ethnic groups” of Hungarians and Romanians, Brubaker et al. investigate through ethnographic work, archives, and interviews how ethnicity and nationhood are “embodied and expressed [...] in everyday encounters, practical categories, common sense knowledge, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, mental maps, interactional cues, discursive frames, or organizational routines, social networks, and institutional forms (Brubaker

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et al., 2006: 6-7). In this study, Brubaker et al. empirically examine the nation as “a category of practice” rather than as a “category of analysis;” this is a crucial conceptual distinction that echoes back to one of Brubaker’s earlier work: “Instead of focusing on nations as real groups, we should focus on nationhood and nationness, on ‘nation’ as a practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent event [because] to understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category ‘nation,’ the ways it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organize discourse and political action.” (Brubaker, 1996: 7) After analyzing and accounting for the town’s tumultuous nationalistic history in an extensive way, their main concern is to understand how ethnicity works: where it is and when it matters, in everyday life, and “without automatically taking ethnic groups as [a] unit of analysis” (Brubaker et al., 2006: 8). As Thomas Hylland Eriksen rightly notes, “if one goes out to look for ethnicity one will find it and thereby contribute to constructing it” (2002: 161). With such a posture Brubaker et al. examine ethnicity “alongside a range of alternative, non-ethnicized ways of seeing and being; to study ethnicity alone is to impose ethnicity as an analytical frame of reference where it might not be warranted; it is to risk adopting an overethnicized view of social experience” (Brubaker et al., 2006: 16). In their study, Brubaker et al. conclude that nationhood and ethnicity are most of the time irrelevant in an individual’s daily life: “Most Clujeni do not frame their cares and concerns in ethnic terms […] ethnicity is only intermittently salient […] many nominally interethnic interactions are not experientially interethnic […] social connections, political power, economic interests, and moral corruption are more readily invoked than ethnicity in explaining who gets what and why. And ethnicity has little bearing on strategies for getting by or getting ahead.” (Brubaker et al., 2006: 363) While this outcome is of interest, their investigation does not explain the mechanism behind the mobilization of the national category (Martigny, 2010: 13). As political scientist Vincent Martigny observes, Brubaker’s et al.’ investigation neglects the fact that if the national referent is not always predominant, people still interact in a social universe wherein the nation is signified to them daily, and in which this community is often considered to be the most legitimate and significant form of belonging (ibid.). In other words, Brubaker et al. do show when and where nationhood becomes salient (in institutions such as churches, associations, or schools along linguistic lines; families through names and habits; or language practices in diverse situations), but they largely overlook how it happens, and how it comes to matter. They often discard potential nationhood issues by arguing that another category or form of identity or belonging than the national is most relevant to a given situation. Briefly, they fail to identify how nationhood is experienced.

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

Does the category nation have to be explicitly used for nationhood to matter? Or is it possible to experience nationhood in other any other ways? In order to examine how nationhood is experienced in Montreal and Brussels, I have developed a new approach by using the concepts provided by a “phenomenologically-based sociology” (Endreß, 2005: 4), which combines aspects of Max Weber’s and Alfred Schütz’s approach to sociology.1 This conceptual approach, I argue, allows to investigate lived nationhood, or the experienced meanings of living in a world divided into nations. I present in what follows the basis of a sociology of lived nationhood which will help me overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of previous research designs used to investigate everyday nationhood.

Lived Nationhood: The E xperienced Meanings of Living in a World Divided into Nations The conceptual approach I elaborate in order to investigate lived nationhood is meant to help me examine the implications of living in a world divided into nations. It treats nationhood, the idea of a world of nations, as a “body of ‘knowledge’ […] socially established as ‘reality,’” and is thus “concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckmann, 1991 [1966]: 15). In exploring lived nationhood through individuals’ experiences, this approach ultimately sheds light on the ongoing “construction” of nations in day-to-day activities: something that remains little explored. Acknowledging that nations are constructs, however, has become common sense in the field of the sociology of nationalism; nations are not and have never been primordial aspects of the world. As the sociologist Andreas Wimmer mentions, there is indeed a “constructivist consensus” in nationalism studies on the idea that nations, or ethnic groups, are constructed (2013: 2). It has, according to Brubaker, become “complacent and clichéd” to argue for such an obvious statement (2004: 3). Because nations are constructs, as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty would most likely also argue (1945), they hide and make incomprehensible complex activities and phenomena of everyday life. To be understood, one must go below the “objectified world of sciences” and treat nations as “generators of meanings.” To go below the objectification of the nation and to grasp the meanings it generates, I suggest focusing on lived 1 | According to Thomas Eberle, “there is no such thing as a ‘phenomenological sociology’” (2010: 134) —except, as he admits, under George Psathas’ writing (1973; 1989). On this matter, Thomas Luckmann clearly distinguishes sociology as an empirical science, and phenomenology as philosophy, which can, however, be helpful to the social sciences (Luckmann, 1973: 164). This is how phenomenology informs my approach to sociology, which I practice through an empirical fieldwork.

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experiences through which meanings are first given; meanings allowing individuals to perceive and make sense of the world, but that are later on forgotten (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 31 and 69). Throughout my research, I explore nationhood as it is lived; not so much out of interest for the nations themselves as out of interest for the understanding of how the meaning of living in a world of nations is constituted in the activities of individuals. Individuals are the point of entry into investigating lived nationhood. Obtaining direct access to “the actual stock of knowledge” of a person, which is nothing more than the sedimentation of all of his or her experiences defined by the previous situations he or she has encountered (Schütz, 1970: 123; see also Eberle and Hitzler, 2004: 67), would be ideal. It is, however, hardly feasible. What can be more seriously considered is a way to identify and interpret a fragment of an individual’s knowledge and understandings through his or her actions; more precisely, considering the objects at hand, practices and expressions in which nationhood may be identified through interpretation. In so doing, I will have access to the individual’s experienced meanings of living in a world divided into nations. Nationhood, in this perspective, is treated as a “finite province of meanings” in which it is the meaning of individual experiences that constitutes reality, and not the ontological structure of objects (Schütz, 1962: 230). In order to explore the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations, I will look into actions that are social, a central dimension to Weber’s interpretive sociology. According to Weber, “we shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior—be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (1978 [1921/1922]: 4). Understanding social action is best done by aiming to grasp individual motives, that is “a complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question” (ibid.: 11). Hence, aiming to understand how the idea of living in a world divided into nations is experienced, I will inter-subjectively investigate motives underlying social actions.2 2 | In Schütz’s work, as Eberle notes, “understanding is not a category of the social sciences, but a method of everyday practice in the life-world” (Eberle, 2014: 12). Schütz, however, agrees with Weber’s “entry point” with regard to the researcher’s interests: “The postulate of subjective interpretation has to be understood in the sense that all scientific explanations of the social world can, and for certain purposes must, refer to the subjective meaning of the actions of human beings from which social reality originates” (Schütz 1962, 62; see also Nasu, 2005: 126-132). Schütz, nevertheless, is further interested in describing the universal structure of subjective orientation and the conditions of actions than their consequences (Endress, 2014: 46), which is why I priv-

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

The sociologist Barbara Thériault notes that “motives point to a sociology that proceeds by the reconstruction, and not the constitution, of action, which has, for its end, the understanding and thereby the explanation of a phenomenon we have before our eyes and try to render intelligible” (2013: 49; see also 2010: 208). Reconstructing actions may not underline nationalist motives, but it could nonetheless lead to the understanding of a phenomenon involving nationhood. Whether being an element of the context in which the action is performed or the outcome of the action itself, nationhood could be observed through motives, but also through cognitive schemas, under institutional forms, or assumed collective knowledge suggesting individuals to act in a specific way because of the idea of a world of nations. In exploring lived nationhood through the reconstruction of actions, I am primarily interested in examining “the interpretation and generation of sense, carried out by those living in the social world, [through] cultural objects which constitute themselves in the processes of generation and interpretation of sense in the social world, and ‘understand’ those cultural objects by inquiring back into their constituting sense” (Schütz, 2004 [1932]: 438 quoted in Endreß, 2014: 46). The focus on individuals and their motives, therefore, must not make me lose sight of the social world. Sociologists often remind us that human beings are individuals as much as social beings. Eviatar Zerubavel notes that we are “products of particular social environments that affect, as well as constrain the way we cognitively interact with the world;” we do not only personally experience the world through our senses, “but also impersonally, through [our] mental membership in various social communities” (1997: 6-7; see also Schütz and Luckmann, 1974: 243). In this perspective, the nation is to be conceived as a mere community or form of belonging among others in which individuals experience the world, but also of which individuals are a product. The nation represents a finite province of meanings, among others, readily available for individuals to use; it is part of “the intersubjective world which existed long before our birth, experienced and interpreted by Others, our predecessors, as an organized world […] given to our experience and interpretation […] in the form of ‘knowledge at hand’ [which] function[s] as a scheme of reference” (Schütz, 1962: 208). Considering nationhood as a way of “perceiving, interpreting and representing the social world” (Brubaker, 1996: 7), as the idea that the world is divided into nations, loosens the focus on the potential inherent importance of the nation. It impels considering it also as unimportant, at times. In other words, instead of seeing it as ilege Weber’s approach to motives and to understanding. I am, of course, interested in describing the way nationhood structures the life-world, but to do so, I choose to further focus on the way nationhood structures actions, i.e., by investigating motives underlying individual actions through empirical observations. I am thus exploring individuals’ subjectivity, and I aim to inter-subjectively understand their actions.

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an entity potentially embracing every facet of a society, it represents one form of belonging alongside others and with which it can intersect, such as gender, religious confessions, generational classifications, or social classes. But most of all, it represents a practical category (Brubaker, 1996, 2004, 2006) that is to be observed through actions and the contexts in which practices and expressions take place. While a sociology of lived nationhood adheres to these premises, I wish to nuance them. I argue that it is not because an individual does not directly use the category nation that nationhood does not matter, i.e., that s/he is not experiencing the world of nations in any other way. I do not only aim to explore and understand what “objects” generate a sense of nationhood or are interpreted as reflecting nationhood in everyday life. With the help of a phenomenologically-based sociology and an interpretive sociology, I inquire into the “constitutive sense” of actions but also objects in their contexts, which, through interpretation can lead to better identify different aspects of nationhood in everyday life.3 In grasping different motives underlying actions, I explore if, when, where, but also how nationhood comes to matter in day-to-day activities in order to uncover the different experienced meanings of the phenomenal manifestation of nations. The categorization of motives stemming from such an approach will necessarily result in a typification.4 By uncovering these motives, I will reveal various conditions of action with regard to nationhood. A sociology of lived nationhood will not only allow me to unveil the implications of living in a world of nations and its ongoing construction, it will also shed slight on the multiple ways through which nationhood comes into actions; the multiple ways in which nationhood is enacted. Having depicted how a sociology of lived nationhood best represents a conceptual approach to investigating the experienced meanings of living in a world divided into nations, I will frame and conceptualize in what follows the two milieus in which the empirical research takes place: Montreal and Brussels. Although the information regarding both sociopolitical scenes is brief here, I will complement it in due time throughout the book. 3 | While I do favor a German school of thought in the elaboration of the conceptual approach that will allow me to investigate lived nationhood, my interests in everyday life are not unfamiliar with those of French sociologists. In his seminal book L’invention du quotidien (1990 [1980]) or The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, for example, seeks to understand how people individualize and address societal phenomena through mundane activities (see also Martuccelli and de Singly, 2012). 4 | As suggested by Alfred Schütz, “the sum-total of these various typifications constitutes a frame of reference in terms of which not only the sociocultural, but also the physical world has to be interpreted, a frame of reference that, in spite of its inconsistencies and its inherent opaqueness, is nonetheless sufficiently integrated and transparent to be used for solving most of the practical problems at hand” (1964: 233)

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

Nationhood in Bi-Ethnonational Milieus Like Brubaker in his Cluj investigation (2006), I also focus on individuals within a city. This is the most appropriate scale for an investigation of everyday phenomena of the nation; it impels exploring how nationhood “works” in an individual’s life and routines, i.e., without prioritizing national narratives, a state, or a national or ethnic group treated as a homogenous entity (Brubaker et al., 2006: 7). This perspective may avoid the researcher falling into the methodological nationalism trap of “assuming that nation/state/society is the natural social and political form” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002: 302) or into groupism by automatically taking nations, races, or ethnic groups as basic units of analysis (Brubaker, 2004: 8; 2006: 8). In my research, I add another “anti-groupism” factor to the investigation: a second city. Exploring a similar phenomenon in two distinctive cities leads, I believe, to a more dynamic understanding of lived nationhood. It further compels to loosen the focus on the master national narratives associated with the populations under investigation, and it also strengthens the central position of the object of research over the location in which it is investigated. In other words, it encourages accounting for lived nationhood over state nationhood and historically grounded knowledge. Beyond my personal affection for Montreal and Brussels, the juxtaposition of the cities offers thought-provoking intersecting points for an investigation on lived nationhood. They are both located in what I call bi-ethnonational sociopolitical spaces, Canada and Belgium, in the sense that the central state recognizes two major ethnonational groups.5 Moreover, both cities are located in territories “targeted” by sovereignist projects from Quebec and Flanders. The activities of these movements, in Brussels as much as in Montreal, have led to the adoption of policies aiming to reflect in many aspects of public life the official ethnonational character of the space each city is located in. These are, respectively, Brussels (Brussels-Capital Region, as a federated entity), and the federated province of Quebec. Both cities, however, are grounded in different “social constellations.” As I illustrate below, I understand the social constellation of each city to be constituted of two dimensions: the “state-centered,” institutional, official, or formal status (in which the main ethnonational traits that 5 | It can be said that Belgium is a trilingual—tri-ethnonational—country. Its German-speaking population, however, represents less than 1% of the total population. Moreover, the German-speaking community is centered over a hundred kilometers from Brussels—the entity of interest in my research—in the far East of Belgium, on the German border. Also, it can be said that Canada is a multi-ethnonational country. The multiple Canadian first nations represent about 3% of the population, and mostly live in reservations. Although recognized, indigenous languages do not have an official status in the country.

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are meant to be “defended” by politics) and its more empirical status (the actual significance of those traits for the state and its politics “in practice”). Besides contextualizing my investigation “from above,” the differences or similarities between the social constellations open the door to a discussion of their impact on lived nationhood in each city.

The Social Constellation of Montreal As part of a federated state, Quebec has power over most public linguistic matters in the province, such as the policies regarding the language of advertisements and the languages of education. Montreal—or the municipalities of the Greater Montreal (the Metropolitan area of Montreal)—thus has no leverage with regard to language usages on its territory. La Charte de la ville de Montréal, a document published by the Quebec government, states in the second line of its first article that “Montréal est une ville de langue française” (Québec, 2000: C–11–4 art. 1). The same document is available in one other language, English, the Charter of Ville de Montréal, in which it is also stated that “Montréal is a French-speaking city” (Québec, 2000b: C–11–4 art. 1). From a state-centered or a formal point of view, contemporary Montreal is hence a unilingual French-speaking city, privileging individuals that have and use French as a language—whether it be their mother tongue or not. Being part of an official Canadian language minority in Quebec, English speakers of the province, who mainly live in the Montreal metropolitan area, have the right to receive services in English. The English-speaking community living in what is today Quebec has always been a powerful elite influencing diverse affairs of the area, even before the 1867 Canadian Confederation Act (Rudin, 1989: 223). Even though they have always been a minority in Quebec, their authority allowed English speakers living in Montreal to run “the most important affairs of the city” throughout the years (Boone, 1996: 70).6 In comparison with French-speaking minorities living in other provinces throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century, English speakers of Quebec have had their own separate public institutions since 1869, most notably those of a confessional and educational nature (Corbeil et al., 2010: 63). In spite of Quebec’s 1977 Charte de la langue française (Charter of the French language, or Bill 101) making French the only official public language of the province, as well as making Quebec the only unilingual French-speaking province of Canada, the 6 | In an article entitled Language Politics and Flood Control in Nineteenth-Century Montreal, Christopher Boone reconstructs a 19th century event depicting relations between the two main language groups of the city: “In miniature, the struggle for flood control illustrates the tensions between a privileged anglophone minority and an expanding francophone majority for control of the city’s resources and design” (1996: 70).

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

English-speaking community has maintained their long since acquired vested rights. English, as exemplified by the Charter of Ville de Montréal, the English Montreal School Board, and in the possibility for administration in the boroughs to be bilingual English-French, hence remains a language “available” for public usage within institutions that are under Quebec’s jurisdiction. As statistics show, English is a widely used language in schools, public services, and workplaces, but also at home in the Montreal metropolitan area (with slightly higher percentages on the Island of Montreal [Statistics Canada, 2007]). In some boroughs (Pointe-Claire, Westmount, Baie d’Urfé, Hudson, and Côte-Saint-Luc), over 70% of the population speaks English as their first language (Corbeil et al., 2010: 102). In a federal report based on statistical data entitled Portrait des minorités de langue officielle au Canada: les Anglophones du Québec,7 the authors reveal that in two of the main public services area under Quebec’s jurisdiction—health care and justice, including interactions with layers, judges, and all levels of police officers—English speakers have in the past used English to communicate up to 80% of the time in some cases (Corbeil et al., 2010: 59–62). In the Montreal metropolitan area, 50.9% of the individuals with French as their mother tongue identify themselves as French-English bilingual, while this number rises to 69.3% for individuals who have English as a first language. In 1971, Allophones (individuals having another language than French or English as a mother tongue) living in Quebec largely favored English as a “public language” (up to 71%), whereas in 2006, approximately 50% of Allophones chose French, while the other half chose English as their main language of communication (Statistics Canada, 2007: 24; Corbeil et al., 2010: 96). In primary and secondary school, however, 81.5% of Allophones studied in French in 2006, compared to 14.6% in 1971 (Lachapelle and Lepage, 2010). This large difference in numbers is due to the 1977 Bill 101, which only admitted to English-speaking schools children whose father or mother are Canadian citizens that have received the majority of their primary school education in English in Canada to public English-speaking schools (Québec, 1977: C–5 art. 73). The Bill has often been recognized as effectively “designed to force immigrants and Canadians who had migrated [to Quebec] from other provinces to adopt the francophone culture” (See, 2010: 201; Riendeau, 2000: 353–4). As shown by the 2006 statistics, however, the percentage of Allophones pursuing their studies in French after secondary school drops to 46.2% (Lachapelle and Lepage, 2010). I sum up the social constellation of Montreal as follows: individuals living in Montreal are meant, from an institutional or formal point of view, to be socialized to the characteristics of the French-speaking groups, or the 7 | Portrait of official language minorities in Canada: Englishcspeakers of Quebec (2010).

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French-Québécois. Through education, media, public communications, and policies, the state is thus meant to favor ethnonational traits (language, history, symbols, contemporary and historical personalities, religion, and “folkways”) of one ethno-linguistic group over others. In virtue of being present in Montreal for over a century before ethnonational traits of French-Québécois became, from a formal point of view, favored over others in the province, the English-speaking group, or the English-Québécois, as a minority, assures that English remains an “available” language for public usage within institutions under Quebec’s jurisdiction. As a consequence, the ethnonational traits of a second ethnolinguistic group continue, in a restricted way and under special conditions, to be shared through education, media, public communications, and policies. The English-Québécois traits are “institutionalized-as-a-facilitation.” In this sense, I qualify the social constellation of Montreal as “officially” uni-ethnonational while leaning towards bi-ethnonational “in practice.”

The Social Constellation of Brussels The Brussels-Capital region is a federated entity of the Kingdom of Belgium. In total, Belgium has six federated entities, which territorially and institutionally overlap with each other. Three of these are regions: those of Brussels-Capital, Wallonia, and Flanders; and the three others are communities: those of the Flemish(-speaking) community, the French(-speaking) community, and the German(-speaking) community. Being a region on its own, Brussels-Capital is also part of both Flemish and French communitiesalthough the region of Flanders’ parliament has since the second federalization in 1985 fused with the Flemish community’s parliament, now forming one government. This is the Flemish government, also based in Brussels, which reflects a greater will to be politically unified or strong than the French speakers of the country, who are divided between Wallonia and Brussels. Communities’ competences concern “cultural matters” such as education, museums, social care, and communications, whereas those of regions rather focus on “economic[al] matters” such as territorial management, socio-economic planning with regard to business, industries, and energy, and the organization of municipalities (Belgique, 1994: C–4, art. 127 and art. 134). Hence, “the overlap between the two main communities [Flemish and French] within the limits of the Brussels region makes Belgian federalism very modestly non-territorial: […] ‘person-related competences are […] entrusted to the communities, […] while the regions’ assemblies and executives are in charge of ‘place-related’ competences” (Van Parijs, 2013a: 2). In other words, many of the institutions found on the territory of Brussels-Capital actually depend on the Flemish and French communities. On a cultural level, because “Brussels is not recognized as a specific entity, and is hence not recognized as a community, Flemish and French communities

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

are largely competent with regard to communitarian matters in the Brussels region. The latter remains represented as a city in which Francophones and Flemings cohabit” (Sinardet, 2008: 146, my translation).8 While this configuration makes contemporary Brussels officially French-Dutch bilingual (Belgique, 1994: C–1 art. 4), the citizens’ representation “organized through two distinct electoral colleges and sub-parliaments,” that of both French and Flemish parties, still “rests on the assumption that all Brusselers belong to one and only one ‘nation’ with segregated educational and cultural institutions, and that the Brussels subset of each of these two nations needs to have its own separate political space” (Van Parijs, 2013: 4). Because the same constellation holds true at the federal level, Van Parijs speaks of Belgium as a “binational” democracy (2013). Its political institutions, Sinardet suggests, make the “Belgian federal system [unique], in the sense that it has created on the same territory two types of federated entities, which is the exteriorization of a compromise between the mostly Flemish will of a decentralization on a cultural level—translated into communities—and the mostly Wallonian will of a decentralization on a socioeconomical level—translated into regions” (Sinardet, 2008: 141, my translation).9 Being culturally, economically, and politically central to the country, Brussels seems “adapted” to reflect Belgium as a whole. From an institutional or formal point of view, contemporary Brussels is thus a city leaning towards being bilingual French-Dutch, thus privileging individuals of the French and Dutch linguistic groups—whether they be native speakers or not. Nevertheless, as many authors agree, Brussels, “though bilingual in law is francophone in fact” (Loh, 1975: 219); French being “the most important language, [the] lingua franca [that] dominates public language use” (Janssens, 2008: 14). In Brussels, “about two thirds of the respondents [of a survey conducted in 2011] report that French was the language or one of the languages that were spoken at home in their childhood,” the second language being Arabic (21%), “which has now overtaken Dutch (20%) as Brussels’ second native language” (Taalbarometer, 2011, quoted in Van Parijs, 2013b: 14). With

8 | “Bruxelles n’est pas reconnue comme entité spécifique et donc pas reconnue comme communauté, les communautés flamandes et françaises sont largement compétentes en ce qui concerne les matières communautaires de la région bruxelloise. Celle-ci reste donc représentée comme une ville où cohabitant francophones et Flamands” (Sinardet, 2008: 146). 9 | “Le système fédéral belge est unique dans ce sens qu’il a créé sur le même territoire deux types d’entités fédérées, ce qui est l’extériorisation d’un compromis entre la volonté surtout flamande d’une décentralisation sur le plan culturel—traduite par les communautés—et la volonté surtout wallonne d’une décentralisation sur le plan socio-économique—traduite par les régions”. (Sinardet, 2008: 141)

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regard to linguistic competence, 89% of Brusselers claim to know French, 30% English, 23% Dutch, and 18% Arabic (ibid.: 16). I characterize the social constellation of Brussels as being “mirrored” to that of Montreal; bi-ethnonational becoming “official,” and uni-ethnonational becoming “in-practice.” Individuals living in Brussels are meant, from an institutional or formal point of view, to be socialized to characteristics of two linguistic groups of the city: French speakers and Dutch speakers. Brussels is thus meant to favor ethnonational traits (language, history, symbols, contemporary and historical personalities, religion, and “folkways”) of two ethno-linguistic groups through education, media, public communications, and policies over others. Since the foundation of Belgium in 1830, the French-speaking group has, however, always been more influential in Brussels, and is still today the dominant ethnonational group to which most Brusselers are socialized to, in spite of the slight increase of Dutch speakers rising in the last decade (Van Parijs, 2013a: 17). The social constellation of Brussels is hence “officially” bi-ethnonational while leaning towards being uni-ethnonational “in practice.” In the following point, I reflect upon how I conducted and constructed the fieldwork “from below.” This will be the occasion to discuss the methods with which I empirically explore lived nationhood, or the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations.

An Ethnography of Lived Nationhood: Shadowing the Nation at Work In investigating lived nationhood, I am most interested in how individuals enact and express the idea of a world of nations rather than in focusing on the representations people have of the nation or nations to which they belong. I have thus privileged an ethnographic approach in constructing the fieldwork. When I first began, however, I was undecided about how to proceed or which empirical method I should choose. At the very beginning of the research, the possibilities of my chosen field appeared endless. Perhaps naïvely, I wanted to investigate every type of everyday situation I could possibly find. These ranged from conversations in cafés to the more family-oriented contexts of homes, via work environments, dayto-day commuting, and sporadic events such as dinners, public gatherings, parties, leisure activities, and sports. I went out in Montreal alone or with a participant—as Brubaker et al. (2006) had done over a course of several years in Cluj—to investigate lived nationhood. Uncertain, at first, of the type of ethnographic approach I should adopt to work with informants, I simply asked individuals if I could follow them throughout their day; if possible, from their morning coffee to their workplace and dinner. Six people in Montreal agreed to help me in what would be a preliminary fieldwork—albeit usable as empirical

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

information for the research. I literally followed most of these first participants throughout their day, or almost. Understandably, I was not welcome everywhere and at all times. There were everyday environments in which my presence as a researcher—a complete stranger in most cases—felt inappropriate or awkward, be it at home, early in the morning for coffee, or during dinner and transportation. I quickly started to question the actual feasibility of conducting such observations. After following these six participants in Montreal and having attempted a first analysis of my observations, I came to the conclusion that the richest material was that emerging from workplaces. I then decided to only focus on individuals in this type of environment. A further motivation for this approach was that my informants did not necessarily enjoy being “stalked” for too long throughout their day, especially outside their workplace. In addition to the way the work environment somehow imposed itself as the locus of the fieldwork, the specificities of this type of social context perfectly suits an investigation into lived nationhood. Limiting the fieldwork to workplaces not only made the empirical investigation more feasible, but it also, I argue, made the research more convincing. Solely exploring workplaces allows me to show—as I delve into in Section 1—the great variety of nationhood phenomena in one type of environment. I made my fieldwork observations while following one individual at a time in his or her work environment. Ethnographers refer to this technique as “shadowing” (McDonald, 2005; Quinlan, 2008; Bartkowiak-Theron and Sappey, 2012; Gilliat-Ray, 2011; Kussenbach, 2003, 2012). Because my aim was to empirically observe if, when, where, and how nationhood matters in everyday life through individual actions, shadowing was the best way to carry out the empirical phase of my investigation and to construct the fieldwork. The shadowing technique is one of a wider group of methods referred to as “mobile.” Margarethe Kussenbach describes mobile methods as “techniques of data collection during which researchers move alongside participants” (2012: 252). Shadowing helps uncover the actions an individual performs in an organized group—such as a work environment—that existed prior to the arrival of the researcher (ibid.: 257). By following one member of a group over an extended period of time, and by asking questions to generate a running commentary on the activities observed, the shadower aims to reveal “the subtleties of perspective and purpose shaping [actions] in the real-time context of an organization” (McDonald, 2005: 455–456). Investigating “what people actually do in the course of their everyday lives [and] not what their roles dictate of them” (Quinlan, 2008: 1480), the shadower not only observes “daily work and personal insights, but also systematically collect[s] and record[s] their contextual setting including organizational structures and processes, and their immediate colleagues’ behaviors and reactions to particular events” (Bartkowiak-Theron and Sappey, 2012: 8).

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In both cities, I asked friends of friends or acquaintances to help me find my way in diverse workplaces. Because being followed over hours and days was often perceived as a burden, the bond of trust was obviously easier to establish with the friends of friends or acquaintances than with complete strangers. Although I did contact some organizations by myself, such as police districts, media groups, or taxi companies, these attempts were met with a negative response or no response at all. As Barbara Thériault also notes, researchers’ use of their friends’ networks to put pressure on a person of interest often causes a potential key informant to “feel obliged” to give an affirmative answer to the common friend of the researcher (Thériault, 2015: 5). After having asked among organizations and my network of friends in both cities, all I had to do was to wait for answers, or reach out to individuals I was told could be interested in meeting me. Before actually following informants in their workplace, I came into contact with many individuals. I had, at first, very few criteria to guide the selection process. Concealing the topic of my research as to avoid biases, I would mainly tell potential participants that I was interested in following people who engaged in a minimum of interaction in their work environments, whether it be with clients, colleagues, or other fellow worker. Basically, as to give possible informants a better idea, I would tell them that it would not be interesting for me to work with someone who sat behind a computer screen all day. Most of all, I emphasized the fact that I would need to be able to follow them throughout their entire work routine, for a period ranging between one and three days. Avoiding any references to nationhood, I said that the objective would mainly be to observe everyday interaction in work environments while asking for comments, when possible. Because they could sense that participation would entail a burden upon them, the great majority of people I asked refused to take part in the study. Moreover, those who were interested in helping me still had to convince their superior(s)—when there was one, which was the case for most places visited—to allow me to accompany them. This was an aspect I had not thought of at the very beginning of the fieldwork when I was contacting organizations. Relying on the help of participants in charge of letting me into their workspace was crucial in accessing work environments.10 In total, I was able to become the “shadow” of ten individuals in each city. Fortunately, the workplaces I had the chance to visit, and the professions of the individuals I had the pleasure of working with, were very diversified. They covered a wide range of work tasks and environments. The following graph lists 10 | In cases where my informants were successful in convincing their superiors, I sometimes had to sign a form in which I would agree to keep some information undisclosed, provide an official document from my universities stating my academic position and faculty affiliation, or write a cover letter.

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

the professions of the people I was able to follow within their work environments for one to three entire days. Professions of the Participants in Montreal and Brussels Montreal

Brussels

College French Literature Teacher

Piano Tuner

Nurse

Current Affair Journalist

Restaurant Manager

Piano Seller

Special Education Technician

Veterinarian

Writer/Publisher

Economics Journalist

Carpenter

Owner of a Camera Store

Building Technician

Human Resources Employee

Environmental Technician

Representative of a SatelliteTV Company

Paramedic

Construction Entrepreneur

Fruit-Stand Manager

Makeup Artist

As hard as it may have been to obtain a favorable answer from potential informants, the shadowing technique allowed me to have an in-depth and meaningful access to an individual’s lived experiences in his or her everyday work environment.11 From practices to discussions between my informants and their 11 | Indeed, not only did approaching one individual at a time help me gain access to environments that are often closed, it also allowed me to observe and collect first-hand field notes of activities, “rather than second hand-accounts” obtained from interviews, discourses, or writings (McDonald, 2005: 466). This asset is of course not specific to shadowing; it is common to all ethnographic approaches. But in contrast to many ethnographic approaches, the shadower entirely assumes his role as a researcher. While shadowing, I never intended to be seen as an “indigenous” by my informants. Standing next to the participants, I observed and listened to individuals at work; I also asked questions in order to engage in conversations about the matters at hand so as to obtain explanations for issues and elements as they happened. In so doing, I had the opportunity to “actively explore [the] stream of experiences and practices” of my informants as they moved through and interacted with “their physical and social environment [along] activities that existed before [I] entered the scene and will continue to exist after [I] depart,” which is what is most specific to shadowing according to Kussenbach (2003:

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colleagues, customers, or myself, from decorations, items, and spontaneous interpretations or potential interpretative paths to other observations, my notebooks quickly became filled with descriptions, which in turn were shaping the fieldwork. The field notes resulted in thick information (Geertz, 1973) regarding individuals’ practices and expressions, the environments and social relations in which they were observed, and the positions my informants held within the complex and interrelated processes of their workplaces (Quinlan, 2008: 1482). Once I had completed the ethnographic part of the fieldwork with a participant, I requested an interview. They lasted between fifteen minutes and three hours, and mainly focused on the observations made in the workplace.12 I asked interviewees one recurrent question: “What are you most preoccupied with at work, and how do you deal with this issue?” The idea was to see if, and how, individuals discursively framed everyday activities and situations of their work environment with the category nation. As for the other questions, I mostly asked my participants to comment further on some of the observations I had made, which, of course, I thought involved nationhood. After the interview, I would tell my participants more precisely about my research topic. I always added that if they did not want me to use the field notes I had made with their help I would discard them. All participants allowed me to keep the material, and none of them appeared aggravated after discovering the main interest of my research. Most of them actually said that they completely understood why I had wanted to conceal my work objectives. Some informants even confessed that they were relieved to learn about my real inquiry, because they had thought

463; 2012: 257). By inviting my participants to comment on what they were doing as they were conducting their activities, sharing their views on the matters at hand or other aspects of their lives, it was certainly engaging on their behalf, which is why I always made sure that such a commitment was understood before I followed them. 12 | With the first six participants, I experimented with different types of interview methods. Twice, I gathered two informants together. In the case of the two other participants, I asked them to have his and her life partner, respectively, take part in the interview. Following sociologist Michael Skey’s methods (2011) when working on everyday nationhood, the idea was to create a day-to-day conversation in which people talked about daily issues, whether these were personal topics such as work, aspirations, or vacations, or more public subjects such as politics and economics. By the help of these interviews, I wanted to understand how and for which topics individuals discursively frame ideas with the category nation in banal conversations. Each of these four interviews lasted for one to three hours. They were very successful, but because I had changed the scope of the ethnographic aspect of the fieldwork, limiting it to work environments, I also reviewed the interview strategy.

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

that my work was uninteresting up until that point—as I had previously only told them that I was working on everyday interactions in workplaces.13 While designing strategies and experimenting with methods to investigate nationhood through trial and error, I continued to review my field notes in order to sharpen my object of research and the main question of the inquiry, almost until the very end of the work. After all, the fieldwork of a sociologist advocating the use of qualitative methods is not meant to validate a pre-established problem or hypothesis; the fieldwork rather is the starting point of the problematization (Kaufmann, 1996: 20). After I had attempted a first interpretation14 of the early empirical material and noticed how the multiplicity of everyday life environments would be problematic, the scope of the fieldwork could quickly be readjusted to the workplace. Yet, at the time, I was still looking for another way to approach and organize the empirical material. Because I was conducting my fieldwork in two cities, I wanted to find a way to organize and interpret the field notes of Montreal and Brussels in parallel, in order to prevent having distinct chapters or sections of chapters focusing only on one city. I wanted to avoid a “groupism” analysis, and account for lived nationhood in a dynamic way without focusing on groups or historically grounded knowledge. Inspired by the histoire croisée approach that aims to investigate empirical cases “through one another, in terms of relationships, interactions and circulation” (Werner and Zimmermann, 2006: 38), I attempted to combine material from a Montreal-based work environment with another one from Brussels. When I started to assemble the empirical material, I began with my own experiences of meeting with a participant, a journalist in Brussels. Bearing in mind that “a central goal of phenomenological description is to destabilize those unexamined assumptions that organize our pre-reflective engagements with reality” (Desjarlais and Throop, 2011: 88), I reviewed my day, writing 13 | Some participants never even really asked about the objectives of my research. But others did try to learn more about my work, and were at times very insistent. In these cases, at first, I started talking about phenomenology, by telling them that I was interested in learning about the structures of their work tasks and interactions in their work environments. If they had more questions, or asked for examples, I would tell them that I was looking for practices or ways of doing things involving knowledge that they had forgotten learning in the first place. Only one participant continued to question me at this point. I then told him that I could not disclose the precise nature of my research until after the interview. He understood and continued to help me. 14 | I first focused on the mere relationship my participants had with nationhood without necessarily taking into account the context in which it appeared. While this first attempt at interpreting my material was in line with my research interests, I felt that it did not do justice to my observations.

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down, step by step, what I had observed, heard, and thought about some of the issues that were raised. Without taking anything for granted, I problematized things that most people would see but to which they would most likely not pay much attention. While writing, I reached a point where I had to account for a brainstorming session in which my informant, a journalist, and his colleagues were trying to figure out what news should feature in the television program later on that day. Various topics were brought to the table, which made me wonder, as I was listing the suggestions, what would have been brought to the table in Montreal on the set of a similar news program on the same day. Lingering on the matter, I remembered discussing with a teacher of French literature in Montreal how he decided what topics or authors would feature in his lessons on a particular day. While the teacher was of course not concerned with news, the decision process he was going through reminded me of the one I had observed in the brainstorming session at the television station in Brussels. I then decided to tell the story of the journalist and the teacher in parallel, for certain aspects of their work tasks were similar. Writing about different work environments, with different professions and objectives, I found myself constructing a first encounter between Brussels and Montreal by crossing material from both cities in which similar work-related activities appeared to intersect. At this point in the writing process of the encounter, I was still unsure about how the narrative would unravel, what it would actually account for, and how I would be able to use it as an “interpretative tool” for the field. But as I kept going metaphorically from Montreal to Brussels and vice versa, I realized that the story I was shaping was revolving around the accomplishment of a work task in which nationhood was at play. The encounter I was constructing between two work environments located in different cities had permitted work tasks to emerge in which national elements were involved. In aiming to understand how informants had been carrying out their tasks within the contexts and parameters of their respective work environments and particularly how nationhood was structuring the work tasks at hand, I was trying to break down the encounter into different components: the determinants of both work places, and the motives that underlay my informants’ actions with regard to the activities allowing them to accomplish the task in question. First, I asked myself: Which of my observations of the participants impacted the processes or the outcomes of the work tasks at hand and did not depend on my informants? This led me to take into account various elements of the workplace: the guidelines from the employer, the incursions of colleagues, the professional codes stemming from my participants’ jobs, the public policies from the regions or the states, or again the time frames in which the tasks needed to be accomplished. I wondered which of these work environment elements were relevant to the tasks under investigation and in which ways they were meaningful when my participants interacted with them while conduct-

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

ing the tasks at hand. Second, reconstructing individual actions—from what I had observed and heard from participants—while considering interactions with the above-mentioned elements, colleagues, or clients of the workplaces and the outcome or intended outcome of the tasks, I asked myself: How did my participants subjectively relate to nationhood while conducting a work task involving national elements? To answer this question, I reconstructed the motive underlying the actions leading my participants to accomplish their work tasks. At first, I was uncertain of the role such sociological encounters could play in the structure of the research. Yet, I tried to construct others. In reworking the descriptions of the fieldwork in line with the feuilleton approach, which consists of a story-driven writing style that remains grounded in empirical material (Dumont-Lagacé and Thériault, 2016; see also Thériault, 2017; Kracauer, 1998 [1930]), I accounted for these encounters through narratives which, in the end, became the heart of the research. I found myself constructing multiple encounters, which all consist of work tasks involving national elements that represent typical everyday cases of lived nationhood.

Main Research Question Drawing on Brubaker, and with the tools of a phenomenologically-based sociology and an interpretive sociology in mind, I elaborated in the introduction of this book a conceptual approach to investigate what I refer to as lived nationhood, or the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations. Aiming to understand how nationhood is experienced by individuals in Montreal and Brussels—the research problem of the book exposed in the Preface—I suggested taking interest in the constitutive sense of actions, but also objects within their contexts, which, through interpretation, will lead me to better identify different aspects of nationhood in day-to-day activities. In examining motives underlying social actions in which nationhood is involved, by reconstructing not only the action itself but also the outcome of the observed practices and expressions within their contexts, the investigation of lived nationhood, I argued, will allow me to unveil the ongoing construction of the idea of a world of nations and the implications of this idea on individual’s everyday experiences. Most importantly, it will help me shed light on the multiple ways in which nationhood is enacted by individuals in everyday life. In ignoring the manifold ways in which nationhood can be experienced or enacted, previous studies stemming from the field of the sociology of nationalism do not appear to consider the various dynamics through which nations are made on a daily basis. A sociology of lived nationhood will help me examine through the multiplicity of everyday nationhood phenomena how individuals are “doing nationhood” and “making nations” on a daily basis, i.e., how individuals enact the idea that they live in a world divided into nations, and thereby

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reproduce it as such. Besides, being personally and intellectually connected to Montreal and Brussels, it was both obvious and necessary for me to conduct such an investigation in these two cities—after all, it is because I have lived in both cities that I work on nationalism. While the implementation of the measures that constituted the social constellations of each city are of concern throughout the book, I am nonetheless mostly interested in understanding the relationship individuals have to nationhood in such bi-ethnonational milieus by exploring lived experiences. In identifying this relationship, I will be able to reveal the ways in which nationhood is enacted in the bi-ethnonational contexts of Montreal and Brussels, and the mechanisms through which nations are made. Therefore, the central question I want to explore in this book is: How can the relationship with nationhood be understood and characterized in the bi-ethnonational milieus of Montreal and Brussels?

Division of the Book The book is divided into two sections. In the first one, I will examine five work tasks—constructed through the sociological encounters—in which national elements play a key role. By unveiling the motives of individuals accomplishing these tasks, I will shed light on the relationships they have with nationhood in the work environments of Montreal and Brussels. In characterizing these relationships under three ways of enacting nationhood, I will also identify three work tasks dynamics and the ways in which they each operate with regard to nationhood. With the help of a typology, I will establish a nexus between a specific way of enacting nationhood while accomplishing a work task and the way this task operates with regard to nationhood. Each work task dynamic corresponds to a mode of operating nationhood: a theoretical construct applicable outside work-related activities that entails a unique way of enacting nationhood and legitimizing elements as national. The chapters of Section 2—Chapters 1, 2 and 3—are divided along these three work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood. The second section of the book will discuss the main results of the research. First, in Chapter 4, I will discuss the theoretical impact of my findings with respect to the field of the sociology of nationalism. I will reflect upon the investigation of lived nationhood in work environments, and return to the research design I constructed to carry out the empirical investigation. I will then concisely present the typology of the work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood as developed in Section 1. I will discuss how each mode represents a specific way of “doing nationhood” and “making nations.” Second, in Chapter 5, I will focus on the bi-ethnonational social constellations of Montreal and Brussels and discuss how my research furthers our understanding of nationhood in the sociopolitical contexts of both cities.

Introduction: A Sociology of Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

Besides leading me to understand and characterize how the idea of living in a world divided into nations is experienced through the accomplishment of work tasks, the encounters I construct in the following section of the book reveal in an original way singular phenomenal manifestations of the nation as they are lived in Montreal and Brussels. These manifestations are chosen on the basis of their “typicalness” with regard to lived nationhood; they necessarily are banal phenomena that most people—perhaps even more so people familiar with both cities—will recognize without, in all likelihood, ever having paid much attention to them.

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Section 1 Five Work Tasks and Three Modes of Operating Nationhood

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession: The Work Task Dynamic Operating upon Nationhood Having decided to investigate nationhood through the accomplishment of work tasks, I begin the empirical section of the book with perhaps the most obvious type of these: tasks that overtly aim to establish political communities. Such initiatives immediately bring to mind political nationalism and nationalist actions. These can take the form of narratives, figures, and symbols that are meant to be thought of as national, campaigns and events celebrating the nation, texts such as legislative charts defining the “essence” of the national community, or claims for the sovereignty of a region. Politicians’ activities often de facto intend to nationalize the traits of the political community of a state. Their legitimacy depends on such practices, as they are elected on the understanding that they will not only represent but also defend the nation. But to do so, the nation in question must be defined. Political figures need to make the nation explicit so as to make it intelligible. In so doing, politicians, as I understand it, operate upon nationhood. Political leaders continuously (re-)define the specific nation—and at times nations—they aim to represent: the intentions of the nation regarding multiple public policies and programs, the memories it wants to commemorate, or other nations it should befriend or not. Politicians in power govern until the people decide that there are others who can best define their aspirations—that is, in a democracy. This governing phenomenon echoing the so-called resolution of nations to self-determination (United Nations, 1960)—which is arguably more an ideal principal of the United Nations than an actual institutionalized right—is undoubtedly the most widely recognizable example of the activities operating upon nationhood. At the same time, it is easy to think of other professional groups, in addition to politicians, that could also at time operate upon nationhood, like artists, scholars, or journalists, especially columnists. The work tasks of such individuals, when engaging in national-related topics, aim to regenerate the national community or (re-)define the nation and its content by (re)building a national history, or reviving, maintaining, and creating national

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symbols (Hutchinson, 1987: 3-10). They typically engage in what is labelled as nation-building. In what follows, I focus on an individual from a particular group of nation-builder: the intellectual. The work of intellectuals in nationalist movements—and in nation-building in particular—is of central interest to research on nationalism. Intellectuals are best described as articulators of nations (Sunny and Kennedy, 1999), and may be divided into two groups: cultural entrepreneurs and political brokers—neither of which are exclusively made up of intellectuals. Cultural entrepreneurs— or the “keepers of traditions” in Anthony Smith’s terms (1991)— engage in cultural nationalism. By formulating or reformulating symbols, memories, or figures, they overtly aim to establish or reestablish the “cultural ideals” and the “solidarity resources” of a nation (Hutchinson, 1987: 3-34; Young, 1976: 45-46). “Political brokers,” on the other hand, engage in political nationalism to mobilize and reformulate such ethnonational resources and ideals “into concrete political, economic, and social programs” (Hutchinson, 1987: 34; see also Young, 1976: 46). These two types of groups, ideal as they may be in theory, may merge in an empirical sense, as Liz Stanley and Helen Dampier have shown in the nation-building case of South Africa during the beginning of the 20th century (2007: 519). The roles of intellectuals in national-related phenomena have been studied extensively. Most scholars have examined such practices with the help of discourse analysis methods or macrosociological approaches. Few studies have adopted an ethnographic perspective on the activities of intellectuals, despite the promise of the method to offer insight into the issue (Boyer and Lomnitz, 2005). According to anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Claudio Lomnitz, research “on intellectual practices and nationalism will clarify further the contribution of knowledge specialists to the production and reproduction of the communitarian horizons of the nation [by investigating] the social knowledge at play in nationalist discourse and the technical types of knowledge at work in state administration” (ibid.: 106-107). In what follows, I take up Boyer and Lomnitz’s stance on the examination of intellectual activities and nationalism and focus on an individual case in Montreal with the conceptual approach I have elaborated to investigate lived nationhood. In this first empirical chapter of the book, I recount my work with Philip, a Montreal-based writer and publisher in his sixties. Philip’s work specializes in producing Québécois literature and disseminating knowledge about Quebec— or, in Boyer and Lomnitz’s terms, on producing and reproducing the communitarian horizons of a nation. I refer to his work task as cultivating nationhood. Investigating Philip’s professional activities leads me to construct the work task dynamic operating upon nationhood, the first type of dynamic of the typology I elaborate in this book as to help me characterize the different relationships individuals have with nationhood. First, I examine our encounters in order to

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

shed light on Philip’s activities and position in the political spectrum of Quebec. Secondly, I describe Philip’s life story in his own words in order to gain a sense of how and what he frames as the most significant elements in his work. This leads me to focus on what I understand to be his work environment: the field of cultural production in Quebec and Canada. Thirdly, I delineate the motives underlying Philip’s professional activities. Drawing on Philip’s case, I focus in the conclusion on the central work task dynamic at play throughout the chapter and define how it operates upon nationhood. In an epilogue, I explain the semi-absence of Brussels in this chapter. This allows me, at the same time, to shed more light on the way I interpret my material.

1.1 C ultivating N ationhood : W riting and P ublishing for the N ation “The widespread use of books from abroad has implications for local publishing industries, for the growth of authorship, and for the basic intellectual life of a nation as well. Without an indigenous publishing enterprise, a nation is doomed to a provincial status and will continue to be dependent on outside elements for its intellectual sustenance.” (A ltbach, 1975: 7)

In Montreal, on a Monday evening of December 2013, I am invited by a friend and colleague to attend the meeting of a political organization promoting the independence of Quebec. The association describes itself as a network of citizens exercising political vigilance. It aims to create a movement that will reestablish the idea of the independence of the province as a topic of importance in the political discourse of Quebec. Even though the organization is not affiliated with any specific political parties, it often invites current or former members of sovereignist parties such as the Parti québécois, Québec solidaire, Option nationale, or the Bloc québécois to speak at its meetings. The gathering I attend takes place in the private event room of a lounge bar. The drink menu mainly consists of products from Unibroue, a Quebec-based microbrewery, first bought in 2004—perhaps ironically given the circumstances of our meeting—by Ontarian investors, and then again in 2006 by Japanese investors. My friend and I are among the first to arrive, but the room rapidly fills up. In the group of approximately thirty people, I recognize a few public figures of the Quebec sovereignist movement. One of them catches my attention; I recall interviewing him for a college project in 2005 when making a documentary film on the 1995 Quebec referendum. At that time he had just launched a book on the subject. As an Ontarian-born

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English speaker, he had made an impression on me. My colleagues and I deemed it unusual yet very convincing for our topic to have someone with a thick English accent pleading for the independence of Quebec in French. But before I have the chance to talk to him, the friend I came with introduces me to another group of people. One of the individuals in the group, an American-born man working at a university library in town, tells me that he attends the organizations’ meetings out of curiosity. In flawless French, he says that he is mostly interested in understanding the incentives people have for wanting Quebec to be independent. We are apparently both there for similar reasons; we are not interested in participating in the nationalist movement, but rather in understanding the individuals who do have a vested interest in the movement. While conversing with other participants at the event, the American asks about the reasons underlying their activism. The answers he receives reflect the official objectives of the organization as advertised on their website: the promotion of ideas on sovereignty in order “to make it happen.” Someone elaborates on this comment by adding that he advocates the creation of a Québécois currency. He says that he has been working on this idea for years, and that he comes to such gatherings in order to promote his idea and gain support among sovereignist circles. After inquiring into some of these individuals’ main occupations, I realize that their professional activities are not geared towards political activities. Besides the librarian, there is—to name just a few—a musician who mainly works in construction, an economist, a college teacher, and several students. Except for a handful of politicians and former politicians, the majority of people attending the event do not seem to hold positions—or at least full-time work positions—that allow them to work directly for the independence of Quebec. There is perhaps one exception: Philip. Following the conversations with my friend’s acquaintances, I make my way to the writer, Philip, who I interviewed some ten years before. When I bring up my old college project as a conversation starter, he admits that he is not sure that he remembers our meeting, though he recalls having given a certain number of interviews to students in those years. He rapidly discards the topic in favor of my current endeavors. I speak briefly of my interest in everyday life in Montreal and Brussels, without evoking the particular focus on everyday nationhood.1 His first reaction is to ask me, in Dutch, if I speak Dutch. Quite enthusiastic and yet somehow surprised, I promptly respond, also in Dutch, that I do speak it and ask him when and where he learned the language. He admits that spreekt u nederlands is probably the only phrase he remembers. I rephrase my question in French. He replies that he picked up a bit of Dutch while spending three months near Rotterdam as a welder at 1 | When conducting this part of the fieldwork, I had not yet decided that my investigation would focus solely on workplaces in Montreal and Brussels.

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

the age of twenty. He adds that his father was stationed there during World War II, and that his family had kept in touch with the people who had hosted him ever since. Language issues now dealt with—or perhaps not quite—he quickly focuses on my project again. His interests in national movements has not faded since our first meeting and he asks me about Leuven. I immediately assume that he is thinking about the 1968 split of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) between its Flemish-speaking section and its French-speaking section. I am not mistaken. He then immediately alludes to the McGill français movement of the 1960s, which aimed at a Francization of McGill University.2 He says that he finds this case very similar to what he has heard about the one in Leuven in Belgium. Not only did these two events take place at the same time, they are, as Philip points out, analogous in several aspects.

Vignette 1: The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Split The impasse the bilingual Katholieke Universiteit Leuven went through during the late 1960s was the first major sociopolitical crisis Belgium faced after definitively fixing its language border in 1962. Up to this day, the event represents a climax in Belgian communitarian issues (Destexhe, 2008; De Wever, 2012). Although noteworthy for its numerous demonstrations and striking slogans, the “Leuven affair” was only one of many episodes that contributed to challenging and defining the linguistic borders in Belgium. The borders in question aimed to make territories congruent with languages. This territoriality principle with regard to linguistic rights was widely disputed for the first time when Flamingants3 of student movements claimed that a bilingual university could no longer exist on unilingual Flemish territory. In 1962, the settlement of the language border established that the provinces north of the border were officially Dutch-speaking, while the ones on the south were officially French-speaking. Brabant, the province in which the municipalities of Brussels and Leuven were located before Brussels became a separate region, was the only province of the country divided by the border. Only a minority of municipalities, such as Brussels and its surroundings until it became a region, continued to define both French and Dutch as official languages. The bilingual KU Leuven, then located in the newly unilingual Dutch municipality of Leuven, rapidly came to be seen as 2 | McGill University (located in Montreal) is the oldest post-secondary institution in Canada. 3 | “Flamingant” is a term that refers to an activist of the Flemish movement, which consists of political parties, non-governmental organizations such as student movements and lobbying groups, and civil demonstrations.

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problematic. Because the linguistic border clearly binds languages to territories, it encouraged, as federal Belgian senator Alain Destexhe notes, “Dutch speakers to refuse the presence of French speakers and that of the Université catholique de Louvain on a land that they from now on considered to be fully theirs” (2008: 101, my translation).4 As reported by historian Bruno De Wever (2012), many Flemings also feared that the bilingual status of the university might eventually serve as a pretext to encroach Brussels and its bilingualism upon Flemish territories. According to Destexhe (2008: 101), a project to expand the francophone section of the university also provoked indignation among Flemings. In 1968, after years of heated political debates and intense demonstrations with slogans such as Walen Buiten5 and Leuven Vlaams,6 the French-speaking section of the university was moved to a new location: Louvain-la-Neuve. Despite the mechanisms aiming to balance power at the federal level between the two linguistic communities, maintaining the initial bilingualism of the university as desired by the francophones has proven impossible. In this sense, Destexhe notes that the Leuven affair instigated “awareness for the first time among French speakers about their minority status within the Belgian state,” which led all of the federalist parties to agree on the decentralization of the state (ibid.: 102, my translation).7 From the Flemings’ perspective, the split represents the recognition of a unilingual Flemish territory and a first step towards greater political autonomy. With the first federalization of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1970, political autonomy on specific issues such as culture and education was granted to the Flemings on a defined territory, with political institutions of their own. Today, the KU Leuven can be envisaged as a lieu de mémoire 8 incarnating the integrity of the linguistic rights of Flemings (Poitras, 2013: 132).

4 | “[…] la nouvelle legislation qui fixe la frontière linguistique lie clairement la langue au territoire. Elle incite donc les néerlandophones à refuser la présence des francophones et de l’UCL sur une terre qu’ils considèrent désormais pleinement leur” (Destexhe, 2008: 101). 5 | Walloons out. 6 | Leuven Flemish. 7 | “Après la crise de Louvain, qui suscite une prise de conscience parmi les francophones de leur minorité au sein de l’État belge, les partis fédéralistes progressent et la decentralization de l’État est acceptée par tous” (Destexhe, 2008: 102) 8 | Lieu de mémoire is a concept developped by French historian Pierre Nora (1984). They are lieux (not necessarily physical) that are “rescapés d’une mémoire que nous n’habitons plus, mi-officiels et institutionnels, mi-affectifs et sentimentaux […] qui n’expriment plus ni conviction militante ni participation passionnée, mais où palpite

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

Philip and I undoubtedly have similar interests with regard to nationalism issues. While he may have learned more about the case of Leuven from me, I also learn several things from him as our conversation continues. After telling Philip the story of the KU Leuven split—as reported in Vignette 1—he promptly engages in a counterfactual exercise by invoking a segment of Quebec’s history I am unfamiliar with. As a response to my account, he suggests that it would also have been possible for the movement McGill français to use the territoriality principle with regard to languages in order to change the linguistic regime of the university, making it a unilingual French-speaking establishment. While we are talking about the actual situation of McGill University today, I notice that Philip is disappointed about the way things have turned out. Hearing what he sees as the KU Leuven “success story,” Philip revisits what he sees as the “unsuccessful” McGill français movement.

Vignette 2: Philip’s Counterfactual E xercise While the KU Leuven became a unilingual Flemish-language establishment, as wished by the advocates of the Leuven Vlaams slogan, the supporters of McGill français did not enjoy similar success at the end of the 1960s. At the time, there were three English-speaking institutions of higher education in Montreal: McGill University, Loyola College, and Sir George Williams University. There was only one university giving classes in French: the Université de Montréal. For years, there were ongoing discussions about creating a second francophone establishment of higher education, but the public was becoming more and more uncertain about the realisation of such an idea and its supporters were losing hope (Warren, 2008). In the meantime, the province of Quebec was going through what is referred to today as its Révolution tranquille (Quiet Revolution). The Québécois state was adopting welfare state principles and creating a reliable separation between church and state, while a Québécois national identity distinct from that of French Canadians was emerging and coming into its own (Bouchard, 2000: 326). Nationalist Québécois initiatives and movements rose. Among them was the Opération McGill français. As Philip rightfully suggests, the Opération McGill français employed arguments similar to the ones used by the Flemish movement when it was advocating for the split of the KU Leuven. The members of the Montreal movement also intended to apply the principle of territoriality with regard to linguistic rights in order to achieve their political ends: the Francization of McGill University. This episode, however, took place almost a decade before the 1977 Charte de la langue française (Charter of the French language, or Bill encore quelque chose d’une vie symbolique” (1984: xxv; see also 1989; and Thériault, 2006: 170).

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101). The government of Quebec was not yet privileging a unilingual French status for the province. Nevertheless, campaigners of the movement, as reported by the sociologist Jean-Philippe Warren, argued that “only 7% of students enrolled at McGill spoke French as their native language, a figure that included Belgian and French students, while the French-speaking population of Quebec was as high as 82%” (2008, my translation).9 Consequently, they demanded that “classes be only taught in French at McGill, and for the university to be the object of progressive Francization (50% in 1969-1970, 75 % in 1970-1971, and 100 % in 1971-1972” (ibid.).10 Academic authorities “attempted to soothe the situation by promising reforms that would grant more space to French within research, administration, and classes” (ibid.).11 More than forty years later, another francophone University has opened its doors, the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM); whilst McGill University still offers the great majority of its classes in English, while widely accepting papers and theses written in French. Fearing that bilingual Brussels would eventually be further extended into unilingual Flemish territories through a bilingual university in Leuven, the Flamingants of student movements and other groups exhorted authorities to “Flemishify” the establishment. An informant of my 2013 research, a student of KU Leuven in 1969, recalled that the dominating mindset of the time was that Flanders was Flemish-speaking, that the principal of linguistic territoriality needed to be respected and that a bilingual university in Leuven should not be possible (Poitras, 2013: 103). Although a similar principle also acquired legal status in Quebec through the 101 Bill, which stipulated that the province be unilingual French, McGill University mainly remains an English-speaking establishment. Concordia University, a second major English-speaking university in Montreal, was created following the merging of two smaller institutions, Loyola College and Sir George Williams University. In Montreal, bilingual establishments of higher education have thus proven to be unsuccessful. This is also true for Brussels, in spite of its bilingual status. The Dutch-speaking contingent of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) quietly—in comparison with the KU Leuven affair—left the institution in 1969 to form its Flemish counterpart: the Vrije Universiteit 9 | “Seulement 7 % des étudiants inscrits à McGill avaient le français comme langue maternelle, en incluant dans ce chiffre les étudiants belges et français, alors que la population de langue française du Québec s’élevait à 82 %” (Warren, 2008). 10 | “L’enseignement soit donné en français à McGill, [et] une francisation progressive de l’université (50 % en 1969-1970, 75 % en 1970-1971 et 100 % en 1971-1972” (Warren, 2008). 11 | “Tentèrent de calmer le jeu en promettant des réformes afin de faire une plus grande place au français dans la recherché, l’administration, les cours” (Warren, 2008)

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

Brussels. While the KU Leuven is not located in Brussels, the Flemish movement nevertheless considered the city of Leuven to be located too close to the Belgian capital for one of its universities to remain bilingual. Leuven Vlaams and McGill français may be similar slogans, but their outcomes were different. Playing along with Philip’s counterfactual exercise, I ask myself: could it have been otherwise if the KU Leuven was situated further from the bilingual region of Belgium? Or are more factors at work here than those of simple location issues? And what would it have taken for McGill university to become a French-speaking institution? While such hypothetical questions may be intriguing or even thought-provoking, they are most likely unanswerable. Philip’s disappointment in the outcome of the McGill français movement, which became apparent in conjunction with my account of the KU Leuven story, gives a hint of his political preferences and orientation. The thesis he defends in his previous book and his mere presence at the meeting of a political organization promoting the independence of Quebec, of course, most likely already places him on the sovereignist side of the political spectrum—the other side being the federalist one. Philip’s concern regarding the linguistic situation of Quebec and the potential solutions to resolve this issue nevertheless become clearer. This is also when our conversation turns towards his current professional activities. Throughout the evening, Philip reveals many clear opinions on various political topics; yet, his opinion on linguistic issues stands out. Later during the evening, the American librarian mentioned above joins our conversation. Our discussion remains grounded in the academic world, but moves on from the KU Leuven and McGill stories to scientific publications. Philip voices his regret about the paucity of scientific publications in French. The librarian agrees, and mentions that the issue has become very problematic at the library he works at. He says that his employer always asks for recent articles and books in French, that they have a budget solely dedicated to such publications and a desired quota of material in French. He explains, however, that it is an impossible goal to fulfill, because there is simply no one publishing in French in the specific academic field in which his library specializes. He mentions that in the past few years Brazilians have begun publishing a lot of scientific articles in Portuguese in the field, but that Francophones from Quebec or France mainly write their papers in English. While nodding in agreement, Philip adds that French speakers have switched too quickly to English compared to German speakers, for example. He adds that he has only recently realized this when working on the publication of a book about the writings of a German anthropologist. In addition to learning that he has a publishing business, I am curious to learn more about his stance on scientific publications and languages. In the inter-

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view, when I ask him to develop his thoughts on the reasons why he thinks there is “little vitality in the francophone scientific world,”12 he answers that I think I said that because I was publishing a book on [a German anthropologist], and then, it was a retired professor of [a university], who is German, of German origin, we had finalized a book on the writings of [this anthropologist] in German, because the Anglo-Saxon world, as we say the Anglo-Saxon world does not read other languages than English. It’s a small book in English that explains, we say that he is the founding father of modern anthropology, and sometimes people do not understand, because they have not read what he has published, because he has been very prolific in German. He [the university professor] is the one who made me understand that there is a whole scientific world in German, that remains in German, and that people do not necessarily feel the need to put everything in English, and I think I meant that in French, we are very quick to abandon French. That’s a perception, because I’m not, you know, there’s the ACFAS [the French Canadian Associations for the Advancement of Sciences], I see that, there’s an effort, but do people consider that it [a text] exists if it’s not written in English in the scientific world? (Interview, 06/28/2014)13

Philip seems to be pleasantly surprised at the existence of a non-translated German scientific world. Considering the reasons he had for founding his publishing business, however, he would certainly answer his own question by saying that in fact people do not consider an article or a book to exist if it is not published in English. Indeed, in the interview, when I inquire into his motivations for founding his publishing business, he replies that

12  |  “Peu de vitalité dans le monde scientifique francophone” (Interview, 06/28/2014). 13 | “Je pense que [je disais ça] parce que j’avais publié un livre sur [l’anthropologue allemand], et puis là, c’est un professeur retraité [d’une université], qui est Allemand, d’origine allemande, on avait fini un livre sur les écrits de [cet anthropologue] en allemand, parce que le monde anglo-saxon, comme on dit : ‘le monde anglo-saxon lit pas d’autre langue [que l’anglais].’ C’est un petit livre en anglais qui explique [cet anthropologue], on dit que c’est le père fondateur de l’anthropologie moderne, et des fois les gens comprennent pas, parce qu’ils n’ont pas lu ce qu’il avait écrit, parce qu’il avait été très prolifique en allemand. C’est lui qui m’a fait comprendre qu’il y a tout un monde scientifique en allemand, qui continue à se faire en allemand et les gens ne voient pas nécessairement une obligation de tout mettre en anglais, et je pense que j’ai avancé [qu’] en français on est très vite a abandonné le français […] C’est une impression, parce que je suis pas, tsé, y’a l’ACFAS [l’association canadienne française pour l’avancement des sciences], je vois ça, y’a un effort, mais est-ce que les gens considèrent que ça existe si c’est pas en anglais dans le monde scientifique?” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession The objective when we founded [Rupture],14 maybe I told you, I had experience with writing books in French, many books. And even in press conferences, representatives of the English-speaking medias said: “When will there, will there be an English adaptation.” And I remember, I told them almost as a joke: “Well find me an editor and you’ll have the book in two months,” because there were no interested editors. Often when the editor, most of all in political questions, but in general, they were not very interested by, English Canada was not interested in what came out of Quebec, [regarding] politics mostly, but even with regard to literature, they are not interested. There’s an article in the New Yorker today, this week, that talks about this solitude, even in Le Devoir this morning, there was an article about that. Whereas there’s a guy that says that people talk more; I am not convinced. So we, I observed that, and [a friend], maybe you know him, the historian, he’s an editor, and he’s been a minister in [a government of the Parti québécois], he had also made this observation: sometimes he had manuscripts on subjects that he thought were very good, as they themselves published in French, there were no markets for those manuscripts, he’s the one who told me: “Philip, you have to set up an English publishing company,” because you know, I knew a bit of the publishing world, it’s kind of him that pushed me in this direction. I already had the idea at one point, but if I had started right then, I would have started a French language publishing house. But then from this observation, this difficulty, he speaks of two solitudes,15 I think that this is still very true, there are two worlds. And so, this is how we started the company, we have euh, so half of the books we publish are translations, about half, often history books and others, about Quebec. (Interview, 06/28/2014).16 14 | Fictive name. 15 | The term the two solitudes comes form Hugh MacLennan’s novel of the same name (1945). The story set during WWI and WWII revolves around a man struggling to reconcile his French and English Canadian identities. A critic says: “Under this romantic but not inaccurate title, Mr. Hugh MacLennan has attempted to describe, rather than to analyze, the relations which exist between the two leading races of Canada: the French and the English” (Leland, 1945: 424). By extrapolating his protagonist’s personal experiences, MacLennan describes the unwillingness of French Canadians and English Canadians to talk to each other. 16 | “L’objectif quand on a fondé [la maison d’édition] Rupture, peut-être que je te l’avais dit, moi j’avais l’expérience d’avoir écrit des livres en français, plusieurs là. Et même en conférence de presse les médias anglais disaient: ‘quand est-ce que, est-ce qu’il va avoir une adaptation en anglais.’ Et moi je me rappelle je leur avais dit quasiment en boutade: ‘ben trouvez moi un éditeur et vous aurez le livre dans deux mois,’ parce qu’il y avait aucun éditeur intéressé. Souvent quand l’éditeur, surtout sur les questions politiques, mais en général, ils n’étaient pas très intéressés par, le Canada anglais était pas très intéressé par ce qui sortait du Québec, [en ce qui concerne la] politique surtout, mais même côté littérature, ils sont pas intéressés. Y’a un article dans le New Yorker aujourd’hui, cette semaine, qui parle de cette solitude, même dans

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Philip clearly opposes the idea of researchers whose first language is not English publishing first in English rather than in their own language. That the ideas, stories, knowledge, and cultural products of francophone authors only remain accessible to francophone readers, however, seems to him equally inadmissible. Half of the materials Rupture publishes—as I can confirm by looking at their website—are translations from French into English. While I am reflecting on this observation, a segment of our conversation at the meeting of the political organization promoting the independence of Quebec comes to mind. At the time, when discussing publications in the academic world with the American librarian, Philip shared his aversions towards a unilingual English-speaking professor—although he admitted admiring the work of the scholar in question. From this discussion, I remember Philip mentioning that the latter had mediocre academic practices: he conducted research on Montreal that could only be properly carried by someone who understood French, while he himself was a unilingual English speaker. Philip added that not learning French in Canada had over the years become a state of mind. At this point, I think it is fair to ask: Why would Philip—an individual aversive towards English Canadians who do not learn French and uncomfortable with the idea of researchers who speak English as a second language not publishing in their own languages—want to create an English language publishing house that specializes in Québécois topics in Montreal? While knowledge about and cultural products from Quebec may be cultivated through many francophone publishers in the province, Philip seems to think that it needs to be expanded beyond Quebec and the French-speaking world overall. This, according to him, was until recently not possible with the market and publishers that were in place: “English Canada was not interested Le Devoir ce matin il y avait un article là-dessus. Alors qu’il y a un gars qui dit que le monde se parle plus; moi je suis pas convaincue. Alors nous, moi j’avais fait ce constat, et [un ami], peut-être vous le connaissez, l’historien, il est éditeur, pi y’a été ministre dans [un gouvernement du Parti québécois], lui avait eu ce constat aussi: parfois y’avait des manuscrits sur des sujets qu’il trouvait très bien, comme eux il publiait en français, y’avait pas de débouché pour ces manuscrits, c’est lui qui m’a dit: ‘Philip, il faut que tu partes une maison d’édition en anglais,’ parce que tsé, je connaissais un peu le monde de l’édition, c’est un peu eux qui m’ont poussé dans cette voie-là. J’avais déjà eu l’idée à un moment donné, mais si j’avais commencé tout suite, j’[aurais] commencé une maison d’édition en français. Mais là avec ce constat, cette difficulté, il parle de deux solitudes, je je, je pense que c’est encore très juste là, on, y’a deux mondes. Et donc c’est comme ça qu’on a parti la maison, on a euh, donc la moitié des livres qu’ont publient sont des traductions, à peu près la moitié, souvent des livres d’histoires et d’autres, sur le Québec” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

in what came out of Quebec, [regarding] politics mostly, but even with regard to literature, they are not interested.” In the interview, Philip asserts that he was unsuccessful in finding a publishing company to print and distribute a translated version of his first book. He also mentions having translated from French to English one-third of a friend’s book, the work of a professor, hoping it would be easier for a publisher to accept the manuscript. After sending the translated text to a dozen houses, the project met the same fate as his book. It remained un-translated, unpublished in English, inaccessible to anyone unable to read French. He tried to do the same with his books touching upon “huge cases, [but] no one wanted to put their hands on such things.”17 When further inquiring into the reasons why he was unable to publish his books in English, he explains that It was political motives. We can say that the world of editing in Canada, including in Quebec, it’s a bit of a conservative world, the reason being, they [the publishers] are so subservient—subservient, maybe it’s a bit exaggerated to put it that way—but controlled by the Canada Council for the Arts, and so they are, they receive support, often essential, but it has a dissuasive effect on editors to take up somewhat controversial questions, controversial topics, because they’ll see their grants drop, or cut down. It’s never direct, but they have this experience. That makes that world of editing, as I say, sort of conservative. I think that it explains a bit, I mean, it’s not an audacious world. In Quebec, there used to be some, but, there is one, but generally, when they know that an important part of the funds comes from the federal government, it influences their editorial choices […] They (Councils for the Arts of Canada) have an evaluation system of books made, they call that, the peers committee, editors, authors, but often they don’t positively see things going against the main current flow. That’s why we created the company Rupture. Well you know things are going pretty well. One way to work is, as the Canadian market is crumbling—that’s another story, I won’t get into that—our strategy was also to sell in the United States a lot. So we sort of have created a profile in the United States, also, because the market, even though the book market suffers a lot in the United States (inaudible), they aim at the mass, greatly, so you can still compensate for a Canadian market that is absolutely not interesting. It’s not interesting, because there are no booksellers, there are no more bookstores in Canada. There’s only Chapters, Indigo, one company. Dave: Ok, so in the end your books sell more in the United States?

17 | “Des grosses affaires, [mais] personne ne voulait toucher à ça” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

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Nationhood at Work Philip: Yes, but maybe, we put almost, half of our books are in the United States, it allows us to survive. Dave: And not Europe? Isn’t that a market or… Philip: Yes yes, but that’s more complicated because of distribution, it would need an agreement, our distributor can sell in Europe, I would need to, we would need to create, to establish an agreement with a publisher in the United Kingdom, and then we publish in parallel. We won’t print [the books] here and then send them over there, that’s too expensive (Interview, 06/28/2014).18

18 | “C’était des motifs politiques. On peut dire que le monde de l’édition au Canada, et y compris au Québec, c’est un monde un peu convenu, la raison étant que, ils [les propriétaires des maisons d’édition] sont tellement inféodés—inféodés, c’est peut-être une façon exagérée un peu de le dire—mais contrôlés par le Conseil des arts du Canada, et donc ils sont, ils reçoivent un soutien, souvent indispensable, mais ça a un effet de dissuader des éditeurs de prendre des questions un peu controversées, des sujets controversés, parce qu’ils vont voir baisser leurs subventions, ou couper. C’est jamais direct, mais ils ont cette expérience-là. Ça fait que le monde de l’édition, comme je dis, est assez convenu. Je pense que ça explique un peu que, je veux dire, c’est pas un monde audacieux. Au Québec il y en a eu, mais, y’en a un, mais en général, quand ils savent que une partie importante du financement vient du gouvernement fédéral, ça influence leurs choix éditorial [sic] […] Ils [les comités au Conseil des arts du Canada] ont un système d’évaluation du livre qui est fait, qui appelle ça, le comité des pères, des éditeurs, des auteurs, mais souvent ils voient pas d’un bon œil des choses qui vont à contre poids [sic]. C’est pour ça qu’on a créé la maison Rupture. Bon ben ça roule. Une des façons de fonctionner, c’est, comme le marché canadien s’effondre—ça c’est une autre histoire, j’embarquerai pas là-dedans—, notre stratégie a été de vendre aussi aux États-Unis pas mal. Alors nous on a créé une sorte de profil aux États-Unis, aussi, parce que le marché, même si le marché du livre souffre énormément aux États-Unis [inaudible] ils visent la masse, énorme, donc tu peux quand même compenser pour un marché canadien qui n’est pas intéressant du tout. Ce n’est pas très intéressant, parce qu’il n’y a plus de libraires, il n’y a plus de librairies au Canada. Il y a juste Chapters, Indigo, une entreprise. Dave: OK, donc finalement vos livres sont plutôt vendus aux États-Unis? Philip: oui, mais peut-être, on met, presque la moitié de nos ventes sont aux États-Unis, ça nous permet de survivre Dave: Pis pas en Europe ? C’est pas un marché, ou… Philip: Oui oui, mais ça c’est plus compliqué parce que la distribution, faudrait une entente, notre distributeur peut vendre en Europe, faudrait que je, qu’on crée, qu’on établisse une entente avec une maison d’édition au Royaume-Uni, pis on publie paral-

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

For Philip, knowledge about and cultural products from Quebec need to be cultivated through publications. According to him, this cultivation should also take place in English for a diffusion in the anglophone world, something that was for various political reasons hardly feasible before the advent of Rupture. Through Rupture, in the words of my informant, Philip may publish, in English, “books, on a political level that have a progressive point of view, but with an emphasis on Quebec.”19 In the interview, he gave me an example of a book translated from French into English they would soon distribute. It concerns, Philip tells me, A Québécois priest who wrote, published a book last year. I saw the reviews, I bought the book. I said: “This is a story that needs to be told.” So it’s, it’s a fragment of Quebec history that is not very well known in Quebec. For some generations yes, maybe a bit more, mostly my generation, but zero, but zero abroad. So him, he’s a committed guy. I would have liked to know him before, he’s 75 years old. So we’re having a lunch at the Notre-Dame congregation, at the corner of Atwater and Sherbrooke, so we try to invite the whole of the socially committed church. Dave: How do you approach such people? Philip: Well, I read the book, what you do is, I know the editors, they’re called [XYZ], 20 I told them: “I like this book, I would like to publish it in English.” They’ve put me in contact with the author. The author was delighted at the idea. We got a grant from the Council for the Arts for the translation, that was almost automatic, we found a translator, a year from now it’ll be out. The book was well received here in Quebec. Well, it got nice reviews. The company [XYZ], I think they did not do a great job with promotion, but in France it was well received. So he wished that it also be published in Spanish, that’s where he spent much of his life […] his story is absolutely fascinating, especially here we saw a debate on the Charter where people rejected religion. Well me, I am not religious for a dime, but there are people in religion who did great things, and that’s so much a part of Quebec history, it’s it’s. Him, now I have convinced him to maybe write a book with stories from committed priests, Quebec priests from around the world. When I lived in Africa, everywhere I went I would come across Québécois, socially committed priests, politically. That’s it, people don’t know about such stories (Interview, 06/28/2014). 21 lèlement. On va pas imprimer ici puis expédier là-bas, ça coûte trop cher” (Interview, 06/28/2014). 19 | “Des livres sur le plan politique qui ont une vision progressiste, mais avec un accent sur le Québec” (Interview, 06/28/2014). 20 | Fictive name. 21 | “Un prêtre québécois qui a écrit, publié un livre l’an dernier. Moi j’ai vu la critique, j’ai acheté le livre. J’ai dit: ‘ça c’est une histoire qui doit être rapportée.’ Alors c’est,

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Through Philip’s publishing business, literature, knowledge, and essays from authors he sees as advocating progressive political points of view with an emphasis on Quebec, such as the priest, become accessible to English readers. My encounter with Philip in Montreal reflects a narrative in which nationalist issues are central to the life of an individual, a narrative in which nationhood and national elements are overtly and knowingly cultivated. Not only did his interests and knowledge of nationalist episodes outside Quebec lead to a counterfactual exercise, they also appear to be the premises that led him to write books and found the publishing company Rupture. To examine further the cultivating phenomenon in which Philip is involved, I will focus on his biographical elements and what I understand to be his work environment: the publishing world of Quebec and Canada. In so doing, I explore how his activities are those of an “articulator of nations” or of a cultural entrepreneur and how they contribute to the “production and reproduction of the communitarian horizons of the nation” (Boyer and Lomnitz, 2005: 106-107).

c’est un pan de l’histoire québécois[e] qui n’est pas trop connue au Québec. Certaines générations oui, peut être un peu plus, surtout ma génération, mais zéro, mais zéro à l’extérieur. Alors lui, c’est un gars engagé. Moi j’aurais aimé le connaître avant, y’a 75 ans. Alors on fait le lancement à la congrégation Notre-Dame, au coin d’Atwater et Sherbrooke, alors on essaie d’inviter toute l’église engagée socialement. Dave : Comment vous approchez ces personnes-là? Philip: Ben moi j’ai lu le livre, ce que tu fais c’est que, moi je connais les éditeurs, ils s’appellent [XYZ], je leur ai dit: ‘j’aime ce livre-là, j’aimerais le faire en anglais.’ Ils m’ont mis en contact avec l’auteur. L’auteur était ravi de cette idée. On a eu une subvention du conseil des arts pour la traduction, ça a été quasiment automatique, on a trouvé une traducteuse [sic], d’ici un an on va le sortir. Le livre a été bien reçu ici au Québec. Bon y’a eu des belles critiques. La maison [XYZ], je pense qu’ils n’ont pas fait un gros travail de promotion, mais en France ça a été bien reçu aussi. Alors lui il souhaiterait que ça paraisse aussi en espagnol, c’est là qu’il a passé une partie importante de sa vie […] son histoire est absolument fascinante, surtout ici on a assisté à un débat sur la charte [des valeurs québécoises en 2013-2014] où le monde rejette la religion. Bon moi je suis pas religieux pour deux cens, mais il y a des gens en religion qui ont faites des grandes choses, pis ça fait tellement parti de l’histoire québécoise là, c’est c’est. Lui, là j’ai convaincu lui [sic] de peut-être faire un livre avec des histoires de prêtres engagés, des prêtres québécois un peu dans le monde. Moi quand j’ai habité en Afrique, partout où j’allais je croisais des Québécois, des prêtres engagés socialement, politique. C’est tout, le monde connait pas ça ces histoires-là” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

1.1.1 On the Making of Knowledge and Cultural Productions Philip’s story discloses the narrative and practices of an individual whose professional activities center on knowledge about and cultural production in Quebec through writing and publishing activities. This knowledge and cultural production, however, is linked to particular aspects of production and diffusion. Books, as Philip himself concedes—albeit using different terms—are not “published in a vacuum;” they are “affected directly by many social, economic and political elements, and by both national and international conditions and trends” (Altbach, 1975: 3). To better grasp the impact of such elements on Philip’s work, I explore in what follows the position held by Philip and Rupture in the publishing field. But before doing so, I present Philip’s life story from his own perspective. I concentrate on how he connects his writing and publishing activities to his biography. My aim, for now, is not so much to discern the motives underlying his current professional praxis as to highlight what he frames as the most significant elements in his work and how he makes sense them.

1.1.1.1 Philip’s Life Stor y In our encounters, Philip demonstrated an unmistakable interest in politics and nationalist issues. Our topics of conversation at the gathering revealed his knowledge of political matters and nationalist issues. The KU Leuven discussion opened the door to other nationalist-related topics: language use in the academic world with regard to publications. Our conversation on such subject matters not only permitted me to learn more about Philip’s political positioning on diverse topics, it also introduced me to his current professional activities. I already knew about some of his writings, which adopt the form of essays sustained by in-depth investigations. The fact that he was the founder of a publishing company was, however, new to me. When interviewing him, both of his present-day professional activities interested me—in any case, his work as a writer and publisher intertwine at times when, for example, he publishes his book or translations from French into English of his own books with his publishing house. During the interview, when asking Philip about what led him to undertake his writing projects, he felt the need to tell me “a couple of things about [himself] (Interview, 06/28/2014):22 I am from the north of Ontario. I studied in Toronto. I learned French at the age of twenty, probably. So, when I worked in the forest [industry] as a student in the north of Ontario, that’s where I started learning French because all the lumberjacks were Québécois or 22 | “Deux trois choses sur moi” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

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Nationhood at Work French Canadians. So I started learning French there. And I would say that in hindsight my political involvement started there, because French Canadians were treated as second zone citizens [but] the event that struck me [the most], still with a look back, I realize that, it’s from October of 1970, the war measures, the reaction of English Canadians, from my friends, to the war measures repelled me so much, it was so anti-Québécois. It wasn’t anti-felquiste, 23 it was anti-Québécois (Interview, 06/28/2014). 24

While Philip considers such memories to be the start of his political engagement, he admits in this same section of the interview that it was only after the October events, when he was living in Africa, that he really discovered Québécois culture and decided to move to Quebec: After that [the October crisis], I lived in Africa. It was 1974. Over there I lived in a francophone country, so over there I met Québécois. It’s over there that I started being interested in Québécois culture. It’s over there I heard Vigneault, Félix Leclerc for the first time, that I was reading. Because in Toronto, never there, there’s no way… Dave: It’s more present in Africa than some kilometers from… Philip: That’s it yes, absolutely. So I settled in Montreal. So, well, I was pretty sympathetic to the sovereignist movement from, I worked for the “yes” in 1980, I was [in a sovereignist political party]. So when, let’s say my writings, [the title of one of his books about a crisis in Quebec], I worked at [a national institution] at the time. I was hired as a political columnist. And the day on which the crisis started, because then [this national 23 | The Felquiste are the members of the FLQ, which stands for the Front de libération du Québec [Liberation front of Quebec). The FLQ was a nationalist movement in the 60s and early 70s. Members of the movement often resorted to violence and went as far as perpetrating terrorist acts by planting bombs and kidnapping politicians. The latter incidents led the federal government to invoke the War Measures Act, which allowed the suspension of civil liberties and the deployment of the Canadian army in the streets of Montreal (see Bédard, 1998; Tetley, 2010). 24 | “Moi je viens du nord de l’Ontario. J’ai étudié à Toronto. J’ai appris le français à l’âge de vingt ans, probablement. En fait, quand j’ai travaillé dans le bois comme étudiant dans le nord de l’Ontario, c’est là que j’ai commencé à apprendre le français parce que tous les bucherons étaient Québécois ou Canadiens français. Alors j’ai commencé à l’apprendre là. Pis je dirai[s] qu’avec le recul mon engagement politique a commencé là, parce que les Canadiens français étaient traités comme des citoyens de seconde zone [mais] l’événement qui m’a frappé [le plus], encore avec le recul je me rends compte de ça, c’est avec octobre 70, les mesures de guerre, la réaction des anglais canadiens, de mes amis, sur les mesures de guerre m’a tellement rebutée, c’était tellement anti-Québécois. C’était pas anti-felquiste, c’était anti-Québécois” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession institution] started being in a state of crisis with the autochthones, it started on the 11th of June, and on that day I was in Quebec City to conduct research, because we wanted to establish, [the government of] Quebec was being criticized for its relations with the autochthones, mostly from the exterior. They were attacked pretty, in a pretty harsh way. So I went to investigate myself, and my investigation demonstrated that Quebec was still achieving many things in their relations with autochthones. There were tons of things such as the preservation of the language, of autochthone languages. It’s in Quebec that autochthone languages are doing the best. In the West, it’s total assimilation. In Quebec, they are still viable languages: Innu, Cree, Inuit. What’s remarkable is that all of those statistics existed. So I was over there, I come back and then pouf, I learned that it’s the beginning of the crisis. And then Canada, this is after Meech. Meech had failed, and Canada got on its high horse, on how Indians in Quebec were victims of discrimination. It was like the story of the mote and the beam, in a really bad way. Then I, this book here that I published the year after, answers those questions, that went into the nature of the crisis, how we did, romanticized the warriors, when they were people, the ones that took up arms, were the ones that were in casinos, and that it was the Mohawks that threw them outside before. So that was my subject, my subject was not just on the question of the relations, the situation of autochthones in Quebec compared to in Canada, it was also about the nature [of the conflict]. But at some point, because Canada wanted to find Quebec at fault, to find faults, they said: “Oh autochthones, it’s pretty bad in Canada, but even more so in Quebec.” When in fact, it’s not like that. When you go in the West… So that, this was this book here, a sort of response to a political question that was troubling the Québécois, because I think that a lot of Québécois saw themselves as mixed (métissés), that’s always been the story. What I found out by doing these investigations, with the help of a guy in the West, the expression “speak white” first aimed at Indians, it has nothing to do with blacks, it first aimed at Indians, the mixed, and then French Canadians. Because in the mind of those who said that, it was a fusion, French Canadians were half-breed, you know, mixed. So the Québécois were very troubled during this crisis. And we dramatically stopped some racist acts. So I wanted to answer to that with this book. The book did well. After, well. So the other books, the next book that I wrote was about [an African country]: [the title of the book], which provoked a whole debate. Not at first when it came out, but later, because [a newspaper] started that when I was a candidate. Most of all, I think, there are people that put me, it’s a directed staging by a few journalists, I know that, but they mainly did that because I had also written [the title of one of his books], and [the title of one of his books], that were [Québécois] electoral issues. Dave: In those years. Philip: Yes, at the time, I was even looking into my files, it was in the political debate, at the National Assembly in the preceding weeks before the beginning of elections. It was, there was a commission that started following the book, the Grenier commission,

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Nationhood at Work and Charest tried to avoid everything by saying: “Well, it’s in commission.” The PQ [Parti québécois] tries to raise this question. So I think that they wanted to discredit me, among others: “So a guy that writes that about [an African country], how can you take that seriously about the referendum.” Dave: And your motives that pushed you to write [the title of one of his book]? Philip: Well listen, first, I felt like writing more books. I worked at [a national agency] until 1999. Then I went to work at [a nationalist NGO] as director of communications for three years, which was a good experience […] because everybody was expecting another referendum, I told myself: “Well, I’ll go work there.” [A person] had invited me, so after that I stopped in 2002, it was 2002. So then one thing, I wanted to do the book on [an African country], I did it, and then I wanted another project, I talked about it with [a publisher]: “Well why not make a book on the referendum, the stolen referendum.” So me, I was not convinced that it was stolen, I wasn’t sure. So, then I said I’ll go with it and then, it took me a year and a half to work on that, while I was also self-employed. After that I was convinced, you know, we would have won, but not by much, but we would have won, but history was different. If it was not for, of course everybody says: “Well it would be better to have two, three, four percent of a victory,” but between a victory and a loss, it’s big. If we would have won by 50 000 votes, history would’ve been different. It’s still a severe thing, well I, I found that, I maybe had an advantage because I could meet, I could have interviews with people, since I’m English, they couldn’t know that I was a sovereignist, I think that they would have been more wary if it would have been someone, a francophone, they would’ve been wary, or they were not yet, because at the time, all the stories of, of the Gomery commission had not emerged yet. So people who accepted giving me an interview in 2004, bragged about having stolen it, won it. They wanted to be in history books, they were disarmingly candid, a year after they would not have been, even for me, or another one you know. Dave: OK, so it’s really your research for this book that convinced you that it [the referendum] was stolen? Philip: Yes yes, I knew there were all sorts of things, the question of money and you know, but I was not aware of the magnitude of it. Also the magnitude, the will, the way in which Canadians said: “Well it’s our right to violate the law, it’s our right, my country […] passes first” you know. That, I wanted to demonstrate that, that it was part of their state of mind, their nationhood […] so I wanted to show that for the Canadian everything goes, that he would have done anything to save the country. It’s irrational […] When you start with a book, like that, you start your investigation, and little by little you decide OK, I wanted to show that as well, that people thought they had the right to violate, they didn’t care about the Québécois law. It’s a Canadian law, but to hell you know, they can, and they have the right to do that […] the ones that spent [all the money] as if there was

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession no tomorrow, we’re talking millions millions and millions here. There’s one side, you have to demonstrate that they did that, but you also have to demonstrate, to themselves they say: “We’re waiting for them. We violate the law and that’s it. We violate the law and we have the right to, it’s our country that passes first.” So theoretically, they should recognize the right for nations to, you know, govern themselves, but there is a Canadian state of mind that is a state of mind of conqueror […] Canadian unity, the Canada they have themselves conceived of, Quebec is a minority that is to be tolerated (Interview, 06/28/2014).25 25 | “Après ça [la crise d’Octobre], j’ai habité en Afrique. C’est en 74. Là j’habite dans un pays francophone, fac là j’ai rencontré des Québécois. C’est là que j’ai commencé à m’intéresser à la culture québécoise. C’est là que j’ai entendu pour la première fois, Vigneault, Félix Leclerc, que je lisais. Parce que Toronto, jamais du tout là, pas du tout là. Dave: C’est plus présent en Afrique qu’à quelques kilomètres du… Philip: C’est ça oui, absolument. Alors, je me suis installé à Montréal. Pis là bon, j’étais assez sympathique au mouvement souverainiste dès, je travaillais pour le “oui” en 80, j’étais [dans un parti politique souverainiste]. Alors quand, mettons mes écrits [sur le titre de l’un de mes livres portant sur une crise au Québec], je travaillais [pour un organisme national] dans ce temps-là. J’avais été embauché comme chroniqueur en politique. Pis le jour où [la crise] a débuté là, parce que là [cet organisme national] commençait à avoir des crises avec des autochtones, ça a commencé un 11 juillet, et cette journée-là j’étais à Québec pour faire des recherches, parce qu’on voulait établir, [le gouvernement du Québec] se faisait critiquer pour ses relations avec les autochtones, surtout de l’extérieur. Ils étaient attaqués assez, de façon assez grave. Alors j’ai été moi-même faire des recherches et mes recherches démontraient que le Québec avait quand même réussi pas mal de choses dans ses relations avec les autochtones. Y’avait des tas de choses comme la préservation de la langue, des langues autochtones. C’est au Québec que ça se porte le mieux les langues autochtones. Dans l’Ouest c’est l’assimilation totale. Au Québec, il y a des langues encore viables: l’innu, le cri, les Inuits. Ce qui est remarquable c’est que tous ces chiffres existaient. Alors j’étais là-bas, je reviens puis pouf, j’apprends que c’est le début de la crise [en question]. Pis là le Canada, c’est après Meech. Meech avait échoué, et le Canada a monté sur ses grands chevaux, sur comment les Indiens au Québec étaient victimes de discrimination. C’était comme l’histoire de la poutre et de la paille. Vraiment de façon grave. Là j’ai, ce livre-là que j’ai publié l’année d’après, répond à ces questions-là, qui allaient dans la nature de la crise, comment on a fait, romancé les guerriers alors que c’était des gens, ceux qui avaient pris les armes, étaient ceux qui étaient dans les casinos, et que c’était les Mohawks qui les avaient mis dehors avant. Alors ça c’était mon sujet, mon sujet n’était pas juste la question des relations, la situation des autochtones au Québec comparé au Canada, c’était aussi sur la nature. Mais à moment donné, comme le Canada voulait trouver le le Québec en défaut, de trouver des défauts, ils disaient: ‘ah les autochtones c’est grave au Canada, mais surtout au Québec.’ Alors que dans les faits c’est pas ça.

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Si tu vas dans l’Ouest… Alors ça c’était ce livre-là, une sorte de réponse à une question politique qui troublait les Québécois, parce que je pense que beaucoup de Québécois se voyaient métissés beaucoup, ça a toujours été l’histoire. Ce que j’ai trouvé en faisant ces recherches-là, avec l’aide d’un gars dans l’Ouest, l’expression speak white visait d’abord les Indiens, ça n’a rien à voir avec les noirs, ça visait d’abord les Indiens, les métisses, et puis les Canadiens français. Parce que aux yeux de ceux qui le disaient, c’était une fusion, les Canadiens français étaient des half-breed, tsé des métisses là. Alors les Québécois étaient pendant cette crise bien troublés. Et on a monté en épingle quelques gestes racistes. Alors moi je voulais avec ce livre répondre à ça. Le livre a bien été. Après bon voilà. Alors les autres livres, le prochain livre que j’ai écris c’était sur [un pays en Afrique] : [le titre du livre], qui a provoqué tout un débat. Pas tout de suite quand c’est sorti, mais après, parce que c’est [un quotidien] qui a monté ça pendant que j’étais candidat. Surtout, je pense, il y a des gens qui m’ont mis, c’est une mise en scène de quelques journalistes, je le sais, mais ils l’ont fait ça surtout parce que j’avais écrit aussi [le titre de l’un de ses livres sur un scandale financier et politique], pis [le titre de l’un de ses livres portant sur le référendum de 1995], qui étaient un enjeu électoral [québécois]. Dave: Dans ces année-là oui. Philip: Oui, à ce moment-là, même je regardais mes dossiers là, c’était dans le débat politique, à l’Assemblé nationale dans les semaines qui précédaient le déclenchement des élections. C’était, y’avait une commission qui avait été déclenché suite au livre, la commission Grenier, et Charest essayait d’éviter tout en disant: ‘ben c’est devant la commission.’ Le PQ essaie de soulever cette question-là. Donc je pense qu’ils voulaient me discréditer entre autres: ‘donc un gars qui écrit ça sur [un pays africain] comment tu peux prendre ça au sérieux sur le référendum.’ Dave: Et vos motifs qui vous ont poussé à écrire [le titre de l’un de ses livres sur le référendum de 1995] ? Philip: Ben écoute, d’abord, j’avais le goût d’écrire d’autres livres. J’avais travaillé à [un organisme national] jusqu’en 99. Ensuite je suis allé travailler sur [un ONG nationaliste] comme directeur des communications pendant trois ans, qui était une bonne expérience même si c’était, parce que tout le monde pensait qu’il y aurait un autre référendum, moi je me suis dit: ‘bon, je vais aller travailler-là.’ [Une personne] m’avait invité, ben après ça j’ai arrêté en 2002, c’était 2002. Ben là une chose, je voulais faire le livre sur [un pays africain], je l’ai fait, pis là je voulais avoir un autre projet, j’en ai parlé à [un éditeur]: ‘ben pourquoi tu fais pas un livre sur le référendum, le référendum volé.’ Pis moi j’étais pas convaincu que ça avait été volé, j’étais pas sûr. Alors, ben là j’ai dit je vais y aller pis bon, j’ai mis un an et demi à travailler dessus, pendant que je travaillais à mon compte aussi. Après ça j’étais convaincu, tsé on aurait gagné, mais pas de beaucoup, mais on aurait gagné, mais l’histoire a été différente. Si ça avait pas été, c’est sur que tout le monde dit: ‘ben ce serait mieux d’avoir deux trois quatre pour cent de victoire,’ mais entre une victoire pis une perte c’est gros là. Si on avait gagné par

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

In their article Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements, Boyer and Lomnitz state that most research on nationalism and intellectuals “points toward a social and phenomenological basis for nationalist epistemology, [a process] by which schemes and settlements of national knowledge come to be aligned with the social experience and social imagination of intellectuals themselves. This phenomenon is a fascinating and important one and deserves much further research” (2005: 113). This alignment appears to be present in Philip’s narratives, in the sense that he frames his political, writing and publishing activities as closely related to elements from his biography. According to Philip’s account of his life story, his past led him to articulate multiple projects which have led him to become what I understand to be a cultural entrepreneur of Quebec in general and of the Québécois nationalist movement in particular. 50 000 voix l’histoire aurait été autre. C’est quand même un [sic] affaire grave, ben j’ai, moi j’ai trouvé que, j’avais peut-être un avantage parce que je pouvais aller fréquenter, je pouvais avoir des entrevues avec des gens, comme je suis anglais, ils pouvaient pas savoir comme ça que j’étais souverainiste, je pense qu’ils auraient été plus méfiants si ça avait été quelqu’un, un francophone, y’aurait été méfiant, ou il ne l’était pas parce qu’à ce moment-là, toutes les histoires du, de la commission Gomery avait pas fait surface. Alors les gens qui ont accepté mes entrevues en 2004, ils se pétaient les bretelles de l’avoir volé, de l’avoir gagné. Ils voulaient être dans les livres d’histoire, ils étaient d’une candeur désarmante, un an après ils ne l’auraient pas été, même pour moi ou un autre tsé. Dave: Ok donc c’est vraiment ta recherche pour ce livre-là qui t’a convaincu que c’était volé ? Philip: Oui oui, je savais qu’il y avait eu toute sorte de choses, la question de l’argent pis tsé, mais de l’ampleur j’étais pas au courant. Aussi l’ampleur, la volonté, la façon dont les Canadiens disaient: ‘ben c’est notre droit de violer la loi-là, c’est notre droit, my country right alone, ça passe avant’ tsé. Ça je voulais démontrer ça, que ça faisait partie de leur état d’esprit, leur nationhood […] alors moi je voulais montrer que pour le Canadien tout passe, qu’il aurait fait n’importe quoi pour sauver le pays. C’est irrationnel. […] Quand tu pars un livre là, comme ça, tu pars de recherches, et peu à peu tu décides OK, moi je voulais montrer ça aussi que les gens pensaient avoir le droit de violer, ils se foutaient de la loi québécoise. C’est une loi canadienne, mais tsé au diable, ils peuvent, ils ont le droit de faire ça […] ceux qui ont dépensé à pu finir là, pis on parle de millions de millions et de millions là. Y’a un côté, il faut démontré qu’ils ont fait ça, mais il faut démontré aussi, pour eux autres ils disent: ‘on les attend. On viole la loi pis, c’est tout. On viole la loi pis on a le droit, c’est notre pays qui passe avant ça.’ Alors que théoriquement, ils devraient reconnaitre le droit des nations tsé, de disposer d’eux même, mais il y a un état d’esprit canadien qui est un état d’esprit de conquérant […] l’unité canadienne, le Canada comme eux autres ils l’ont conçu, le Québec est une minorité qu’on tolère” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

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While I cannot attest, solely based on his discourse, that a causal link between Philip’s past and his contemporary role as a cultural entrepreneur exist, his life story has helped me grasp what he understands to be the most significant elements in his work, and how and why he frames them as important. In our discussions, Philip has accounted for many professional activities: other than his writings on topics related to Quebec and his commitment to publishing “books, on a political level, that have a progressive point of view, but with an emphasis on Quebec,” Philip has also been active in a sovereignist political party, both as a supporter and a candidate. All of these activities should be understood, according to Philip, as the result of the animosity he felt when he first heard anti-Québécois comments and saw French Canadians be treated as second-class citizens. His work activities, as I can confirm by paging through his own books and those of his publishing company, delve into much of what he frames to be his past and current concerns regarding Quebec. His book arguing that English Canadians are mistaken in their assertions that First Nations are treated worse in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, for example, aims to thwart anti-Québécois comments used for political purposes by federal politicians. Also, his work demonstrating how some English Canadians, during the referendum of 1995, felt that they had the right to violate Quebec laws in order to protect the unity of Canada invokes his anterior observations that French Canadians have always been treated as second-class citizens. It also illustrates how English Canadians conceive of Québécois as a tolerated minority. As for the founding of his publishing company, Rupture, Philip argues that it was a necessary step to take, considering the state of the publishing world in Quebec and Canada. First, in his words, since “English Canada was not interested in what came out of Quebec, [regarding] politics mostly, but even with regard to literature, they are not interested,” he took it upon himself to diffuse Québécois literature and disseminate knowledge about Quebec in English, whether it be by translating some of his books and those of other authors, or by publishing original material such as essays, biographies and history books, but also novels and short stories. Philip, however, says that he only publishes books with a progressive view on Quebec. In this way, he hopes, perhaps, to defuse anti-Québécois sentiments and criticize the way certain English Canadians treat the Québécois as second-class citizens; two phenomenon created, in his view, by the state of Canada. His support and candidacy for a sovereignist party is the action most clearly demonstrating his animosity towards Canada and wish that Quebec become sovereign. By looking into Philip’s work, one can only attest for the ways in which the content of the book he publishes as an author and a publisher clearly aims to formulate the symbols, memories, and figures of Quebec and its sovereignist faction. While his role as a cultural entrepreneur seems undeniable, Philip’s narrative alone, nonetheless, does not allow me to examine the actual signifi-

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

cance of his work as “cultural ideals” and “solidarity resources” for the nation. Before delving into this specific issue, I explore his work environment: the publishing field of Quebec and Canada. To do so, I slightly distance myself from Philip’s discourse and rather focus on his actions and elements of the publishing field—at least those that are observable.

1.1.1.2 Philip’s Niche in the Field of Cultural Production: Offering English-language Books about Quebec In The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]), Pierre Bourdieu draws “attention to the structured nature of making symbolic goods, and the way that the social making-up of the rules surrounding such activities, is hidden from view, or misrecognized” (Hesmondhalgh, 2006: 216). When investigating the work of a creator—to use Bourdieu’s term—he rightfully notes that one cannot “understand a career or a life as a unique and self-sufficient series of successive events without any other link than an association with a subject” (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]: 258–259). This would be “almost as absurd as trying to make sense of a trip on the metro without taking the structure of the network, meaning the matrix of objective relations between the different stations” (ibid.). In the same vein, the phenomenon of cultivating nationhood under investigation cannot be understood without examining the structure of the environment in which Philip writes and publishes, i.e., the publishing world of Quebec and Canada or, to use Bourdieu’s term, the field of cultural production of Canada and Quebec. Examining the activity of a writer—or any creator—often leads people to focus on “the charismatic ideology of ‘creation’” (ibid.: 167) that emanates from the work. In so doing, the investigation only considers “the apparent producer—painter, composer, writer—and prevents us from asking who has created this ‘creator’ and the magic power of transubstantiation with which the ‘creator’ is endowed” (ibid.). In focusing solely on Philip’s life story regarding his writing and publishing activities, the previous section may perhaps have endowed Philip with the charisma of a creator. Taking a step back from Philip’s autobiographical portrayal of the inception of and meaning behind his professional activities may be helpful to explain the position he occupies in the structure of the field of cultural production. This perspective, in turn, will also unravel how this position affects his professional activities, and therefore the phenomenon of cultivating nationhood. Bourdieu’s sociology is only pertinent to this chapter of the book, because of his conceptualization of the field of cultural production. I privilege his approach in what follows, for it helps me establish a relationship between the economic logic of the field of cultural production and the different statuses of authors. Canada’s field of cultural production is hardly comparable to that of France—the one with which Bourdieu constructs his theory. The former, among other things, is more dependent on state subsidies than the latter.

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Nevertheless, the use of Bourdieu’s concepts permits me to shed light on some fundamental specificities of the Québécois and Canadian cases. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu distinguishes two economic logics within the field of cultural production.26 First, he defines the “the anti-‘economic’ economy of pure art” founded “on the denegation of the ‘economy’ (of the ‘commercial’) and of ‘economic’ profit (in the short term),” which privileges productions that “can acknowledge no other demand than one it can generate itself” (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]: 142). It is a logic oriented towards “the accumulation of symbolic capital,27 a kind of ‘economic’ capital denied but recognized, and legitimate—a veritable credit and capable of assuring, under certain conditions and in the long term, ‘economic’ profits” (ibid.). Second, he defines “the ‘economic’ logic of the literary and artistic industries which, since they make the trade in cultural goods just another trade, confer priority on distribution, on immediate and temporary success,” by offering products that correspond “to a pre-existing demand, and in pre-established forms” (ibid.). Nonetheless, both forms of economic logic of the field lead enterprises to accumulate cultural capital.28 If, for the moment, we only take into consideration the information revealed in the previous sections of the chapter, Philip’s professional activities identify him with the first economic logic, which is driven by the “autonomous principle” (ibid.: 216). Based on what Philip revealed in our conversation, his books, and even more so his publishing company, are in fact meant to counter the “heteronomous principle” attributed to individuals and enterprises who economically and politically dominate the field, and hence impose their will on cultural productions (ibid.). Indeed, if we interpret Philip’s words with the help of Bourdieu’s concepts, it seems that the reason why Philip founded his publishing company, Rupture, was to obtain greater autonomy within the hierarchy of the cultural production field. The independence of having his own firm, as he mentioned, was meant to allow him to publish translations of his own manuscripts, and English-language books with progressive views on Quebec—undertakings that were in the past impossible in the Canadian publishing world, according to Philip. His topics and his translations were rejected by English Canadian publishers because, he explained, they are “conservative,” “not audacious,” and “controlled by the Canada Council for the Arts.” In his perspective, 26 | “Bourdieu has a very broad understanding of culture, in line with the tradition of classical sociology, which includes science (and social science), law and religion, as well as expressive and aesthetic activities such as art, literature and music” (Hesmondhalgh, 2006: 212). 27 | In Bourdieu’s writings, “symbolic capital” refers to prestige and honor (Thompson, 1991: 14). 28 | In Bourdieu’s writings, cultural capital refers to skill, knowledge, and other cultural acquisitions (Thompson, 1991: 14).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

the reasons why publishing companies in Canada, but also nowadays in Quebec, do not “take up somewhat controversial questions [and] controversial topics [is] because they’ll see their grants drop, or cut down.” According to Philip, consequentially, editorial choices in Canada are strongly influenced by politics; they hence succumb to a “heteronomous principle.” What Philip fails to mention, however, is that Rupture, as acknowledged on its website, also receives funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. In addition to this information, Rupture mentions and thanks other funders, such as the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC), the Government of Quebec, and the Government of Canada, for its support through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing of the Canada Book Fund (CBF).29 We should perhaps exercise caution in accepting Philip’s version of the initial rejection of his translated work as a result of editorial influence on the part of the Canada Council for the Arts. After all, he was able to publish some of these same previously rejected manuscripts through Rupture while receiving money from that same Council. Although public funding does not necessarily make a publishing company profitable, I wonder if Philip’s professional activities could also be attributed to the “economic logic,” which answers to “a pre-existing demand, and in pre-established forms” (idem.)? If so, could it mean that Philip has found a position in the field, a niche, that no other writers or publishing companies had held or exploited before him? A characteristic of the economic logic as conceptualized by Bourdieu is to privilege “short-term investments” by favoring writers that will earn faster economic capital for the publishing company. These are authors such as “journalists who extend their ordinary activity by ‘topical’ writings, ‘personalities’ who offer their ‘testimony’ in essays of autobiographical accounts and professional writers who bow to the canons of a tested aesthetic (‘prize-winning’ literature, successful novels, etc.)” (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]: 143–144). Rupture, as we can learn from its website, has published about a dozen manuscripts from each of these three categories of authors. The company holds the copyrights of many books by journalists, scholars, recipients of major Canadian literary awards, and important personalities, such as current and former politicians. Among them is a past premier of Quebec. According to Bourdieu’s writings, publishing companies favoring these types of writers are more inclined to treat cultural products in the same way as any other trade. In so doing, they are more devoted to accumulating economic than symbolic capital—the latter representing prestige or honor. According to Philip’s narrative, however, Rupture only “survives” by selling its books to an29 | The latter type of funding was mentioned once in the interview, when Philip reported receiving financial support to pay a translator for the upcoming book about the humanitarian priest who had worked in South America.

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other “national space”—to use Bourdieu’s term—namely, the United States. Although the types of writers he mainly chooses to publish are oriented towards sales and immediate success, Philip’s publishing company does not seem to meet the accumulation of economic capital a large-scale production firm based on an economic logic should. Rupture does not, in Philip’s view, generate much economic profit—numbers that I unfortunately cannot confirm. Nevertheless, other clues point towards the actual small-scale production of Philip’s publishing company. According to the website, the enterprise only consists of two permanent employees, in addition to Philip. The website also reveal that they publish only a few titles a year. Few employees and few annual publications are two characteristics typical of a “small artisanal firm” (ibid.: 145). It thus seems difficult to clearly position Philip’s publishing activities within Bourdieu’s conception of the field of cultural production, as they appear to exhibit characteristics from both forms of economic logic. The coexistence of the two logics in one publishing company is possible, but only when it has accumulated symbolic capital over time. The firm, then, has the potential of transforming its symbolic capital into economic capital (ibid.), a stage Rupture cannot possibly have reached due to its fairly recent foundation. Could this “incongruence” of Philip’s publishing company in the field of cultural production be due to the very specific position Rupture holds? Is Philip, as a writer and a publisher, more interested in conducting these activities as he sees fit than in worrying about economic issues that could eventually drive his business into deficit? Or could this “anomaly” regarding his position in the economic logics stem from a particular feature of the field of cultural production in Quebec and Canada? Philip the writer never seemed to have troubles publishing his books in French in a Quebec-based publishing company. According to Philip, publishing some of the same manuscripts translated into English, however, turned out to be impossible; not only in Quebec, but also in other parts of Canada and abroad. Philip’s struggles to widen his audience, as he mentioned, led him to found a publishing house. This allowed him to publish his translations and other books with progressive views and an emphasis on Quebec, i.e., with the same public funding possibilities as the publishers that had earlier rejected his work. While Rupture has not established Philip as the head of a cultural firm with a largescale production earning a large amount of economic capital, it nevertheless appears to allow him and his publishing company to produce cultural products and knowledge in a more of less financially viable way. Hence, the “pre-existing demand” of English-language books with progressive views and an emphasis on Quebec’s history, literature politics, and other topics probably existed before the foundation of Rupture. The books published by Rupture, about fifty since the company’s inception, are selling, though most likely not in large quantities. In other words, he has found a niche as an author and even more so as a

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

publisher. In examining the few English language publishing houses located in Quebec, one would quickly notice that Rupture indeed publishes on topics that are generally not covered by competitors. Philip has thus constructed his position in the publishing world of Quebec and of Canada, which he occupies through his writings and Rupture. According to Bourdieu’s theory, holding a position that responds to a “pre-existing demand” endows Philip with the actual autonomy he was seeking when creating his publishing house since he finds himself supplying literature and disseminating knowledge for the demand of a market. Nevertheless, the field of cultural production always occupies a position in which it is dominated by the field of power, and thus has a restricted autonomy with regard to what it produces. Ever since the foundation of Rupture, the position Philip has produced and occupied by exploiting a niche in the field of cultural production of Quebec and Canada may have allowed him to accumulate further cultural capital—which, in Bourdieu’s writings, corresponds to knowledge, skills, and cultural acquisitions. Rupture has indeed established him not only as a writer, but also as a translator and publisher. The latter skill, particularly, has allowed him to be in touch with knowledge and its production and diffusion, which in turn may potentially have given him or enhanced his already existing symbolic capital, i.e. his prestige and honor in the field of cultural production—perhaps also in the field of power, which generally does not include cultural entrepreneurs or producers. The field of power, however, does include individuals using the products of cultural entrepreneurs, especially when it comes to unify a political community under a nation state (Hutchinson, 1987; Stanley and Dampier, 2007; Young, 1976). If Philip wants to cultivate nationhood more efficiently, would he not be better off working in the field of power, such as in politics? As a matter of fact, Philip mentioned in the interview that he once tried but failed to be elected under the banner of a sovereignist party during a provincial election in Quebec. Falling back onto, remaining in, or sometimes even choosing professions such as those of writer or publisher is, according to Bourdieu, typical of a trajectory such as that of Philip. The ‘profession’ of writer or artist is, in effect, one of the least codified there is; one of the least capable, too, of completely defining (and nourishing) those who claim it, and who, quite often, cannot assume the function they take as their principal one unless they have a secondary profession to provide them with their main income. But one can see the subjective profits offered by this double status, with the proclaimed identity allowing one, for example, to be satisfied with all the small jobs described as being just to pay the bills, which are offered by the profession itself (such as that of reader or proofreader in publishing houses). These jobs (for which the art professions have equivalents, not to mention the cinema) have the virtue of placing their occupants at the heart of the ‘milieu,’ where the information circulates which is part of the specif-

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Nationhood at Work ic competence of the writer or artist, where relationships are forged and protection is acquired which is useful to gaining publication, and where sometimes positions of specific power are conquered—the status of publisher, editor of a review, of collections of essays—which may contribute to the growth of specific capital, through the recognition and the homage obtained from new entrants in exchange for publication, sponsorship, advice and so forth. It is for the same reasons that the literary field is so attractive and so welcoming to all those who possess all the characteristics of the dominants minus one: to ‘poor relations’ of the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats ruined or in decline, members of minorities stigmatized or rejected from other dominant positions, and in particular from high public service, and those whose uncertain and contradictory social identity predisposes them in some way to occupy the contradictory position of dominated among the dominants (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]: 227).

In sum, in line with Bourdieu’s reasoning, Philip’s professional activities are plainly meant to meet the demand of knowledge about and cultural products relating to Quebec, first in French with his books, and subsequently in English through his publishing undertakings. This second activity was, however, the most difficult to accomplish, due to the lack of firms willing to publish on his preferred topics—a deficiency Philip claims to have having responded to by creating Rupture. But how does Philip deal with his apparent position of dominated among the dominants? In the light of Philip’s life story, which intertwines his biographical elements with the inception of his writing and publishing activities, and of my exploration of Rupture’s position within the publishing world of Quebec and Canada, I explore in the following section what I understand to be the main motive underlying Philip’s professional activities. Philip’s biography may have, according to his discourse, influenced his professional activities and led him to embrace the Québécois nationalist movement, but to a sociologist, such a narrative does not reveal motives so much as it recaptures intentions in hindsight.30 This does not mean, however, that his life story cannot help me and guide some of my interpretations. In order to better asses the motive behind Philip’s professional activities, I also take into consideration empirical material that is perhaps more tangible and less tinted with Philip’s recollected intentions. In uncovering his motive, I reconstruct his actions and shed light on the driving force underlying the activities leading to the phenomenon of cultivating nationhood in Quebec and Canada—also, I examine further the apparent “incongruence” of Philip’s publishing company within Bourdieu’s theory.

30 | Motives, indeed, are not intentions; the latter being “motive talk,” the reasons or arguments that people give to justify or make sense of an action (Thériault, 2013: 48; see also Campbell, 2006: 214).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

1.1.2 Navigating through Bi-Ethnicity with a Cause for Quebec and its Sovereignty: Knowledge and Cultural Production Beyond Two Solitudes The examination of the motive underlying Philip’s activities as a writer and publisher inevitably begins by looking into a contradiction that I have already raised: Why would Philip, a fervent Québécois sovereignist, be interested in publishing books about Quebec in English—a language he even occasionally flayed in our conversations—under financial circumstances that only allows his enterprise to, in his words, survive? Philip talks about his writings as investigations aiming to reveal truths and show things as they are. Whether it is by beginning to work on a project in order to demonstrate the veracity of a hypothesis he has in mind or finding himself having to readjust his first hypothesis, he often describes his manuscripts as being a “contre-poids” to the prevailing views of English Canadian public discourses, as “going against the main current flow.” This is the argument he made to explain the reasons why English-language publishers rejected his books. Philip’s first books in French, on the contrary, were apparently easily published by a Quebec-based publisher, which probably receives subventions to publish his book more easily. In the interview, he even recalls that after the publication of his first book, he mentioned to his publisher that he wanted to write another one. The latter, a public figure known to work closely with members of the sovereignist movement, suggested a topic: the ploys of the “non” option during the 1995 referendum. Philip accepted. It would not be his last book on nationalist issues favorable to the Quebec sovereignist movement published through the same publishing company, Frontenac,31 which just like Rupture also specializes, among other things, in publications about Quebec issues written in French. Compared to Rupture’s ambiguous position in the field of cultural production, Philip’s first publisher holds a position that is undeniably clearer: he sits at the head of a “large-scale” publishing house that has adopted an “economic logic,” in Bourdieu’s terms. The company works with the three categories of authors typically connected to this economic logic: “journalists who extend their ordinary activity by ‘topical’ writings, ‘personalities’ who offer their ‘testimony’ in essays of autobiographical accounts and professional writers who bow to the canons of a tested aesthetic (‘prize-winning’ literature, successful novels, etc.) (idem.). Frontenac publishes dozens of books each year. Briefly, the economic capital of Philip’s first publisher undoubtedly has—or at least has the chance to have—a higher economic capital and cultural capital than Rupture. Besides, through this first publisher, one of Philip’s books acquired a bestseller status 31 | Fictive name.

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in Quebec. Today, however, Philip has bought the copyright of this particular manuscript as well as that of some of his books published prior to the foundation of Rupture in order to edit and republish them through his own publishing company. He admits that he chose to do this because the former publisher did not agree to reprint them or publish new editions. Philip comments: You know the objective [as] an author, you want your books to be available, because a book isn’t a newspaper, you want for it to continue circulating, most of all if, I know when I sign a contract with an author [I say]: “Your book will be available forever.” If we’re out of stock, and there’s no interest left, well we won’t reprint, but the idea is that a book should be available, but a book has a life you know. Dave: Not only as an e-book. Philip: No, but sometimes you can decide to keep that, but [my first publisher], like the book on [an African country] in French is not available anymore. Dave: There aren’t any e-book versions either? Philip: No, he never did that, he hasn’t made any e-book versions. So he didn’t want to reprint it, I didn’t ask him to republish, but it also needs an update, but usually when you make a book with a considerable work, that you consider useful, then you have libraries OK, but you sometimes want it to keep on selling (Interview, 06/28/2014). 32

Philip’s relationship with his first publisher was undoubtedly significant for his career as a writer and a publisher. While some of his life story elements may have initially influenced his writings, the support he found in his first publish32 | “Tsé l’objectif, un auteur, tu veux que tes livres soient disponibles, parce qu’un livre ce n’est pas comme un journal, tu veux que ça continue à circuler, surtout si, moi je sais quand je signe un contrat avec un auteur [je dis]: ‘ton livre va être disponible pour toujours.’ Si on est épuisé, puis y’a plus d’intérêt du tout, ben on va pas réimprimé, mais l’idée c’est que le livre soit disponible, mais un livre a une vie là tsé. Dave: Pas seulement en e-book. Philip: Non mais des fois tu peux décider de garder ça, mais [mon premier éditeur], comme le livre sur [le pays africain] en français n’est plus disponible. Dave: Y’a pas de version e-book non plus ? Philip: Non il n’a jamais fait, y’a pas fait de version e-book. Pis là il voulait pas le réimprimer, je lui ai pas demandé de rééditer, mais il faudrait qu’il y ait une mise à jour aussi, mais normalement quand tu fais un livre avec un travail considérable, que tu considères utile, après les bibliothèques OK, mais des fois tu veux que ça continue de vendre” (Interview, 06/28/2014).

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

er most likely encouraged him to continue. The advice Philip accepted from his former publisher, just like the bestseller status one of his books acquired through publishing with him, invite this interpretation. Their disagreement on some publication issues may, however, have encouraged them to go their separate ways. Although this is not part of the story Philip told to explain the reasons for which he founded Rupture, it nevertheless suggests another incentive behind the creation of his publishing company, or at least a philosophy or a specific way to administer his business: the wish to keep books available for circulation and for sale. After establishing a seemingly fruitful career as a writer that allowed him to gain cultural and economic capital and build a reputation for himself, it was time for Philip to invest his efforts in a new professional activity as a publisher. Once again following advice, this time from a friend—a historian, publisher, and former minister of a government of the Parti québécois, who is today one of his two associates—and acting on their shared observation that publishing manuscripts about Quebec in English was a difficult task, Philip founded Rupture. With regard to its topics, this publishing company aims to occupy a position similar to that of Frontenac, but for an English-speaking market. Similar topics, with similar—when not literally the same—authors, Rupture does, however, not appear to be as economically profitable as the former publisher he first published his books with. This economic situation, however, does not seem to discourage Philip. I argue that this is because he works for a cause. Philip’s motive as a writer and publisher cultivating nationhood stems from a cause which shares affinities with the movement for the sovereignty of Quebec. An avid supporter of Quebec’s independence from Canada, his main role in the movement nevertheless falls outside the active or legislative political arena, the field of power. Philip’s activities mainly belong in the field of cultural production. His writings produce discourses and points of view that challenge or promote specific national issues pertaining to Quebec. His work favors a nationalist point of view with which a majority of the sovereignist movement supporters appear to agree. Indeed, Philip not only published several books— one of which was a bestseller—as an author through a nationalist publisher, he also has over the years become an omnipresent and recognizable figure among supporters of the sovereignist movement. He has been invited to speak at gatherings and conferences on many occasions. The results of his investigations, moreover, have become integrated in the discourses of Quebec’s independence supporters. His ideas have also triggered public debates and overt responses by other fractions of society, such as pro-federalist individuals or groups. Philip founded Rupture so as to make available English-language books about Quebec that he considers to be of interest—whether it be, again, discourses that challenge or promote specific Quebec national issues, or Québécois literature such as novels or tales. While its catalogue is most likely not primarily

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meant for or addressed to English Canadians, Philip undoubtedly had them in mind when founding Rupture, as he criticized their lack of interest in cultural products from Quebec. Philip knows that they are not particularly prompt and eager to take interest in the products he offers, in the same way that he is aware that this latest professional activity may cause him financial problems—or will not be profitable. In other words, he does not gain economic capital so much as cultural capital through his business. He has, indeed, been accumulating prestige and honor, or symbolic capital, not from English Canadians, but from the Quebec sovereignist movement. Philip was awarded a prize for his activities promoting the sovereignty of Quebec by a Montreal-based association that supports the cause of the province’s independence. Above, I interpreted Philip’s professional activities as a publisher occupying a niche in the field of cultural production in Quebec and Canada as meeting a “pre-existing demand,” in the framework of Bourdieu’s theory. This may apply to Philip’s writings first published with Frontenac, as he enjoyed successful sales, sparked public debates, and made a name for himself in the Quebec sovereignist movement. But as Rupture only generates enough income to survive, in his words, it would seem exaggerated to think that Philip is satisfying a demand—although he is indeed the only one offering, in English, discourses that promote specific Quebec national issues favoring nationalist points of view. There is perhaps simply no existing market for such ideas, in English, just like Philip had already anticipated, as in his view English Canadians and English-readers are not interested in Québécois issues. Hence, financial success cannot have been Philip’s primary goal. Indeed, what appears to be more important to Philip than financial issues, is to make sure that his investigations about Quebec’s national issues are continuously available. His goal is to reveal truths, show things as they are, and create a “contre-poids” to the prevailing views of English Canadian public discourses. A second goal, perhaps the main one, is to expand knowledge about and cultural products pertaining to Quebec beyond the French-speaking world. In sum, by formulating or reformulating symbols, memories, or figures of Quebec through writing and publishing activities, Philip cultivates nationhood in favor of Quebec—and even more so, of Quebec as a sovereign nation. In other words, Philip cultivates nationhood for a cause, that of Quebec and its sovereignty. He not only promotes the idea that Quebec and the Québécois belong to a national community separate from that of Canada, he “feeds” knowledge to the members of the Quebec sovereignist movement and the politicians supporting this project. The latter, indeed, often adopt his ideas and discourses in order to promote the independence option. These are the same individuals who initially supported and encouraged him to pursue his professional activities, which in turn led him to become a recognized figure in the movement. Philip, without a doubt, is to be recognized as a cultural entrepreneur contributing to

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

the “cultural ideals” and the “solidarity resources” of the Québécois nation, for he aims to define what Quebec is or should be. His position within the publishing world of Quebec and Canada is, however, somehow ambiguous—at least theoretically. The niche Philip has found with Rupture occupies, according to Bourdieu’s theory, a similar position to that of Frontenac. Both publish the same types of authors, with the same kinds of topics. Both companies are, in theory, based on an “economic logic.” While Frontenac appears to be profitable, Rupture does not, but manages to survive in the market. Publishing books in English about Quebec that challenge or promote specific Québécois national issues favoring nationalist and progressive points of view is not economically profitable. The fact that Rupture does not “fit” in the scheme of Bourdieu’s theory is perhaps due to the specificity of the field of cultural production in Quebec and Canada. The linguistic and ethnonational duality creates a field in which some ideas may be profitably published in French, but not in English. Philip was prepared for the consequences of this. In the name of the cause of the Québécois sovereignist movement, however, and because he wants Quebec to thrive and become a nation state distinct from Canada, he took it upon himself to publish ideas that were, before Rupture, not accessible in other languages than French. Philip certainly does not reconcile the groups behind the metaphor of the two solitudes. He does, however, perhaps allow them to understand each other better and to engage in an informed dialogue. As Altbach notes: “The existence of a publishing enterprise does not guarantee an active intellectual life, but publishing is a necessary condition for indigenous scientific and literary activity” (Altbach, 1975: 7). *** Philip’s professional activities led me to identify the work task of cultivating nationhood. This phenomenon was constructed through observing a Québécois sovereignist. Focusing on a Canadian federalist, a fervent supporter of Canada’s unity with similar professional activities, would most likely have led to a similar understanding of the task in question. My encounter with Philip, however, reveals a facet to the bi-ethnonational context of Montreal that an encounter with a federalist would not have had. Federalist ideas have support in Quebec, they may be cultivated and they may “sell;” whereas Quebec sovereignist ideas would most likely not find much support in the rest of Canada. If I had worked with a non-sovereignist, the specificities of the field of cultural production in Quebec and Canada and the specificities of cultivating nationhood in a bi-ethnonational context would necessarily have been neglected. Philip’s story, although being the only one with which I construct the work task of cultivating nationhood, points towards the idea that bi-ethnonational contexts

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create specific niches that may be invested in non-lucrative ways while generating prestige—such specificities with respect to the fields of cultural production in bi-ethnonational contexts, without a doubt, deserve further research. In what follows, I examine the dynamic created by the work task of cultivating nationhood with regard to the idea of living in a world of nations.

1.2 A N ationalist D ynamic : W hen the W ork of a L ife time O per ates upon N ationhood Nationalist motives cropped up only seldom in my fieldwork. Philip’s activities geared towards the accomplishment of his work tasks were the only ones I could interpret as driven by motives that share a direct affinity with nationalism. I did, however, encounter other attitudes that could be qualified as nationalist while shadowing individuals in their work environment. For example, a Dutch-speaking journalist I was working with in Brussels insisted on speaking Dutch to a French-speaking receptionist who obviously did not speak the language. Or again, when shadowing the same person, he interviewed a public relations employee from a Belgian beer brewing company who was describing a specific beer as the “king of Belgian beers” and most likely of beers in general. Also, in Montreal, a fruit-stand manager I was working with told me that he was a pro-sovereignist, but that as of now, he did not wish for a third referendum in the near future. While these practices or expressions may be thought of as nationalist, I rather think of them as isolated and sporadic actions in the course of an individual’s day at work. The category nation, in these observations, was certainly at play, but according to the information I had, the individuals in question did not have a relationship with nationhood that was driven by a nationalist motive while accomplishing their work task. The journalist and the fruit-stand manager may very well be nationalist at times or driven by nationalist motives outside of their workplace. But as employees, as individuals accomplishing their tasks at work, they were not driven by these motives. Philip is the only informant who had a relationship with nationhood that was defined by a nationalist motive while accomplishing a task: the cause of Quebec and its sovereignty. The work task of cultivating nationhood through writing and publishing is accomplished, as I argued, in the name of a cause. The cause, rather than coming from, for example, a guideline given by an employer that an individual would be required to follow, comes from, I suggest, a life-plan that is independent of workplaces—which is perhaps why nationalist motives seldom appeared in the work environments I visited throughout the fieldwork. In the terms of Alfred Schütz, a life-plan:

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession determines the particular plans, which in turn determine the current interests. The interest prevailing at the moment determines the elements which the individual singles out of the surrounding objective world […] so as to define its situation. It is by virtue of the same interest that out of the pregiven stock of knowledge those elements are selected as are required for the definition of the situation. In other words, the interest determines which elements of both the ontological structure of the pregiven world and the actual stock of knowledge are relevant for the individual to define his situation thinkingly, actingly, emotionally, to find his way in it, and to come to terms with it. This form of relevancy will be called “motivational relevancy” because it is subjectively experienced as a motive for the definition of the situation (1970: 122–123).

Finding himself in a situation in which he could no longer publish his writings, Philip thought it would be usefuleven though potentially not lucrative— to create his “own situation” through a new publishing company: Rupture. In so doing, he has implemented the conditions allowing him to pursue the publication of his own writings and that of others he has found to be beneficial for Quebec’s culture in general and for the cause of the sovereignty of Quebec in particular. This is the main motive underlying his actions. Being part of a larger scheme underlying a cause, cultivating nationhood may therefore transcend the accomplishment of a day-to-day work task. In comparison with the tasks I explore in the next chapters, it is more the “needs of the cause” that define the ways in which the work tasks should be carried out and accomplished than the work environment and its determinants. As depicted in the present chapter, elements of the work environment, or the field of cultural production, do influence Philip and Rupture: he has to address competitors; he receives support and creates alliances with colleagues; and he has to adapt, to a certain extent, to the conditions that allow Rupture to receive public subventions. But the starting point of his endeavor is defined by the cause of Quebec and its sovereignty, which he then adapts to the elements of his work environment—whether it is to bypass them or to take advantage of them. The relationship he has with nationhood is hence translated into actions. Philip enacts nationhood for the cause of Quebec and its sovereignty through his writing and publishing activities—but also as a supporter and a candidate. In cultivating nationhood, Philip’s life-plan creates a unique dynamic with regard to nationhood. I suggest that in carrying out his professional activities for a cause, Philip’s work task operates upon nationhood. Individuals involved in a work task operating upon nationhood, I argue, aim to challenge, create, dissolve, restructure, or actively maintain elements as national. Philip’s cause, through writings and publishing, leads him to question and investigate different issues pertaining to Quebec, whether it be the province’s political status in the federation and its relations with Canada or identity issues. His writings on the status of autochthones in Quebec versus

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autochthones in the rest of Canada and the ploys of the “non” option during the 1995 referendum, as well as the history books, biographies, novels, and essays about Quebec that he publishes through Rupture, all participate in the making of Québécois national elements with regard to its history, public figures, or tales. In other words, Philip aims to legitimize what Quebec is: what it consists of, and how it is a legitimate form of belonging as a political community and as a nation of its own. In conclusion, work tasks creating a dynamic operating upon nationhood deliberately reinforce the idea that we live in a world of nations by purposely engaging in challenging, creating, dissolving, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements as national. This dynamic depicts a relationship with nationhood that is defined by a national cause. This relationship, however, has concrete empirical ramifications, as observed in this chapter. In enacting nationhood for a cause, the dynamic created by Philip while carrying out his task was geared towards legitimizing elements as national in order to legitimize, in turn, the political community of the province as national and distinct from that of Canada. The dynamic operates upon nationhood, in the sense that it purposely aims to nationalize elements. Living in a world of nations, political communities, in Philip’s opinion, ought to be divided into nation states. Uncritically bearing this idea—and ideology—in mind, Philip has contributed through his professional activities to making Quebec a nation, a sovereign political community, a nation state. Work tasks operating upon nationhood represent a mode of operating nationhood in which the relationship with the idea of living in a world of nations is understood and characterized by a national cause. Enacting nationhood for this cause, the mode operating upon nationhood legitimizes elements as national, such as defining what a specific nation is or ought to be. This mode of social action is what most people associate with nationalism. The individuals it involves correspond to the common sense term of nation-builders. While I have depicted this mode with a single story, that of Philip, similar phenomena upholding the significance of this mode are lengthily documented in the literature of the sociology of nationalism. Philip’s activities are, indeed, not unlike those of Anthony Smith’s “keepers of traditions” (1991) or those that John Hutchinson attributes to individuals involved in “cultural nationalism” (1987). Andreas Wimmer, also, has developed a typology by focusing on individuals I see as conducting activities operating upon nationhood (2013: see Chapter 3). Besides, the fact that I have only identified one individual and one work task creating such a dynamic in the course of my fieldwork indicates the empirical rarity of the mode operating upon nationhood in everyday life. Nonetheless, in the scope of an investigation into lived nationhood, this mode allows me to show that although it is seldom, it is present even in mundane and everyday life activities, namely at work, a social sphere distinct—yet not entirely as demon-

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

strated with Philip—from active politics. Also, concentrating on the mode operating upon nationhood will help me contrast its characteristics, which are fairly well understood, with those of the two modes developed in the following chapters. Before moving on to the next chapter, I explain why Brussels has played a less prominent role than Montreal in this chapter. This will also be the occasion to reiterate and clarify the ways in which I interpret the empirical material in this book. Building on the conceptual approach to investigate lived nationhood as presented in the introduction of the book, I focus in the epilogue on the importance of examining the motives underlying the accomplishment of work tasks in order to understand the relationship individuals have with nationhood.

1.3 E pilogue : W orking for a P opul ar S oap O per a : C ultivating N ationhood without an I dentifiable N ationalist M otive In Brussels, I explored the set of a soap opera called Het Heem.33 The phenomenon of cultivating nationhood was omnipresent throughout the day. In the early weeks of writing this chapter, I had planned—and actually began—to create a sociological encounter between the individual I was shadowing on the set of Het Heem and Philip. However, the national cause as a motive underlying the activities of the individuals working on the soap was elusive and different from Philip’s. Therefore, I abandoned the encounter, but decided to keep some of the material from Het Heem in order to better illustrate how I interpret the empirical information of the fieldwork throughout the book. Soap operas, but also televised series or film productions in general, have been the subject of many studies in the field of identity and nation-building. The focus of the studies and their results vary. In the literature, soap operas may be used by the state broadcaster to offer a “national resource [to] empower people through knowledge and to enable them to make more informed decisions concerning their lives” (Kruger, 1999: 7), to construct “a new way of imagining national identity in the age of globalization” (Lu, 2000: 25), or to produce, as an unintended consequence, multiple and hybrid identities within immigrant populations of countries such as demonstrated in the British case (Barker, 1997). Except for the research conducted by Kruger in South Africa, investigations into soap operas have not underlined specific nationalist motives. My observations also lead me to this conclusion. While the empirical information from my investigation on the set of the soap has not allowed me to grasp nationalist motives, Het Heem also appears to cultivate nationhood in a way 33 | Fictive name.

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similar to elements in Philip’s story. Lacking a palpable motive, however I cannot specify the relationship the crew members have with nationhood, nor what type of dynamic the work task creates with regard to nationhood. Throughout my day on the set of Het Heem, crew members of the soap opera constantly appeared to be enthusiastic and proud to be part of something bigger than the actual set on which we were—at first, I thought that their professional activities could be part of a life-plan, as was the case with Philip. On many occasions, when an actor or an actress would enter the make-up room, the make-up artist I was working with would tell me that s/he was a famous Flemish or Belgian actor or actress. She would say that a specific actress had played in a film nominated for an Oscar in the category of best foreign-language feature film, or that someone else was one of the most well-known actress of the country. I was also reminded on many occasions about how proportionally high the rating of viewers for the show is in Flanders. Once, someone mentioned that there are only six or seven million people in Flanders, but that the soap opera gathers around one and a half million spectators every day. Later, after I asked if there were other Flemish-speaking soap operas, I was told that there was indeed another one, but that it had only 500.000 viewers, while one Flemish out of four or five watches Het Heem on a daily basis. Furthermore, one of the crew members also wanted to inform me about the great benefits of Het Heem for actors of a country like Belgium. When I asked her to develop her idea, she explained that they were well paid, and that it is hard in a small country like Belgium to find such good working conditions. She elaborated with the help of a comparison, suggesting that unlike the United States, a country which produces dozens of soap operas and thus many more jobs in acting, performers from Belgium have a hard time pursuing a cinematographic career. She added that older actors usually enjoy staying on the show, because it is easier than working for big productions, and that for younger actors, it is a good opportunity to start their career and gain experience, but that after two or three years, they often try to find something else, limited though their options might be. All of these thoughts and comments that people insisted on sharing with me suggest that they see their work-related tasks not only as serving the production of the soap opera itself, but also as a means to cultivate the entertainment or stardom industry of Flanders and Belgium—or cultural production, to use Bourdieu’s term. Their enterprise, moreover, appears to be fruitful: the show has been running for over two decades while maintaining a large audience—although, after looking at the actual ratings, it is slightly lower than the numbers I was given. It has also obtained numerous awards. Indeed, upon entering the studio I saw that many prizes were hanging on the walls: the most imposing one says “Klassikers.” It is juxtaposed with DVD covers and the name of the Belgian television channel and it mentions that the series Het Heem has received an award for having sold over 60.000 copies.

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

Also, the soap opera is widely known. Prior to my day with the crew, when telling Flemish friends that I was going to visit the set of Het Heem, everyone showed that they were familiar with the program. The taxi driver who drove me from the train station to the studio was also enthusiastic about the show, asking me, among others, if I was an actor. At the end of the day, after I had stepped in as an extra for a scene, I chatted with another extra, who had come all the way from Brussels with public transports for only 15-minute of shooting. I inquired into the reasons why he would come all the way here, to the studio, to do an unpaid job. He answered that he wants to be an actor, and that since there are not many acting job opportunities for Dutch speakers in Belgium, he hopes to make it one day as an actor on this particular show. As one may have noted above, many crew members demonstrated a noteworthy “confusion” regarding the terms of Flanders and Belgium. When talking about the viewers, they always referred to them as coming from Flanders, whereas when they were talking about actors, they rather talked about Belgium than Flanders. Since I was not able to detect specific motives—and even less nationalist motives—the interchangeability between Belgium and Flanders is hard to understand. One may argue that Dutch-speaking actors in Belgium have a greater chance of being known and recognized as Belgians than Flemings —especially abroad or by a foreigner, which is probably how they conceived me—and that viewers of the show are most likely Flemish-speakers located in Flanders, and perhaps Brussels. Indeed, Het Heem is only aired on the Flemish-speaking television channel, and has never been translated into French. Besides, the French-speaking television channels of Belgium do not produce soap operas, although they import and translate many from France, Switzerland, the United States, Colombia, etc. Could it be that the two solitudes are more “accomplished” in Belgium than in Canada? This question, as well as my assumptions regarding the reasons why Flanders and Belgium appeared to be confused at times, cannot be investigated further here, I argue, because of the lack of a clear motive underlying the work task of cultivating nationhood on the set of Het Heem. While the work-related tasks on the set of Het Heem point to the same phenomenon of cultivating nationhood that I identified in the case of Philip, I was not able to characterize a specific motive underlying the activities of the crew members creating the phenomenon in question. The relationship they have with the phenomenon and towards nationhood altogether remains for this reason unclear. In order to identify motives, I must be able to “(re)construct the social meaning of every form of interaction (linguistic and non-linguistic; faceto-face and institutional) and all types of products of action” (Reichertz, 2013: 2) observed on a field. Only in doing so can I then examine

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Nationhood at Work how subjects of action—situated and socialized in historically and socially developed, confirmed routines and interpretations of the given field of action (patterns, types, orders, structures)—on the one hand encounter and (are compelled to) appropriate these routines and interpretations, and on the other constantly lend them new interpretations and thereby (are compelled to) invent them in their own individual way. These independent reinterpretations of given knowledge are in turn fed back (similarly as knowledge) into the social field of action and change it [but] from this perspective, the action of these subjects can only be (said to have been) understood if the interpreter is able, on the basis of the collected data (interviews, observations, documents, etc.), to relate it to the given frame of reference relevant to the practice in question and show it in this way and for this situation to be one (for the actors) and sense-making (if not always purpose-rational) (Reichertz, 2013: 2, see also 2004).

Throughout my investigation, the frame of reference relevant to everyday practices is that of the work environment, and at times, when not too “far-fetched,” that of nation states. In exploring the empirical materials from work environments, I first look for the elements of workplaces that interact with the conduct of a work task—such as, in the present chapter, the economic logics of the publishing world, or again the support or obstacles that stem form other actors of the milieu—and aim to understand their impact on my participants’ actions. Second, I focus on my informants’ activities insofar as they are conducting the work tasks of interest. In so doing, I aim to reconstruct the motives underlying actions, which again allows me to understand the relationship a participant has with nationhood while conducting the task. Because intentions are not motives, reconstructing the latter through observations has to go beyond my participants’ narratives, their ways of justifying or making sense of their actions. When accounting for the empirical material, as I began doing in this chapter, I illustrate a “small social life-world as [an] enclave of consciousness [and as a] cultural world of experiences” (Eberle, 2014: 26). The ensuing thick description of the narrative reconstructs the investigated world “as experienced by people, rather than the world as it appears in the opinion of sociologists” (Honer, 2004: 116). In so doing, I reconstruct the activities of my participants that result in a specific work task—such as cultivating nationhood—in which nationhood appears as it is lived. Interpreting Philip’s activities of writing and publishing in the light of his work environment, I was able to reconstruct his main motive in cultivating nationhood: the cause of Quebec and its sovereignty. His writing and publishing activities could not plausibly be interpreted in a different way. I have throughout the interpretation of the material considered other motives, whether they be financial considerations, opportunism, empathy, or self-interest. The financial motive, for example, was discarded as being the basis of his professional activities since Philip is not engaged in a profitable market, especially when it comes to his publishing activities. The motive based

Chapter 1. Building Nations as a Profession

on empathy was initially plausible, as Philip does support the people of Quebec, but it does not allow me to convincingly explain the majority of his activities, which go beyond empathy and are rather part of a life-plan. The interpretation of the material led me to isolate the the cause of Quebec and its sovereignty as the motive underlying Philip’s work task of cultivating nationhood—although, arguably, financial and empathic incentives may at times intersect and support Philip’s actions. In Brussels, I was not able to identify such motive among the crew of Het Heem. Participating in the entertainment industry and stardom phenomenon, Het Heem appears to appoint and maintain figures representing the “cultural elites” of Flanders and Belgium while being involved in the development of emerging talents, the next generation of the “cultural elite.” To a certain extent, therefore, they can also be said to cultivate nationhood. Starting from my empirical observations, however, the work task cannot be traced back to or associated with a specific motive that I could reconstruct from the fieldwork material. While national elements are undoubtedly part of the task in question, I simply cannot specify the relationship the crew members of Het Heem have with nationhood; I cannot argue that they purposely aim to challenge, create, dissolve, restructure, or actively maintain elements as national, or defend the idea that they enact nationhood for a national cause. Perhaps I have not met with the “right” professionals of the crew members? Or is the work task of cultivating nationhood in Flanders and Belgium through Het Heem an unintended consequence of actions that have not developed from nationalist motives?

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Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies: The Work Task Dynamic Operating with Nationhood The individuals involved in the work tasks of this chapter have a relationship with nationhood that is strategically driven. In acknowledging that we live in a world divided into nations and by taking advantage of this generally accepted idea at work, my participants, in what follows, methodologically assemble what I refer to as national constructs that allow them to better accomplish their work tasks. The dynamic created by these tasks operates with and not upon nationhood. This dynamic, in comparison with the one examined in the previous chapter, is fairly common in workplaces. To construct it, I investigate three sociological encounters in which individuals elaborate strategies with nationhood that allow them to carry out their tasks in the most convenient manner. In the first sociological encounter, I work with a Brussels-based journalist and a Montreal-based teacher of French literature. I explore how they construct a national context around public figures—a politician and two poets—in order to stage and make sense of their presence in the content of a news program and a lesson. I refer to this work task as nationhood as context for staging public figures. In the second part of the chapter, I examine how individuals do business with nationhood. I divide this work task into two sociological encounters: nationhood as knowledge for selling and promoting and selling and promoting with nationhood. In the first encounter I follow a television satellite company representative based in Brussels, and a Montreal-based fruit stand manager. I investigate how nationhood-related knowledge is used to guide choices that are meant to help these individuals promote and sell products and services offered by their respective companies. In the second sociological encounter, with a Brussels-based piano seller and a Montreal-based building engineering technician, I explore how nationhood-related references are added onto products or services as a strategy that helps my participants to sell and promote them. In the third and last section of the chapter, I focus on the dynamic central to the work tasks at hand.

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2.1 N ationhood as C onte x t for S taging P ublic F igures : S haring K nowledge as a Te acher and C ommunicating I nformation as a J ournalist So often in the ‘nation-building’ policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth (A nderson 2006 [1991]: 113-114).

Contextualizing writers, poets, novelists, politicians or other public figures in a lesson, a news report, or in a mere conversation is a common-sense matter. This everyday phenomenon is most often taken for granted, especially when it comes to nationhood. In an era of nations, the education system and the media have become strong agents of the banalization of national contextualization. The existence, emergence, and maintenance of nations is in the classical theories on nationalism often attributed to state-centered education systems and mass media (Gellner 1964; 1983; 1991; 1997; Anderson 2006 [1991]; see also Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Moores, 1997). In the first sociological encounter of this chapter, I am not questioning such theories. I rather use them as premises to shed light on the ways individuals address such national contextualization processes in order to accomplish particular work tasks. Following a Brussels-based journalist and a Montreal-based teacher in French literature, I explore how they each elaborate national contexts as to stage two Québécois poets, Hector Saint-Denys Garneau and Gaston Miron, and a Brussels politician, Jos Chabert. *** On a Thursday morning in April 2014, I arrive in Brussels to meet Jeroen, a journalist from the Dutch-speaking branch of a Belgian broadcasting corporation. The metro station I step out from is located in front of the main entrance to the television station. I promptly head towards the little booth with the sign entrée des visiteurs (visitor’s entrance). Once inside, the receptionist asks me whom I am there to meet. My answer leads him to look at his computer screen, probably searching for my name on a list of the visitors of the day. Baffled, he announces that he cannot find me in his system. I tell him the name of the current affairs program Jeroen works for. In a clear but exasperated tone—as if I am wasting his time—he says that this is the entrance to the French-speak-

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

ing branch of the broadcasting complex. To have access to the Flemish part,1 he explains while pointing in a specific direction, I have to go back onto the boulevard and around the tower. My second attempt to gain access to the building in which I am to meet my informant is successful. This time the sign on the booth says bezoekers (visitors). Once inside, Jeroen greets me in English, which surprises me as I have been communicating in Dutch with the person who has established the contact between us. As we walk into a first corridor, which he refers to later as being like “the Berlin Wall,” he points to his right, indicating that everything on that side of the corridor is the French part, whereas the Flemish part of the broadcasting station is to the left. Arriving in the main office space, he introduces me to a few of his colleagues, and assigns me a place to carry out my observations while he conducts his tasks. About an hour later, we attend the morning meeting where the journalists and directors of the current affairs program for which Jeroen works decide on the content of their daily broadcast. This is a moment, as Jeroen asserts in the interview, where “we look at what is happening, and what is on people’s mind[s]” (Interview 04/18/2014).2 Various subjects come up: one journalist mentions an interest in a worldwide internet virus; another one suggests that they could talk about the Belgian contributions to the Solar Impulse plane; someone else offers to contact a Belgian expert who could talk about the crisis in Ukraine; Jeroen proposes to cover a story on a women’s football team from Leuven. He says that since women’s football is not as popular here as in other countries such as Sweden, the United States, and— he turns around to look at me—Canada, it would be nice to give the women more exposure by doing a cover story on their team. When leaving the meeting, he informs me that they will now all be busy on their telephones, trying to contact people to comment on the potential topics for the day. He says that today’s program will cover the Ukraine and the Leuven women’s football team. Later that day, Jeroen and I do end up going to Leuven, but to cover a completely different story than the one that has just been brought up in the morning brainstorming session. ***

1 | For reasons of confidentiality I have not given the actual names for the two sections of the television station, nor for the current affairs program. 2 | The interview was conducted in English. Although I first started our conversation in his language Jeroen insisted throughout our days together on not speaking Dutch. He preferred English, but also French at times. He obviously felt comfortable in both languages.

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Let me now turn from the topics of a Flemish-language current affairs program in Brussels to the choices Mathieu, a teacher of French literature at a French-speaking college in Montreal, a Cégep,3 makes for the contents of a lesson. On a Wednesday morning in November 2013, as we walk into his office decorated with, among other things, a poster entitled L’arbre du théâtre québécois de jeu—an object that momentarily captures my attention—I ask what the upcoming lesson is about. He answers that it is concerned with French-language poets, and that today he is beginning the section of the course dedicated to poets from Quebec. Following a stop to fill our coffee cups, we arrive in the classroom. As the lesson begins, he announces the day’s theme by saying that, after last week’s French poets, the lesson will now dive into Québécois poetry. After giving a few reminders about organizational matters, Mathieu’s introductory comments on the lesson catch my interest: he explains that Hector SaintDenys Garneau was the first modern poet from Quebec, the first to break with fixed verse. He adds that Garneau was influenced by poetry from France and that he helped Québécois poetry make the transition into modernity; that his career was brief, but that he radically changed the literary universe in Quebec. Curious about Mathieu’s choice of this particular poet for the introductory lesson, I plan to address this issue as soon as I have the opportunity. Once back in his office after the lesson, however, my attention is once again drawn towards the poster on the wall. Interested to hear how he would frame what is on display in the room, I ask about his office settings and decor. After lingering for a moment on the position of the desks and furniture, which are arranged to maximize space, he focuses on the decorations and what I am truly interested in. He mentions that the poster of L’arbre du théâtre québécois de jeu is quite ugly. He asserts that he has only put it there because a colleague designed it and gave a copy to everybody in the department. Once my attention is brought back to the content of the class, I ask him if a specific program is imposed on his lessons, or if he has the freedom to plan his classes as he wishes. He responds in the affirmative to the latter, adding that there are no time periods or authors assigned. As long as he talks about poets who write in French, his classes can apparently take any direction he likes. Therefore, he adds, he chooses the writers he deems most important and the ones in which he is most interested. From what I have come to know about Mathieu’s literary interests, I think I can safely assume that Garneau is of the first category: an important writer in whom he is not necessarily interested. An example of a poet from the second 3 | The acronym “Cégep” stands for Collège d’enseigenement general et professionnel (General and Professional College). It is unique to the province of Quebec. It was implemented in the 1960s to encourage the Québécois to gain access to post-secondary education. At the time, in comparison with other provinces, Quebec had a low rate of post-graduate students working towards and obtaining degrees.

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

category would be Gaston Miron: a writer discussed in class during my other days of observation at the College. Mathieu’s introduction of Miron is embedded in a sociohistorical contextualization of the writer. He starts his lecture by saying that in the 1960s, a true culture took form in Quebec as it was emerging from the Grande noirceur (Great Darkness) of the forties and the fifties, a period in which the Church constantly exercised censorship. He says that the seventies were milestone years in Quebec, that a poetic identity emerged in tandem with important historical events, and that during this era, the people and the artistic community of the French-speaking province supported Miron and the others from l’Hexagone.4 He asserts that a whole generation of poets followed in the footsteps of Miron and his movement, which he describes as a plea for the French language, Québécois poetry, and la patrie. Before covering the poet’s work, Mathieu lingers on elements from Miron’s life. He mentions that he was descended from a family of blacksmiths in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, a village where, as Mathieu phrases it, the French-speaking population was constantly adopting the language of the numerous English-speaking tourists who came to vacation there in the summer. Mathieu says that this was an important experience in the poet’s life that exercised considerable influence on his work, in the sense that inferiority complexes and the alienation of French-Canadians were constant themes in his poetry.5 After this biographical and sociohistorical contextualization, Mathieu explores Miron’s poems. One of the first poems he talks about has Montreal as its subject. Commenting on Miron’s writing, Mathieu says that the poet ironically thought Montreal was at the time the greatest English-speaking francophone city in the world. Mathieu shortly steps away from the poem to go back to contextualizing elements, and mentions that if we have the feeling that there is a great cleavage between English speakers and French speakers in the city today, it was, according to his impression, even more so at the time. He adds that there were no linguistic laws back then, and that when people walked on the Main,6 which is now the rue Saint-Laurent, everything was in English. Mathieu continues with comments describing the whole of Miron’s work, saying that he was a very didactic poet, even a pamphleteer, which leads Mathieu to wonder if

4 | A publisher co-founded by Miron that still exists today. 5 | Before the seventies, citizens of the province of Quebec were referred to as French Canadians, like any other French-speaking Canadians of Canadian provinces. Only in the seventies, with the Révolution tranquille (Quiet revolution), did the term “Québécois” emerge (see the introduction of the book). 6 | The English term was used, which was also a more common name to refer to Saint-Laurent at the time.

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there is actually anything poetic to be found in his work. In his view, there is, no doubt, because the texts have a certain rhythm. After showing a documentary about the poet’s life, work, and generation, Mathieu finishes his class by concluding that Miron’s work is one of love, but also of patriotism, as the love for the homeland is never far from his poems. Drawing on examples of such themes, Mathieu asserts that we can see metaphors for certain aspects of Québécois life throughout the poet’s oeuvre. He says that we can always discern a national sentiment in Miron’s work because the dream of the nation is constantly present, though other readings are possible. In light of Mathieu’s presentations of Garneau and Miron, I have at this point no doubt about the presence and the significance of nationhood in his classroom. But how does it shape Mathieu’s activity of sharing knowledge in a lesson? Or is it Mathieu who is shaping nationhood? *** I return to Brussels. Shortly after the morning meeting, I am sitting at a table not far from where Jeroen and the other journalists are busy making phone calls when suddenly a discussion about a certain Jos Chabert begins. From a distance, all I can grasp is that this person seems constantly to be appearing in photos with the king, and that no one in the newsroom really knows much about him. Later, during lunch, Jeroen informs me of our afternoon schedule. Since they have just learned about the death of an ex-minister, Jos Chabert, he has been instructed to postpone his report on women’s football and instead cover this story that has just come in. As the topic changes, so do the objectives, which Jeroen promptly summarizes to me. He says that Jos Chabert, as he has just learned, did many important things in his time, and this is what we will focus on in our coverage because the younger generation, like the two of us, does not know about him and his accomplishments. Jeroen continues his short monologue by adding that as minister, Chabert imposed mandatory seat belts, speed limits on highways, and intoxication controls on the roads. He concludes that Chabert was very present in media coverage because he apparently always wanted to be seen on television. As we collect interviews from a deputy at the Belgian Parliament, a minister of the Brussels-Capital Region in his office, and an ex-prime minister of Belgium at his house in Leuven, I quickly realize that Jeroen mainly tries to explore, at first, two themes mentioned earlier: the pleasant and sympathetic individual who always wanted to be in front of the cameras, and the minister of transport who imposed numerous new regulations on drivers. However, a third theme emerges as we go from one place to another: the tolerant community unifier of Brussels who did everything he could to bring Flemish-speaking and French-speaking Belgians together and to make the city a truly bilingual

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community.7 The first occurrence of this new theme, during our first interview at the Parliament, makes Jeroen realize—it seems to me—that he needs to further explore the topic of Chabert, the Brussels unifier. In the upcoming interviews, he indeed adds this dimension to his questions, and gathers information on the matter. Once in the editing room, this third point, in keeping with Jeroen’s initial objective to inform the younger generation about Chabert’s most important accomplishments, becomes prominent. All of his interviewees had something to say about Chabert’s community-uniting ambitions. The idea of the nation, through this last topic, further imposes itself as a theme to explore a public figure. It becomes a part of, as Jeroen recalls in the interview, “what people should know” (Interview 04/18/2014) in the content of his story: it is information to be communicated on the daily broadcast of a current affairs program. If nationhood here seems to become a theme to explore in a news event, similar to how in Mathieu’s case it appears as a theme exploring the works of poets, what impact does it have on the information to be communicated, or on the knowledge to be shared? *** According to what I observed with Mathieu, students attending an introductory lesson on Québécois poets should know that Hector Saint-Denys Garneau was the first modern poet from Quebec. However, it appears that, except in an introductory lesson on Québécois poets, there is little reason to bring up Garneau, something Mathieu seems to be completely aware of. In his introductory remarks on Garneau, the category nation, through the term Quebec, is used to frame a national group and a vague temporal era in order to give a sense of relevance to the poet and his work. Nevertheless, outside of the context of this specific space, the author’s writings might not have been chosen to illustrate anything of literary interest. Mathieu even mentions that, without the contact with another national group (namely that of France), Garneau might not have taken up the way of writing he is known for in Quebec today. Moreover, his work would be of no interest outside Quebec. Thus, nationhood not only frames the group and temporal era to underscore the originality of the poet Garneau, it can be argued that the national context of Quebec is actually the only reason why Mathieu chooses to talk about this specific author in his lesson. To talk about Garneau outside Quebec would be worthless since his work has not much literary value, at least in the way my informant frames and 7 | As a reminder: “community,” in the Belgium context, refers to the federated entities of the (linguistic) communities (communautés, gemeenschappen). In this case, I am talking about the French-speaking community and the Flemish-speaking community which overlap in Brussels.

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talks about his work. Only the poet’s group origin and belonging make him of interest. Mathieu seems to know this, but as he emphasizes, he feels that he needs to teach the most important French-language poets, and not just those he likes. Since he has decided to frame his lessons with the national groups of, among others, France and Quebec, he seems to feel that an introductory class on Québécois poets without Garneau would be incomplete. Miron is presented as another poet students should know about in the lesson on Québécois poetry. Mathieu’s emphasis on Miron’s biography and Quebec’s historical context during his time seems to be what justifies the writer’s importance in Quebec poetry and his inclusion in the lesson. Not only did the people of the artistic community in Quebec, in Mathieu’s words, support Miron, a whole generation of poets followed in his footsteps and a poetic identity emerged in Quebec at that time. Moreover, since the poet’s main theme is, as Mathieu teaches it, his love for the fatherland, one must, according to Mathieu, also be aware of Miron’s biography and Quebec’s historical context to grasp the importance of this public figure. Not to have such a contextualization would, presumably, not do justice to Miron’s work. Therefore, a national narrative beyond a few words on the poet’s generation is needed, something Mathieu again seems to be aware of. In one of our conversations during a break, I ask Mathieu about the purpose of all these sociohistorical elements. He simply answers that he mentions them in order to help his students understand the context in which the writings he teaches were produced. To this, he adds that you cannot talk about Baudelaire without invoking La prise de la Bastille (the storming of the Bastille). He then says that if he did not talk much about sociohistorical elements today (the day of the lesson on Garneau), he says that he still expects that a student working on a specific author for a term paper would look up the information by him or herself. What Mathieu writes on the board in the classroom when teaching, indeed, does not contain sociohistorical context information. It focuses only on the analytical themes, keywords, and linguistic concepts in order to help the students grasp the essential content of the lesson. The sociohistorical context information appears as a secondary learning object, but it is used, as I later argue, to justify Garneau’s and Miron’s inclusion in the lesson and facilitate the sharing of knowledge. *** I return now to Brussels. For Jeroen’s TV audience, Chabert’s origins are, as far as I can observe, not immediately of interest, unlike the case of the poets. A sociohistorical contextualization of Chabert’s political work, however, is a part of the story in Jeroen’s presentation on him, just as it is for Mathieu’s treatment of the content of his lessons. When Chabert’s work as a tolerant community

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

builder becomes one of the themes of the reportage, a context revolving around the sociopolitical aspect of Brussels in the 1970s is put into place. Compared to Mathieu, Jeroen does not have much time to assemble his presentation, but after noticing that a national theme is of importance while conducting his very first interview, he leaps into action, quickly adjusting his questions as we go on looking for potential interviewees during the day to gather information on Chabert’s political work and legacy. After reviewing and selecting the material to create his story, Jeroen, once in the editing booth, looks into the station’s archives for old news coverage concerning Chabert, which he uses to illustrate the comments he has collected. His story, in the end, does deal with Chabert’s accomplishments as Minister of Transport, but it mainly covers his efforts to unite Flemish-speaking and French-speaking Belgians to make Brussels a truly bilingual city in order to calm the community conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. In the final story we see Chabert in parliament commissions discussing the bilingual status of Brussels, reaching out to reluctant colleagues on the matter, and ensuring that he sees a brighter future for Brussels. The story becomes a national context for staging Chabert and his accomplishments. Having constructed a sociological encounter between Jeroen and Mathieu, I aim to further explore in what follows how Jeroen and Mathieu draw a national context for staging public figures. To do so, I break down the encounter. First, I explore elements of the workplaces that had an impact on the conduct of the tasks. Second, I reconstruct Jeroen’s and Mathieu’s actions in order to unveil the motive underlying the accomplishment of their work tasks, and their relationship with nationhood.

2.1.1 The Bias Towards Nationhood-Related Topics: Education,Journalism, and Methodological Nationalism As illustrated in the encounter, both participants think of their main tasks— at least the ones I observed during the fieldwork—as activities in which they share and communicate knowledge and information to a given public: a class of students in Mathieu’s case, a TV audience in Jeroen’s case. Even though there is no doubt that my informants have agency in these activities, a matter that I develop below, I firstly want to identify and examine what seems to be the most important workplace elements impacting my informants’ tasks: the bias towards nationhood-related topics in their activities of sharing and communicating knowledge and information assigned by their respective work environments. The topic of Mathieu’s class constitutes such an assignment. When describing his task in response to my question on the way he structures the content of his lessons, he asserted that out of all the French-language poets (the topic of the course), he has selected the most important authors and the ones he

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likes the most. Even though this does give him a wide range of poets to choose from, a limit is still set through a specific topic. The assignment of Jeroen’s work environment is, in his words, “what is happening, and what is on people’s mind[s].” When choosing the stories for the content of the current affairs program, however wide such coverage might be, the content is still limited to particular events and interests. I think of these assignments as elements of work environments guiding Mathieu and Jeroen’s activities. A broadcasting station and a college, of course, tend to produce nationhood-related subjects, topics, or points of view. As Ernest Gellner famously argues, it is largely through the educational system that states have “created” nations (1964; 1983). In turn, “modern educational systems explain the cultural identifications that move so many human beings” towards one nation or another (O’Leary, 1997: 194). Benedict Anderson’s theory on the creation of imagined communities (2006 [1991]; see also Castiñera, 2011) not only suggests that print capitalism made modern education systems possible, but also that it allowed the emergence of mass media such as contemporary journalism, a profession often seen as playing “a fundamental role in the formation of national identity” (Pintak, 2009: 191). Jeroen’s and Mathieu’s assignments participate in methodological nationalism by taking nations as unquestioned “natural social form[s]” (idem.). But how do my participants understand this national bias assigned to their work tasks? Having to teach a class on francophone poets has necessarily limited and framed Mathieu’s choices for the composition of his lessons. But above all, it has probably led him to first think of his teaching content in terms of the authors’ country of origin, as opposed to, say, their topics or the time periods they lived in. A language is often associated with a sociopolitical space or, in other words, a nation(-state); Mathieu seemed to select authors stemming from these determined regions and to think of them in nationhood-related terms. In fact, the encounter revealed that he had divided his course into lessons by concentrating on poets sharing the same origins, in chronological order from the oldest and up to contemporary authors. In the same vein, the assignment of Jeroen’s workplace involves similar attributes, which has also led him to think in nationhood-related terms. Focusing on “what is happening, and what is on people’s mind[s],” Jeroen unambiguously referred to the fact that he has to limit his news coverage to current—as in today’s or ongoing—events, and people’s current interests in public affairs: the people who watch the program most likely live in or have an interest in (the Dutch-speaking part of) Belgium. Moreover, as he also clarified in the interview, there needs to be “enough domestic stuff, and enough foreign affairs stuff” (Jeroen, interview 04/18/2014) on the daily show. The covered stories, therefore, must be about current events and of current interest to the viewers, but also delimited and described in what seems to be the terms of diplomacy or international politics: the domestic—according to

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

Jeroen’s location—probably Belgium, or less probably, Wallonia, Brussels, or Flanders; and the foreign, outside the country. Defined as such, the stories to be reported on can be thought of as depending on national categories: the territory and its people. As described in the sociological encounter, the death of a Belgian minister on the eve of the day I was with Jeroen became his cover story: a local current affair which is most likely, because of its recent occurrence, of interest to the viewers of his program. Therefore, the bias towards nationhood-related topics implemented in Mathieu’s and Jeroen’s work environments induces a national aspect onto their main activity. It limits, to a certain extent, the knowledge and information to be transmitted to nationhood-related subjects. While it is indeed through powerful institutions such as the media and the education system that national logics reproduce nationhood as a structure of the social world that is taken for granted (Billig, 1995: 38-40), the agency and awareness of the individuals shaping or taking part in the formation of these logics should not be ignored. While the workplaces of my informants may define the parameters of their tasks by assigning nationhood-related topics to them, the sharing and communicating processes are elaborated by Jeroen and Mathieu themselves.

2.1.2 Properly Fulfilling Tasks: Elaborating National Contexts In order to better understand the agency of my participants in the process of framing their topics, I now examine Jeroen and Mathieu’s actions in the context of the sociological encounter. The limitation to nationhood-related subjects induced by the two workplaces resulted in the appearance of public figures and some of their accomplishments in the work tasks of my informants. The way this content is actually shared and communicated by my participants, however, needs to be further explored in order to understand Jeroen’s and Mathieu’s involvement in the tasks constructing national contexts. A nationhood-related subject undoubtedly needs to be minimally framed by nationhood, but how is it brought about in practice, and how does this framing come into play with regard to the information and knowledge to be transmitted? In both of my informant’s activities, the sociological encounter revealed public figures as well as their accomplishments as central to the shared and communicated knowledge and information. The significance of this centrality, however, is dependent on the context in which it is framed. As sociologist William A. Gamson notes: “Facts have no intrinsic meaning. They take on their meaning by being embedded in a frame or story line that organizes them and given them coherence, selecting certain ones to emphasize while ignoring others” (1989: 157). My participants know this. In their mind, without a proper contextualization, the information and knowledge cannot be effectively transmitted, meaning that what Mathieu’s and Jeroen’s audiences should know in a

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class on French-language poets and a current affairs daily program could lose its value or hardly make sense. Most of all, this information and knowledge could fail to be assimilated through the communication and the sharing process—at least in my informants’ views. Once heard, it could then easily be forgotten, discarded, or misunderstood: a factor of concern to both of my Mathieu and Jeroen. In order to maximize the success of their tasks, Mathieu and Jeroen carefully planned and took the time to elaborate the required context allowing them to frame the public figures by searching for the adequate material in articles, books, archives or other sources The appearance of each public figure and their accomplishments is then not only justified in the classroom and in the program by the context it is framed in, it also most likely—according to my participants—becomes meaningful, i.e., the context may make sense or be known by the public. Because Garneau’s work constitutes a decisive turning point in Quebec’s poetry, Mathieu mentioned and elaborated on Quebec’s literary universe of that time. Since Miron’s poems reflecting his love for the fatherland are deeply personal, but also exercised their influence on a whole generation of Québécois poets, Mathieu developed a biographical and a generational contextualization of the writer by exploring, among other things, the linguistic issues of the province. Finally, since Chabert is mostly remembered and described by his peers as a community unifier aiming to make Brussels truly bilingual, Jeroen, even though he did not plan at first to elaborate on this topic, reframed his questions as he met the interviewees in order to include this aspect and retrieved more information on the matter. Having reached the editing room, he looked into the television station’s archives to find footage materials to support and frame this third and unexpected theme. In brief, Jeroen and Mathieu understand that mentioning a public figure’s accomplishments involves constructing the context in which they become significant, and they both emphasize this context. After searching for and gathering the appropriate material to elaborate an adequate contextual framework for sharing and communicating the interests underlying each public figure, it appears that my informants undeniably found, through the construction of a narrative around nationhood, a fruitful context to stage Garneau, Miron, and Chabert in their respective lesson and program. This staging, in accordance with the assignments of their work environments, explains the presence of each public figure in the content of Mathieu’s lesson and of Jeroen’s news coverage, but it also asserts the poets’ significance and the politician’s accomplishments. Strategically framing these into contexts that most likely make sense and are meaningful to a majority of my participants’ audiences, Garneau, Miron, and Chabert appear in their eyes as actors or representatives of accomplishments that these audiences should know about. In so doing, presumably, Mathieu and Jeroen hope to effectively share and com-

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

municate the intended information and knowledge: their main activity at work. Therefore, as I understand it, their intention is not simply to accomplish this task of transmitting these figures’ accomplishment; indeed, it is to accomplish it in a successful way. Mathieu mentions in this respect that you cannot talk about Baudelaire without mentioning the storming of the Bastille, whereas Jeroen says that he is looking for the information that the younger generation should have about Chabert, meaning that he does not wish to simply communicate the news of the ex-minister’s death. Therefore, I suggest that the main motive underlying their elaboration of national contexts is that of successfully accomplishing their tasks. It does not primarily come from nationalist interests, nor is it related to a compliant enactment with regard to nationhood or the biases induced by their work environments. Reporting Garneau, Miron, or Chabert’s accomplishments would technically be possible without the construction of national contexts. Without these contexts, however, Mathieu and Jeroen would probably believe or have the impression that their jobs are not properly fulfilled. The knowledge and information would be shared with and communicated to their public, but it would most likely be, in my informants’ mind, meaningless to many students or viewers, and it would presumably be forgotten, discarded. The motive underlying Jeroen’s and Mathieu’s actions guides them to construct a meaningful context: to understand the importance of Garneau’s work, one must at the same time understand Quebec’s literary universe; to seize Miron’s poems and literary significance, one must know about his biography and his generation; and to grasp Chabert’s legacy in politics, one must be aware of his role as a community unifier in Brussels and thus the sociopolitical context of the city in the 1970s. Nationhood as context for staging public figures can be summed up as follows: individuals whose main activity is to share and communicate information and knowledge to a given public in a work environment which imposes nationhood-related subjects will not simply share and communicate the information and knowledge itself. If they are driven by the will to successfully accomplish their tasks, they will most likely gather the required elements to construct and elaborate a context in which nationhood frames the subjects, and situate them in a context that most likely makes sense to the public. Such a strategy, when successful, is meant to favor the reception of the knowledge and information in the content of the day and, at the same time, justify its interest. In what follows, I explore the activities of individuals that also elaborate strategies involving national elements as to help them accomplish their work tasks.

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2.2 D oing B usiness with N ationhood : A R epresentative , a M anager , a S eller , and a Technician in N ational M arke t s Ethno-nationalism is becoming a common feature of neoliberal times and is insinuating itself into the heart of the liberal nation-state […] giving rise to what we may dub Nationality, Inc. (C omaroff and C omaroff, 2009: 118).

A post on a social media account says: Le 12 août, j’achète un livre québécois (on the 12th of August, I buy a Québécois book). The post refers to a campaign launched in 2014 by two Québécois authors who refused governmental support to help them with their initiatives (Bachand, 2015). It invites readers to buy a Québécois book “to promote and to make our culture shine, to support an author from here” (Cazeault and Dubé, 2015, my translation).8 Reports say that on the 12th of August 2014, 49% more Québécois books were sold than on any other day of the year, which undoubtedly helped authors from Quebec, but also Québécois businesses depending on book sales (Blais, 2015). Advertising products or services with the help of terms such as “Québécois,” “Flemish,” “Belgian,” or “Montrealer” is commonplace. It is, however, far from trivial. The purpose behind this campaign may be understood as a strategy to encourage individuals to adopt an “ethnocentric customer behavior,” at least for a day, with regard to one type of merchandise. The idea underlying the consumer ethnocentrism concept is the belief that “purchasing imported products is wrong [because] it hurts the domestic economy, causes loss of jobs, and is plainly unpatriotic” (Shimp and Sharma, 1987: 280). In this perspective, buying a Québécois book on the 12th of August could give individuals “a sense of identity, feelings of belongingness, and […] an understanding of what purchase behavior is acceptable or unacceptable to the ingroup; […] products from other countries (i.e., outgroups) [being] objects of contempt” (ibid.). The two Québécois authors of the social media page advertising the campaign perhaps sought, by inviting the citizens of Quebec to buy a Québécois book, to instigate an ethical economy and communal pride responsiveness in order to sustain and promote their culture and their authors; to sustain, in other words, the Québécois book business. But as studies show, such campaigns are not necessarily required in order for individuals to favor the purchase of products with which they identify. Authors from the fields of business management and marketing have conducted investigations using the 8 | “Pour faire vivre et rayonner notre culture, pour soutenir un auteur d’ici” (Cazeault and Dubé, 2015).

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

consumer ethnocentrism concept, often by combining it with the country of origin effect on buyers. Results tend to confirm ethnocentric behavior in customers. These results also provide some nuances by underlining the influence of social characteristics other than ethnicity, such as gender and age (Lee et al., 2010; Josiassen, et al., 2011), an individual’s openness—or non-openness—towards others (Vida et al., 2008; Dmitrovic and Vida, 2009), and the judgment of the quality of a product (Dmitrovic and Vida, 2009). The participants I work with in this second part of the chapter are doing business with nationhood. They are, among other things, passively aware of the country of origin effects and of consumer ethnocentric behaviors. They apply, or at least take into consideration, the notions underlying such concepts while conducting their work tasks. Although they do not openly mention or articulate the implication of these notions in practice, the combination of marketing and nationhood is reflected in their actions when promoting and selling the products or services of their companies. In exploring the work task I refer to as doing business with nationhood, I construct two sociological encounters: nationhood as knowledge for promoting and selling, and promoting and selling with nationhood. In the first encounter, I work with Damien, a representative of a satellite company based in Brussels, and Jean, a Montreal-based fruit stand manager. I examine how nationhood-related knowledge is used to guide choices that are meant to help them promote and sell their products and services. In the second sociological encounter, with William, a Brussels-based piano seller, and Étienne, a Montreal-based building engineer technician, I investigate how nationhood-related references are added onto products and services as a strategy to help my participants sell them.

2.2.1 Nationhood as Knowledge for Promoting and Selling… On the 2nd of July 2014, I meet with Damien at the train station of Braine-l’Alleud, a “suburb-distance” commune of Brussels located in Wallonia and bordering Flanders. The only information I have about his job is that he is the representative of a Brussels-based satellite dish company. Waiting in front of the station, he picks me up with his car. After we introduce ourselves, our conversation moves towards the Belgian football game of the night before, which the Belgians won. Damien, a French speaker in his early thirties, is quite enthusiastic about the victory leading his team to the quarterfinal of the FIFA World Cup. Having discussed these football issues, I ask him to explain what his tasks in the satellite dish company consist of. He informs me that he works

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for BigTV,9 an American company providing satellite television services. In the interview that follows a few weeks later, he more concisely explains that BigTV is a firm that bought satellite rights, TV rights for satellites. So they are the owners of these rights and in each country in which they are present, they implanted a firm that takes care of distribution and the marketing of products that are in fact packages of TV channels, you know, and there, I myself work for one of these firms, for Belgium. Dave: And this is only covering Belgium SatTV right? Damien: Right, SatTV is for the whole of Belgium, yet it is essentially for French speakers, and then there is SatVlaanderen, which is the exact same product but with Dutch-speaking channels. And then in other countries there’s SatDigital in the Netherlands, there’s SatTVLux [in Luxemburg], there’s SatAustria in Austria, and there’s again Czech Republic and Slovakia. Dave: And SatTV and SatVlaanderen opened at the same time? Is there a link between them? Damien: No, no, so, yes they have links in the sense that they have the same offices, it is the same management. They are the same people, so to say, that work for the two brands, aside from the marketing that has a French-speaking team and a Dutch-speaking team. But no, SatVlaanderen, I cannot even tell you exactly which year [it was founded in]. I think that SatVlaanderen was in 2005, something like that, and SatTV arrived end of 2008, beginning of 2009 (Interview, 06/19/2014).10

9 | Fictional names are used to replace the actual company names of my informants and their branches throughout this part. 10 | “Damien: BigTV est une société qui a acheté des droits satellites, des droits de TV pour les satellites. En fait eux ils sont propriétaire de ces droits et dans chaque pays où ils sont présents, ils ont implantés une société qui s’occupe de la distribution et du marketing, de produits qui sont en fait des bouquets de chaine tv quoi, et voilà, moi je travaille pour une de ces sociétés, pour la Belgique. Dave: Et c’est que couvert en Belgique SatTv, c’est ça? Damien: Voilà, SatTv c’est pour toute la Belgique, maintenant c’est essentiellement pour les francophones, et puis y’a SatVlaanderen, qui est exactement le même produit mais avec des chaines néerlandophones. Et alors dans les autres y’a SatDigital aux Pays-Bas, y’a tv SatTvLux [au Luxembourg], y’a SatAustria en Autriche, puis y’a encore la Tchéquie et la Slovaquie. Dave: Et SatTv et SatVlaanderen, ils ont ouvert en même temps? Est-ce qu’ils ont des liens?

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

After these clarifications about his company, Damien—in what seems to be an entrepreneurial tone—announces his plans for the day. He lists the places he wants us to visit. None of them, to my surprise, are actually located in Brussels; they all are in Wallonia. I ask him if he covers Brussels and Wallonia, or only the latter. He answers that he covers both, but that some cities, including Brussels, do not allow their citizens to have satellite dishes on their properties. He adds that this impediment is illegal, because the European Union clearly underlines that people may inform themselves in whichever way they want. However, he adds, no one is seriously contesting the law banning satellite dishes in Brussels. For this reason, the business market of SatTV is mainly located in Wallonia. More precisely, the market is located in regions far from large cities: “15 km from a city [where] neither Belgacom or other companies have installed cables,”11 as he recalls in the interview (06/19/2014).12 Our first stop is at one of Damien’s company wholesalers, one among the few they have in Wallonia, as he mentions. Driving into the empty parking lot, he says that most of their wholesalers are located in Flanders, but that customers from Wallonia living near those located north of the linguistic border prefer to drive father in order to stay in the south and be served in their own language. He adds a comment, without finishing it, by saying that Flemings anyway are… and he then draws a line with his hand vertically flat going from his eyes straight towards his sight of view—as if, I imagine, he thinks of them as “rigid,” “straight,” or hard to address. Telling me this, we remain in the car, although the location appears to be our first destination as it has advertisements for satellite dishes and other electronic devices. When I wonder aloud why we are not stepping out the car, he says that the shop is not yet opened because, according to him, store owners in Wallonia do not like to open before 10 a.m. Once in the store Damien presents a new system to help customers solve technical problems to the wholesaler. It is a support call center that customers having difficulties with their products or services can call. He continues his presentation by saying that the center is already operational in Flanders, and that it works really well. In reply to this comment, the owner of the store says that such services always work better in Flanders, and that in general everyDamien: Non non, alors, oui ils ont des liens dans le sens où ce sont les mêmes bureaux, c’est le même management. Ce sont les mêmes gens on va dire qui travaillent pour les deux marques, mise à part au marketing où y’a une équipe francophone et y’a une équipe néerlandophone. Mais non, SatVlaanderen, je ne sais même plus te dire exactement quelle année. Je crois que SatVlaanderen est apparue en 2005, quelque chose comme ça, et SatTv lui est arrivé fin 2008 début 2009” (Interview, 06/19/2014). 11 | Belgacom is another Belgian telecommunication company. 12 | “15 km d’une ville [où] ni Belgacom, ni d’autres compagnies ont posé des câbles” (Interview, 06/19/2014).

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thing always works better in Flanders—without mentioning any specific reasons why. Damien agrees and attempts to provide an explanation: he says that the market is different in Flanders, because Flemings always take the small package of channels, the light one,13 and buy the decoder, whereas the Walloons choose to take more channels and rent the decoder because they want to be able to let the contract go any time they want—possibly a speculative interpretation, I tell myself. In so doing, Damien says that there are fewer customers calling about rental issues in Flanders than in Wallonia, which are generally more complicated than other service matters. He also adds that Wallonians in general, and in some regions such as Charleroi in particular, tend to complain a lot—hence the higher number of calls and greater problems with the offered services to resolve technical problems. As Damien is about to conclude his discussion with the wholesaler, he looks out the window and asks if the recreational vehicle parked outside with a satellite dish is his. His question is met with an affirmative response. The wholesaler adds that the RV is for sale, and that the dish is formatted for SatVlaanderen—thus not SatTV, the francophone counterpart of the Belgian TV satellite dish firm. Damien replies that it should then not be too hard to sell since Dutch speakers frequently go camping with such vehicles. For the rest of the day, indeed, Damien and I will be very much busy selling, promoting, and answering questions about SatVlaanderen in Belgian regions where camping sites are commonplace. *** Jean, my Montreal informant, works in the food industry. More precisely, he works as a manager for a seasonal fruit stand outside a metro station. When I meet him at dawn on a 15th of September, he does not have much time to introduce me to his workplace, tasks, and colleagues. He informs me that he has to finish filling in a list of orders for the upcoming week. While I am waiting, he invites me to sit at a small table next to the cashier, and offers me some coffee. Jean seems to feel sorry about this and is apologetic about the situation. But, of course, it does not bother me; it even suits me. My position offers a great opportunity to freely observe the work environment and the ongoing tasks conducted by a few other employees: some are unpacking and displaying fruits and vegetables, homemade pies, candies, and granola bars; one is busy opening the greenhouse section of the stand, taking out some of the flowers and plants in order to display them outside; another one is making coffee; and some employees inside a small caravan converted into a kitchen are preparing sandwiches and other meals sold in a small refrigerator near the entrance of the stand. 13 | English term used in the discussion.

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

Wandering around the stand, what strikes me at first is a basket of garlic with a black and yellow sign clipped on it. The sign states in the top left corner the name of the fruit stand, and in the top right corner it says ail (garlic), with the inscription produit du Québec (product of Quebec) with the flag of Quebec province underneath. The price of the product covers the remaining space on the sign. I continue walking around the stand. All of the displayed products are boldly tagged with their place of origin: there are peaches from Ontario, honeydew melons from California, shallots from Saint-Rémi, Quebec, fresh herbs from Saint-Jacques-le-Mineur, etc. Only the products from the province of Quebec, such as the two last ones listed state the specific villages from which they are from, mostly villages I am unfamiliar with. Aside from this information— the name of the stand, the provenance, and the price—only the term biologique is to be found on some products; sometimes beside its English equivalent, organic. A sticker stating Québec in white on a blue background with darker blue fleurs de lys (lilies) is the item I see most frequently on the stand. These stickers seem to be glued to every single product from Quebec. For example, it is affixed to every bunch of broccoli lying in a basket on which a clipped dark and yellow sign advertises the price and the name of the product with, once again, a Quebec flag next to the word Québec. Once Jean finds some time to talk, he lets me know that he will probably not be very busy that day. He explains that rushed periods occur mainly in the early morning; although there are few customers, the companies providing their products like to receive their orders at this time. Discussing conveniences of such work schedules, our conversation then turns towards the possible new federal law that would not allow seasonal workers to receive unemployment money from governments during the low season of their respective professions. This appears to be a palpable concern for Jean and his colleagues. They all have seasonal jobs as employees of a stand that only operates during the summer season. The stand is only open from May until October as well as in December to sell Christmas trees—a period in which not many employees are required, a fraction of the ones working during the high season. After telling me about this issue—which was at the time not yet legally settled14 —Jean mentions that it could be hard for the stand to maintain its economic viability if the law were to be adopted. Moreover, most employees would find a more permanent job, and not come back for the summer season. He says that he hopes a solution or a middle ground can be found because, after fighting with the borough in the last year to preserve the presence of the stand by demonstrating that the citizens wanted it to stay, it would be hurtful to see the stand shut down. 14 | A change in government after the 2015 Canadian federal election cancelled the intended changes to the seasonal worker program which the conservative government had wanted to implement.

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Political issues aside, I ask Jean if they always have so many products from Quebec throughout the season. He answers by admitting that it is true that they are abundant at the moment, but that this is not always the case. He adds that as soon as fruits and vegetables come to be available on the market, the stand usually has them. People, he adds, always ask for them too early in the season because they probably do not understand that they do not grow here during winter. When, during the interview, I ask Jean about the main criteria on which they base their choices about the products to sell, he answers: Well, it’s mainly for the vegetables, because the fruits, well, in Quebec we have small fruits, you know, strawberries, raspberries, but other than that there’s not much, but as soon as there are vegetables, for example when bell peppers from Quebec are out we take stuff from Quebec. Sometimes we will wait a little, because the prices are always very high in the beginning, and then they stabilize, they go down, and at the end they go up again you know. But we do not wait so long, and as soon as we can we take vegetables from Quebec [...] it’s the same producer that our boss has been dealing with for years, so he goes to see him and at some point he sees the guy and says “well you know the lettuce, is that coming soon,” and then he’ll say “next week we’ll have some,” so then he stops buying lettuce from the States, and he buys lettuce from Quebec as soon as he can. Dave: So he makes the choice of buying here? Jean: Yes that’s it, that’s one of the points on which I think people make the difference between the small market or going to the grocery store you know, although in the grocery store they will also sell stuff from Quebec, but you know, if we did not sell things from Quebec here also we would lose our specificity compared to other big stores markets you know. Dave: You think that some people only come here because you actually have more choices from Quebec? Jean: Yes yes of course, I think that… Dave: How would you know? Jean: Well, people often tell us, they ask us “oh does the stuff come from Quebec and all” but, I know that the regulars, they come a lot for that also, but you know, the choice is easy because generally it’s also cheaper you know. Dave: It’s cheaper when it comes from Quebec?

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies Jean: Yes often, but at the peak of the season if you want, the moment when there is a lot, you know that there is a lot, there it’s really cheaper you know. For sure at first when it starts, that’s why there is a choice to make, because the first week the kidney beans come out they will be so expensive, you know. Should we offer them kidney beans from Quebec that are for example a buck more than the States’ ones or not, you know? So we judge that. Normally that’s it, we wait, we let the first batch15 pass by, and then after that we dive in […] the choice is still pretty easy you know: strawberries, raspberries those things, I know that the grocery stores sometimes have the tendency, even during the strawberry seasons, to take them elsewhere, because it’s true that they’re pretty expensive, the strawberries from Quebec compared to the strawberries from California, you know […] but people still agree to say that the strawberries from Quebec are better so you know, it’s just that the difference in price sometimes is pretty shocking (Interview, 09/29/2014).16 15 | English term used in the interview. 16 | Jean: Bah, c’est surtout pour les légumes, parce que les fruits, bon au Québec y’a des petits fruits tsé, les fraises, framboises, à part ça y’a pas grand chose, mais dès qu’on peut, dès qu’il y a des légumes, mettons dès que les poivrons du Québec sont sortis on prend les trucs du Québec. Des fois on va attendre un petit peu, parce que les prix sont toujours très élevés au début, puis ils se stabilisent, ils descendent, puis à la fin ils remontent, tsé. Mais nous on attend pas trop longtemps, pis dès qu’on peut on prend les légumes du Québec […] c’est les mêmes producteurs que notre patron fait affaire avec eux depuis des années fac là il va les voir pis à moment il voit le gars pis il dit ‘bon tsé les laitues est ce que ca s’en vient bientôt,’ pis il va dire ‘la semaine prochaine on va en avoir,’ fac là il arrête d’acheter des laitues des États-Unis, pis il achète des laitues du Québec dès qu’il peut. Dave: Fac il fait le choix d’acheter ici? Jean: Oui c’est ça. C’est un des points sur lesquels je pense que les gens font la différence entre le petit marché ou aller à l’épicerie tsé, malgré qu’à l’épicerie ils vont vendre des trucs du Québec aussi, mais tsé, si nous on vendait pas des choses du Québec aussi on perdrait notre spécificité aussi par rapport aux grands marchés tsé. Dave: Tu crois qu’il y a des gens qui viennent acheter ici parce que justement vous avez plus de choix du Québec ? Jean: Oui oui certainement, je pense que… Dave: Comment vous savez? Jean: Ben les gens souvent ils nous le disent, ils nous demandent ‘ah les trucs viennenttu du Québec et tout’ mais, je sais que les habitués ils viennent beaucoup pour ça aussi, mais tsé le choix est facile parce que généralement c’est moins chère aussi tsé. Dave: C’est moins chère quand ça vient du Québec? Jean: Oui souvent, mais dans la grosse saison si on veut, au moment où ce qu’il y en a beaucoup là tsé, y’a abondance, là c’est vraiment moins chère tsé. C’est sûr qu’au début quand ça commence c’est pour ça que t’as un choix à faire parce que dans la

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Jean acknowledges that the appeal and thus probably the sales of the fruit stand may be influenced to a certain extent by the origin of the products he his selling; he recognizes that some people come to his kiosk asking and looking for fruits and vegetables from Quebec instead of going to a grocery store. A customer comes to the cash register where Jean is standing to buy a basket of peaches with a Quebec sign on it. Before paying, the client says—in an astonished tone, as it seems to me—that these are probably the last Québécois peaches of the year as we are already in mid-September. Jean agrees, and says that we will indeed probably have to wait for next year to see them again. As the customer leaves, Jean turns towards me and smiles. He tells me that the peaches are not from Quebec, but from California. Jean then goes to switch the signs. Would the customer have bought the peaches knowing that they were not from Quebec? Although the country of origin—or in this case the state, province, or even village of origin—is significant to his clients, it is not the main factors guiding Jean in his selection of the products to sell at the stand. It is rather, in his words, a mix between their origin, their price and their quality. What motive, or perhaps what combination of motives, could then be underlying the decision to offer a specific product over another similar product? Considering that Jean’s first and main objective appears to be that of keeping the stand financially viable, what could his mercantile positioning be based on when it comes to refurnishing his stocks? The provenance of vegetables and fruits is omnipresent in the stand, especially when it comes to products from Quebec. This factor appears to be significant to shoppers and Jean also says that it plays an important role in the selection of the merchandise. But could it be that in the end, as the interview appears to suggest, the provenance is not so relevant to Jean’s decisions about which products he should offer to his customers once at the warehouse? ***

première semaine quand les haricots vont sortir ils vont être tellement chères tsé. On leur propose-tu un haricot du Québec qui est mettons une piastre de plus que celui des Etats-Unis ou pas tsé? Fac là on fait un jugement là-dessus. Généralement c’est ça, on attend, on laisse passer la première batch puis après ça on embarque […] le choix est quand même assez facile tsé : les fraises, les framboises, ces choses-là, je sais que les épiceries ont plus tendance des fois à même pendant que c’est le temps des fraises d’en prendre d’ailleurs parce que c’est vraie que c’est quand même ou chères les fraises du Québec comparées aux fraises de la Californie tsé […] mais les gens s’entendent pour dire que les fraises du Québec sont meilleur fac tsé, c’est juste que la différence de prix des fois est assez frappante (Interview, 09/29/2014).

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

I return now to Damien. Before heading towards the regions in which camping sites are commonplace, we first visit a store that supplies the products of his company in Charleroi, a city he describes as economically deprived. On our way there, he says that these types of regions are fertile for their business, and that they have many French-speaking Belgian customers in Charleroi. While telling me this, he explains that many individuals are blocked with other television providers due to overdue payments and that, since SatTV is fairly new on the market, such “rejected” customers often become clients of his company. After a brief meeting with the owner of a store in Charleroi to prepare an upcoming advertisement campaign for their products, we set out again towards the province of Luxemburg located in the south of Belgium, a wooden area in the Ardennes. While trying to reach the highway, a driver honks at Damien near the entrance ramp, a small incident that triggers a—fairly commonplace, I would add—monologue linking various driving habits to countries and regions. Damien says that in Switzerland, you have to stay on the left in a roundabout, but that you stay on the right in Belgium; in Flanders, because people follow the 120 km/h limit, if someone drives on a double lane at 118 km/h and someone else on his or her side goes at 119 km/h, it can take hours for a driver stuck behind to overtake them. In Wallonia, people usually drive faster and you do not encounter such problems. He then adds that he does not mean to say that these practices are better or worse than others, but that Flemings should maybe accelerate a little more, and Walloons slow down. His views on matters such as driving, but also on the functioning of the company he works for and certain opportunities for their business, appear to be strongly framed in nationhood-related terms. As a matter of fact, the reason why we are about to visit a region that comprises many camping sites is because of Damien’s idea, mentioned earlier during the day, that Flemings go camping a lot. This is probably, in his mind and as camping season is approaching, a good opportunity for his company to sell their products and services. He then goes to promote them. Arriving at one of the stores selling Damien’s products near some camping sites, his first question to the reseller is about whether or not he has SatVlaanderen decoders at his disposal. The owner answers that there are none left. Damien tells him that it would be important to have some in stock because his company is planning to advertise the different products of the firm in the local press, both in the Flemish and the French-speaking sections. Damien’s interlocutor says that he has his own demo units and that he usually orders the SatVlaanderen decoders on demand only. Damien—who seems puzzled—appears to be trying to change the reseller’s mind. He tells him that the decision to keep decoders on hand in his store or not should not depend on sporadic demands so much as on the presence of Dutch speakers in the nearby camping sites. The owner replies that he, in any case, advertises the products of Damien’s company in both French and Dutch—which does not, I feel, answers to Damien’s con-

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cern. Damien then adds—perhaps hoping the vendor will show more interest in promoting the products—that he should also show potential Dutch-speaking customers the Dutch and the Flemish channels, and, conversely, show the Belgian and the French channels to French speakers. After acquiescing, the reseller asks how to sign a new client up to SatVlaanderen, a question Damien answers by saying that it is the same procedure as with SatTV, but in Flemish. Damien leaves his business card with the reseller and tells him to order decoders—in an imperative tone, as it seems to me—as campers usually like watching the football games during the World Cup. Back on the road, I question Damien on the rise of their SatVlaanderen sales in Wallonia during the summer. He replies that they are usually much higher than during the rest of the year. He adds that with the number of Dutch and Flemings arriving in the area around that time of year, “it sells like hot cakes.” Damien’s references to nationhood, such as his framing of consumer or driver groups as Flemings, Walloons, or Swiss, and his comments on cities or regions, are especially helpful in interpreting his actions, in comparison with other statements he makes. His idea that French-speaking individuals living in villages far from cities, or in what he describes as economically deprived regions, are more inclined to use the services of his company, and that Dutch speakers are in general fond of camping sites, leads him to visit resellers of his products in specific areas of Belgium. Just like Jean’s explanation that the provenance of the fruits and vegetables is of importance to the selection at the warehouse, notions related to nationhood guide some of the choices Damien makes in conducting his task of promoting—in the hope to sell—products and services. *** Doing business with nationhood consists, so far, of individuals using knowledge described in terms of references to nationhood in order to promote and sell products and services. Damien knows or assumes that there are many Flemings in camping sites, just like he knows or assumes that French-speaking individuals living in specific regions of Wallonia are more inclined to become clients of his company and use their services. For this reason, based on his knowledge—or assumptions—he visits the suppliers in these areas in the hope to promote and and eventually sell the services his company offers. In the same way, Jean knows or assumes that his customers prefer to buy products from Quebec and, as soon as his producer have some on hand, he says the clients will buy them, provided the prices are not too high. In these two cases, my informants are not actually selling anything in the name of a specific nation or for a specific nation and do not aim to sustain a national culture as the above-men-

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

tioned advertisement to buy a Québécois book suggested. They merely “do” things based on nationhood as a form of knowledge. Jean’s advertising of the provenance of his merchandise also, to a certain extent, aims to sell with nationhood—as individuals do in the next sociological encounter. As he admits, the price weighs more than the origin of the merchandise in the decision to sell one product over another, nationhood becomes an incentive among others, like the “freshness” and organic aspects of his fruits and vegetables. His customers are more inclined to buy a fruit or a vegetable from Quebec, but he mainly favors offering his customers products at a lower price, regardless of their provenance. References to nationhood is part of his strategy, but not as much as knowledge with regard to nationhood. Besides, in 1981, it became mandatory to indicate the origin of fruits and vegetables through a legislative decision issued by the government of Quebec (Regulation respecting fresh fruits and vegetables, Québec, 1981).17 Therefore, it is not for Jean to decide whether he will indicate the provenance of his merchandise or not. However, national references to his products from Quebec, as noted above, are more present and visible than for products from other provenances. He takes time to add the precise village in which a fruit or a vegetable was cultivated, and extensively advertises them with “stickers” in Quebec’s colors. Such practices of advertisement are omnipresent during the day; they even guide me to buy me purchase an item. On my lunch with Jean, I notice in their refrigerator a glass bottle with a fleur de lys. I have never seen this drink before. I pick it up out of curiosity and decide to try it.

Vignette 3: The Québécois Cola Taking the bottle with a fleur de lys out of the fridge, I wonder aloud what the product is. Jean tells me that it is a new drink, a maple syrup cola, and that they have been selling it in the stand for only a couple of weeks. My question triggers memories. Jean recalls that the week before my visit to the fruit stand, a culinary event took place on the street where the kiosk is located. He adds that during the event, the producer of the cola in question was at their stand distributing samples to promote his products. Unfortunately, I was not there to meet him. What could he have told me about his product? Without a doubt, the cola in question uses Quebec as a brand: it is named Bec Cola, a small fleur de lys is apposed over the name, and underneath Québec it says Produit du terroir with the translation Local product. More writing 17 | It states that the package or the stand in which the product is sold must bear “the words ‘Product of Québec’ in the case of fruits or vegetables produced in Québec [or] the name of the country of origin, or the word ‘Canada,’ in the case of a Canadian product, or the name of the province of origin in the case of a product from outside Québec” (Québec, 1981: c. P-29, r. 3, s. 18).

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marks its quantity in millimeters and ounces. The product is also advertised as biologique or, as also written on the bottle in smaller characters, organic. At this point, with only those indications, it would be tempting to conclude that the producers merely aim to sell with nationhood by apposing Quebec features to their product. Curious about the drink, I have further questions about the product. The packaging of the cola turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the Québécois branding aspect of the drink. The company manufacturing the Bec Cola has a webpage on which the intention to brand the cola as a Québécois product is once again clearly stated. It says: “Bec Cola is a refreshment that celebrates the flavors of our land. It’s a soda sweetened with maple syrup and prepared with organic ingredients. An authentic taste of Quebec” (BecSoda, 2015). It also mentions that it is 100 percent pure maple syrup, 100 percent organic, and 100 percent Quebecer (ibid.). Since its commercial launch during the summer of 2014, Bec Cola has caught the attention of the medias. Articles and interviews considerably focus on the national aspect of the drink. A 2014 article from La Presse, for example, states in its introduction: “Peruvians have the Inca Kola, Maghrebians, the Mecca Cola, and Québécois… now have their Bec Cola, a new soft drink with an identity feature offering another alternative to that of the giants of Pepsi and Coca-Cola” (Ballivy, 2014; my translation).18 The statements of Olivier Dionne, one of the cofounders of BecSoda—the company producing Bec Cola—probably played a key role in making the national aspect so prominent in the media. In interviews, he constantly underlines that his drink has a typical Québécois aspect. He describes it as a cola “with a home flavor […] a maple aroma, this taste of Quebec” (Dionne, 2014; my translation).19 Commenting on how he and his colleagues came up with the idea of their product during a radio interview aired on Radio-Canada International in 2014, he says that they were wondering: “How is it that we do not have our Québécois cola? And that if we are to develop a cola from here, we might as well use a sugar that we have here” (ibid.).20 In telling the audience about some of the feedback he has received at different events in the first months following the launch, he asserts that he has had the impression that the “Québécois are proud to finally have 18 | “Les Péruviens ont l’Inca Kola, les Maghrébins, le Mecca Cola et les Québécois... ont maintenant leur Bec Cola, une nouvelle boisson gazeuse proposant une autre option à caractère identitaire aux géants Pepsi et Coca-Cola” (Ballivy, 2014). 19 | “À saveur de chez nous […] avec un parfum d’érable, ce goût du Québec” (Dionne, 2014) At 15 seconds into the recording. 20 | “Pourquoi nous on n’aurait pas notre cola québécois? Et tant qu’à développer un cola de chez nous, pourquoi pas se servir d’un sucre qu’on a ici” (Dionne, 2014). At 2 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording.

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

a cola from here” (ibid.).21 While in terms of marketing the national aspect of the product seems to have caught the attention of the media, the drink is also a commercial success, according to Dionne. In February 2015, eight months after the initial launch, “the demand is such that we are on back order!” (Dionne, 2015; my translation).22 The creation of Bec Cola incarnates the two empirical manifestations of doing business with nationhood as observed in the fieldwork. Knowing that there is no Québécois cola on the market, and acknowledging in the interviews that many people around the world have their own ethnonational cola, Olivier Dionne most likely thought that it would be a good business opportunity to create a product that would occupy this niche in the Quebec market. This nationhood-related knowledge perhaps made him come up with the idea to create an actual product with national references, a “taste of home” as he describes it, by adding maple syrup, along with the branding of the fleur de lys to sell a product from Quebec. While the additions of national references may help his company to brand the drink, and thus help it to sell his product, his ambitions seem to go beyond this mere goal. According to his comments from the interviews, Dionne appears to aim to generate a national feeling with regard to a culinary experience by creating a product that is properly “Québécois.” In his words: “It has always been important to me to assert the values of our Quebec, because we have beautiful resources, we are a beautiful province, and I am proud of it” (Dionne, 2014; my translation).23 Dionne not only uses nationhood as knowledge—just like Jeroen and Mathieu—to guide some of his choices to increase the sales of his product by appealing to a potential market: the Québécois whom previously did not have their own Cola. He also sells with nationhood by promoting a drink with Québécois national references—as the following sociological encounter of the chapter illustrates in greater detail. There could be, however, more to the case of Bec Cola. In following his thoughts, Dionne creates a product meant to be thought of as national by asserting values he claims to be those of Quebec. He appears to play on a sense of identity and feelings of belongingness. He asserts and claims to share the values of Quebec and its resources, which somehow aims to “empower” the Québécois through the confection of a culinary product that would resemble them. Could the creation of the Québécois cola be guided by nationalist motives, not unlike 21 | “Les Québécois sont fiers d’avoir enfin un cola d’ici” (Dionne, 2014). At 1 minute and 15 seconds into the recording. 22 | “On a tellement de demandes qu’on est en back order!” (Dionne, 2105). 23 | “Ç’a toujours été important pour moi de faire valoir notre Québec, parce qu’on a des belles ressources, on est une belle province et j’en suis fière” (Dionne, 2014). At 3 minutes 46 seconds into the recording.

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Philip’s foundation of a publishing company? Or are his activities a mere strategy to better promote and sell a product? In the light of his comments, Dionne’s work could belong to a dynamic operating upon nationhood, such as that investigated in the last chapter, as much as it could belong to a dynamic operating with nationhood—the dynamic of this chapter that I later define. The motive, which would help me characterize the relationship Dionne has with nationhood and the ways in which his activities operate with regard to nationhood, is ungraspable through mere discourses. The latter, as recaptured on the website of Bec Cola or in the interviews, do not reflect his actual motives as much as his intentions (See Chapter 3). While Dionne undoubtedly uses the category nation with regard to its gastronomic dimension and creates a product which he promotes and sells as a Québécois drink, the motives underlying these actions cannot be reconstructed with such unreliable information. Only an ethnographic fieldwork reconstructing his actions could clarify the matter and shed light on his actual motives. Interestingly, the Bec Cola advertisements, as well as Jean’s to a certain extent, often link Quebec with “progressive values,” such as buying locally and eating organic. Could there be a Québécois banal nationalism advocating for a “greener tomorrow” under development? The use of nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices, as depicted so far, only constitutes half of the work task I identify as doing business with nationhood. The last sociological encounter of this chapter, indeed, explores activities in which individuals are promoting and selling products and services with nationhood. I argue that rather than pretending to create a product or a service aiming to (re-)define a nation through symbols or events such as the inventor of Bec Cola could be doing, the individuals in what follows only add national references to products and services as a strategy to better promote and sell them.

2.2.2 … And Promoting and Selling with Nationhood On a Saturday of March 2014, a piano store manager in Brussels invites me to accompany him throughout his workday. He tells me that he chose this specific time of the week in the hope that it would be busy—although he would admit near the end of the day that it was quieter than he had expected. The days we spend together nevertheless allow me to grasp important nationhood aspects within his work environment, which consist among others of practices used by his coworkers and himself to promote and sell pianos. Although the manager of the store first “assigns” me to follow him, I end up spending more time

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

during my days at the store with William—especially on that Saturday—a piano seller from Flanders who started his shift later during the day. Arriving at the store at the opening hour of 10 a.m., I am greeted by the manager. He first tells me that he has to quickly finish the delivery schedule of the day and that while he is busy doing so, one of his coworkers will show me around the store. As we start walking towards the showroom on the ground floor, displaying over thirty pianos, the employee explains how the instruments are mainly grouped by brands, divided among four floors. She takes me to all of them, although the rest of the day is mainly spent on the ground floor where most of the grand and collectible pianos are showcased. While she briefly explains the characteristics of the different types of pianos, I notice that the inscriptions noting the specificities of the instruments on are not standardized. Some of them are written in both French and Dutch, whereas others are unilingual English or unilingual French. Another language issue emerges and interrupts the “tour.” Another salesman from one of their stores in Flanders, William, who has come to fill in for someone for the day, comes to ask the person I am following, in Dutch, how a piano scheduled for delivery will be transported. My guide, who was giving me the tour in French, answers in Dutch that she has no idea, but that they should ask the manager about it. William asks his superior the same question, once again in Dutch again, and the superior answers in French. Throughout the day, every time the manager is addressed in Dutch, he always answers in French. He seems to understand what his interlocutors are telling him as he does not ask them to repeat themselves and gives “adequate” responses to their questions. However, when the opposite occurs—when a French speaker speaks to a Dutch speaker in French—the Dutch speaker always, or almost, answers in French, as I observe later on during the day, and as I have noticed in other fieldwork cases.24 Once the question concerning the transportation of the piano is solved, the manager announces to his colleagues that they will receive, again, the steward of the king in the store in a few days. Later during the day, when listening to William talking to customers interested in purchasing a piano, references are made once again to the royal family of Belgium. William’s exchange, when giving information to potential buyers on pianos, is similar from a client to another. In between all the technical characteristics concerning each instrument, his monologue includes references to nationhood. He always points out differences between the types of wood from which the instruments are made: there is Asian wood and European wood, the latter apparently most renowned for their quality. When it comes to restored pianos, which is what most clients are interested in, William often emphasizes that they are restored in the atelier of their main store, located in a city in Flan24 | See chapter 3, section 3.2.

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ders.25 When a person asks about what the differences are in between his company’s pianos and another’s—one of their main competitors, as I later found out—William answers that they are a bigger piano company, but that they also have the biggest piano store of the Benelux, the one located in the Flemish city. When a customer seems interested in a restored Odin piano,26 the salesman also has a pre-fabricated speech to most likely persuade the potential buyer to purchase them. William always refers to a long history between his employer and the most renowned piano maker, Odin, by saying that they have a good relationship and that it has always been a challenge for them to restore such prestigious pianos. In so doing, moreover, William always adds that they are the sole Odin piano dealer in Belgium. Among all of these tactics aiming at characterizing pianos in order to promote them, William often concludes by adding that their store is the official supplier of the Belgian royal family and that members of the court always come to them to purchase pianos. Near the end of our day, after William has presented a similar monologue, a customer seems serious about the purchase of a piano. Since his wife works for the European Union, and they are not from Belgium but from Ukraine, the client wonders about the procedures required to be exempted from Belgian taxes, which, as he appears to know, are a little over twenty percent. William, seemingly informed on the matter—as if it is a routine question he is frequently confronted with—explains the procedures by listing the required personal documents and paperwork that could prove that the piano would not remain in Belgian territory beyond a certain period of time. The salesman, in hoping to conclude a deal—I can only imagine—tells the client that if he is interested in credit to buy the piano, they would have just enough time before the end of the day to fill in a request for the National Bank of Belgium. *** In Montreal, on the 13th of January 2014, Étienne, a building engineering technician, invites me to follow him on a construction site—on which I will end up going for three days in a row. On our way to the complex of a project, he explains what his job and tasks consist of. He tells me that the company he works for helps the government to spare Hydro-Québec’s electricity; instead of building another dam at the Baie-James,27 he says that they help companies to consume less energy. He elaborates by mentioning that this is becoming harder as state 25 | I choose not to reveal the name of the city for reasons of confidentiality. 26 | The name of the piano company is altered, again, to preserve confidentiality. It is a very famous company. 27 | Located in the north of Québec, the Baie-James consists of the biggest and most efficient region harboring Hydro-Québec’s dam.

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

subsidies have become scarcer since the latest change of government and that their profit and economic viability largely depend on government subsidies. He thinks that the Parti québécois—the party in power at the time—seems to want to invest money in a different way than the previous government. After every election, whether provincial or municipal, Étienne says that the attribution processes of the subventions always have to start anew. He adds that this is problematic since their business relies almost entirely on state subsidies offered to the companies hiring them to raise their energy efficiency. Throughout this initial conversation, moreover, I learn that his company is not exclusively based in Montreal, and that it has branches located in Quebec City, Toronto and, as a recent addition, New York City. Once on the site, I follow Étienne, along with one of his colleagues. For hours, they mainly go from circuit-breakers to circuit-breakers in order to record statements of the electrical system they are installing. Mainly consisting of silence and technical terms, these parts of our day are not of great interest with regard to nationhood; at least, not as much as Étienne’s and his colleagues’ breaks. During the first pause of the day, the employees working on the building all gather in the headquarters of the project. One of them inquires about my presence. I tell him that I am conducting research on work environments in Montreal and Brussels. Promptly, he responds that I should also make a comparison between Montreal and Quebec City to compare differences in teams within their company. When I ask him why, he answers that they are two different worlds, that they do not have the same policies there, nor the same mentality and that they do not work in the same way. When I ask him to develop his comparison further, he repeats more or less the same comment. I then attempt, one last time, to ask how and in which ways those mentalities and work habits differ. He remains vague and evasive. One of his colleagues jumps into the conversation and gives me an example. He says that the other day he had to work via phone with someone from Quebec City, that it was noon and that the guy wanted to go eat, but that he needed him now. He says that he personally does not care about his lunch time, and that he just wants to be home as soon as possible because he has a life, and that in Quebec City, they just go eat at 12 p.m. and finish at 5 p.m. no matter what. He concludes by mentioning that he has the impression that here, in Montreal, people are just more stressed. Individuals identified as “others,” whether it be in the Montreal vs. Quebec City case or another, often have different ways of working or behaving in the minds of individuals. They are easily framed as having a different “mentality” in people’s views; yet, this mentality is rarely definable, even by the individuals who advocate it. In the case of Damien, what he said about Flemings buying a decoder, whereas Wallonians would rent it, there were no reasons to explain such different behaviors. When asking Damien in the interview to make sense of this difference he says: “it is because of… a mentality that is different. In

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Flanders people know, they say: ‘So I want that,’ and they’ll assume so to say their choice [regarding the plan]. While in Wallonia we say: ‘Pff I’ll rent and we’ll see in two years maybe I want to change things” (Interview, 06/19/2014).28 There might not have been much at stake in this discussion on framing differences between Flemings and Wallonians or the ways colleagues from Quebec City and Montreal work, but when it comes to doing business, the attitude Étienne adopts towards potential clients or buyers qualified as “others” appears to be more compliant than what was just described. Étienne, once again during a pause, receives an email and, seemingly astonished, shares it with everyone. Reading aloud, he says that a Québécois company in the United States is praising the fact that the firm for which Étienne works has established a branch in New York City. I ask him if they have been there for a while. He answers that it has only been there since the first of June 2013—for about a year and a half. He says that they had no choice but to do so if they wanted to have access to the U.S. American market, because Americans are—he then gives me a nod, saying something like: “you know how they are”—so patriotic that they would not want to hire Canadians or Québécois who would take their money and spend it elsewhere. He says that his firm opened a new branch of their company in New York City in a tiny office with only six employees: two Québécois and four Americans. Right away, he says, they obtained contracts. I then ask him if he thought it would be the same here, that the Québécois would rather hire Québécois companies if American companies were to establish themselves in the province. He answers that he indeed has no doubt that it would be the same in Quebec, adding that if Americans would come here, he would himself as an entrepreneur or citizen rather work with a company from Quebec. Implementing a company satellite abroad, as a strategy to do business elsewhere, definitely intrigues me. As the website of his company shows, four projects out of the nineteen advertised on their main page are or were conducted in the state of New York. Although it is not possible to gauge the economic value of such projects on the basis of the available information, the New York projects seem to be of greater value in comparison with the others as they comprise large universities and major hospitals, while the others located in Quebec or Ontario are company buildings. When I inquire into the opening of the new branch of the firm in New York City during the interview, his answer is that

28 | “Par… une mentalité déjà qui est différente. En Flandre les gens savent, ils disent: ‘alors moi je veux ça,’ et ils vont assumer entre guillemets leur choix. Tandis que en Wallonie on dit: ‘pff je vais louer et on verra peut-être dans deux ans je veux changer de chose’” (Interview, 06/19/2014).

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies The New York market, which is expanding considerably, is the future of [our company], it’s there. For sure for sure for sure, in 10 years from now, our […] revenue will be 100 percent in New York. One, American governments want to change their philosophy, they want to reduce […] 60, 40 or 60 percent of their greenhouse emissions, and in New York, I think that it’s 4 percent of all the consumed energy in the United States […] so that’s where the pot of gold is (laugh)! Dave: And your company only targets New York in the United Sates? Étienne: For now yes, the market is too big, we wouldn’t be able to manage. Let’s say we get a contract, it would take a lot of staff there. It’s not viable to try to to to, to attack like many cities, but to attack New York, and to make an American credibility for ourselves, because you know, Americans like to spend money at home and to keep it at home, just like us a bit if you want. So, to have a Québécois, Canadian Québécois that tries to implant their philosophy in New York, it’s not easy […] Dave: And when you say you try to implant your Québécois philosophy there, what is it? Étienne: Well, there are concepts. You know, it’s, you know a banal example: in the United States you still have plastic bags at cashiers [in supermarkets] and for them it’s normal that when you go there they give you 16, they give you 50 if you want. They have no responsabi… well, it might be a prejudice, but you know […] so if you want it’s another philosophy, maybe not just Québécois but, that they don’t have there […] Dave: And what is it, in the United States they have not started doing those kinds of [energy saving strategies with regard to buildings]? Étienne: No no no, they pay, here we pay what, 16 cents by the kW/h, there they pay 30 cents by the kW/h so you know it’s, the cost is more expensive and they consume more than we do, so the payback is much more efficient. You know, it’s completely another world […] it’s like going to work elsewhere. Dave: What are the biggest differences within the constructions there? Why doesn’t your type of company exists there? Étienne: The mentality I think. It must exist yes, but they do not only do that, it’s not as popular, it’s not so much the ideology there. For them it’s not important in their way of doing, I don’t know. It’s really another mentality, there are still big trucks even if they don’t need them, you know, it’s a mentality, I think (Interview, 10/15/2014). 29 29 | “Étienne: Le marché new-yorkais, qui est en plein pleine expansion, c’est le futur [de notre compagnie], c’est là. C’est sûr sûr sûr, que d’ici 10 ans, notre masse, notre […]

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Both individuals in this sociological encounter appear to implement a strategy that adds and accentuates nationhood characteristics that are meant to increase the value of a product or a service in the eyes of a potential buyer. In other words, they aim to promote and sell with nationhood. While William and Étienne may also be using nationhood as knowledge to conduct their work task as depicted in the previous encounter, what their current work task emphasizes are strategies adding national characteristics or references onto a product or a service in order to make it more appealing to potential customers. To do so, chiffre d’affaire va être 100 % à New York. De un, les gouvernements américains veulent changer leur philosophie, ils veulent réduire […] 60, 40 ou 60 pourcent de leur gaz à effet de serre pis, à New York, c’est un, je pense que c’est un 4% de la consommation d énergie à travers les États-Unis […] c’est là qui est le mottons (rire)! Dave: Pis votre compagnie, elle cible que New York aux États-Unis? Étienne: Pour l’instant oui, le marché est trop gros, on serait pas capable. Mettons qu’on cogne un contrat ça prendrait ben du staff là. C’est pas viable d’essayer de de de… d’attaquer comme ben des villes là. Mais d’attaquer New York, pis de se faire une crédibilité américaine, parce que tsé les Américains aiment dépenser de l’argent chez eux pis la garder chez eux, comme un peu nous veut veut pas là. Donc avoir une compagnie québécoise, canadienne-québécoise qui essaie d’implanter leur philosophie à New York c’est pas facile […] Dave: Pis quand tu dis que vous essayez d’implanter votre philosophie québécoise làbas c’est quoi? Étienne: Ben c’est des concepts là. Tsé c’est… tsé un exemple banal tsé, aux États-Unis il y a encore des sacs de plastiques aux caisses [des supermarchés] pis pour eux c’est normal quand tu vas là ils t’en donnent 16, ils t’en donnent 50 si tu veux. Y’ont aucune responsa… ben c’est peut-être un préjugé là mais tsé, […] fac veut veut pas c’est une autre philosophie, peut-être pas juste québécoise mais… que là-bas y’ont pas là […] Dave: Pis c’est quoi, aux États-Unis ils n’ont pas commencé à faire ce genre de [stratégies permettant d’économiser de l’énergie dans les bâtiments]? Étienne: Non non non, ils paient, ici on paient quoi, 16 sous le kw/h, là-bas ils le paient 30 cens le kw/h fac tsé c’est, le coût est plus cher pis ils consomment plus que nous donc la rapidité des pay back est assez importante, mais c’est d’apprendre la philosophie américaine, le marché de la construction américain, tsé c’est un autre monde complètement, […] c’est comme aller travailler ailleurs là. Dave: Quels sont les grosses différences dans les constructions là-bas? Pour le genre de compagnie comme la votre n’existe pas là-bas? Étienne: La mentalité je pense. Ça doit exister oui, mais ils font pas que ça, c’est moins populaire, c’est moins l’idéologie là. Eux pour eux c’est pas important dans leur roulement je sais pas. C’est vraiment une mentalité différente là, eux aussi, y’a encore des gros camions même si y’en ont pas besoin. Tsé c’est une mentalité là, je crois” (Interview, 10/15/2014).

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

William emphasizes, among other things, that his company is the official provider of the Belgian royal family and that they are the biggest piano store in the Benelux region. Etienne, wishing to offer the services of his company in the United States, “Americanizes” or gives an American feature or façade to his company by opening a satellite branch in New York that could eventually lend them “American credibility,” a greater access to the American market in which his company works. Having accounted for the two manifestations of doing business with nationhood, I aim in what follows to examine how the work environments of my participants affect the conduct of their work tasks and the motives underlying their actions. By using nationhood as knowledge and by adding national references onto products or services within their respective workplaces, I deconstruct how my informants strategically elaborate plans that help them to accomplish their tasks; how, in brief, they are doing business with nationhood.

2.2.3 National Products and Ser vices: The Bias of National Markets The sociological encounters indicate that there are many elements from the work environments of my participants that may lead them to think in nationhood-related terms or through the category nation: the functioning of BigTV, which buys television satellite rights for specific countries and the marketable regions, such as in Belgium, with the two branches divided along linguistic lines; the Quebec legislation making it mandatory to indicate the provenance of fresh fruits and vegetables; the manufacturing of pianos with regard to the origins of their material, or the fact that William’s company is the largest piano seller of the Benelux; and the difficulty of accessing the United States market, as described by Étienne. The influence of these work environment elements on my participants’ tasks reflects the logic that markets are divided along national lines. National or nationalized markets, consequently, result in products and services that are significantly limited to being national. Even before undertaking the activities of promoting and selling, products or services are limited to nationhood within the process of doing business: BigTv, the head company of the Wallonian division for which Damien works, offers two television satellite services divided along a linguistic line; when Jean chooses the fruits and vegetables to offer to his customers at the warehouse, their provenances are limited to states, provinces, or regions; some of the pianos William and his colleagues are offering are in Belgium sold exclusively in their stores; and Étienne’s company can only offer services on the condition of obtaining subventions from different levels of governments, whether it be in Quebec, Canada, or the United States, but they are also most likely confined to markets in which they have a presence through a branch.

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The products and services offered by the companies for which my informants work are thus connected to national categories: languages, sociopolitical territories, and state governments. In other words, products and services are nationalized because they come from or are addressed to a specific market, which is itself thought of as national, as they come from particular provinces, regions, or states. In imagining such markets, products or services are promoted and sold accordingly; yet in turn, markets are nationalized by “products and services highlight[ing] their country-of-origin (sic.) as potential competitive markets” (Dinnie, 2004: 165). It is when actively addressing this state of the market that Damien, Jean, William, and Étienne show agency in promoting and selling products and services. Just like Jeroen and Mathieu used nationhood as context for staging public figures, the participants from the sociological encounters at hand also seem to be aware of the nationhood bias in their workplaces. Understanding them as opportunities, my informants elaborate a strategy to help them conduct and accomplish their tasks, a strategy which leads them to do business with nationhood.

2.2.4 The Elaboration of Business Plans: Nationhood-Related Knowledge and References as Levers Whether my informants used nationhood as knowledge or added national references in order to promote and sell products and services, the motives underlying their actions remain the same. As in the first sociological encounter of this chapter, the individuals doing business with nationhood that I have worked with, I argue, aimed to properly and most efficiently accomplish their work tasks. To do so, they developed strategies that involve the elaboration of plans in which nationhood helps them to better promote and sell products or services. Damien, Jean, William, and Étienne engaged in the construction of such strategies because, as I now explain in more detail, they considered that they are the most effective way to conduct their tasks. While other options would have allowed them to fulfill the same requirements, they used nationhood as knowledge and added national references out of professional convictions, not because of constraints or nationalist principles. Damien is the representative of the French-speaking division of BigTV in Belgium, SatTV. The difference between the branches, however, did not stop him from helping SatVlaanderen by promoting and selling their services in Wallonia. Imagining—on the basis of prejudices, observations, or statistics— that Flemings often visit camping sites during the summer, he visited his wholesalers in areas in which camping sites are commonplace in order to establish the best promoting and selling conditions for SatVlaanderen products. For the same reasons, he visited Wallonian regions he imagines to be deprived

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

because, according to him, they usually contain many potential SatTV clients, French-speaking Belgians who have been blocked from all other television providers because of their unpaid bills. In this way, Damien hoped to maintain or increase the sales of the services his company offers; just like Jean tried to offer as many fresh fruits and vegetables from Quebec as possible—when comparable in terms of quality and price with those from other areas—in order to preserve his clientele, keep his business on track and keep his employees employed. Such choices, based on knowledge of his clientele, wholesalers, and products, are part of strategies meant to favor his business; just like Damien’s knowledge on specific areas of Belgium, their characteristics and inhabitants, guided the choices for his visits of the day to promote and sell the services divided along linguistic lines. In both cases the strategies employed draw on nationhood as knowledge to promote and sell products and services to very specific markets constructed through national categories. In the sociological encounter on promoting and selling with nationhood, William deliberately constructed a narrative around nationhood to promote and sale pianos by emphasizing many characteristics that most likely do not directly affect the quality of the pianos themselves—except perhaps the origin of the wood. The addition of references, such as the company being the only official dealer of Odin pianos in Belgium, their long-lasting and close relationship with this prestigious piano maker, and their connection to the Belgian royal family, are all linked to the pianos in order to increase their value in the eyes of potential buyers. National references are added as part of a strategy that aims to favor the sale of the products. Similarly, Étienne and his company added an “American façade” onto their firm by opening a branch in New York City. In so doing, the management of the company, in the words of Étienne, intended and still intends to acquire an “American credibility.” The management thus favors the promotion and the sale of their services on the American market, instead of only developing and conducting business in Quebec and other Canadian provinces. Additional national references are thus apposed onto products or linked to services as a strategy aiming to increase their value for potential buyers, favoring their promotion and sales in specific markets thought of as national. Whether all of these strategies are successful or not, is another question. I summarize the work tasks of doing business with nationhood as follows: individuals who are animated by the will to successfully accomplish their tasks of promoting and selling products or services for companies with national offerings will use nationhood as knowledge to guide their marketing choices and add national references onto their products or services. They will do this out of professional conviction and not because of constraints or nationalist principles. These strategic plans, in other words, are elaborated as national constructs meant to help promote and sell products or services in nationalized markets. But can Damien, Jean, William, and Étienne’s activities be considered a form

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of nationalism? Or are the strategies in question a mere intersection of nationhood and economic issues? To explore this interconnection, it is useful to bring in the concept of nation branding. The nation branding concept stems from the idea “that the reputations of countries are rather like the brand images of companies and products, and are equally important” (Anholt, 2007: xi). Nation branding is generally used as a soft power in public diplomacy to promote the qualities of a specific state at home as much as abroad (Potter, 2003) because we live in a world in which “every country, every city and every region must compete with every other for its share of the world’s consumers, tourists, investors, students, entrepreneurs, international sporting and cultural events, and for the attention and respect of the international media, of other governments, and the people of other countries” (Anholt, 2007: 1). The nation branding concept explicitly makes a “connection between nationalism and marketing” by putting forth “the convergence of the state’s use of commercial strategies for public and international relations with the private sector’s use of nationalism to sell products” (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011:598–599). None of Damien, Jean, William, or Étienne’s activities came close to such a form of state nationalism. In the scope of my typology, nation branding practices, as a form of nationalism, would rather be work tasks involved in a dynamic operating upon nationhood—such as Philip’s activities in the publishing world of Quebec and Canada presented in Chapter 1. Doing business with nationhood through companies (and not states) nonetheless reflects to a certain extent this era of “nation branding.” Companies offering products and services from and for specific national markets brand their business activities through nations: whether it be individuals using nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices, or individuals adding national references onto products or services, as was the case with my informants. Nationhood is a part of corporate firms. In acknowledging this, my participants accomplish their tasks accordingly; in other words, they work and operate with nationhood, and thus make their products, services, but also businesses national. This moment in history, as anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff note, is particular: “the rampant branding of cultural heritage, its rendition as alienable property, and the increasing distillation of both nation and state into the vocabulary of business enterprise, gives Nationality, Inc. a distinctly contemporary twist. Indeed, it opens up an illuminating window on what both state and nation, and their hyphe-nation, are becoming in the New Age of Capital” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009: 118). Doing business with nationhood, as explored in this second section of the chapter, involves activities that do not operate upon the idea of living in a world of nations. The elaboration of strategies implemented to do business with nationhood investigated in the last two sociological encounters are rather involved

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

in a dynamic operating with nationhood, a dynamic that I explore in the last section of this chapter.

2.3 A n A cknowledged D ynamic : O per ating with N ationhood for the S ake of C onvenience In contrast to the previous chapter, the motives underlying the actions of the participants accomplishing the work tasks examined in this chapter were not nationalist. The motives here rather pointed towards the mere will to properly fulfill the particular tasks in question. To do so, individuals methodologically elaborated national constructs—such as the national contexts and the business plans involving nationhood as knowledge and national references. The relationship individuals had with nationhood was strategically rather than emotionally drive. As was the case in the previous chapter, this relationship translated into actions. The ensuing activities resulted in the development of strategies in which nationhood was central, allowing individuals to accomplish tasks. Nationhood, therefore, was enacted through strategies. In constructing national contexts to stage public figures, using nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices, and adding national references onto products or services, individuals strategically adapted their actions according to the situations defined by their work tasks and work environments. In the tasks examined in Chapter 3, it was the needs of the cause that further defined situations. In the work tasks of this chapter, individuals gathered within the given situations the required elements and adapted them under the elaboration of the national constructs to accomplish their work tasks. The situations defined by work environments and work tasks act—to use Schütz’s words—as “general framework[s]” that are “experienced by the individual members in terms of institutionalizations to be interiorized, and the individual has to define his personal unique situation by using the institutionalized pattern for the realization of his particular personal interests” (1964 [1976]: 253) to accomplish his or her work tasks. Rather distant to nationalist actions, individuals involved in the tasks at hand were not emotionally or ardently engaged in defining the idea of a world of nations, as was the case in the last chapter. However, they acknowledged the significance of this idea and took advantage of already nationalized elements as part of common sense in order to draw strategies allowing them to accomplish tasks. I argue that the dynamic created while accomplishing these work tasks operates with nationhood. In sharing and communicating the accomplishments of poets and a politician, my participants adapted to each of these figures a context intended to facilitate the sharing process with students and viewers. Selecting the appropriate elements with regard to the situation at hand required them to construct

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the most efficient context to share and inform the required material. In feeding students and viewers hints with contextualizing elements—whether historical, political, or territorialmy informants aimed to spark a familiar context in their mind, that of nationhood, onto which they could perhaps—in my participants’ mind at least—more easily assimilate knowledge and information: the accomplishments of poets and of a politician. As vague as the knowledge of such contexts may be for recipients, the constructed context was meant as a narrative intended to enable the interaction to take place. In other words, Mathieu and Jeroen elaborated national contexts allowing them to better structure the sharing and communication process of the main content of a news program or a lesson. They did so thinking that they could successfully accomplish their respective tasks. Doing business by using nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices and adding references onto products or services out of professional conviction enabled tasks to be conducted and made sense of by my participants and their interlocutors—mostly potential customers in the cases at hand. Believing that Dutch speakers spend their vacation at certain camping sites, or that people of particular Belgian cities located in Wallonia are more inclined to use their services because of their distant location form centers or their “deprived” status, Damien planned his visits to wholesalers throughout Belgium accordingly. He wanted to make sure, among others, that they had enough merchandise in stock. In Montreal, Jean, thinking that people rather buy fruits and vegetables from Quebec when they are similar in terms of quality and price to those from, say, the United States, preferred offering products from Quebec to customers and, when so doing, heavily advertised them as such, in comparison to products that were not from Quebec. William, when mentioning to clients that his company was the official provider of the Belgian royal family, or that they were the biggest store of the Benelux, tried to spark the interest of potential buyers in their products by adding these national references. In Montreal, a building technician aiming to sell his company’s services in the United States mentioned the need to “Americanize” his company, or to give it an American feature and façade. According to him, this is what led the company to open a branch in New York, giving them an “American credibility” and better access to the American market, as confirmed by their website. Individuals, in the work tasks examined in this chapter, acknowledged the significance of nationhood without ardently engaging with it in a nationalist sense. Rather, they knowingly used it out of convenience to accomplish their work tasks. The situations in which individuals are involved depend more on their work tasks and work environments than situations they might have created for themselves, but they nevertheless adapted their actions according to the tasks to be accomplished. This is what led them to implement the above-mentioned strategies, to the best of their capacity and knowledge. While these in-

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

dividuals might not be nationalist in the sense Philip from Chapter 1 was, they nonetheless, I argue, nationalized elements through the accomplishment of their work tasks. Individuals involved in work tasks that create a dynamic operating with nationhood do not aim to challenge, dissolve, restructure, or actively maintain elements as national, as was the case for the previous dynamic. They nevertheless perpetuate existing elements deemed national, and thus legitimize them as such. Participants involved in the first sociological encounter (re)constructed contexts in which public figures not only make sense, but contexts, that of nations, “in need” of figures. Whether artistic or political, and other public figures—with varying degrees of celebrity and importance—are a significant aspect of nations. National figures help differentiate and distinguish nations from one another through the personalities of different milieus within society. They are part and parcel of these myths of common ancestors and contemporary leaders (Smith, 1987: 21; see also 1991; 1998). Poets gain national importance when they are established throughout the years as significant figures by artistic communities, just like a politician is established by his peers from political communities. It is only through such recognition that they can become national figures. In enacting this significance through the construction of a national context in a class or in a news program, individuals legitimize these public figures as national and of national importance. Individuals doing business with nationhood by using nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices and adding national references onto products or services also perpetuate and legitimize elements as a national, whether these be fruits, vegetables, pianos, or services. In marketing and advertising products and services in order to increase sales, individuals from the second and third sociological encounter of this chapter used categories of country of origin—or provinces, and even villages in one of the case of Montreal; and those, among others, dividing the two main Belgian linguistic groups. When businesses label and advertise their products and services through such categories—whether it be by law or not—and when individuals in turn choose to market and sell these products by “playing” along with such categories while conducting their tasks, they legitimize such products and services as national. In doing business with nationhood, my informants participate in this moment in history when nationhood becomes an integral part of businesses (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). In conclusion, work tasks creating a dynamic operating with nationhood consist of practices drawing on the implementation of strategies that are meant to help carry out the tasks in question by assembling different elements already thought of as national, which result in national constructs—such as national contexts and business plans that involves nationhood as knowledge and national references. In enacting nationhood through such strategies, individuals are merely motivated by the desire to successfully accomplish their tasks. In the

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process, however, they legitimize elements as national—such as public figures, products, services, and businesses. For the sake of convenience, they reify and reinforce the idea that we live in a world divided into nations while carrying out their work tasks. Their motive is not nationalist; they are not driven by a cause as much as by the will to carry out their task in a successful way. Work tasks operating with nationhood represent a mode of operating nationhood in which the relationship with the idea of a world of nations is understood and characterized through the elaboration of strategies that aim to accomplish tasks—whether they be work-related or not. By enacting nationhood through strategies, the second work task dynamic entails a mode of social action operating with nationhood in which elements are legitimized as national out of convenience, for the accomplishment of a task. The mode operating upon nationhood may have been the most obvious type but it was rare in the fieldwork; whereas the mode presented in this chapter is the one I have empirically observed the most. While this is not surprising, in the sense that the great majority of people are not professional nation builders, the mode operating with nationhood offers an original interpretative perspective: it demonstrates how individuals may have a relationship with nationhood that is not nationalist, but rather strategic, and how they might still legitimize elements as national in the course of day-to-day activities. In the next chapter, I will unveil a third and last work task dynamic and mode of operating nationhood. The way in which the work-related task of mapping land with nationhood is conducted can be summed up as follows: individuals whose activities within their work environments require them to refer to space are most likely to map land to others by using nationhood-related terms that cognitively delimit geographical landscapes or landmarks. In so doing, they do not refer to the sociopolitical or sociohistorical entities themselves—their political function or the historical status they represent—but to the geographical locations that these are imagined to occupy, and to the qualities they are believed to have. While mapping land with nationhood-related terms does simplify their tasks, it is not possible to say that individuals are motivated by this result. Such actions are rather the result of a lack of choices or significant alternatives, since most individuals do not master potential alternatives to mapping land, such as the use of geographical coordinates. Individuals, therefore, use nationhood-related terms identified as landscapes or landmarks to map land to others through routine habits. This practice reflects the acknowledgement of interlocutors that they are members of an undefined collectivity for which the terms constitute a similar meaning that is broadly shared yet not neutral; it is a practice upholding the power of states upon the definition of land through toponyms that represent landscapes and landmarks. Consequently, it emphasizes and legitimizes that spaces are national because “domesticated, replicated in local contexts, and [understood] as part of everyday-life” (idem.). Territories are thus defined by

Chapter 2. Elaborating National Constructs as Strategies

the idea of a world divided into nations through the power of states, but also routines. Although matters intersecting space and nationhood are anything but seldom, those concerning languages are by far the most common today, most particularly in Montreal and Brussels. Both cities are notable and renowned arrays of linguistic cleavages. Though I did not directly focus on such matters in the work-related task at hand, they were conspicuous in the context of Montreal, and also in Brussels—yet to a lesser extent. Sophie and her colleagues addressed, for example, mediocre translations from firms located in the United States. As for Carla, even though linguistic complications did not appear to be serious, she alluded to what can be considered linguistic issues when referring to the French-speaking delegate of a Flemish company for the regions of Brussels and Wallonia. In the following part of the chapter, I examine such matters by focusing on their everyday implications and repercussions in workplaces.

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Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines: The Work Task Dynamic Operated by Nationhood The two tasks I explore in this chapter create a dynamic in which the work activities of my participants become operated by nationhood. In this third and last dynamic of the typology, the tasks are to a certain extent “compelled” by nationhood. They not only assert the idea that the world is divided into nations; they are conducted in a specific way because of the idea that we live in a world of nations. When thinking of activities operated by nationhood, whether they be work-related or not, what may first come to mind are the impacts of some “coercive” public policies on societies, such as the institutional standardization of one or more language. While the inception and deliberations of such public—and perhaps nationalist—policies are worthy of examination, I for my part, in line with my research interest, focus on the impact such rulings may have on day-to-day activities in the workplace. In this chapter, I examine the ways individuals routinely, out of a lack of significant alternative, accomplish work tasks with national elements and unreflexively legitimize them as such. The first sociological encounter looks into empirical segments from a Montreal-based environmental technician and a Brussels-based veterinarian. I explore how nationhood appears through landscapes and landmarks when mapping land to other people in order to display, communicate, share, or complement required knowledge or information with regard to spaces and their qualities. This is the work-related task I identify as mapping land with nationhood. The second sociological encounter follows a Brussels-based human resources employee of the city’s public transport firm and a Montreal-based nurse working for a company testing pharmaceutical products on voluntary patients. In this second encounter, I investigate how my participants and their coworkers comply with specific languages and language usages in workplaces from cities in which linguistic legislations exist. This is the work-related task I identify as compliance with languages. In the last section of the chapter, I delineate the dynamic central to the two work-related tasks at hand: the dynamic in

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which work tasks are operated by nationhood. In so doing, I shed light on the last mode of operating nationhood from the typology developed in the book.

3.1 M apping L and with N ationhood : R outine P r actices of a V e terinarian and an E nvironmental Technician The naming of a territory is inextricably linked with the ethnic group occupying that territory: England – Englishmen; Scotland – Scots; Serbia – Serbians and so on. There are symbols and rituals that reinforce this connection but it is primarily when this so-called ‘ethnic correlation’ is called into question that identity with the land is mobilized into a nationalistic cause. (S altman , 2002: 3)

In relation to nationhood, issues regarding spaces are commonplace. The different sociopolitical units in which Montreal and Brussels are embedded are no exception. Such points in question are often related to borders, as in the Brussels-Hal-Vilvoorde affair and the split of several communes surrounding the Brussels-Capital Region (see Bouillon and Jean-Pierre, 2010); to the claim of larger territories, as in the ongoing allegation from Quebec arguing that the Labrador region was unjustifiably annexed to the province of Newfoundland (see Rothney 1963); or to banal everyday encounters, as in the constant way the area we live in is shown to us on the weather channel or on a simple map displaying borders of states, provinces, regions, or cities (Billig, 1995: 74). Matters regarding spaces with respect to nationhood stem from major political issues as much as mundane activities, and “depend on a range of institutional and everyday practices” (Edensor, 2002: 65). The naming of delimited spaces of whichever magnitude or nature is perhaps the most evident yet forgotten institutional practice interconnecting territorial issues with nationhood. Naming land “is inextricably linked with the ethnic group occupying” it (Saltman, 2002: 3); it is a practice that represents “a fundamental step towards defining the meaning of place and exercising control over place” (Nash et al., 2010: 54). As defined in the literature, on the one hand, land and territories “are neutral items fixed in time and space” (ibid.: 3) and “common denominator[s] of the phenomenal world” (Ingold, 1993: 154). On the other hand, landscapes and landmarks tell, or rather are stories (ibid.: 152). Landscapes and landmarks are constructed; they are the “work of the mind” (Schama, 1995: 6), shaped by conceptions that are “culturally acquired and sedimented in memory” (Ingold, 2012: 4; see also, 2000), and serve as “repositories of socio-political meaning and symbolic associations that are negotiated and contested in discourse”

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

(Nash et al., 2010: 53). While the negotiations and contestations underlying the meanings and symbols to which landscapes and landmarks are associated may be of interest, they usually belong to the realm of institutional practices. I have not encountered such actions when exploring day-to-day activities in the workplaces of Montreal and Brussels. Everyday practices of referring to spaces with nationhood-related terms were however commonplace, especially in the workplaces of a Montreal-based environmental technician and a Brussels-based veterinarian. In exploring such activities, I examine in the fist sociological encounter how nationhood subtly emerges through landscapes and landmarks when banally mapping land. *** On a Tuesday morning in January 2014 in Montreal, I am invited by Sarah, a French-speaker, to observe her day at work. We meet at Laurier metro station on the Plateau Mont-Royal at 7:30 a.m. As we head towards Côte-Vertu station, she gives me details about her job, first by mentioning that she is an environmental technician in an engineering firm. She says that she works with clients constructing or renovating buildings who contact her firm in order to obtain an environmental certification. The first customer we visit on that day is one of these. She mentions that he is mandated by the administration of the borough to certify his condominium and office complex. As Sarah and I meet him in his personal office, he receives a phone call. He answers on speaker mode. He wishes his interlocutor a happy new year, and then adds that they are a bit late for such greetings, just like in the Maritimes.1 The conversation begins in French, but quickly switches to English. Apparently familiar with the topic, Sarah at some point jumps into the discussion in French, while the others continue to speak English. The exchange, from what I can understand, appears to be about the materials used to build the complex. In the course of the conversation, Sarah mentions that if the glasses for the windows come from Chicago, the distance would be too great for them to be considered ecological, unless they were brought here by train. She adds that if they were indeed transported by train, that would somehow have to be proven with, for instance, a reception notice. As an outsider to the ongoing discussions and the project at hand, I do not understand the meanings and purposes of these distances issues. 1 | A common saying used when someone or something is late: Une heure plus tard dans les Maritimes (An hour later in the Maritimes). The Maritimes are a common word used to designate the Canadian provinces located to the East of the Quebec province: New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia. Their time zone, as well as that of Quebec’s Îles-de-la-Madeleine, is UTC-3 (except for Newfoundland, which is UTC-2:30), while Quebec’s is UTC-4.

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Later, while her client is busy with another task, I try to find out more about the matter of distance that seems to be at stake. Sarah explains that the construction materials of a given project cannot be considered ecological after having travelled a certain amount of kilometers in a polluting vehicle such as a truck. She adds that this is an important criterion in the evaluation process of delivering a LEED certificate for a building.2 From what I subsequently understand from her explanations, the more distant the origin of a construction part is, the less ecological the part is considered, and it is thus awarded fewer points to meet the LEED program expectation. Unfamiliar with the latter program, I inquire about the certificate and the signification of the acronym. I learn that it stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. When I ask why there is no French translation of the term, Sarah replies that acronyms are usually not translated. I challenge her—hopefully in a respectful and non-arrogant way—by giving her the example of the ONU (Organisation des Nations unies), which is translated from the UN (United Nations) English term. She concedes the point, but furthers her thought by saying that a translation of the name would change the acronym. Curious about the origin of the certification, I ask if it is Canadian. She answers in the negative, and adds that it is an American certification that was adapted to Canada in English, and then translated into French. She ends her explanation by adding that this way of doing will not last because they soon plan to directly translate the content of the certificate from the United States program into French. When the client refocuses his attention on Sarah, they once again both start listing products intended for the construction of the complex. Interested in their provenance, they seek those that could be considered as local. These are products, I can only imagine, that do not come from “too far away,” and that could be recognized as ecological by the standards of the LEED certification. The client contends that the doors are FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) approved, and that they are from “here;” that the elevator is made in Quebec; that the soil, the turf, and another bunch of products concerning the yard are all from “here.” However, he admits that the ceramic is—in his words—all Italian junk! He then deviates from the initial listing, and begins talking about some of the issues he has encountered concerning the sale of offices in the building under construction. He says that the paperwork potential buyers have to submit to him represents an annoying and challenging task. He expands on the idea by telling the story of a German customer who submitted everything in German and English. He then lightly strikes his desk with his hand—in an irritated way, or maybe as if he is about to say something obvious to him—and says that

2 | LEED is a building certification program that recognizes best-in-class building strategies and practices. Its label is granted to buildings that meet various requirements.

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

it is unfortunate, but that everything will have to be in French; we are here in Quebec. Shortly after, when we are about to leave, Sarah asks for a taxi to be called. After relegating this task to the receptionist, the client admits, with a smile, that he thought I was her chauffeur for the day. While accompanying us to the elevator, he expresses his surprise about the fact that she does not have a car. He adds—probably as an attempted humorous comment, just like the previous one concerning me—that that is probably for the best, since it leaves another dangerous woman off the streets. As if she were discarding this last remark, Sarah only promptly says that she lives on the Plateau,3 and that she therefore does not need a car. The client replies by telling her that she then has all the flaws, and adds that no one is allowed do anything in this borough: we cannot turn right, we cannot turn left, we cannot move backward, we cannot move forward! *** From the use of the names of provinces, cities, and countries in a conversation on the provenance of materials, I look into similar mapping practices from my observations in Brussels with Carla, a French-speaking veterinarian. After my arrival in her office on a morning of April 2014, the first thing she wants to share with me concerns her earnings and the functioning of the clinic—I did tell all of my participants, after all, that I am interested in their practices at work. She takes out a sheet of the amounts she charges for consultations and other services. She then sums up her monthly earning average, and subtracts from that amount her expenses, such as the office rent and all the materials, which belong to her partner, the owner of the clinic. As she is explaining this, her telephone rings. She responds, and tells the person on the line that s/he could just leave the package in the American-style mailbox in front of the clinic. Hanging up, she suggests moving towards her office and waiting for customers to arrive. She adds that today is a day without fixed appointments, and that she expressly invited me for such a work shift because they are busier. Crossing the corridor, the room in which we arrive is decorated with two posters depicting the anatomy of a cat and a dog in English. They are hanging next to a shelf filled with medical books in French and English, next to a French-Dutch dictionary. Waiting for customers, meanwhile, she attempts to know more about my inquiry. Almost immediately, however, someone rings the bell of the clinic and interrupts our conversation—to my relief.

3 | Le Plateau is a shortened term for the Montreal borough of the Plateau Mont-Royal. It is often characterized as a hub for “leftists,” artists, “progressists,” and ecologists.

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A woman and a boy step into the clinic with a rabbit in a cage. As she lays it down on the examination table, Carla exclaims that it is a real Chinese Impress. After the examination is over and the customers have left, Carla tells me that in the last years there has been an explosion of rabbits in Brussels families. She says that it is a catastrophe, because they are much more allergenic than cats or dogs. She adds that they are fine pets to have in an outdoor cage, but that this is rarely possible in a large city such as Brussels. She recalls in the interview that when children want a dog or a cat, parents normally quickly exclude this option when living in a city, but that “if a child does end up obtaining an animal, people go for very small animals that we can keep in a cage […]. A gold fish is particularly frustrating, because you can’t hold it, you can’t pet it, so [they] go for hamsters, guinea pigs, ferrets eventually, even though they stink, and rabbits. And I’m against that, because they are animals that are extremely allergenic [and are] absolutely not adapted to closed areas like a house or an apartment” (Interview, 04/24/2014).4 Even before she has concluded her appointment with this first animal, other customers are already gathering in the waiting room. The next person in line is there to have her dog vaccinated. While Carla is saying that this specific vaccine is valid for three years, I see the customer take a document out of her purse, with the words Passeport pour animal de compagnie (Passport for pets) on it. The document is headed with the European flag, and France is written just below. While Carla is writing a note in the document, the client asks if the vaccine is also valid in Switzerland. Carla answers in the affirmative. She also advises the customer on her first visit to a Swiss veterinarian that she should make sure that the “vet” starts looking in the passport from the end. In this way, s/he will hopefully become tired and not read through the whole booklet, since the first vaccines are not exactly the same there and may not be recognized. Unaware of the existence of such passports and curious about their usage, I inquire about their purpose during the interview, and ask her to give me her opinion on their usefulness. The first thing she tells me is that they are mandatory as soon as you go through a border, therefore, most dogs living in the depths of the Ardèche in France do not have passports, because they never have to cross borders. In a quite special country like Belgium where borders are always less than 200 4 | “Si l’enfant parvient à obtenir un animal, les gens se lâchent surtout sur des tout petits animaux qu’on maintient en cage […] Le petit poisson rouge est particulièrement frustrant parce qu’on peut pas le prendre en main, on peut pas le caresser, on se rabat alors sur des hamsters, des cobayes, des furets éventuellement quoique ça pue, et des lapins. Et moi je suis contre parce que ce sont des animaux extrêmement allergisants […] ce sont des animaux absolument pas adaptés à des milieux clos comme une maison ou un appartement” (Interview, 04/24/2014).

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines kilometers away, almost every dog has a passport because you might cross a border really quickly: you go for a weekend in France, or you hop over to Luxembourg, or I don’t know what. So, many dogs in Belgium have this passport, but it is only mandatory if you cross the borders of one of the 28 countries of the European Union. [...] If you’re a hunter from the depths of the Ardennes, and you’re invited to go to a hunting trip in France, and there, stop stop! In order to go hunting in France you have to cross a border. It requires a passport. He then goes to the vet who identifies the dog, who examines the dog, who says “in the end you are a hunter, you need this type of vermifuge, ah but in the end ticks” and so on. It is an occasion for the veterinarian to do his [or her] job properly (Interview, 04/24/2014). 5

The use of passports for animals seems to be guiding some of Carla’s activities. Such items lead her not only to use, but also to think in nationhood-related terms: references to space become guided by toponyms related to states. Vaccines—or perhaps other treatments that I did not come across—registered in pets’ passports raise questions in the minds of clients about their validity in Switzerland or France, for example, or elsewhere than its place of issue. Since animals are bound to passports issued by one state, and since they must be valid in order to cross one of the national borders within the European Union, usage of these “elsewheres” questioning the validity of vaccines is limited to the uses of the toponyms of European states. Carla exemplifies this when listing France, Belgium, or Luxembourg during the interview. However, other toponyms which do not directly refer to states, like the Ardèche or the Ardennes,6 5 | “Première chose, le passeport est indispensable dès que tu passes une frontière, donc la plupart des chiens, au fin fond de l’Ardèche en France n’ont pas de passeport, parce qu’ils ne passent jamais de frontières. Dans un pays assez spécial comme la Belgique où les frontières sont à moins de 200 km, quasiment tous les chiens ont un passeport parce que très vite tu peux passer une frontière: très vite tu vas faire un weekend en France, ou un petit saut au Luxembourg, ou que sais-je. Donc beaucoup de chiens en Belgique ont ce passeport, mais il n’est obligatoire que si on passe l’une des frontières des 28 pays de l’Union européenne [mais] à partir du moment où tu es un chasseur du fin fond des Ardennes, et on t’invite à aller faire une chasse en France, et là stop stop. Pour aller à la chasse en France on passe une frontière. Il faut un passeport. Il passe chez un véto, qui identifie le chien, qui examine le chien qui dit ‘mais dans le fond vous êtes chasseur il vous faut tel vermifuge, tient mais au fond les tics’ et tout ça. C’est une occasion pour le vétérinaire de bien faire son boulot” (Interview, 04/24/2014). 6 | The Ardennes may refer to many geographical entities: a French department and a non-politically defined area encompassing Belgium, Luxemburg, and France. This last area, of which the great part is located in Belgium, is most likely the location Carla is referring to, since she is talking about a hunter needing to cross a border to go to France for a hunting trip.

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do not seem to have been employed under the same “constrain,” so far. How to make sense of the usage of the later toponyms? The following customer visiting the clinic comes in with two Chihuahua dogs. The client mentions that for one of them, it is the first visit to a veterinarian. Carla first inquires about the place the dog was purchased. The customer replies that the first one was acquired from a dog breeder in Flanders, but that it ended up having a disease, and that she decided to acquire the new one from a family she found on the Internet. Carla then asks if she already has papers for the puppy. The customer answers in the negative. As Carla prepares some paperwork and other medical material, she remembers out loud—probably in order to follow up on the first dog’s disease as mentioned by the customer— photos she thought were horrible from a dresser in Hungary where many dogs were kept into little boxes. When installing the tracker in the dog’s skin, she mentions the name of the vaccine she will also administer, and says that when the dog enters the woods or the bushes, in the Woluwe Park or the Royal Park for example, the vaccine will protect it from diseases that could be transmitted from rats, excrement from other animals, or ticks. Afterwards, Carla tells the client that she will receive by mail the number of the tracker, which is valid in all the countries of the European Union. Carla then suggests to the client that if she likes shopping, she should bring the puppy to the Neuve Street or the Grand’ Place on Saturdays to immerse it into a crowd, so that it will quickly become accustomed to people. She adds that in this way, her dog will be fine in public for the rest of its life. The customer promptly replies to these suggestions by saying that she has already brought it to Neuve Street, and to the Grand’ Place as well, but that she was so afraid that people would step on it that she chose to carry the dog at all times. She concludes by saying that it should not be too scared of people, since the dogs already accompany her every day to the beauty salon where she works with her mother in Uccle. Knowing where she lives, Carla comments that it must take her quite a long time to drive to work every day. The references to the Brussels borough of Uccle, the Neuve Street, the Woluwe Park, the Royal Park, and the Grand’ Place, or the French department of Ardèche, the Belgian region of the Ardennes, the states of Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, and France, as well as the European Union, seem to be used in a way similar to that of the references to the entities observed earlier in Montreal. In both cases from each city, so far, mentioning such an entity generates meanings with regard to the location of a space and its qualities. Sarah, when speaking of Chicago, refers to the distance of the city as being too far to meet the LEED requirements of a local product, which her customer seems to understand without further information, in the same way that Carla uses France and Luxemburg as examples of places where a Belgian dog would need a passport to travel, without having to mention that these are territories that are not in Belgium. In order to test my assumptions regarding the use of such entities, as

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

well as to better elucidate how they involve nationhood, I return to Montreal. More precisely, I return to the second meeting of my day with Sarah. This time, instead of visiting clients, we meet engineer colleagues of her firm after lunch in a building on, as she mentions, Sainte-Catherine street. *** While discussing the ongoing developments of another construction project, a building located in downtown Montreal to which she needs to deliver a LEED certificate, Sarah distributes a document to her colleagues. One of them, after quickly going through the papers, breaks the silence and inquires—in a puzzled way it seems to me—about the author of the files. Before he has the chance to continue, Sarah interrupts him and says that an English speaker has probably translated what they are reading from English into French. The colleague replies by pointing at a line in one of the documents, and says that by “retenir” (hold), they probably mean “rétention” (retention). Intrigued by these language problems, I ask Sarah about them later on during the day. She answers that these documents are norms from the United States that are adapted to Canada, and that an American has probably expeditiously translated them into French. When I ask if she thinks this was done by Google translate or a similar program, she answers in the affirmative without adding any further comment—as if, I am under the impression, this is a recurrent issue to which she does not pay much attention. Lingering on other English expressions that are apparently not translated into French in the text, Sarah and her colleagues admit that they are not able to make sense of everything the document aims to convey. Following this agreement, the conversation moves on to what appears to be the main issue of the project: depending on the soil, what are the drains and filters to be used on the structure of the building? After reading aloud the suggestions from the author of the paperwork, one of Sarah’s colleagues shakes his head with his eyes wide open in a manner conveying that he is annoyed. He then contends that in Quebec there are very strong rainfalls in very short periods of time compared to, for example, Nebraska, and that here, we only need to sprinkle water in July. He adds that the required material used to drain water at the bottom of buildings is not the same in Montreal or in the province of Quebec as in Nebraska—the state the client appears to be from. Weather conditions, in this case the accumulation of water within a defined time span, causes the material variation in each location. He explains the distinctions in regard to the norms of the United States, which this client seems to be aiming to apply in Montreal. Sarah immediately replies that some people most likely simply copied usual practice in the United States without asking themselves if this would function here as well. She admits that although this may be valid for Americans, she has no idea if

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it meets Canadian standards. Her colleague then lists different administrative regions of the province of Quebec. He mentions that in Mauricie and Montreal, water filtration in the soil is impossible; that in Quebec City and in Lanaudière, it is really excellent; but that he is not sure about Estrie. He concludes by adding that in Montreal, the administrative authorities taking care of construction issues are not content with the use of retention pools, because water can sometimes easily infiltrate and damage the aging bricks of the city. Unable to reach a clear consensus on which material is needed, Sarah leaves the meeting knowing that she has to contact once again the promoter of the project in order to have a better idea of what his or her plans are. The administrative regions of the province of Quebec were listed to refer to the distinct filtration capacities of kinds of soil and to sustain potential reasons behind the differences between Canadian standards and the norms suggested as being from Nebraska and the United States. They not only seem to generate meanings with regard to the qualities of a location, they also appear to be a part of the knowledge of emplacements that is assumed to be known by, and shared with, the interlocutor, e.g., my informant, Sarah. Her colleague indeed takes into consideration that Sarah knows he is invoking regions that are not in the United States—otherwise, he would further specify his remarks, because his listing would not make sense with regard to the comparison he is establishing with Sarah between the norms of the United States and Canada. Similarly, Carla appears to assume that her customer knows what the qualities of the Woluwe Park or the Royal Park are, when she mentions them as examples of a place where the dog of the client may be protected from diseases by the vaccine she is administrating. If not, she would not use it as an example and only mention or describe a wooded area where rats, animals’ excrement, and ticks may be found. Likewise, by simply invoking “the depths of the Ardèche” and “the depth of the Ardennes” in the interview, Carla appears to expect me to know the location of these entities, but first and foremost to seize the intended imagined environment she wishes their names to convey: locations where hunters most likely have dogs that do not need passports, because they never have to cross a border, unless, in the case of the Ardennes, they go on a hunting trip in France. Hence, the meanings concerning the location of a space and the qualities generated by the use of such terms seem to be shared. But moreover, both Carla and Sarah seem to share these assumptions with their interlocutors. I suggest that they help the discussants display, communicate, share, or complement the required knowledge or information with regard to spaces and their qualities. The name of a country, without a doubt, might convey nationhood. But what about the administrative regions of Quebec or the parks of Brussels? ***

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

In Brussels, back from lunch, Carla informs me that she is waiting for the representative of a pet pharmaceutical company. Curious, I seek to acquire more information on this person’s job and the purpose of her visit. Carla tells me that the representative, who will be arriving at any moment, comes from a Flemish firm manufacturing and distributing drugs for domestic animals. She adds that the expected visitor is the French-speaking delegate of the company in question and that she is covering the whole of Wallonia, in addition to Brussels. Upon her arrival, Carla guides her guest to the back office. She informs her that phone calls or clients may disturb them, since the afternoon schedule of the clinic is devoted to drop-in customers. As the representative goes through all of her products displayed on Carla’s desk, she presents and explains the new samples and the changes in the older ones. At some point, she looks at me and opens her eyes widely—as if she is stunned, it seems to me—and says that the best thing about all of these medicines is that they are from Belgium. She continues her presentation by adding that although her firm works with a French laboratory, they have exclusive distribution rights for Benelux. After describing the products and discussing their uses with Carla, the representative concludes her visit by reiterating that the company is Belgian, and that this is, according to her, a huge advantage: it flattens—as she shows by drawing a line with her finger—the communication within the organization, thus making exchanges faster and generating more efficiency in serving customers. She mentions as an example that unlike multinational companies, where it sometimes takes hours and days to obtain an answer, she can talk directly to her bosses to receive feedback on an inquiry. Meanwhile, a few people have arrived in the waiting room and are waiting for Carla to call them into her office. She does so as soon as the representative leaves. The first pet to be taken care of, a dog, is there for vaccines. Carla repeats the same lines as earlier about the diseases from which her animal will be protected from with the vermifuge. This time, however, Carla also adds that since there are more dogs per square kilometer in Brussels than in the countryside, such as in the Ardennes, they can easily contaminate each other with, for example, their excrement, and even re-contaminate themselves, which is why this vaccine needs to be renewed every now and then. Near the end of the consultation, the customer asks if the treatment is also effective against ticks in le Midi,7 since she often goes there with her husband and their family; a question to which Carla answers in the affirmative. Towards the end of our day, after the second English-speaking customer of that day leaves the clinic, I ask Carla if she has more English-speaking customers than Dutch-speaking customers. She quickly confirms that this is the case—as if there were no hesitation regarding the response to such a ques7 | Le Midi is a term that usually refers to the south of France.

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tion—by first mentioning that the neighborhood is very international. Second, she adds that there are anyways no Dutch-speaking people in Brussels. She develops this last assertion by adding that Flemings may say that they constitute a quarter of the population in the capital, but that in fact they are probably not even ten percent. During the interview, in order to obtain more information on the matter, I ask Carla to elaborate a bit more on the composition of her clientele: Yes, then, before this professional activity here on the Chant d’oiseau [street], I worked in two other clinics: one in which I was doing an internship, on Léopold II Boulevard, it was at the time, ancient Belgians. Now the neighborhood is full of immigrants, but before it was Belgians; after that, I had a clinic almost in front of the Koekelberg Basilica, once again Belgian Belgian Belgian… So, when we had our private offices here, at some point I closed the cabinet at the Basilica and came here and started from the beginning again. You only have to look around you in the street, less than half of the houses are inhabited by Belgians, they are people, Europeans essentially, whether they work here their whole lives, whether they are just passing by, so, this is a bit of a challenge for us, because we are confronted with other hygienic cultures. For example, Finns are flabbergasted by the fact that there are ticks; there are no ticks in Finland. In fact, if someone goes to Finland, I am obligated to treat [the animal] against ticks. There are different things; there is a lot of explaining to do. These are also people who are traveling a lot; there is the whole legislative side to it that we have to explain […] this is a neighborhood that is sought after by Eurocrats, the whole south-east of Brussels in fact […], so yeah, it has always been a more or less international neighborhood. I am not talking about the sixties, you know, because the European Union had just been implemented then, but for at least thirty years, it’s been an international neighborhood (Interview, 04/24/2014). 8 8 | “Oui alors, avant cette activité professionnelle ici au chant d’oiseau, j’ai eu deux autres cabinets où j’étais stagiaire au boulevard Léopold 2, c’était à l’époque des anciens belges. Voilà, maintenant c’est devenu un quartier très émigré, mais avant c’était des Belges. Puis j’ai eu un cabinet quasiment en face de la Basilique de Koekelberg, à nouveau Belges Belges Belges. Donc quand nous avions notre privé ici, a un moment j’ai fermé le cabinet de la Basilique et je suis venue ici et j’ai tout remis à zéro. Il suffit que tu regarde autour de toi dans la rue, moins de la moitié des maisons sont occupés par des Belges. Ce sont des gens, des européens essentiellement. Soit qu’ils travaillent ici depuis toute leur vie, soit qu’ils sont de passage, donc, ça c’est un peu un challenge pour nous, parce que nous sommes confrontés à d’autres cultures d’hygiène. Par exemple les Finlandais ils tombent des nus qu’il y a des tiques, par exemple, y’a pas de tiques en Finlande. D’ailleurs, si on va en Finlande, je dois obligatoirement traiter contre les tiques, voilà. Y’a des choses qui sont différentes, y’a un travail d explication et tout. Ce sont aussi des gens qui voyagent beaucoup, il y a tout le côté législatif qui faut leur expliquer […] c’est toujours un quartier qui a été prisé par les eurocrates, tout

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

As the sociological encounter between Sarah and Carla illustrates, the activities and tasks within the work environments of both informants—at least from what I have observed during our days together—strongly involve working with references to spaces. In Montreal as much as in Brussels, the practice of invoking these appears under a terminology related to public sites, boroughs, regions, cities, streets, provinces, or countries. These names, far from being meaningless, are all determined by commissions of toponyms of public authorities, and represent or are meant to represent sociopolitical or sociohistorical entities. In other words, these names, as I explore in what follows, refer to the idea of living in a world of nations.

3.1.1 Reif ying Space as National: Power, Landscapes, and Routine Practices The workplaces of both participants themselves appear to create very little bias upon the activities of mapping land with nationhood. Except from the state-centered episodes observed in the case of the passport that led Carla to use and think in nationhood-related terms, there appears to be no specific elements typical to the workplaces directly influencing mapping land with nationhood. Other elements than the ones from the work environments themselves should be then considered. When referring to spaces, Carla and Sarah—as well as their clients and colleagues—used terms that they were expecting their interlocutors to know the location they were believed or imagined to occupy, but also the qualities they were believed or imagined to have. If there were doubts, visual aids such as geographical charts or the technical support of geographical coordinates would be used. Such assistance, however, did not come up in the fieldwork. In order to display, share, communicate, or complement the required knowledge or information with regard to spaces and their qualities, my informants and their colleagues or customers simply used names as cognitively delimited geographical landscapes and landmarks to map land to others. A piece of land or a territory conceptualized or abstractly defined through a specific term is no longer neutral; it has a story, which is, for individuals, “culturally acquired and sedimented in memory” (idem.). The land, in other words, becomes landscape—or a landmark. States exercise great power over naming spaces. Quebec, Canada, Brussels-Capital Region, and Belgium, as political authorities, all have a commission of toponyms. Landscapes and landmarks le Sud-Est de Bruxelles en fait. […] donc oui ça a toujours été un quartier plus ou moins international. Je te parle pas des années soixante hein, parce que l’Union européenne venait de s’implanter, mais au moins trente ans, c’est un quartier très international” (Interview, 04/24/2014).

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are therefore defined and established by states. They are toponyms intended to territorially define a specific nation and asses that the territory represents and belongs to the nation in question. But as noted by Edensor, “for national space to retain its power, it must be domesticated, replicated in local contexts, and be understood as part of everyday-life” (2002: 65). As a consequence, by mapping land to others with no other means than names or toponyms, my participants and their interlocutors not only imagined landscapes and landmarks and entered into correspondence with them (Ingold, 2000: 14), they legitimized landscapes and landmarks as national and reified the significance that states detain on defining land. While naming land often goes unnoticed, and the names of land seem banal, the practice nevertheless becomes apparent when conflicts over toponyms emerge. For the British, for example, a certain archipelago located in the south of the Atlantic Sea is known as the Falkland Islands, whereas it is known as the Islas Malvinas to Argentinians and Argentinian authorities. Also, what is referred to by the Chinese as the South China Sea is called the East Sea by the Vietnamese. Hence, references used to map land are not neutral, even if they are most often considered as such. Investigating the motives of actors aiming to uphold the names of such areas could perhaps lead me to characterize them as nationalist. But what could be the motives of individuals mapping land with nationhood? In Montreal, instead of mentioning the number of kilometers between Montreal and Chicago, or by looking up this information in order to obtain a precise number, Sarah only mentioned that the point of departure of the glass was too far to be considered ecological. Later on during the day, rather than using the geographical coordinate delimiting the regions of Montreal, Mauricie, or Lanaudière to refer to differences in soils, her colleague only mentioned their names. In Brussels, Carla, instead of describing a wooden area, or alternatively using geographical coordinates delimiting locations, used the name Ardèche and Ardennes to refer to the geographical qualities of a hunter or of an area in which there are fewer animals than in a city. When Carla, Sarah, and their interlocutors referred to sites, boroughs, regions, cities, provinces, countries, or streets, they did not mean to allude to their nationhood aspects, the actual sociopolitical or sociohistorical entities themselves, i.e., their political function or their historical status, but to the location they were believed or imagined to occupy, and to the qualities they were believed or imagined to have. It is not the national significance or meaning embedded in, for example, the Royal Park or the administrative regions of Quebec9 to which my informants meant to refer, 9 | While the nationhood aspect of the Royal Park, or the Grand’ Place may be more obvious, that of the administrative regions of Quebec may not be. They all have, however, sociopolitical or sociohistorical aspect. The name Lanaudière, for example,

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

but to specific locations and their qualities. Nationhood, then, does not only emerge through landscapes and landmarks. Nationhood defines landscapes and landmarks. While the uses of nationhood-related terms exhibit an understanding of an individual’s possession of information about his or her location and surroundings and their qualities, the expectation, but even more so the fact that interlocutors possess the same information, reveals a common form of belonging and sharing of information. As noted by Edensor, the accumulation of individual experiences is “sustained by a collective sense of place which is grounded through a sharing of the spatial and temporal constellations where a host of individual paths and routines coincide” (Edensor, 2002: 56). Hence, Edensor further comments, “meaning becomes sedimented in time as successive social and cultural contexts are materialized, remembered, projected and performed upon space” (ibid.). As a result, mapping land with nationhood-related terms is a practice reflecting the acknowledgement that the interlocutors taking part in a given activity are members of a collectivity (and its knowledge) which is not precisely defined, but which does uphold nationhood by, in this case, generating inclusion and exclusion with regard to the landscapes and landmarks of nations. Carla, when using the term Ardennes, perhaps thought of me as “included” in this undefined collectivity. Knowing that I lived for many years in Belgium, she most likely assumed that I knew where but mostly what the Ardennes were. Otherwise, I would have been “excluded,” intentionally or not. Actions of mapping land with nationhood do not directly refer to the fatherland as defined by Anthony Smith, in which “one great family,” recognizing its members as brothers or sisters, speak the same mother tongue and share “sacred centers” (Smith, 1991: 16 and 79). While the Grand’ Place could without a doubt be one of these centers, it was not referred to as such in the sociological encounter. It was rather invoked as a mere crowded landmark to which Carla’s customer took her dog. A crowded area was the constitutive meaning underlying the usage of the Grand’ Place in this case, not the sacred center or the iconic sites of Brussels or of Belgium. Nevertheless, the term used reifies nationhood in the banal context of everyday life, as much as do the references to states, cities, or streets. Not mentioning toponyms, and simply describing a crowd, would be sufficient for the indented meaning of the phrase. Mapping land with nationhood, however, greatly simplifies this task. This easiness was commemorates and refers to a family that owned a seigneurie in the region (Québec, 2016a). Mauricie comes from the Rivière-Saint-Maurice that runs through the region. The name of the river was, again, given to commemorate the owner of a seigneurie: Maurice Poulin. For years the region was referred to Vallée du Sain-Maurice, which was perceived as an English formula of St. Maurice Valley, and was changed for Mauricie, which sounded more French (Agora, 2012; Québec, 2016b).

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never explicitly acknowledged by my participants. It was not the goal of the mapping practice. As the story of Carla and Sarah illustrates, this mapping practice is regularly carried out in work environments in order to display, communicate, share, or complement knowledge or information with regard to spaces. This led them to accomplish their tasks in simple ways. It does not, however, seem possible to assume that the motivations underlying this practice stem from the fact that individuals want to simplify their tasks, but rather because individuals are often limited to the use of landscapes defined in nationhood-related terms by political authorities when they want to refer to a specific location and its qualities. The agency of most individuals upon the uses of toponyms defining landscape is thus almost inexistent. They are compelled to use the terms in question, because they refer to the same location they are believed or imagined to occupy, and to the qualities they are believed or imagined to have. The motives underlying practices of mapping land with nationhood are absent, or unobservable. The latter work-related tasks, indeed, appear to be devoid of specific motives. The relation towards nationhood further seems to fall into routine practices inherent to a world of nations. In other words, mapping land with nationhood-related terms appears to be how individuals living in a world of nations understand and share information with regard to spaces. Such commonplace uses of landscapes and landmarks in mundane work-related tasks, nonetheless, uphold the significance of nationhood as a form of belonging, but even more, they perpetuate and legitimize spaces as national and sustain that states have the power to name and define land.

3.1.2 From Territorial Matters to Linguistic Issues The way in which the work-related task of mapping land with nationhood is conducted can be summed up as follows: individuals whose activities within their work environments require them to refer to space are most likely to map land to others by using nationhood-related terms that cognitively delimit geographical landscapes or landmarks. In so doing, they do not refer to the sociopolitical or sociohistorical entities themselves—their political function or the historical status they represent—but to the geographical locations that these are imagined to occupy, and to the qualities they are believed to have. While mapping land with nationhood-related terms does simplify their tasks, it is not possible to say that individuals are motivated by this result. Such actions are rather the result of a lack of choices or significant alternatives, since most individuals do not master potential alternatives to mapping land, such as the use of geographical coordinates. Individuals, therefore, use nationhood-related terms identified as landscapes or landmarks to map land to others through routine habits. This practice reflects the acknowledgement of interlocutors that

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

they are members of an undefined collectivity for which the terms constitute a similar meaning that is broadly shared yet not neutral; it is a practice upholding the power of states upon the definition of land through toponyms that represent landscapes and landmarks. Consequently, it emphasizes and legitimizes that spaces are national because “domesticated, replicated in local contexts, and [understood] as part of everyday-life” (idem.). Territories are thus defined by the idea of a world divided into nations through the power of states, but also routines. Although matters intersecting space and nationhood are anything but seldom, those concerning languages are by far the most common today, most particularly in Montreal and Brussels. Both cities are notable and renowned arrays of linguistic cleavages. Though I did not directly focus on such matters in the work-related task at hand, they were conspicuous in the context of Montreal, and also in Brussels—yet to a lesser extent. Sophie and her colleagues addressed, for example, mediocre translations from firms located in the United States. As for Carla, even though linguistic complications did not appear to be serious, she alluded to what can be considered linguistic issues when referring to the French-speaking delegate of a Flemish company for the regions of Brussels and Wallonia. In the following part of the chapter, I examine such matters by focusing on their everyday implications and repercussions in workplaces.

3.2 C ompliance with L anguages : A N urse ’s and a H uman R esources E mployee ’s P r actices of A ccommodating B ilinguali sm Corporate and institutional priorities, ideologies and structures, the values and practices of different professions, and the particular social climate of the local work group construct these conditions [for language socialization] and their dynamics (R oberts , 2010: 223)

Since the industrialization era, according to Ernest Gellner, we have lived in societies that require “both a mobile division of labor, and sustained, frequent and precise communication between strangers involving a sharing of explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom […] by means of written, impersonal, context-free, to-whom-it-may-concern type messages” (1983: 34-35). To be “employable,” a matter Gellner focuses on at length, one must possess these two qualities in order to ensure and sustain the operations and activities of industrialized workplaces, and by extension those of societies and their new type-based economy. In order to make sure that the great majority of a given population acquires such skills, states homogenize cultures—which mainly comprehend

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languages and imprecise liberal values in Gellner’s writings—on their territory through mandatory, normative, and standardized educational systems (1983: 37; 1991: 9). While Gellner’s theory may be disputed as a whole, it can also be argued that it applies only to some states, such as France and England, which have “a long history of centralized governments;” consequently, a long history through which cultures have been homogenized from above (McCrone 2000 [1998]: 14). Nevertheless, the idea that being able to communicate in an apprehensible way in industrialized workplaces is all the more true in contemporary globalized markets. In Montreal and Brussels, languages are not and have never been homogenized—above all not in workplaces. Nowadays, moreover, especially with the effects of globalization to which these cities are not immune, many companies involved on an international level have adopted English as a lingua franca (Roberts, 2010: 213). Contemporary professionals using “two or more languages in their daily and professional lives” are often even considered as “the backbone of the global and virtual economy” (Day and Wagner, 2007: 392). Languages are not homogenized in contemporary workplaces as much as they once may have been, at least in Gellner’s eyes, but they nevertheless remain “central to the workplace”: they “enter into work in a variety of different ways, both at the heart of the work process itself and in the overall control of work and production goals” (McAll, 2003: 235 and 238). This, as Christopher McAll further notes, “is of paramount importance when we try to understand how different language groups attempt to take control of, or are relegated to, particular kinds of work,” hence the need “to see the workplace in the broader social context of the relationship between specific language groups” (ibid.: 238). In the following sociological encounter, I focus on the uses of languages and the way people relate to them in the workplaces of Montreal and Brussels. More precisely, I am attentive to how individuals address and comply with specific languages and language usages in work environments that are to a certain extent determined—or at least should be determined from a legal perspective—by linguistic legislation. I argue that practices complying with languages are embodied and routinely enacted by individuals in daily tasks as required by their work environments—even though they may not be inclined to agree on these same language uses in everyday situations outside the workplace. In so doing, the prominence of languages peculiar to Montreal and Brussels are reified through ongoing uses in workplaces, whether the linguistic legislations in which they are involved favor a unilingual work environment or a bilingual one. ***

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

On the 17 th of June 2014, I am invited to spend a couple of days with Quentin, a French-speaking employee from the human resources department of the public transport firm in Brussels. While waiting for him at the reception, I skim through some publications laid out on a small table in front of me, such as two Metros,10 the French version and its Dutch counterpart, and the Brusseleir,11 a monthly bilingual magazine published by the city of Brussels. Before I have the chance to select one, Quentin arrives. He greets me and suggests going right away to his office floor. As we step out of the elevator, Quentin explains that the company applies the concept of dynamic office to their work environment, a concept he refers to by using the English term in our ongoing French conversation. He elaborates on his comment by explaining that this mainly entails the use of unassigned offices or desks in the workplace. From what I understand, everyone simply takes his or her own things from their locker each morning, and sits wherever they want, at whatever places are available. Quentin adds that this does not allow employees to have family pictures or other types of personal items, but that it creates or at least aims to create more interaction among employees. While walking towards the employees’ coffee lounge, he lets me know that he first intends to tell me more about the firm, and that we will later be attending a few meetings with his colleagues. He points out that our day shall, however, end a bit earlier than it usually would, around 4-4:30 p.m., he estimates, as Belgium is playing a football game tonight.12 Once in the employees’ room, which offers a view on the open central court of the building, my attention is drawn towards colorful signs painted or fixed on every floor. Each one of them states a motto or a value—I imagine—of the firm in both Dutch and French: Verantwoordelijkheid is written next to Responsabilité (responsibility), Eenvoud en Nauwkeurigheid to Simplicité et Rigueur (simplicity and rigor), etc. After our coffee, we head back to the desks and office area and enter a closed space called a cocoon, in order not to disturb other employees. A sheet on the wall with the English title “Finance and Services” on its top right corner in what looks like the modified logo of the company describes,13 in French and Dutch, the rules to follow while using this space. After noticing all 10 | A free weekday newspaper customized for most metropolitan areas throughout the world. 11 | “Brusseleir” also refers to a Brussels’ Dutch dialect tinted with many French words. 12 | It was the 2014 FIFA World Cup. On that day Belgium was playing its first game of the tournament against Algeria. 13 | Many of these signs were present in the workplace, and seemed to represent each department of the company. The most common of the modified logos I observed were those from the human resources department, also written in English but with bilingual French-Dutch content.

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of these language uses within the first hour, I ask Quentin in our conversation about the structure and specificities of the company. While he answers, at some point, I ask him if the firm is bilingual, without specifying which languages. His response is an uncluttered yes—as if the question, it appears to me, is irrelevant or too obvious, and therefore not in need of further comments. My intervention does not divert him from the initial subject of the discussion. He quickly resumes what he was telling me about the semi-public and semi-private aspects of the firm, without ever again mentioning bilingualism. However, the arrival of a colleague from his department leads us to suspend our conversation. The French-Dutch bilingualism in some aspects of work environments in Brussels is to be expected. The fact that Quentin does not mention it at all while talking about the company in a somehow detailed manner, and passes quickly over my question on the matter, may, however, be more surprising. Perhaps it is only of interest to me? It nevertheless leads me to think that the presence of two languages in his workplace is insignificant to his tasks or more generally to the work environment—from his point of view at least. The addition of English, even on what seems to be official documents from the company hanging on walls, may also be considered unexpected, since English is not one of the three official languages of Belgium. In Belgium there are no policies regulating language usage, at least not to the same extent as in Quebec. The Quebec government has sovereignty over Canada on linguistic legislations on its territory. In 1977, l’Assemblée nationale du Québec (the National Assembly of Quebec, the legislative parliament of the province) voted La Charte de la langue française (the Charter of the French Language), which made French the only official language of the province. This Charter, as all of the official documents of the Quebec government, is nonetheless available one other language: English. With regard to workplaces, the Charter stipulates that “enterprises employing 100 or more persons must form a francization committee [to] analyze the language situation [and] where necessary, shall devise a francization program for the enterprise and supervise its implementation” (Québec, 1977: C-11, ch. 15, art. 136). How is English—or any other language other than French, as a matter of fact—addressed in the work environments of Montreal, a city in which it is, as statistics show (Statistics Canada, 2007), a widely used language at home and at school, as well as in public services and workplaces? *** In Montreal, on the 29th of November 2013, Sofia, a French-speaking nurse, invites me to follow her in her workplace—where I will end up spending two entire days. She works for a company that tests pharmaceutical products on voluntary patients. While the extremely regulated environment—on matters

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

such as what and in which quantities volunteers consume the products, and the stopwatch time schedules of blood sampling and meals—is what strikes me first, language-related issues also emerge early, and this on many occasions within the hour after my arrival. While Sofia consults her tasks for the day in an area restricted to employees, I notice that she picks up a binder onto which the term Work Copy, in English, is inscribed. Curious, I immediately inquire about the item. She informs me that it contains informative documents of the pharmaceutical company for which they are testing drugs today. Saying this, she opens the binder and swiftly goes through some of the pages, allowing me to have a glance at its content. I observe that it is only, as far as I can see, in English. After I note this out loud, she straightforwardly responds that the pharmaceutical company is not from Quebec. She thus links languages and territories—and also perhaps understands and then responds to my surprise about the papers not being in French—just like Carla did when mentioning the arrival of the French-speaking representative covering the whole of Wallonia for a Flemish firm that manufactures and distributes drugs for pets. Considering that this Flemish company presumably does so in order to accommodate potential French-speaking customers in Belgium, it seems fair to ask why the content of a binder would not be translated into French in Montreal; especially if one keeps in mind that the government of Quebec is resolved “to make of French the language of government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business” (Québec, 1977: C-11, Preamble). In both cases, a similar relation between customers and providers is observed: Carla is a possible customer from the point of view of the Flemish company that wants to sell its products, and Sofia works for a firm that has obtained a contract to provide its services to a pharmaceutical company that seeks to test its drugs. Following the customer-dominant logic that seems to apply to both customer-provider relations at hand, Sofia, as opposed to Carla, is in the position of the provider. She—and her firm—thus have perhaps a greater necessity to accommodate their customer: the pharmaceutical company paying her own company to test the drugs. Could this be the reason behind the unilingual English binder and Sofia’s apparent compliance with or indifference to the unilingual English binder? At the moment, with no further information on the matter, I find myself wondering about the legality of the use of such an item in a Montreal workplace, considering that in the province of Quebec, by law, “workers have a right to carry on their activities in French” (Québec, 1977: C-11, ch. 2, art. 4). ***

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I now return to Quentin in Brussels, a city in which rights with regard to working in a certain language is not legally defined in the way it is in Quebec. A document entitled Lois sur l’emploi des langues en matière administrative (Laws on the Use of Languages in Administrative Matters) exists, but it only states that “local services—defined as activities that do not go beyond those practiced by one commune [municipal administration]—within its domestic services, within its relations to the services whose jurisdictions it falls into, as well as its relations with other services of the Brussels Capital Region, every domestic service established in Brussels Capital Region uses, without relying on translators, French or Dutch” (Belgique, 1966 [2002]: chap. 3, section 3, art. 17, my translation).14 It was not yet clear to me that the company Quentin works for is legally bound to apply this policy since, as he mentioned earlier during the day, it is only partly public. Nevertheless, documents that seem to be officially written communications are both in French and Dutch, and my participant has hastily referred to the firm as being bilingual. So far, however, I have no knowledge about the use of spoken languages and how it is addressed in this specific workplace. The first conversation I hear between Quentin and one of his colleagues, the one who has just entered the cocoon, gives me my first clue. Upon her arrival, Quentin asks her if the test went well. As they start comparing questions, I soon realize that they are talking about a Dutch language test. Their discussion leads Quentin to acknowledge that when he had to take the test a few years ago, it was much easier than it is today. My impression at the moment, from the complaints about and examples from an examination that seems to exasperate them, is that they may have a sort of aversion towards taking such tests. Later on during the day, I slip into one of my conversations with Quentin a couple of questions about the exams. I first ask if they are mandatory. Quentin tells me that they are, and from this answer, he adds that all employees have to undergo the test of Dutch proficiency because—while shortly gazing at the ceiling as if, it appears to me, this is a comment that goes without saying or as if it is something that annoys him—they all have to learn Dutch, since they work in a firm located in Brussels. When I ask him if the test is difficult, he replies by a “well,” and then pauses, before adding that at the level of Dutch of most French-speaking employees, it is definitely difficult. During the interview, I inquire once more about his and his colleagues’ perception of the Dutch proficiency test. His answer is that

14 | “Dans ses services intérieurs, dans ses rapports avec les services dont il relève, ainsi que dans ses rapports avec les autres services de Bruxelles-Capitale, tout service local établi dans Bruxelles-Capitale utilise, sans recours aux traducteurs, le français ou le néerlandais” (Belgique, 1966 [2002]: ch. 3, section 3, art. 17).

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines They are generally well accepted since when they apply to work for the company and pass the selection tests, they are aware that the [firm] is a Brussels-based company that is bilingual, and so it’s normal that these people are not surprised that these tests take place. But they may be surprised by the [difficulty] level of the tests. In some cases, they think it’s really easy, in other cases very difficult. It must be said that we have a population with a great deal of foreigners; we have 48 to 49% of immigrants [allochtones]… Dave: In the [firm]? Quentin: Yes, they’ve often had to learn their mother tongue plus French, and then to ask them to pass a test in a third language, for them it is really complicated. Especially that it is often, they have learned everything that is Arabic and French, and Dutch is light years away from Arabic and French. For example, 70% of the driving staff do not have their linguistic examination. They do no claim it… Dave: The [firm] does not claim it? Quentin: No, the workers do not claim to have to pass this linguistic examination, but hey, we must find a way so that they have it, because it is normally an obligation that we have vis-à-vis the region. Dave: So how do you make them claim it then? Quentin: Well, actually they have a less interesting career, the drivers, if they do not have the linguistic examinations, so they have less interesting salary developments, and at some point in time they come to realize it, and just tell themselves “well anyway I will never have a proficiency in Dutch,” and the difference between what they earn and what they could earn if they had their Dutch is big enough for them to tell themselves, “OK, that is really interesting, I will pass it.” So most people say “pfff”. They just give up you know. Dave: Is the opposite true as well? Rather Dutch speakers that… Quentin: Before the Dutch speakers, they had far fewer problems. Dutch speakers, for the most part, have no difficulties in learning French, but more and more they have this difficulty of learning French because it is less natural at school, and so we have more Dutch speakers that have problems passing the [test]. Dave: Ah OK, but they decide to learn it still, or in the end they tell themselves the same things as the immigrants?

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Nationhood at Work Quentin: Often they will say the same thing as the immigrants. In fact, I think that if in the two or three first years of the contract they have not passed [the test], most of them will not do it. So then we try to put into place mechanisms that push more and create a greater differentiation between those who have it and those who do not, [but the tests are] accepted, they all know that Brussels is bilingual and that it is an obligation (Interview, 06/26/2014).15 15 | “Ils sont généralement bien accepté vu que, quand ils postulent pour l’entreprise et qu’ils passent les tests de sélection ils sont au courant que la compagnie est une entreprise bruxelloise qui est bilingue, et donc il est normale que, ces gens ne s’étonnent pas que ces tests aient lieu. Simplement ils peuvent s’étonner du niveau des tests. Dans certains cas ils considèrent ça comme très facile, dans d’autres cas comme très difficile. Il faut savoir qu’on a une population à grande partie étrangère, on a 48 à 49% d’allochtone… Dave: À la compagnie? Quentin : Oui, ils ont souvent dû apprendre leur langue maternelle plus le français, et donc leur demander de passer une troisième langue pour eux c’est vraiment compliqué. Surtout que c’est souvent, ils ont appris tout ce qui était arabe et français, et le néerlandais se situe à des années lumières de l’arabe et du français. Par exemple, 70% du personnel de conduite n’a pas son examen linguistique. Ils ne réclament pas… Dave: La compagnie ne réclame pas? Quentin: Non les travailleurs ne réclament pas qu’ils doivent passer cet examen linguistique, mais bon nous on doit trouver des solutions pour qu’ils l’aient, parce que c’est une obligation normalement qu’on a vis à vis de la région Dave: Et qu’est-ce que vous réclamez alors? Quentin: En fait ils ont une carrière moins intéressante les conducteurs si ils ont pas d’examens linguistiques donc, ils ont des évolutions salariales moins intéressantes, et à partir d’un certain moment ils s’en font une raison et ils se disent ‘bon de toute façon je n’aurai jamais mon néerlandais’ et la différence entre ce qu’ils touchent et ce qu’ils pourraient toucher s’ils avaient leur néerlandais n’est pas suffisamment grande que pour se dire ‘ok, c’est vraiment intéressant je le passe’ et donc la plupart se disent ‘pfff’, ils abandonnent quoi. Dave: Est-ce que le contraire est vrai aussi? Plutôt des néerlandophones qui… Quentin: Avant les néerlandophones, ils avaient beaucoup moins de problèmes. Les néerlandophones la plupart n’ont aucun problème d’apprendre le français, mais de plus en plus ils ont cette difficulté d’apprendre le français parce que c’est moins naturel au niveau scolaire et donc on a plus de néerlandophone qui ont du mal à passer le [test]. Dave: Ah ok, mais est-ce qu’ils se décident de l’apprendre tout de même, ou finalement ils se disent la même chose qu’un allochtone? Quentin: Souvent ils se disent la même chose que l’allochtone. En fait moi je considère que si dans les 2-3 premières années du contrat de l’entreprise ils n’ont pas passé le [test], la plupart ne vont pas le faire. Et donc on essaie de mettre en place des méca-

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

As much as the linguistic tests may seem to be thought of as inconvenient— not to say annoying or troublesome—during a discussion between employees on the work floor, they appear to be generally accepted in the company. From Quentin’s perspective in the interview, individuals generally seem to agree upon the uses and presence of Dutch speakers and French-speaking tests. But how does this fairly positive attitude towards linguistic duality holds up against the spoken linguistic duality employees are potentially confronted with on a daily basis? Do practices reflect discourses? *** In Sofia’s workplace in Montreal, the spoken linguistic duality of French-English is omnipresent. Whether among employees and among test subjects, or between employees and test subjects, conversations in French and English—if not bilingual—are commonplace. When calling out the numbers attributed to test subjects in order to let them know they have to go to the blood sample table, Sofia shouts them in both French and English. According to the Charter of the French language, employers are not allowed to openly require or impose bilingualism on their employees. In Sofia’s workplace, it may be possible for a non-English-speaking employee to accomplish tasks that requires them to speak English, insofar as her colleagues most likely speak the language, allowing them also to communicate with non-French-speaking patients. The apparently unilingual English binder may, however, be more problematic. Fulfilling the tasks required by the pharmaceutical company hiring the firm for which Sofia works could be problematic if the tasks are not correctly understood due to language issues. This is apparently not a problem for my participant. Difficulties aside, the content of the binder nevertheless appears to guide her language use to a certain extent. One of her main tasks while conducting the clinic studies for pharmaceutical products is to report symptoms of the subjects on which the drugs are tested. When a volunteer has a symptom or anything else to report, she takes a form out of the binder and fills it out. My first observation of this practice is with a test subject addressing Sofia in French. While he is listing his symptoms, I notice that Sofia constantly turns to the first page of the binder and, while doing so, repeats in English what the test subject has said in French, before writing something down onto the form. After inquiring about this practice later on, I learn that there is a French-English lexicon on the first page of the binder. Since everything has to be communicated in English to the pharmaceutical companies testing products in their laboratory, Sofia explains that the nismes qui poussent plus et qui crée une plus grande différenciation entre ceux qui l’ont et ceux qui ne l’ont pas” (Interview, 06/26/2014).

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employer inserts such a lexicon with translated medical terms in every binder. She further comments on the practice by saying that they do so in order to make sure that employees are using the right terms when corresponding with and filling out documents for the pharmaceutical companies that do not use French. From what she has told me earlier, I understand that these are companies that are most likely not located within the province of Quebec. This seemingly easily approved compliance in work environments is reflected upon in the group interview I conducted with Sofia and another participant I have worked with. When the latter recalls during a discussion about languages in the interview that “you [Sofia] are from the West-Island, many Anglos are there,” Sofia replies: Well, I went to a French-speaking school, but the majority […] of my friends were bilingual, but I was way more anglophone when I was 16-17 years old, well, from 14 to 17 years old, than today. But you know at work, I worked for five years in a boutique where I spoke, I would not even say bonjour-hi, and the francophones said “why are you not saying bonjour first?” Well, it’s because 75% of the population, 90% of the population here speaks English, so I bend to them, but I would tell them that I am francophone first [but that] first of all bonjour-hi is ugly; hi-bonjour is much nicer, it’s easier to say […] and even when [I worked] at the Lakeshore Hospital [in the West-Island], I always first approached my patients or my clients in the boutique in English, because I was way more certain to find someone that speaks English than someone that speaks French you know, so, you bend to that. When I moved downtown, wow, I would be walking on the streets, I would hear people speaking French, I would be like, wow! Now when I go back to my parents [in the West-Island], and that I am always approached in English, I’m like “ah why is she speaking to me in English, I’m French you know.” I went shopping [once] and the guy told me “listen I don’t speak a word of French, but if you speak to me in French there is no problem but I will answer in English.” “Oh, it’s OK we’ll speak English it’ll be less complicated,” and I was with one of my friends from Rosemont, who always lived in Rosemont, he was like “why, doesn’t he speak French, I don’t understand” you know. I was like “welcome to the West-Island” you know, that’s how it is you know; you have no choice (Interview, 01/09/2014).16 16 | “Other: Toi tu viens du West-Island, les anglos y’en a pas mal. Sofia: Ben moi j’allais dans une école francophone, mais la majorité […]mes amis étaient bilingues, mais j’étais beaucoup plus anglophone quand j avais 16-17 ans, ben de 14 à 17 ans que aujourd’hui. Mais tsé au travail, moi j’ai travaillé 5 ans dans une boutique où ce que j’parlais, j’disais même pas bonjour-hi. Pis les francophones disaient pourquoi est-ce que tu dis pas bonjour avant? Ben c’est parce que 75% de la population, 90% de la population ici parle anglophone. Fac, j’me plis à eux, mais je leur disait moi j’suis francophone à la base, pis ils disaient ben pourquoi tu dis pas bonjour avant? Ben premièrement bonjour-hi c’est laid, hi-bonjour c’est ben plus beau, ca se dit mieux

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

Whether it is from the direct observations of practices collected in her current workplace, or her own past recollections from previous work experiences shared in the interview, Sofia appears to “bend” to the required language or to the one which seems to be easier to use in a given context. Although she somehow is—or at least imagines to be—more critical towards the English facet of some work environment-related experiences in Montreal, the consequence remains that whether deliberately or not, a language is privileged over another when it is required, or when it simply appears to make things “less complicated.” In Brussels, do Quentin or any of his colleagues also “bend” to one language over another while conducting their work tasks, or does the fairly positive attitude towards the linguistic duality of the city I perceived earlier in the interview hold up against empirical observations of practices? *** Quentin’s schedule is filled—at least on the days I followed him—with formal or informal meetings. These gatherings allow me to observe multiple and diverse types of interactions. While still discussing the linguistic test with his colleague, another colleague enters the cocoon and sits down at the table, joining the others for a meeting that Quentin has previously warned me about. He explained that the meeting is about workforce management, or more precisely about retirement issues and on the replacement of certain employees. To begin with, Quentin pulls a pile of documents from his suitcase. He starts listing positions they need to fill, in English: safety manager, customer operations, project managers, etc. I am instantly intrigued by the fact that he uses English terms in what is a French conversation to name these positions—perhaps as a French-speaking Québécois whose language is often said to be riddled with […] pis même quand j’étais à l’hôpital Lakeshore j’abordais toujours mes patients ou mes clients dans la boutique en fran, en anglais en premier, parce que j’étais ben plus sûr de tomber sur quelqu’un qui parle en anglais que quelqu’un qui parle en français tsé. Fac tu te plis à ça. Quand j’ai déménagé au centre-ville là, eille, j’me promenais dans les rues, j’entendais parler français, j’suis comme wow ! Maintenant quand je retourne au centre-vi, dans, chez mes parents, pis que j’me fais toujours aborder en anglais j’suis comme ‘ah pourquoi elle me parle en anglais j’suis française tsé’. J’suis aller magasiner dans une affaire quand moi pi mon ex on s’est laissé, pi j suis retourné vivre chez mes parents, le gars y me dit ‘écoute j’parle pas un mot de français, mais si tu me parle en francais y a pas de problème, mais j’vais te répondre en anglais’, ‘oh, c’est correct, on va parler en anglais, ce sera moins compliqué’. Pis j’étais avec un de mes amis qui a toujours habité à Rosemont, il fait: ‘pourquoi il parle pas français, j comprends pas’ tsé. J’étais comme: ‘bienvenu dans le West-Island’ tsé. C’est comme ça tsé, t’as pas le choix” (Interview, 01/09/2014).

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English-language words. I take a look at the paper and notice that the terms are actually all listed in English. As observed earlier with Sofia, a document in Brussels once again seems to guide language use. Even though French is spoken throughout the meeting, English terms from a document to which my participant refers are used. At some point, Quentin mentions that they need to focus on the position concerning a prevention team leader because the lack of that position is the most acute. The comment is made in French, with once again the English term used for the title of the position. When discussing a potential candidate, the last colleague who joined the meeting comments on its qualities—or perhaps lack thereof—by saying, in Dutch, that “je mag niet het badwater met het baby weggooien” (you should not throw the baby out with the bathwater), an expression to which Quentin instantly responds by repeating it in French. Typically, throughout my time with Quentin, English terms seem to be used in conversation only when they are mentioned in a document, whereas Dutch expressions come out in all-French conversations to express a short idea. Quentin, as well, finds himself using such short Dutch expressions as ingewikkeld (complicated) or ik weet het (I know), to react or comment on some encountered situations during the current meeting, but also later on with other colleagues. While most spoken interactions observed when following Quentin are in French, even with his or her Dutch-speaking colleagues, one of the last meetings of my first day with my participant is about to begin, in Dutch. Just before the discussions starts, however, the person in charge of conducting the session personally warns me in flawless French that this meeting will unfortunately for me mainly be held in Dutch, because the majority of its participants are Dutch speakers. Promptly, before I have the chance to say anything, Quentin replies that this should not be a problem since I speak better Dutch than he does—in his own opinion. The meeting begins, in Dutch. The first PowerPoint slides are in French, but are then followed by English ones. When Quentin interrupts the talk to ask a question, in French, to a Dutch speaker, the latter’s answer is in French as well. Once the central speaker leading the meeting starts anew what seems to be his main talk, he nevertheless pursues in French, only to come back to Dutch later for a shirt time, always by using some of the French and English terms from the PowerPoint slides displayed on the wall. To better understand the language practices observed in the meetings and more generally in the workplace, I question Quentin during the interview on how people address issues concerning the bilingualism of the company and other linguistic issues. His answer is that In fact, I think that there is more and more of a modus vivendi in the company that says: everybody speaks their own language. You are in a meeting, if you are French-speaking you speak French, if you are Dutch-speaking you speak Dutch. So you are supposed to

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines understand the guy that speaks to you in Dutch, so you can answer him for example in French. When you are in a meeting with colleagues or in the end with people for whom you do not represent the management, myself, when I have a collaborator, a worker that sends me an email in Dutch, I answer in Dutch, because I represent the management team, and it is up to me to adapt myself to the linguistic role of my coll… of the worker that communicates with me. I communicate with a colleague here in the human resources that sends me an email in Dutch, I answer in French, no worries. So it is always this role, this game, to adapt yourself to the person in front of you, to identify what he wants from you. A worker that sees someone from management expects from you a certain type of behavior, he shows some respect, but from the other side, he also expects from your side that you adapt yourself to him, there go all the complexities […] this is really what I like in my job: it’s to tell yourself “OK,” to say that it’s like a theater play is too much,17 but it’s a bit like that, it’s to say “OK,” in every relation or interaction that you have, you’re always saying “OK, this person has this role, and then you, you have to take this costume” and it’s pretty nice I think (Interview, 06/26/2014).18

On that day, I still have not come across Quentin writing an email or in any other situation in which he has to speak Dutch. Following the previous meeting, however, we return to the cocoon so that he can finish composing a booklet intended for workers before the end of the day. After asking him what it is about, I inquire about the language in which he is writing, by asking him if it is 17 | “Too much” in English in the interview. 18 | “Ben en fait, j’crois qu’il y a de plus en plus un modus vivendi dans l’entreprise qui dit: ‘chacun parle sa langue.’ Tu es dans une réunion, t’es francophone tu parles français, tu es néerlandophone tu parle néerlandais. Donc tu es censé comprendre le type qui te parle en néerlandais, ben tu peux lui répondre par exemple en français. Quand t’es dans des réunions avec des collègues ou avec finalement des gens pour lesquelles tu ne représente pas la direction, moi quand j’ai un collaborateur, un ouvrier qui m’envoie un email en néerlandais, je réponds en néerlandais, parce que je représente la direction et c’est à moi de m’adapter au rôle linguistique de mon coll, de l’ouvrier qui communique avec moi. Je communique avec un collègue ici des ressources humaines qui m’envoie un mail en néerlandais je lui répond en francais y’a aucun soucis. Donc c’est toujours ce rôle, ce jeu de, s’adapter à la personne que tu as en face de toi, d’identifier ce qu’il attend de toi. Un ouvrier qui voit quelqu’un de la direction attend de toi, un certain type de comportement, il fait preuve d’un certain respect, mais de l’autre côté il attend aussi que de ton côté tu t’adaptes à lui, donc c’est ça toute la complexité […] c’est vraiment ça qui me plait vraiment aussi dans mon boulot, c’est de se dire ok, dire que c’est une pièce de théâtre c’est too much, mais c’est un peu ça. C’est de te dire ‘ok, dans chaque relation ou interactions que tu as, tu es toujours dans te dire ok, cette personne à ce rôle là et donc toi tu dois prendre ce costume là’, et c’est assez sympa je trouve” (Interview, 06/26/2014).

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in French or Dutch. It is in French, he answers. I then ask if he will translate it into Dutch later? He then answers that he will just send it to the translator—in a tone that leads me to believe that this is, once again, obvious. I then wonder if this bilingualism is ever conflictual in the work environment of the firm; a problem I have not come across. According to Quentin, during the interview, It has been conflictual, especially among Dutch speakers because the company is still very much French-speaking, very very very very French-speaking. The majority of drivers are French-speaking, and so I once realized that in certain meetings Dutch speakers were irritated because we did not speak Dutch enough, according to them, or because a person speaks to us in French, so we cannot identify that it is a Dutch speaker, and then we are blamed for that, “yes, well I am Dutch-speaking and no one has spoken in Dutch to me.” So then, it’s really more among Dutch speakers. Dave: And how do you defuse these situations? Quentin: Then we adapt: we know that this person is more sensible on this level and that when we go to a meeting with him, we speak to him in his language and then, even if they reply in French, we keep on speaking to him in Dutch, just to make sure, that’s often what happens. Dave: And anyway, I think that you were saying that there are translators for everything that is on an official level, everything remains bilingual; people may receive information in their own language? Quentin: Yes, you see during the work council there are two persons that are there to translate you know. Just like you see in the European councils where people always have headphones, well it’s the same thing here. So everything that has to do with the official organ, we try to respect that. But well, it doesn’t look like much because we often speak French, so you see the guy from time to time, we interact and when there’s a guy that speaks Dutch, you see everybody at once taking up their headphones. I don’t find it very natural (Interview, 06/26/2014).19 19 | “Ça a déjà été conflictuelle, surtout auprès des néerlandophones parce que la société est malgré tout très francophone, très très très très francophone. La majorité des conducteurs sont francophones, et donc j’ai déjà constaté qu’à certaines réunions que des néerlandophones pouvaient se braquer parce qu’on ne parlait pas assez néerlandais à leur gout, ou que la personne nous parle français, donc qu’on ne sait pas identifier que c’est un néerlandophone, et après on te reproche: ‘oui mais moi je suis néerlandophone et personne ne m’a parlé en néerlandais’. Et donc, c’est surtout vraiment chez les néerlandophones. Dave: Et comment est-ce que vous désamorcez ces situations?

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

Near the end of our day, Quentin mentions that he has to go soon to pick up his daughter at school before joining his friends to watch the game. A person near by asks him, to my surprise, if she is in a Dutch-speaking school. Quentin answers that his wife and himself have tried putting her in such a school, in vain. I wonder: have they tried doing so because they would find it more “natural” for everyone to be bilingual in Brussels? *** After examining language uses in two workplaces of Montreal and Brussels, it appears that Quentin, Sofia, and their colleagues comply with the languages and language usages suggested by their work environment. In order to better understand how practices complying with languages are carried out, I now seek to shed light on the motives underlying the activities of my informants, and the impact elements of their respective workplaces have on the work-related task under investigation, that of compliance with languages. Unlike the previous task of mapping land with nationhood, the work environments from the sociological encounter at hand appear to be further involved in the conduct of the observed practices of complying with languages. This is, of course, not a surprise, considering the bi-ethnonational contexts of Montreal and Brussels, especially with regard to the linguistic legislation in Quebec and Belgium. However, another element of workplaces, as I intend to explore in the following part, is also of interest with regard to its impact on practices of complying with languages: the position a person holds within the hierarchy of a company, or the relation between providers and customers. To better examine the practices involved in the work-related task of compliance with languages, I first investigate in what follows elements of the workplaces. Subsequently, I explore the Quentin: C’est qu’alors on s’adopte, on sait que cette personne est plus sensible à ce niveau là et que, quand on va en réunion avec elle on lui parle dans sa langue et puis, même si elle nous parle en français on continue à lui parler en néerlandais pour être sûr que, c’est souvent ça. Dave: Et de toute façon, je pense que tu disais qu’il y avait des traducteurs pour tout ce qui était au niveau officiel, tout reste vraiment bien bilingue, les gens peuvent s’informer dans leur propre langue Quentin: Oui tu sais au conseil d’entreprise y’a deux personnes qui sont là pour traduire quoi, tu sais comme tu vois dans les sommets européens où les gens ont toujours des écouteurs, ben ici c’est la même chose. Donc tout ce qui est organe officielle on essaie de respecter cette, mais bon ça ressemble pas souvent à grand chose parce que, souvent on parle français donc tu vois le type de temps en temps on interagit et quand y’a un type qui parle en néerlandais en une fois tu vois tout le monde qui prend ses écouteurs et qui, c’est pas très naturel je trouve” (Interview, 06/26/2014).

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actions of Sofia and Quentin more closely to better seize the implication they have on the conduct of the work-related task at hand.

3.2.1 Workplaces and Linguistic Practices While “the use of different languages at work in bilingual and multilingual societies can be a means for ensuring the privileged access of certain language groups to better-paid jobs (or to work itself) and the exclusion of other groups” (McAll, 2003: 235), it does not seem possible to explicitly come to this conclusion in the cases at hand. There were, however, linguistic issues involved in what appears to be privileges. Quentin did mention in the interview that once the linguistic test was successfully completed, workers received an automatic raise in their salary. But he also added that this did not guarantee that they even wanted to take the examination. The consequences of being unilingual French or unilingual Dutch did not appear—at least according to him—to matter much to workers. It could still seem to be problematic for employees working in Quentin’s department. I have exposed many examples attesting that his work environment could be problematic for a unilingual French speaker or even more so for a unilingual Dutch speaker: the modus vivendi leading individuals to speak their own language—which indeed appears to be applied in the meetings I observed—the meetings conducted in the language of the majority, or the fact that, when representing management towards another worker or employee, one should address him or her in his or her own language. In Montreal, seemingly, it would seem hard for a unilingual French-speaking employee to complete his work task without understanding any of the content of the English language binder; nor would s/he be able to communicate with unilingual English-speaking test subjects. I would equally be problematic, and perhaps even more so, to be a unilingual English speaker. Elements of the work environments of Montreal and Brussels under investigation do not appear to favor a linguistic group over another; it rather is individuals mastering the two institutionalized languages of each city that seem favored over unilingual ones. The linguistic legislation of the province of Quebec is meant to largely favor the use of French in workplaces, making it mandatory in many of its aspects. Whether it be advertisement and display issues, access to information, or individual qualifications in order to apply for a position, thus basically anything that involves linguistic matters, the legislation prioritizes French over any other language. While workplaces in Belgium are not legally bound to linguistic laws to the same extent, the linguistic duality of Brussels still implies what Quentin described as “obligations […] vis-à-vis the region.” Such obligations, whether formal or informal, legally defined or linked to a position in the hierarchy of a company, or again to the relationships providers and customers have with each other, were central to the conduct of the present work-related task. They

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constitute in fact elements of my participants’ workplaces impacting the tasks in question. By further examining these tasks, I aim to reveal their properties and clarify how they were involved in practices that appeared to comply with languages. First, I take a look at what I identify as elements of linguistic legislation. The mere legality of practices under investigation is not questioned. This aspect is not of interest, since it is not necessarily significant to the conduct of practices themselves: whether a language use or linguistic requirement is legal or not does not ineluctably affect the processes of observed actions and their consequences. What is of interest and further significant, rather, are the characteristics of the legislation—and their believed existence—and the way they influence the practices complying with languages. Second, I focus on issues regarding the position a person holds within the hierarchy of a company or in the relation between providers and customers with regard to its influence on the process and the result of the work-related task under investigation. I do not differentiate between these two types of positions in what follows because I consider that their characteristics and their impacts on the tasks are identical.

3.2.1.1 Linguistic Legislation and Bilingualism: Employees Addressing Impositions on the Work Floor Interpreting the linguistic legislation of Quebec is contentious. In May 2015, a deputy of the opposition, Maka Kotto from the Parti québécois (a pro-sovereignty party), presented a Motion at the National Assembly urging the government formed by the Parti libéral du Québec (a pro-federalist party), to modify the legislation of the French Charter. He implored them to implement the judgment of the Court of Appeal concerning the display languages in stores (Québec, 2015).20 The judgment in question stated that the Office québécois de la langue française, the governmental organ policing the application of the French Charter, is not allowed to force retailers to add a French description onto their trademarks by using current laws. The judge advised the province of Quebec to legislate on the matter. The motion presented by the Parti québécois failed on that day. However, the government announced a month later in a press conference that they would soon modify linguistic legislation: “By being flexible, and by taking into account the engendered costs for wholesalers, the Minister responsible for the Protection and Promotion of the French Language, Hélène David, announced that retailers could add—without mentioning any mandatory measures—a description, a slogan, or a generic, as long as it is visible from the 20 | “Motion proposant que l’Assemblée exige du gouvernement qu’il étende les dispositions de la Charte de la langue française aux entreprises de 26 à 49 employés et qu’il propose une modification législative pour donner suite au jugement de la Cour d’appel concernant la langue d’affichage des commerces” (Québec, 2015).

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exterior. To add a French description next to a brand name, said Prime Minister Philippe Couillard, represents a simple act of courtesy towards the Québécois, in a way that reflects their reality (Bergeron, 2015).”21 The government reiterated the same position under a bill in May 2016 and is soon planning to take legal action. While no such legislation exists in Brussels, the French-Dutch bilingualism of the city is still visible in many aspects of the Belgian capital: the street signs are bilingual, as well as the names of the stations of the public transport system, and all the signs of the state-related services such as ministry buildings or communal facilities are written in both Dutch and French. This practice, however, does not extend to the advertisements or banners of retailers. While conducting observations with the owner of a camera store, I noticed that most of the advertisements in her boutique were unilingual English. Only a booth that customers could use to develop films by themselves was bilingual French-Dutch. When taking out a sheet with “klantendienst/service à la clientèle” (customer service) printed on it, I asked if it was mandatory to have bilingual notices or banners. The owner answered in the negative, adding that it would really be far-fetched if policy makers made that mandatory. In the end, she said that they could use whatever language they want. Then she went on writing on the sheet, in French only. In the interview, however, when I once again brought up linguistic issues, she did state “that this is not true for communal administrations and the things of the sort” (Interview, 04/13/2014). Considering the French-Dutch bilingualism of the public transport company of Brussels observed in the sociological encounter, the firm is probably one of these “things of the sort”—to use the terms of the owner of the camera store. Bilingualism, as an imposed element of the work environment in which Quentin works, framed some aspects of the workplace: the inscriptions on banners and other public displays on the work floor, the formally required linguistic tests for employees, or the way the meetings are said and meant to 21 | “En conférence de presse au terme de la séance du conseil des ministres, mercredi après-midi, Mme. David a assuré que le gouvernement allait faire preuve d’une ‘certaine souplesse dans les possibilités’ avec les grandes bannières, qui pourront ajouter soit un descriptif, un slogan, un générique, en autant qu’il soit bien visible à l’extérieur. La ministre a bien pris soin d’éviter toute référence à des mesures contraignantes, à des dispositions pénales en cas de non-respect de la réglementation. Dans ses consultations, Québec serait même prêt à examiner les coûts qu’auraient à assumer les entreprises pour modifier leur affichage […] Le premier ministre Philippe Couillard avait déjà préparé le terrain auparavant à des gestes de son gouvernement à la suite du jugement défavorable de la Cour d’appel. Il avait indiqué que le fait d’ajouter un descriptif en français précédant le nom de la marque s’impose comme une simple marque de politesse à l’égard des Québécois, qui tient compte de leur réalité” (Bergeron, 2015).

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be conducted. Bilingualism framed some of the aspects of Sofia’s workplace in Montreal as well: the binder, with its English unilingual content in which a French-English lexicon had been added at the beginning, Sofia’s bilingual calls to have tests subjects prepare for their blood samples to be taken, or the translation from French to English she carried out while listing the symptoms of a patient. Therefore, while legislation in both Quebec and Belgium may restrict the choices of languages to be used, and the way they should be used, it does not guarantee that practice will reflect the legislation. English, as a matter of fact, was present in both workplaces, even though both systems of linguistic legislation presiding over them do not recognize it as an official language.22 In Montreal, it was as prominent as French, whereas in Belgium, it was a third language—almost as important as Dutch on the day I worked with Quentin. In the binder, French was not used as the prominent language, and the discussions during the meetings in Brussels gradually became more French than Dutch, as the Dutch speakers started replying in French to French speakers. The respective bilingualism of Montreal and Brussels in the two cases imposed themselves onto the work environment of my participants, whether linguistic legislations tend to favor bilingualism or restrict it. My observations strongly suggest that to work in these specific work environments, one must know and use two languages: French and English in Montreal; Dutch and French in Brussels, but also English, to a certain extent. Institutional bilingualism acted as an element of the workplace, despite the legislation in the case of Montreal. In Brussels, on the other hand, institutional bilingualism tended to act with the legislation in workplaces, by adding a third language, English, maybe as an “emancipator” and “neutral” language (Day and Wagner, 2007: 397).23 Bilingualism, however, was not the only element of the workplaces I visited that had an influence on the work-related task of complying with languages. Work positions, those held within the hierarchy of the company or in the 22 | The Canadian provinces have power over linguistic issues. In Quebec, the only official language is French. As discussed in the introduction of the book, English however remains overtly present in multiple ways. For example, the only other language into which legal texts of the province are translated is English. I therefore argue that it is institutionalized, although not to the same extent as French. 23 | The authors report a study “concerning a Swedish-Finnish bank merger. Initially, Swedish was chosen as the only language. This was of course advantageous to Swedes, as well as to a number of the Finns who were bilingual in Swedish and Finnish. This choice proved to be unsuccessful, however, particularly amongst many Finns who felt they were at a disadvantage with their “school” Swedish. English was then chosen as the organizational language. These two cases illustrate different language ideologies: the view that bilingualism is unnecessary and the view that English is emancipatory since it is neutral” (Day and Wagner, 2007: 397).

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provider-customer relation, also appeared to have repercussions in the process of the work-related task.

3.2.1.2 Hierarchy and Provider-Customer Relations: Employees Addressing Work-Related Positions Just like bilingualism, the positions individuals hold in a provider-customer relation, or within the hierarchy of a company, are imposed onto the work environment of my participants. They frame which language to adopt depending on the “role” an individual plays within a given context. Quentin was without a doubt aware of such relations in the company when he acknowledged framing his language use by considering his status with regard to the imposed relation he entertained towards other coworkers. In the interview, he mentioned that when representing the management unit of the company, he adapts himself out of respect to “the linguistic role” of the worker with whom he is communicating. He did so, I observed, only when writing e-mails. The only employees or workers for whom he represented management that we met on the days I worked with him were French-speaking unionists. When writing or speaking to a Dutch-speaking colleague of his department, he used French while his Dutch-speaking interlocutors generally, except in meetings, also spoke French. Interpreting her actions, I suggest that Sofia also seemed to acknowledge such relational issues. She, however, did not formulate this as explicitly as Quentin. During the interviews, she recalled how she would, in her previous workplaces, always approach her patients or clients in English first, because she knew that in her area of Montreal, she had a higher chance of encountering English speakers than French speakers, even though she still needed to assist the latter in their language if needed. In the workplace where I had the chance to follow her, after noting that the binder was unilingual English, she would only respond that the pharmaceutical company was not from Quebec. She was potentially acknowledging the service provider role of her firm—imposed by the provider-customer relation—and was thus most likely framing her language practice accordingly. The result was that she was led to use English in order to accommodate their English-speaking client. From all of Sofia’s work experiences, the role she played as a service provider framed her language uses during imposed relations she encountered in her work environment, demanding her to be French-English bilingual. In the same way, imposed relations with which Quentin had to deal on a daily basis also framed his language uses, and required him to be bilingual in French-Dutch. Just like bilingualism, the impact of the position a person holds within the hierarchy of a company or in the relationship provider-customer on the work-related task is that to work in those specific milieus, in respect with these positions, one must know and use the two respective languages of Montreal and Brussels.

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

But most of all, the position a person holds suggests that one must know when to adapt to which language, and which language usage. After investigating what I identified as elements of the workplaces impacting the process of the work-related task of compliance with regard to languages (the bilingualism, and the position a person holds within the hierarchy of the company or in the relation providers-customers), it appears that this “overarching context of the workplace [which] determines the conditions for language socialization and the form it takes” (Roberts, 2010: 223), requires my participants to be bilingual in the respective languages from their city, whether the linguistic legislations in which they are involved favor a unilingual work environment or a bilingual one. But how did Quentin and Sofia respond to this “overarching context?” The agency of my participants with regard to the process of these practices of complying with languages has received only superficial mention so far. I now intend to examine this point in greater depth.

3.2.2 From Complying to Reif ying Languages and Linguistic Dualities: Resisting Prescriptions and Accommodating Practices From the observations of the encounter, we see that both Sofia and Quentin were complying with the languages they had been appointed to use by their work environment. They embody this compliance. The compliance is to a certain extent unnoticed, as much as it was obvious for them to comply with the linguistic requirements. In Brussels, when I asked Quentin if his firm was bilingual, or if he had to translate into Dutch a document he was writing in French, my questions seemed both times to be met with disinterest. Each answer came in a one-word form, as if such inquiries were irrelevant; or as if their responses were obvious and thus not in need of further comment. Of course, these were questions relevant to my research interests, of which he was not entirely aware. Nevertheless, the French-Dutch bilingualism was omnipresent, whether in the exchanges between colleagues, in written tasks, or in the writings scattered over the work floor. It was a banal matter which, in his eyes, were irrelevant to his work tasks; he never evoked linguistic issues when presenting the firm. In Montreal, my inquiry into what I first thought was a unilingual English binder was also met with a hasty answer. Even though my remark could have led Sofia to think that I found the situation unusual, she did not mention the English-French lexicon, as if it was unimportant. But the lexicon was central to the accomplishment of her tasks. She used it regularly to translate into English the symptoms listed by the French-speaking test subjects. On the work floor, in practice, while accomplishing their tasks, the engagement of Sofia and Quentin with regard to the uses of different languages did

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not reflect their apparent lack of interest in my questions. Without showing any signs of a glitch or the likes of it towards the usage of different languages while working, Quentin adopted the right “linguistic role,” assisted and participated in meetings partly conducted in Dutch, asked questions and replied in French to his Dutch-speaking colleagues, briefly expressed himself in the language of his coworkers of another mother tongue, and used the translator of the company when needed. In the same way, Sofia also just “bent”—in her word from the interview—to the usage of different languages required in her workplace: she called out the number of the test subjects for their blood samples in French and English, she wrote the symptoms of the test subjects in English for the pharmaceutical company by using the French-English lexicon provided in the binder, and she responded in both French and English to test subjects, depending on the language in which she was addressed. Compliance with languages is not only embodied; it is also enacted. This does not mean, however, that it is not reflected upon or even criticized on the work floor, or during the interviews. Indeed, Quentin complained that with their level of Dutch, linguistic tests are too difficult for many employees. He also joked about the exams with his colleague, and they both seemed annoyed by them when remembering and sharing some of the questions they had to answer. But at the same time, he did admit that they all know about these examinations before applying for a position in the firm, just like they know that it is required to speak and understand both Dutch and French at work because, as Quentin explains, the company is located in Brussels, and they have “an obligation […] vis-à-vis the region” to work in the two languages. Perhaps linguistically insecure at times, Quentin nevertheless accepted and addressed the situations as they arose. In Montreal, I did not observe Sofia complain or joke about language use on the work floor with her colleagues. She did indirectly bring up the matter during the interview by slightly displaying aversion towards some everyday language usages of the metropolis of Quebec. When she moved to downtown Montreal, she remembered feeling surprised to “hear people speaking French” when “walking on the streets.” Since then, she said, whenever she goes back to her parents on the West-Island, she wonders why she is approached in English, but in the end, she said, she is most likely to respond in English as well, because it is “less complicated,” by ironically adding to the conversation she reported to have had with a friend of hers: “welcome to the West-Island […] that’s how it is […] you have no choice.” Both Sofia and Quentin may not especially have been inclined to comply with both of the languages of their respective city. When their work environment required them to do so, however, they acquiesce without any signs of animosity or harsh feelings. They complied with the languages of their workplaces. Their actions do not appear to be underlined by any specific intrinsic and observable motives, just like the previous work-related tasks of mapping

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

land with nationhood. They seem to comply because this is what is asked of them, and because this is what needs to be done, out of habits or routine practices—although they sometimes criticize or joke about these linguistic issues. In so doing, even though “the company is still very much French-speaking, very very very very French Speaking,” according to Quentin, Dutch was conspicuous during my presence in the public transport firm of Brussels. Quentin dealt with it and used it passively, and to a lesser degree actively, in spite of his mother tongue being French. In the same way, despite the fact that the government of Quebec is resolved “to make French the language […] of work,” (idem.) English was very much present in the company for which Sofia works. As was the case of mapping land with nationhood, complying with languages also reveals a relationship with nationhood that falls into the routine practices of individuals living a world divided into nations. Before exploring the dynamic with regard to nationhood such practices create, let me summarize the way in which the work-related task of compliance with languages comes about: individuals whose tasks are conducted in work environments in which bilingualism is imposed over or with linguistic legislation will most likely comply with the languages and language usages of his or her workplace. This compliance with languages is not only embodied by individuals, in the sense that it is to a certain extent unnoticed and obvious, it is also enacted in the daily tasks required by their workplaces, even though one may not be especially inclined to agree on these same language uses in other everyday situations outside their workplace. These enactments, however, are not necessarily underlined by any active or observable motives: individuals may comply because this is what is asked of them, and because this is what needs to be done for the tasks to be accomplished. The enactments form a part of habits and routine practices. Therefore, the work-related task of compliance with languages in workplaces routinely reifies the use and the prominence of languages that are proper to a milieu, whether the linguistic legislation in which they are involved favors a unilingual work environment or a bilingual one.

3.3 A C once aled D ynamic : W ork Tasks O per ated by N ationhood through R outine s In comparison with the first two types of work task dynamics, there were no specific or observable motives underlying the tasks creating the third and last type of dynamic of the typology. Nationhood in the tasks examined in this chapter was not enacted for the needs of a specific nationalist cause, nor was it enacted within the framework of strategies. Individuals involved in this dynamic routinely accomplished tasks involving elements that are already intended as national. They used such elements out of traditions or habits, which were

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practices embedded in routines: the routines of individuals living in a world divided into nations. Work tasks operating upon nationhood, as observed in Chapter 1, are part of a life-plan that engages the individual conducting them to define the needed situations in order to successfully accomplish the tasks “required” by a cause. Work tasks operated by nationhood are rather mostly—if not entirely—defined by and concealed within the very situations they engage. The uses of alternative practices that would also allow the accomplishment of the tasks in question do exist. They are, however, scarce and inconvenient. Instead of simply invoking nationhood-related terms to map land, locations could be made further explicit through other means: whether by taking interlocutors to the location in question, by using a map to physically point to a specific location, or by announcing geographical coordinates. When it comes to the qualities of a location, individuals could further describe them, rather than assume that the interlocutor knows the intended qualities projected—such as the busy character of the Grand’ Place of Brussels, or the distance between Chicago and Montreal, to use examples from the fieldwork. The reason individuals did not engage in the possibilities I have just suggested for letting their interlocutor know about locations and their qualities is because mapping land with nationhood, during the situations where it became useful to share the knowledge necessary to the ongoing work tasks, was logistically more practical. Such practicalities, however, never raised interests nor were acknowledged. First and foremost, this mapping practice is part and parcel of how individuals efficiently share information with regard to space. This is how, in other words, individuals living in a world divided into nations have come to map land to others. It is not that individuals do not know how to accomplish the tasks with the alternate possibilities, but rather that the situations and interactions in which they are engaged guide them to do otherwise, and disregard alternative practices, which are, without a doubt, rather scarce and inconvenient. When complying with a specific language and language usages in work environments is again mostly defined by specific situations. It is also an action conducted because of traditions and habits embedded in routines. In Brussels, in the work environment observed, a French speaker’s choice of whether to speak Dutch or French depended on the purpose conveyed by the situation or the hierarchy of the people involved. If the speaker was engaged in a conversation with someone who shares the same status with regard to the company’s hierarchy, or if s/he is in a meeting, the French speaker may speak either Dutch or French. If a worker engages in a conversation with someone representing management, the latter will rather adapt to the language of the former. In Montreal, as explored in Sarah’s workplace, because the clinic’s client who was testing drugs was unilingual English, it created a situation in which my participant needed to adapt and translate symptoms from French-speaking patients into English. Such practices, just as those of mapping land with nationhood,

Chapter 3. The Power of States and Routines

are concealed in routines, and were not necessarily acknowledged by my informants. While these actions remained implicit, it was not because they could not be made explicit. As I was wondering if Quentin’s flyer written in French would also have a Dutch version, he mentioned that this would be done by the translator of the company. The reason why it was not made explicit was because it was not necessary, and not thought to be significant; hence the concealment of the dynamic. What are the implications of these routinely accomplished work-related tasks with regard to the idea that we live in a world divided into nations? In other words, how does the dynamic created by these work tasks operate with regard to nationhood? Far from aiming to challenge, dissolve, create, restructure, or actively maintain existing elements as national, as was the case for the first type of work task dynamic, individuals involved in the work-related tasks of this chapter unreflexively and routinely perpetuate elements as national. The work task dynamic created is operated by nationhood. In the first sociological encounter, mapping land with nationhood-related elements is accomplished without reflection. Individuals simply use in their daily practices toponyms. These, however, are defined and established by states. They evoke and are meant to uphold sociopolitical and sociohistorical meanings. They are toponyms intended to territorially represent a specific nation and asses that the territory belongs to the nation in question. Individuals engaging in the practice of mapping land with nationhood do not, by any means, intend to challenge these institutionalized toponyms. But by using these terms to map land, they reinforce and reify the fact that these elements are allowed to be defined by states, which are themselves invested by actors defining and aiming to represent the political community thought of as the nation. Routinely mapping land by referencing sites, boroughs, regions, cities, provinces, countries, or streets with nationhood-related terms, individuals further heighten the significance that political actors have power over a territorially defined community to which it is associated. However, my participants, in so doing, did not necessarily openly claim that these terms represent and belong to national territories, as political actors would; these meanings remained concealed. Out of a lack of significant alternatives, however, my informants did use these terms. By further investing the nationalized toponyms representatives of political communities have assigned to lands and territories, they unreflexively legitimize the power of states over such routinely used elements on a daily basis. In so doing, lands become landscapes and landmarks, which themselves come to legitimately represent and belong to the national territory. In the second sociological encounter of this chapter, the work-related task of complying with languages, individuals also unreflexively “applied” nationalized elements, in this case, with regard to languages. Languages and language usages being to a certain extent defined by work environments, which

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are themselves defined by the states in which they are located, individuals complying with specific languages and specific language usages again empower actors defining political communities. Through such practices, they recreated and reinforced on a daily basis the legitimacy of certain linguistic communities over that of others. In the national era, states have institutionalized one or more languages as that of a community, often referred to as the nation. Linguistic communities are the most fundamental political communities that political actors aim and claim to represent under a state. By investing and applying the institutionalized languages on a daily basis in workplaces while carrying out mundane tasks, individuals made and perpetuated them as the national language(s) of the state in question. In Brussels, French and Dutch were hence reified as the national languages, while English appeared, at times, as a “neutral” language. In Montreal, English, in spite of not being an official language under the legislation of the province of Quebec, was along French reified as a national language. Through routine practices complying with languages, individuals mundanely legitimized that political communities are associated with and have power over political communities with regard to languages. To conclude, work-related tasks operated by nationhood are those that are embedded in practices arising from the habits or traditions of individuals routinely accomplishing tasks. Engaging in such tasks reinforce the idea that we live in a world of nations by routinely using elements that a class claiming to be representative of political communities has defined as national. The tasks operated by nationhood identified in this chapter unconsciously and unreflexively legitimize, reinforce, and perpetuate the most “basic” elements of nations as a form of belonging: its territorial and linguistic community facets. Work tasks operated by nationhood represent a mode of operating nationhood in which the relationship with nationhood is understood and characterized through routine practices that are enacted out of habits or traditions coming from individuals living in a world of nations. Enacting nationhood through routines, the third work task dynamic entails a mode operated by nationhood in which elements are legitimized as national unreflexively because of a lack of significant alternatives. This third and last type of mode of operating nationhood is the last of typology I have established in this book. In the following section of the book, I will discuss the results of my research in two distinct chapters. The first chapter will, among others, present in a more concise way the three work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood, while the second chapter of Section 2 will focus on the sociopolitical aspects of Montreal and Brussels.

Section 2 The Unquestionability of a World Divided into Nations

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations: The Everyday Significance of Living in a World of Nations Throughout the empirical chapters of Section 1, I focused on individuals carrying out work tasks in which nationhood was involved in multiple ways. For each task, I considered the individual as inseparable from the contexts in which s/he performed actions with regard to the diverse elements of work environments: the formal guidelines of employers, the multiple interactions with coworkers and clients, or the implications of public legislation. Investigating the ways in which these work tasks were accomplished, I took into consideration the agency of individuals and of the relevant elements of work environments. In so doing, I identified five work tasks involving national elements. In examining the material further, I shed light on three types of work task dynamics and the ways in which they each operate with regard to nationhood in Montreal and Brussels. In this section of the book, I present and elaborate on the results of the research. Considering the empirical work from the previous section, I discuss in this chapter the theoretical implications of my findings for the field of the sociology of nationalism. First, I reflect upon the research design and methods suggested at the beginning of the book in light of the empirical investigation in work environments. I argue that the concept of lived nationhood and the approach I have developed to investigate it leads to to a better understanding of the phenomenal manifestations of the nation in banal activities of everyday life. Second, I sum up and discuss the results of the typology of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood.

4.1 L ived N ationhood : B ack to the R ese arch D esign At the very beginning of the book, I exposed a broad research problem: how is nationhood experienced in Montreal and Brussels? I suggested looking into the field of the sociology of nationalism in order to elaborate a conceptual frame-

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work that would help me explore this initial questioning. Drawing on the literature from the field, and with the tools provided by a phenomenologically-based sociology and interpretive sociology, I elaborated in the introduction of this book a conceptual approach to examine what I referred to as lived nationhood, or the experienced meanings of living in a world divided into nations. I suggested that the aim of an investigation into lived nationhood was to show not only when and where nationhood is, but also how it matters in everyday life. However, when I started shadowing my participants, I had not yet put on paper and detailed the concept of lived nationhood—even less the conceptual approach that would allow me to examine it. The idea of focusing on the experienced meaning of living in a world of nations was vaguely present in my mind at the time, but it was far from clear how I would actually empirically explore this object. Through trial and error, I developed about halfway into the empirical phase of the research the concept of lived nationhood and the approach to examine it. This development was essential to the progression of my inquiry; it is what finally led me to observe nationhood at work. When first entering the field, I thought of nations, mainly drawing on Brubaker’s conceptualizations, as “practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, [and] organizational routines” (Brubaker, 2004: 12) used “to make sense of problems and predicaments, to articulate affinities and affiliations, to identify commonalities and connections, to frame stories and self-understandings” (Brubaker et al., 2006: 12). This conceptualization seemed convincing when I was working with my first informant, the college teacher, as he significantly used the nation as a practical category to frame the content of his lesson. After spending three days at the college, among others, I almost expected the fieldwork to be straightforward and easy, as long as I could find participants. My hopes were short-lived. The second individual I shadowed was a restaurant manager. This time, the category nation only appeared sporadically in the course of some rare conversations. I was experiencing doubts for the first time. Thinking that I could not “see” nationhood because of the contingencies of some of the contexts I was examining, I kept on exploring everyday nationhood with the fourth, fifth, and sixth participant. The following weeks spent in the fieldwork did not mitigate my uncertainties. My participants only on rare occasions explicitly talked about nationhood. Moreover, since I was exploring every type of everyday environment I could encounter, the field notes appeared eclectic and hardly meaningful with regard to nationhood; I could not find a thread to help me arrange the material and to tie it together. At this point, my worries peaked. One day, after following Sofia—the nurse from Chapter 3—from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the restaurant manager from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., I went out to meet some colleagues. Disheartened, I brought up the problems in my fieldwork by saying that nationhood did not seem to matter significantly in everyday activ-

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

ities. Meaning well, I can only assume, both colleagues suggested that I was looking at the wrong environments and activities. Attempting to offer some advice, one of them mentioned the tumultuous procedures surrounding the commissioning of a statue on the McGill University campus in honor of an Anglo-Québécois whom some considered to be racist towards French-speaking Québécois. Although interested, I reminded them of the scope of my research: the banality of nationhood in everyday life. I added that their example seemed rather spectacular with regard to nationhood, and that the case of the statue could be better investigated through a discursive approach rather than an ethnographic one—not to mention that the event in question had occurred some twenty years ago. The advocates and opponents of the statue probably acted or presented themselves as experts with regard to nations or nationalist issues. They did not exude signs of banal nationalism or everyday nationhood. Their interest in nations, as well as mine and that of my colleagues, were most likely far from representative of what can be observed in everyday life.1 Throughout the years I conducted my research, attending conferences, and discussing my study with colleagues or friends, I realized that what people most often expect—and also perhaps wish—from an investigation into nationhood falls under the category of spectacular manifestations of the nation. Albeit unsatisfied with the way my fieldwork was progressing and feeling disconcerted with the recurring comments questioning my research interests and approach, I did not budge. I stuck to my choice of investigating the banality of nationhood in everyday life. However, I reconsidered two aspects of the research in order to better explore the everyday manifestations of the nation. First, I reworked the conceptualization of nationhood in order to frame my research object and my approach to the empirical material in a better way. Second, I limited the fieldwork to work environments, which simplified the ethnographic aspect of my investigation and led me to a more comprehensive interpretative approach to how nationhood is enacted on a daily basis. In the following, I recapitulate these two decisive moments, which I consider as research results that should be taken into consideration in future investigations into everyday nationhood.

1 | I would most likely understand the type of actors mentioned by my colleagues as part of the dynamic operating upon nationhood. At the time, however, I did not have in mind the typology I am now using. I was also often aiming to defuse such suggestions offered by colleagues—which were recurrent when I discussed my topic of research—by merely mentioning that I was not interested in such “obvious” forms of nationalism. Observing their devotion to such topics, in comparison to what I was seeing in the fieldwork, it was actually this encounter with my colleagues that first inspired me to construct a preliminary typology in which individuals’ degree of devotion and relation to nationhood was central (see the introduction of the book).

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4.1.1 Nationhood as Part of Activities: Moving beyond the Categor y Nation Andreas Wimmer, although recognizing the existence of a “constructivist consensus” in the field of the sociology of nationalism, notes that the “constructivists’ preoccupation with epistemological questions, with exorcising essentialism, reification, and objectification […] sometimes leads researchers to exaggerate the constructivist position and to overlook empirical variation in how ethnicity [and nationhood] shapes the life of individuals” (2013: 2). While Wimmer is mainly concerned with the investigation of what I consider to be spectacular phenomenal manifestations of the nation, rather than its more banal aspects, I agree with his remark: a restrictive constructivist approach often leads researchers to discard a phenomenon as national when the category nation is not explicitly expressed in a given event or course of action. The conceptual approach I have developed to investigate lived nationhood helps to remediate such problems, among others. In order to fully explore the phenomenal manifestations of the nation in everyday life, the approach I have utilized to investigate lived nationhood not only takes into consideration the use of the category nation in banal activities. It also focuses on the constitutive sense—the “essence”—of everyday social actions which, through interpretation leads to better identify everyday nationhood phenomena. With this approach, I have empirically discerned five work tasks in which nationhood is at play. Examining the motives with which these tasks were carried out, I reconstructed not only the activities themselves but also the outcome of the observed tasks within their contexts. In so doing, I unveiled how individuals enacted certain aspects of the idea of a world of nations while accomplishing work tasks even if the category nation was not explicit. Interpreting the material in this way led me to a better understanding of how nationhood is experienced in everyday life: the main interest of a sociology of lived nationhood. I now put this statement into perspective by discussing the literature on the sociology of nationalism and the results of the investigation. In light of my empirical research, I partly agree with other contemporary researchers (Brubaker et al., 2006; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008; Skey, 2011) that nationhood does not often matter in everyday life. As Brubaker notes, the category nation is rarely used to “explain who gets what and why [and] has little bearing on strategies for getting by or getting ahead” on a daily basis (idem.). My research, however, nuances this conclusion, for I argue that it is not because the category nation is not specifically addressed or explicitly used that nationhood is not at play. The fieldwork would have been “doomed” if I would have exclusively examined the practical uses of the category nation that participants, as I followed them, brought up to explain, interpret, and make sense of diverse

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

contexts or actions.2 The mere observations of individuals framing “things” under the category nation is not enough to understand how nationhood may be experienced. The research design and methods I have used to conduct my investigation allowed me to carry out research on everyday nationhood in a more dynamic manner than what the literature suggests. If I had considered nationhood to be relevant only when explicitly and overtly talked about, and used to make sense or frame events and actions by individuals as Brubaker suggested, I might have strictly focused on nationalist motives or the ways in which individuals sporadically used the category nation. In doing so, I would have left aside the majority of the phenomenal manifestations of the nation identified in my research. For example, when following Sofia on our first day together, I learned about the lexicon at the first page of the binder which helped her translate French terms into English. Although I thought of this information as significant for my investigation, this did not keep me from feeling disheartened about the fieldwork when meeting my colleagues on the same day. I was repeatedly asking myself: how was I to interpret and account for what appeared to be a mere secondary detail that was yet so allusive to nationhood? This question was on my mind for months. It was only when I finally settled on focusing on work tasks that the paper—onto which medical terms with their French and English equivalent appear—in Sofia’s binder made sense. Examining this bilingual lexicon as part of Sofia’s activities aimed at accomplishing her tasks of writing down the symptoms of patients in English only (even when the symptoms were given in French) I was able to see how she complied with languages—one of the two work-related tasks identified in Chapter3. Observing the activities underlying her tasks allowed me to seize the constitutive sense of the lexicon within her tasks and with regard to the linguistic aspect of nationhood. Such a processual analysis of the material encouraged me to go beyond merely acknowledging categorization practices. While Sofia did frame the paper under the category nation,3 interpreting the lexicon in the greater scheme of the task and the workplace revealed much more information regard2 | My participants were not aware of my research interests. The use of the category nation, when observed, was because the situation required it, not because an informant wanted to help me understand how nationhood was at play. This approach to the fieldwork is, I argue, essential for the understanding of how nationhood is experienced in everyday life (see the introduction of the book). 3 | Sofia qualified the paper as a French-English translation lexicon, which lists in both languages different symptoms patients could have. Having noted my surprise earlier during the day when I had asked why all of their paperwork was in English, she again framed her reply with the category nation by saying that the head office of the firm for which they were testing drugs was located outside of Quebec (see Chapter 3).

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ing nationhood. It led me to see how she was enacting the aspect of nationhood regarding languages—by complying with languages—while carrying out her task even when she was not explicitly referencing the category nation. One of the key element that allowed me to move beyond the analysis of the category nation and look into the constitutive sense of actions and objects was to regard nationhood as part of activities in which individuals were involved when accomplishing work tasks. Focusing on other aspects than the categorization, I explored the meaning of actions and objects that can be thought of as national in order to investigate their role in actions, and to understand the relationship that individuals have with nationhood while accomplishing a work task. In other words, I observed nationhood as it is lived, as part of activities in which it may or may not emerge and come to be regarded as significant, rather than nationhood as an activity in itself or as a mere category. The concept of lived nationhood is not unfamiliar with what anthropologist Albert Piette defines as the mode mineur of daily activities. The mode mineur is “a conceptual category of the observer exterior to the situation, which has been identified as a surplus, a side line with regard to the consequences of actions and to the objects directly associated with the issue and with the motivation of the situation” (2009: 251; my translation).4 The majority of actions and activities in my fieldwork were not nationalist—at least not in the common sense of the term. In such a context, it might have seemed pointless to look in work environments for the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations. Like Piette in his work on religion ordinaire (banal religion), however, I did not consider nationhood (religious activities in Piette’s case) apart from other situations or activities (2005: 344) in which work tasks were involved. Neither did I investigate nationhood as a stand-alone activity that would not interact or intersect with other aspects of everyday life, such as politics, obviously, but also geography, business, art, or education—to cite aspects of my fieldwork with which it did intersect. Instead, within the contexts and activities observed, I explored practices and expressions which informed me about individuals’ beliefs, positions, intentions, and relations with a “cultural phenomenon” (Piette, 2003: 5), that of nationhood. The elaboration of the conceptual approach to investigate lived nationhood helped me consider in a more accurate way the actual significance of the idea of living in a world of nations. While nationhood was, in the case of Sofia, more significant than what I initially thought, with the lesson of Mathieu—the teacher of French literature—the significance I had first perceived decreased. 4 | “Le mode mineur est bien une notion, une catégorie conceptuelle de l’observateur extérieur à la situation qui a repéré comme un surplus, un à-côté par rapport aux séquences d’actions et aux objets associés directement à l’enjeu et à la motivation de la situation” (Piette, 2009: 251).

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

Because of my research interests, I was necessarily more attentive and drawn to nationhood than to other types of phenomena in Mathieu’s workplace. Once I found it in his activities, I could have retained my narrow focus on nationhood, and thereby disregard other significant actions with regard to the ongoing work task. As I interpreted the material further, I realized that nationhood was not that central to Mathieu’s lesson. It was rather a mode mineur of the lesson. The “real” central content of the lesson, the core of his teaching, was the accomplishments of poets, their themes, literary skills, and styles; it was not the national context that Mathieu elaborated. Nationhood was undoubtedly present, but it was above all part of the context, part of the strategy Mathieu constructed to share the central content of his lesson better. The work tasks I identified in Section 1 represent phenomenal manifestations of the nation that would not have been as thoroughly explored if I would have only considered the use of the category nation by my informants. A sociology of lived nationhood, as I developed it, moves beyond the uses of this category. Interpreting the constitutive sense of actions and objects in the context of a work task led me to detect different aspects of nationhood even if the category nation was not explicitly present. The approach to investigate lived nationhood, I argue, helps to better identify different aspects of nationhood within everyday life activities. It also offers a different take on what the nation means and does to individuals by investigating the motives—a matter on which I focus in more detail in what follows—of individuals accomplishing work tasks. This is how I identified and characterized the various ways in which nationhood is enacted in day-to-day activities, which is a major contribution to the sociology of nationalism in general, and to everyday nationhood studies in particular. Academic work investigating how actors, in opposition to passive individuals, discursively articulate and make sense of nation(-s) are of interest for understanding the salience of nations for “everyday people” (Thompson and Day, 1999; Miller-Idriss, 2006; Poitras, 2013). Such studies, however, do not explain when and how nations matter in everyday life. Because they focus on discourses, constructed with the help of interviews, and not practices, they say little about the structuring impact of nationhood on lived experiences and everyday life activities. A handful of studies does point towards such a structuring effect: whether it by showing how individuals, while conversing, frame topics by adopting and personalizing politicians’ views, and thereby sporadically making issues national and themselves national subjects (Fox, 2004; Skey, 2011); how institutions’ and states’ logic shape the available choices regarding education or culture (Brinton and Nee, 2001; Edensor, 2002; Bourdieu, 2012); how environments and aspects of everyday life are constantly nationalized (Billig 1995), whether it be at schools (Throssell, 2010), through television programs (Kruger, 1999), or food (Martigny, 2010); or how sports events (Eriksen, 1993) and

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ways of washing dishes (Linde-Laursen, 1993) represent more trivial versions of nationalism. By focusing on mundane activities shaping or shaped by nationhood, all of the aforementioned studies shed light on the practical accomplishment of nations on a daily basis. Yet, in contrast to what a sociology of lived nationhood achieves, they fail to distinguish between the multiple ways in which nationhood is enacted. They seem to suggest that enacting nationhood in everyday life is a homogenous practice with univocal consequences regarding the idea of a world of nations. My investigation rather demonstrates that the idea of a world divided into nations is enacted for multiple reasons and accomplished through three distinct mechanisms: for a cause, individuals’ actions operate upon nationhood; through strategies, individuals’ actions operate with nationhood; and through routines, individuals’ actions are operated by nationhood—I come back to these results regarding the typology later in the chapter. Neither looking for the use of the category nation nor thinking of nations as being either holistically significant or only observable when appearing in spectacular forms, I found a middle ground enabling me to approach the empirical material by thinking about and observing nationhood as part of everyday activities. In so doing, I had begun observing lived nationhood: the object of research central to my work. After re-conceptualizing and refining the object of inquiry halfway into the empirical phase of the investigation, the approach of a sociology of lived nationhood began taking form and proving to be effective. This approach to the empirical material, I believe, best defines a way to explore the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations and everyday nationhood altogether. Beyond examining the uses of the category nation, a sociology of lived nationhood encourages researchers to seize the constitutive sense of actions and objects at play in the contexts in which they are observed, which, I argued, leads to better identify and understand the phenomenal manifestations of nations in banal activities. While reworking the object of my investigation and my approach to the material, I felt that another aspect of the research design would benefit from revision: the scope of the fieldwork itself. Having followed six participants throughout their daily activities in Montreal, I found that the empirical material from workplaces was richer than that of other environments. Workplaces also proved to be more accessible,5 although other environments, such as family contexts or public festivities, are undoubtedly suitable and of interest to the investigation of lived nationhood. Most of all, the workplace, as a defined environment, proved 5 | In the introduction of the book, I mentioned that individuals seemed more at ease with my presence in their workplaces, which, I argued, further allowed me to observe situations that were “truer” to everyday life, as my participants, whether I was there or not, had to accomplish their work tasks as if I was not there—at least to a certain extent.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

beneficial for the interpretation of the material and the quality of the research results. In what follows, I argue that lived nationhood is best investigated by constructing the fieldwork around one type of everyday environment.

4.1.2 Investigating Lived Nationhood in a Defined Environment: Constructing a Cohesive Frame of Reference At the very beginning of the research, I wanted to explore nationhood in every type of everyday situations I could possibly encounter. From conversations in cafés to the family-oriented contexts of homes, via workplaces, daily traveling and events such as dinners, parties, leisure activities, and sports, I went out in Montreal alone or with a participant—as Brubaker and his colleagues (2006) had done for years in Cluj—to explore everyday nationhood. When examining day-to-day activities in the fieldwork with the first informants, I found nationhood to be as scattered and eclectic in work environments as elsewhere. However, when I began arranging the material by focusing on the observations I had made, I realized that nationhood appeared more “coherent” in the workplace than outside of it. This was mainly due to the “goals” the tasks were geared towards.6 The investigation of workplaces turned out to be a rich environment, offering multiple threads to investigate lived nationhood. Other interpretative avenues than those revolving around the execution of work tasks might have been possible. But as the activities of the participants I was shadowing were mainly directed at conducting and accomplishing tasks, it seemed most logical to concentrate the analysis on these activities. Reworking the scope of the fieldwork by setting it in a defined environment in which individuals are engaged in activities towards a specific end opened the door for more processual interpretative possibilities. This scope, I argue, best suites the investigation of lived nationhood. A sociology of lived nationhood, as I defined it, explores the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations. To do so, I suggested examining motives underlying social actions in which nationhood is involved, by reconstructing not only the action itself but also the outcome of the observed practices and expressions within their contexts. The activities in which individuals engage in order to accomplish a work task involving national elements proved ideal. The workplaces, consequently, became the cohesive frame of reference to examine the work tasks. Work environments, as a context that assiduously portrays everyday life activities, exemplify a well-defined frame of reference in which the sociologist can readily interpret the constitutive sense of the actions and expressions of participants with regard to nationhood without having to constantly refer to 6 | Investigating another type of environment equally intensively could perhaps have led me to the same conclusion.

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a distant nation state, which most of the time does not directly influence the accomplishment of work tasks. The investigation of one social context provides a more cohesive frame of reference to interpret the material but most of all, it offers a frame of reference that further decentralizes the focus of the researcher on ethnonational categories or groups. Most contemporary scholars working in the field of the sociology of nationalism agree that in order to investigate everyday nationhood, it is necessary to reduce the focus on ethnic groups so as to avoid “groupism” or “methodological nationalism” (Brubaker 2004; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008a; Wimmer 2013; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). There are many ways to approach the fieldwork and to “de-ethnicize” (or de-nationalize) the scope of the research by using another frame of reference than the nation in order to interpret empirical material: from focusing on neighborhoods, localities, cities, and regions (Brubaker et al., 2006; Glick Schiller et al., 2006) to social classes (Lamont, 1992; 2000), via schools (Kao and Joyner, 2000) and workplaces (Ely and Thomas, 2001). In the same vein, my use of the work environment as a de-ethnicized cohesive frame of reference to investigate the significance of nationhood in everyday life not only allowed me to observe nationhood as part of mundane activities of one social sphere, it also helped me avoid falling back on the nation state when interpreting empirical activities. I could illustrate this by taking, once again, Sofia as an example. One could have interpreted the translation sheet of Sofia’s binder as a “tool” put into place by the employer to accommodate his employees, or as an element implemented out of fear of potential retaliations from the Office québécois de la langue française. Had I done so and only used the frame of reference of the nation state, I might not have taken into account the relevance of the sheet in the workplace in general, and in the accomplishment of Sofia’s work task in particular. The frame of relevance allowing me to interpret how nationhood structured Sofia’s experiences at work was in fact not the nation state as much as her work environment and the tasks that needed to be accomplished—that of writing down, in English, the symptoms of patients. While the nation state was certainly at play through the linguistic legislation, I could not have properly seized the dynamic of the work task and the way that Sofia complied to certain languages and language usages without the succinct context provided by the workplace. This persistent focus on the workplace as a frame of relevance throughout the inquiry, moreover, distinguishes my investigation from most studies on everyday nationhood, because it led me to demonstrate the wide variety of the phenomenal manifestations of the nation within one type of everyday environment. Studies investigating nationhood in de-ethnicized environments, indeed, do not account for the multiplicity of nationhood phenomena in a single type of social context. Thoroughly exploring nationhood in one everyday life envi-

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

ronment, I was able to demonstrate the abundancy of nationhood phenomena in one social sphere: the workplace. In so doing, I avoided simply drawing the portrait of a nation or a city through the activities of individuals. Solely relying on empirical material from workplaces, my research focuses more on the the dynamics of nationhood and its structural impact on everyday activities than on the mere clichés often described as practices of the nation, such as sport events, specific dishes, clothing, celebrations, or political opinions. The narrow scope of the fieldwork on workplaces, most of all, entailed me to interpret and account for the material in an original way. Had I focused on multiple types of social contexts as first planned, I perhaps merely would have described the most obvious activities in which nationhood is involved and accounted for clichés such as above-mentioned. Sticking with workplaces, I was rather compelled to examine hidden structures and smaller impacts of the nation, which led me to shed light on the different ways in which nationhood may be enacted and the various dynamics in which nationhood operates in everyday life. I therefore argue that investigating nationhood in one social context—such as that of the workplace—by focusing on processual activities with a specific aim—such as work tasks—leads to a better understanding of the wide variety of nationhood phenomena and their various dynamics in everyday life. Having reworked the object of my research and limited the fieldwork to work environments, I came to be satisfied with the empirical phase of my research. The interpretative stage, which reservedly began during the fieldwork, soon took front stage. As I constructed the sociological encounters unveiling the work tasks examined in Section 1, I soon realized that these tasks had different dynamics with regard to nationhood. In parallel, I began discerning various ways of enacting nationhood while accomplishing work tasks. These observations led me to organize the material by constructing a typology. Aiming “towards a descriptive, typologically condensed explicit knowledge of acting in order to narratively depict the historical concretion of the cases via a reconstruction of motives” (Endreß, 2014: 49), I elaborated three types of work task dynamics, which each entails a mode of operating nationhood: a theoretical construct applicable outside work-related activities that describes a way of enacting nationhood and legitimizing elements as national. Prior to elaborating these dynamics and modes of operating nationhood, I examined motives: one of the starting points of the interpretative process of a sociology of lived nationhood.

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4.2 Three W ork Task D ynamics : Three M odes of O per ating N ationhood The motives underlying the actions of individuals accomplishing work tasks were central in the elaboration of the typology and in the overall interpretative process. In order to understand the relationship individuals have with nationhood while carrying out work tasks in which national elements were involved, I first wanted to understand the motivation underlying the accomplishment of each tasks. Uncovering these motives, I quickly—and surprisingly—realized that they were never nationalist, to the exception of Philip’s motives analyzed in Chapter 1. If the motives were not nationalist while the tasks in question were “accomplishing” nations, how was I to characterize them? Although the motives of individuals conducting work tasks were rarely nationalist, I argue that their examination is crucial to the understanding of everyday activities as examined with a sociology of lived nationhood. Thereby, before delving into the typology of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood itself, I discuss how significant the investigation of motives was for my work. Having taken the decision to investigate motives, I was at first somehow disconcerted. Guided by my approach of lived nationhood and the literature on the sociology of nationalism, I could not identify actions or motives as nationalist or as sharing any sort of direct affinity with (a) nation(-s) in the way I had anticipated. I was nevertheless certain that the examination of motives underlying actions was key to understanding the experienced meanings of living in a world of nation and characterizing the relationship individuals have with nationhood. Most authors on nationalism usually investigate the intermittent use of the category nation in order to understand how individuals get by in everyday life (Fox 2004; Brubaker et al. 2006; Miller-Idriss 2006; Skey 2011), or the rationally driven actions of individuals with regard to making national boundaries, thereby building a typology around the “spectacular” and more political phenomenal manifestation of nations (see Wimmer, 2013). Or they demonstrate the transformative use of the category nation in patterns of solidarity and social capital in European countries after the adoption of neoliberal policies (Mijs, Bakhtiari, and Lamont, 2016). In line with such “guidelines,” my interests in motives did not seem significant at first when interpreting the fieldwork constructed by shadowing individuals in their work environments. In hindsight, however, exploring motives appears to be the most significant point of entry I could have chosen to reveal and understand the multiple ways of enacting nationhood and the various dynamics in which nationhood operates in everyday life. Following Jean, the fruit stand manager from Montreal presented in Chapter 2, I quickly noticed that the category nation was overtly present. Jean used it to advertise products. He also used it to select his merchandise from the pro-

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

vider at a warehouse and heavily advertised the fruits and vegetables that were from Quebec, in comparison with the non-Québécois ones. In the course of our days together, when his discourse in favor of the independence of Quebec became clear to me, I first interpreted Jean’s actions as driven by nationalist motives. However, as I kept working with him, and also when I began organizing and interpreting the material further, I came to understand that nationhood did not play a role in his motives as I originally thought. Nationhood was rather strictly integrated into his environment as well as in the work tasks he was carrying out. Thinking of our meetings and comparing his actions with other work environments I had visited, nationhood appeared as part of a strategy Jean had put into place to promote and sell his products better. His motive in carrying out his activities at work was not nationalist as much as driven by a will to accomplish his task better, which led him to construct a strategy involving nationhood. Thereby, Jean’s relationship with nationhood can be characterized through the establishment of a business strategy involving national elements; he enacted nationhood through a strategy because he was motivated to carry out his task in a way that he saw fit. As I kept shedding light on the motives underlying the accomplishment of work tasks involving national elements, I came to understand that individuals did not need a nationalist motive to have a relationship with nationhood and to enact nationhood. Unveiling the relationship individuals have with nationhood while they conducted various work tasks allowed me to understand the ways in which nationhood was enacted in everyday activities. I characterized these relationships as three ways of enacting nationhood: individuals enacted nationhood either for a cause, through a strategy, or through a routine. Meanwhile, I also started delineating the dynamics in which nationhood operates that were created by work tasks: there were work tasks operating upon nationhood, with nationhood, and some that were operated by nationhood. Enacting nationhood in one specific way seemed to entail a work task to operate in one specific way with regard to nationhood. At this point, the typology began to take form. Each type of work task dynamic describes a unique way of enacting nationhood and legitimizing elements as national through the accomplishment of a work task. The modes of operating nationhood are each based on one type of work task dynamic; they are conceived as theoretical constructs, more abstract than their work task dynamic counterparts, making them easier to apply to the interpretation of activities outside work environments. Each work task dynamic and mode of operating nationhood functions to a certain extent as an ideal type. The ideal type describes a “conceptual pattern [that] brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into a complex, which is conceived as an internationally consistent system” (We-

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ber, 1949 [1904]: 90).7 The descriptions of the dynamics and especially of the modes themselves are not a “description of reality” as much as the sociological encounters of individuals accomplishing the work tasks with which they are constructed. They nevertheless provide an “unambiguous means of expression [to] make the characteristic features” of work tasks dynamics and modes of operating nationhood “pragmatically clear and understandable” (ibid.). As a means, and not an end (ibid.: 92), the different types of dynamics and modes provide an “equation of transformation according to which the phenomena of the life-world become transformed by a process of idealization” (Schütz, 1962: 138). They are constructs, grounded in empirical information, that allow me to 7 | I am aware that the work task dynamics are not “true” ideal types in Max Weber’s sense. I do not construct the dynamic in a comparative way by grounding each of them in their cultural and historical contexts. In other words, I do not explain the historical significance of work task dynamics and the cultural and historical context from which they emerge, e.g., with regard to the development of nations and nationalism through history. Some aspects of the ideal type approach, as I argue, were helpful to the construction of the work task dynamics and the modes of operating nationhood. Besides, the lack of an historical approach in studies of everyday nationhood is the subject of strong criticism addressed by Anthony D. Smith in an article entitled The Limits of Everyday Nationhood (2008). He sees investigations into everyday nationhood as problematic because, he argues, of their “ahistoricism; ethnocentrism; nation-statism; the[ir] failure to specify ‘the people’” (2008: 567). Such problems, he continues, stem from “rejections of the causal-historical methodology common to previous scholarship in the field […] By concentrating on the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of the nation as talked, chosen, performed and consumed by ordinary people, and neglecting the ‘why’ and ‘who,’ the study of everyday nationhood becomes restricted to the micro-analytical and descriptive rather than the causal and sociohistorical” (Ibid), which, obviously, is in his perspective problematic— or perhaps simply uninteresting and unworthy of the attention of researchers. To such critiques, Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (to whom Smith’s comments were directly addressed) answer that they do not view everyday nationhood “approaches as incompatible but rather as guided by different concerns [than that of scholars such as Smith]” (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008b: 574). They continue: “Our primary focus is not on Smith’s moment of ethnogenesis (for which his work on the topic remains definitive); rather, we concentrate on the ways in which ethnonational idioms—once in circulation—are enacted and invoked by ordinary people in the routine contexts of their everyday lives. Indeed, we are indebted to scholars such as Smith for demonstrating the precise ways in which such idioms have entered circulation. But the availability of such idioms over the longue durée does not in itself explain when, where or how those idioms actually get manipulated by their end users: ordinary people in the ‘here and now’ of everyday life” (Ibid). Although I generally agree with Fox and Miller-Idriss’ response, I remain receptive to Smith’s comments about the “ahistoricist” aspect of research such as mine.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

better distinguish the different ways in which nationhood is enacted and the different dynamics through which nationhood operates. The elaboration of each type was an ongoing process throughout the research. I continually reconstructed them in accordance with new observations made in the fieldwork, as I constructed and interpreted the empirical material. The types continually helped me link the “interpretations back to the horizon of everyday interpretations” in which they are rooted, i.e., “in the lived experience of people” (Endreß, 2014: 44). Creating the typology, I favored “course-ofaction” types of typification rather than the more Weberian-oriented “personal types” (Schütz 1962: 44-46; see also Psathas, 2005: 160). I was more interested in everyday experiences than agents of change, or other specific types of (strong) actors on which Weberian ideal types are constructed. I thereby used the course-of-action types which I believe, at least in an investigation into lived nationhood, leads to a better “appreciation and explication of the details of everyday life, to the study of common sense knowledge, the examination of the role of types and typifications in the mundane world” (Psathas, 2005: 162). Through the typology, I have established a nexus between a specific way individuals enact nationhood while accomplishing a work task and the way this task operates with regard to nationhood (see table below). Enacting nationhood for a national cause, as explored with Philip in Chapter 1, revealed a work task dynamic operating upon nationhood. Philip is the only individual identified throughout the fieldwork that had a relationship with nationhood that can be qualified as nationalist—in the common sense of the term. In Chapter 2, the motives of the participants—Mathieu, Jeroen, Damien, Jean, William, and Étienne—were directed at successfully accomplishing their tasks. Their activities involved elaborating and putting into place a strategy in which national constructs—the national contexts and the business plans involving nationhood— allowed my informants to conduct their tasks better. These stories shed light on a more strategy driven relationship with nationhood. Enacting nationhood through strategies, these tasks created a dynamic operating with nationhood. In Chapter 3, the actions underlying the accomplishment of work tasks involving nationhood were not invested with observable motives. The relationship my informants—Sarah, Carla, Quentin, and Sofia—had with nationhood was rather characterized through routines, and actions enacted out of habit or tradition through practices such as mapping land with nationhood or complying with languages and language usages. Enacting nationhood through routines, these work-related tasks unveiled a work task dynamic operated by nationhood.

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Typology of Work Task Dynamics and Modes of Operating Nationhood Dynamics Work Tasks and Modes

Upon

Cultivating Nationhood

Nationhood as a Context for Staging Public Figures

With

Nationhood as knowledge for Selling Doing Business and Prowith Nationhood moting Selling and Promoting with Nationhood Mapping Land with Nationhood

By Compliance with Languages

Participants

Elements Reified as National

Relationships with Nationhood

Philip: Writer/ Publisher (Het Heem Crew Members) Mathieu: Teacher of French Literature Jeroen: Current Affair Journalist Damien: Television Satellite Representative

Public Figures/ Cause Events/Arguments

Jean: Fruit-Stand Manager

Products, Services, and Businesses

William: Piano Seller Étienne: Building Technician Sarah: Environmental Technician Carla: Veterinarian Quentin: Human Resources Employee Sofia: Nurse

Public Figures

Strategy

Territories/Landmarks Routine Languages

In what follows, I summarize in a more detailed manner the typology of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood. By revisiting the empirical chapters, I focus on the ways of enacting nationhood and, in a distinct section, on the ways of legitimizing elements as national. This leads me to suggest, first, that nationhood is part of an implicit way of acting in a world divided into nations. In other words, I argue that either for a cause, through a strategy, or through a routine, my participants were “doing nationhood” at work while accomplishing their tasks. Second, I discuss the different ways in which work tasks operate with regard to nationhood in order to further distinguish the specificities of each dynamic and mode. I thereby clarify the three distinct mechanisms of “making nations” as observed in the fieldwork.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

4.2.1 Doing Nationhood: An Implicit Way of Acting In this section, I highlight the characteristics of the three different ways of enacting nationhood identified in Section 1 in order to better differentiate them from one another. I add to this summary my participants’ own understanding of their relationship with nationhood while accomplishing work tasks. Addressing this issue, I demonstrate how enacting nationhood is part of an implicit way of acting in a world of nations by discussing how individuals implicitly “do” things in a certain way because of the idea that the world is divided into nations. By suggesting that this idea is sedimented into practices, I show how individuals, on a daily basis, are doing nationhood. The idea of doing nationhood sheds light on a tacit form of being in the world. It demonstrates that the nation, as a constructed structure of the lifeworld, is most of the time implicitly experienced and incontestably enacted as such by individuals. While accomplishing the work tasks, the participants never addressed, questioned, or even acknowledge the very idea of the nation, its contemporary significance, or its structuring effect. Philip, the writer and publisher from Chapter 1, questioned the current national status of Quebec as a political community, but not the idea or concept of the nation itself. In other words, he, as well as all of my participants, did not argue against living in a world of nations—a perspective that I later develop in the chapter. In line with the banal nationalism thesis (Billig, 1995), I argue that nationhood represents an implicit form of acting in a world divided into nations that is observable through individuals doing nationhood. However, I bring nuances to Billig’s conclusions and other works in the same vein. In light of the empirical chapters, I begin by presenting the most implicit way of enacting the idea of a world of nations, which reverses the order in which I have so far presented the typology. Enacting Nationhood through Routines Enacting nationhood is most implicit when enacted through routines, as observed in Chapter 3 with the two work-related tasks operated by nationhood: mapping land with nationhood, and complying with languages. The first task consisted in referring to spaces by invoking nationhood-related terms in order to communicate specific locations or their qualities. Locations and their qualities, however, could have been made explicit through other means. As described in the previous chapter, Sarah and Carla, for example could have communicated the location of a street, park, region or country by using its geographical coordinates. With regard to the qualities of spaces, such as the business of the Grand’ Place, Carla simply could have described an area with lots of people. But mapping land with nationhood was logistically more practical. This practicality was however never explicitly acknowledged by my participants. It

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was not the intended goal of the mapping practice. Mapping land with nationhood is simply how individuals living in a world of nations understand and share information with regard to spaces. Embedded in routine practices, individuals are doing nationhood while mapping land. In the second task explored in Chapter 3, I examined how individuals complied with specific languages and language usages. These practices were mostly deemed as insignificant by my participants. While accomplishing their tasks, my informants never spontaneously invoked information regarding these language issues in order for me to understand what they were aiming to accomplish and how. It was only when carefully observing or requesting—with insistence at times—precise information as to know more about certain procedures of tasks in progress that I sometimes learned that linguistic issues were actually part of ongoing actions. For example, in Brussels with Quentin, the human resource employee, the fact that a communication written in French addressed to workers would be subsequently translated into Dutch by the translator of the firm was not something worth telling me about and elaborating on. Similarly, in Montreal, the fact that a sheet helped nurses translate French terms into English for the company to which they addressed the forms was part of practices embedded in the routine of conducting the specific task. These were actions that could be made explicit, but were not treated as such before I asked about them. While they were being carried out, these activities were considered by my participants to be irrelevant or unimportant. Complying with certain languages and language usages were practices that were experienced as implicit to the actions underlying the accomplishment of the work tasks. They are practices denoting that certain languages are institutionalized as national in Montreal and Brussels, and that alternatives regarding these linguistic usages are scarce in an environment such as the workplace. Through implicit practices of pronounced compliance with languages, individuals are doing nationhood. The work-related tasks of mapping land with nationhood and of complying with languages represent practices that reflect the most implicit way of enacting nationhood. Embedded in routines, these practices reveal how individuals map land with nationhood and comply with institutionalized languages because of the idea that they live in a world divided into nations. Such activities demonstrate how sedimented into certain practices this idea is, and how, thereby, individuals are doing nationhood on a daily basis while accomplishing mundane work tasks. Enacting nationhood through concealed routines, as observed with work tasks operated by nationhood, is at its most tacit. Enacting Nationhood through Strategies The work tasks involved in a dynamic operating with nationhood, as examined in Chapter 2, comprised actions aimed at elaborating strategies that resulted in national constructs allowing individuals to better accomplish the tasks at hand.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

In the first task, nationhood as context for staging public figures, one of my participant’s main goal was to share information on a politician that had just passed away, while the other one’s was to communicate knowledge about the accomplishments of Québécois poets. To do so, both of my informants elaborated a context adapted to the material they needed to convey. By evoking political, cultural, historical, or territorial elements falling under the category nation, they hoped to spark contexts familiar to viewers and students that would make it easier for them to assimilate explicit information and knowledge: the accomplishments of poets and of a politician. As vague as the knowledge of such national contexts may be on the recipients’ side, they are used as tools that enable the interaction to take place. Constructing the required context allowed my informants to structure the sharing and communicating processes of the main content of a news program and of a lesson and to successfully accomplishing their respective tasks. Using these national constructs as context, “mismatched salience” was most likely prevented, a phenomenon which occurs when an individual conveys information to another person and the latter fails to understand it because s/he lacks background information that the former failed to provide (Collins, 2010: 95). While nationhood was not necessarily part of the knowledge and information to share, it was, through the elaborated contexts, central in the communicating processes. In the second work task explored in Chapter 2, I examined how individuals were doing business with nationhood. This task was subdivided into two sociological encounters: individuals were doing business by using nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices, and by adding national references onto products or services. Out of professional conviction, individuals elaborated business strategies, which enabled work tasks to be conducted in a more efficient way. Nationhood as knowledge guided the visits of Damien, the Brussels-based representative of a television satellite company, to wholesalers and stores scattered around Wallonia. Thinking, for example, that Dutch speakers spend their time in camping sites during the summer, Damien planned his visits of the day accordingly. In Montreal, my informant acted in a similar way. Thinking that people prefer to buy fruits and vegetables from Quebec rather than, say, from the United States—as long as the quality and price are more or less comparable—Jean, the fruit stand manager, chose to offer products from Quebec at his stand. He also heavily advertised them as such. Similarly, adding national references onto a product or a service were practices aiming to make products and services more appealing to potential customers. Mentioning that his company was the official provider to the Belgian royal family and that it was the biggest of the Benelux countries, William, the piano seller, elaborated a strategy in which national references were added to products in order to “enhance” the appeal of instruments in the eyes of potential buyers. In the same way, in Montreal, realizing that Americans were

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not buying his services because they would rather spend their money in their own country, Étienne, a building technician, “Americanized” or gave an American feature and façade to his company by opening a branch in New York City. Nationhood as context for staging public figures and doing business with nationhood are both work tasks in which participants took action to elaborate a strategy in which national elements helped carry out the required tasks. But how can nationhood be thought of an implicit way of acting in these two tasks if national elements are used as part of strategies? Constructing strategies in which nationhood takes part necessarily involves using national elements. These, as examined in Chapter 2, were used by my informants in an intuitive way for the elaboration of contexts and business plans as strategies that would allow them to accomplish their tasks. Thinking that their viewers, students, or costumers are familiar with the national elements they are referring to, my participants were drawn towards the convenience of these references and used them as part of their strategies. Re-using these constructs on multiple occasions points towards embodied yet acknowledge practices in which nationhood implicitly takes part, rather than towards a reflection upon the status of what is national or the structuring aspect of nations in everyday life. Strategically elaborating contexts and business plans as national constructs also demonstrates how individuals typically stage public figures and do business in a world divided into nations. Other strategies in which nationhood is not involved could have been and could be developed to accomplish the same tasks. But as long as the strategies involving nationhood successfully allow individuals to conduct their work tasks, they remain unquestioned, and my participants will most likely keep using them in similar ways and in similar situations—as Alfred Schütz would say regarding how individuals often never question their own practices until they become less efficient (Schütz, 1970: 121). In other words, as long as enacting nationhood through these strategies allows accomplishing the tasks at hand, my informants will without a doubt keep on doing nationhood in the same way. The work tasks of nationhood as context for staging public figures and of doing business with nationhood reveal implicit ways of acting in a world of nations that are embedded in strategies. They demonstrate how individuals may be doing nationhood when simply aiming to properly fulfill their tasks. Enacting nationhood through strategies while carrying out banal tasks in work environments, as examined with the two tasks operating with nationhood, again shows how the idea of living in a world of nations and its structuring aspect onto everyday life is experienced as tacit and enacted as such.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

Enacting Nationhood for a Cause Enacting nationhood for a cause, as explored in Chapter 1 with the work task of cultivating nationhood, is also an implicit way of acting, but only to a certain extent. In the sole task of the type of dynamic operating upon nationhood, Philip, through his writing and publishing activities, aimed at producing Québécois literature and disseminating knowledge about Quebec: its history, prominent actors, and tales in the form of essays, biographies, academic works, or novels. Although Philip explicitly mentioned references to nations during our encounters, he experienced the impact of nationhood tacitly. Motivated by a cause, that of the sovereignty of Quebec, Philip questioned Quebec’s political status in Canada, but he did not question the idea of living in a world of nations, or what a nation is. The idea of the nation as a constructed structure of the lifeworld was again implicitly experienced and incontestably enacted as such by Philip. In comparison with the two other types of dynamics, doing nationhood through writings and publishing is the least implicit way of enacting nationhood I have observed. It explicitly touches upon national elements; it even aims to nationalize them. But the structural impact of the idea of the nation remains implicit to his actions. Actively cultivating social and historical aspects as reflecting and belonging to the nation, as observed with Philip, is an implicit way of enacting nationhood; this is how individuals living in a world of nations give meaning to social and historical events in order to build a form of togetherness. This structuring aspect of the idea of the nation, however, was never explicitly addressed by Philip. Philip’s cause led him to explicitly reference and work with national elements while accomplishing his task. Ultimately, he operated upon nationhood: he challenged the current status of Quebec within Canada, and wrote and published material creating or asserting public figures, history, and events as national. He did not, however, question the significance of the idea of the nation itself, as much as the status of a nation within another nation. If anything, Philip greatly reified nationhood as a tacit social structure of the life-world, and as an implicit way of acting within a world of nations. *** In all of the examined work tasks involving national elements, the structuring aspect of nationhood remained a tacit experience for my participants. Enacting the different dimensions of a world of nations was implicit in the accomplishment of these tasks, whether they were conducted through a routine or a strategy, or for a cause. Living with the idea of a world divided into nations, my participants carried out their work tasks accordingly. They were doing nationhood. At times, as discussed, they could have accomplished their tasks without national elements. But nationhood seemed sedimented into their practices to

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the point where alternatives appeared irrelevant, went unnoticed, or were not sought after. After focusing on the three ways individuals enacted nationhood, I now turn to the dynamics work task created with regard to nationhood and the modes of operating nationhood.

4.2.2 Making Nations: Legitimizing Elements as National As Section 1 demonstrates, one way of enacting nationhood while carrying out a work task corresponds to one way the tasks in question operates with regard to nationhood. I identified three of these dynamics: work tasks operate upon nationhood; with nationhood; or are operated by nationhood. Each work task dynamic represents one specific way of legitimizing elements as national; it is a unique mechanism of making nations. Indeed, while carrying out their tasks, individuals are not only doing nationhood, they are also mundanely making nations. In what follows, I discuss the three work task dynamics by summarizing how and what elements each tasks legitimizes as national. Each of these dynamics helps me develop a mode of operating nationhood: a theoretical construct applicable outside work-related activities that entails a unique way of enacting nationhood and legitimizing elements as national. Mode Operating upon Nationhood Individuals challenging, dissolving, creating, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements as national at work for the cause of a nation produced a dynamic operating upon nationhood. Philip’s cause for the sovereignty of Quebec from Chapter 1 led him to question different issues concerning the existing classification of Quebec’s political status in the federation and the relations it has with Canada. He did so through individual writing activities as well as publishing activities with a house he has founded. His writings on the status of autochthones in Quebec versus autochthones in the rest of Canada, as well as the history books, biographies, essays, and novels about Quebec he publishes all address elements of identity issues with regard to nations, i.e., those of Quebec and Canada. Challenging, creating, dissolving, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements of Quebec-related issues as national, Philip undeniably aimed to “move,” alter, or (re)inforce the national boundaries around specific elements in order to make them national: he formulated arguments aimed at reinvigorating the movement for the sovereignty of Quebec, and he wrote, translated and published books into English about Quebec’s history, culture, and political aspiration in order to diffuse such knowledge beyond the French-speaking world. Philip’s actions not only worked towards dissolving the province’s ties to the Canadian federation in favor of an independent state of Quebec, they also sought to define and legitimize what Quebec is: what it is constituted of, and how it provides a legitimate form of belonging as a whole, as a nation. In other

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

words, his actions, driven by a cause, created a work task dynamic operating upon nationhood. The mode operating upon nationhood, in which individuals typically enact nationhood for a cause, deliberately reinforces the idea that we live in a world of nations. Its initiators purposely engage in challenging, dissolving, creating, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements as national. While individuals involved in this mode may aim at altering the characteristics of specific nations, the form of belonging itself is not questioned. While nations are made, some are unmade, yet always in the perspective of making other nations. The idea of a world of nations is upheld on a daily basis with such a mode of social action. This mode of operating nationhood is the most obvious mechanism through which nations are constructed. It is the mode most people associates with nationalism. The individuals it involves correspond to the common sense term of nation-builders. In the scope of an investigation into lived nationhood, this mode allows me to show that although seldom, it is present even in everyday life activities that are not directly connected with politics. Also, the mode operating upon nationhood helps me contrast its fairly well understood characteristics with the two following modes. Mode Operating with Nationhood Individuals developing strategies with references to national elements in order to properly fulfill their work tasks created a dynamic operating with nationhood. Without necessarily being nationalist themselves, individuals involved in the second work task dynamic used national constructs—the national contexts, and the business plans involving nationhood as knowledge and national references—as a convenient way to accomplish their tasks. The processes underlying the elaboration of these constructs allowed me to seize a second relationship individuals may have with nationhood. In the tasks examined in Chapter 2, this relationship was more strategically than emotionally driven, as was the case in the first work task dynamic. In this second dynamic, individuals intuitively enacted nationhood through strategies by disclosing that national elements were helping them accomplish their tasks. Referencing different aspects of nationhood, they took “advantage” of the more well-known national elements in order to develop the strategies that would allow them to more easily carry out their tasks. Individuals conducting work tasks with a dynamic operating with nationhood legitimize elements as national through the elaboration of strategies. The participants involved in the task of nationhood as context for staging public figures (re)constructed national contexts around poets and a politician in order to make sense of their presence in the content of a lesson and a news program, respectively. Elaborating the contexts in question, individuals chose and adapted diverse elements that would highlight the significance of what

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needed to be shared: the accomplishments and importance of these public figures. In both cases, these accomplishments made most sense when contextualized with national elements. By assembling national contexts and inserting into them the poets and the politician with their respective accomplishments, my participants legitimized further these figures as representatives of certain aspects of their nations such as their artistic community and their political community. Their accomplishments, moreover, were also legitimized as of national significance: Hector Saint-Denys Garneau was depicted as the first modern Québécois poets because of his writing style while Chabert was sanctioned as a great communitarian gatherer of his time. The national contexts, as national constructs, helped my participants fulfil their tasks of sharing information and knowledge about the poets and the politician. Consequently, in the process, these public figures and their accomplishments were made national and of national significance. Involved in the same type of dynamic, individuals doing business with nationhood who used nationhood as knowledge to guide marketing choices, or added national references onto products or services to add value to their products and services, also perpetuated and legitimized elements as national on a daily basis; in the cases at hand, fruits, vegetables, pianos, and various services. In marketing and advertising products and services in the hope of augmenting sales, individuals doing business with nationhood used categories of country of origin, or provinces, and even villages in one of the case of Montreal; and those, among others, dividing the two main Belgian linguistic groups. If businesses label and advertise their products and services through such categories and individuals in turn decide to market and sell these products by using and adapting such categories while conducting their tasks, they legitimize such products and services as national, as much as their businesses. The work task dynamic operating with nationhood reveals a relationship with nationhood that is driven by strategies of individuals aiming to properly fulfill their jobs. By inserting public figures and their accomplishments and products and services into national constructs so as to make sense and to convey meaning, individuals reify and legitimize them as national. The mode operating with nationhood, typically created by individuals enacting nationhood through strategies, reinforces the idea that we live in a world of nations for the sake of convenience. The second work task dynamic entails a mode of social action that uses the idea of a world of nations that could be described as opportunistic. The elaboration of strategies, which results in national constructs, are simply geared towards a goal. Consequently, the elements inserted into the constructs are legitimized as national. Although some of the elements may already have been thought of as national, they are, in the process, reified as such. The making of nations, however, may be an unforeseen consequence of the actions of the individuals involved in this mode; their main aim

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

being the accomplishment of a task in a successful way, not the nationalization of diverse elements, as is the case for individuals of the first mode. Besides, the convenience with which national constructs allow individuals to conduct task—whether they be from a work environment or not—leads them to repeatedly use such strategies, causing some elements to be legitimized and reified as national on a daily basis. Through strategies operating with nationhood, nations are made. Mode Operated by Nationhood Contrary to the first two work task dynamics, I could not identify specific motives underlying the tasks that created a dynamic operated by nationhood. In this dynamic, individuals did not enact nationhood for the needs of a nationalist cause. They also did not enact nationhood through a strategy because they were motivated to properly fulfil their tasks. Simply put, individuals involved in the tasks that engendered this dynamic routinely accomplished tasks with existing national elements to which alternatives are scarce. They enacted nationhood through routines. Far from aiming to challenge, dissolve, restructure, or actively maintain existing elements as national, as was the case for the first type of dynamic, individuals involved in work tasks operated by nationhood merely perpetuated elements that are suggested or already thought of as national, as was also the case with the second type of dynamic. In the present dynamic, however, this is done unreflexively, and not strategically, due to a lack of concrete substitute choices. In the first sociological encounter with which this dynamic was identified, individuals, in order to refer to spaces and their qualities, used toponyms defined through nationhood-related terms by states as belonging and representing the territory of the nation. Being defined as such, spaces become landscapes and landmarks—they are not mere pieces of a land; they embody stories and shared meanings, that of the nation(s) in question. In using nationhood-related terms to map land, individuals legitimized and reified landscapes and landmarks as national. In so doing, they did not by any means intended to nationalize spaces. However, sporadically referring to sites, boroughs, regions, cities, provinces, countries, or streets with nationhood-related terms to routinely map land, individuals further legitimized that a political community has power over a territory. My informants did not necessarily openly claim that these landscapes and landmarks belong to the nation or are defined as national in the way representatives of political communities would. Nevertheless, they legitimized the power of states over such elements by investing on a daily basis the toponyms with which representatives of political communities have defined space. The practice of mapping land with nationhood unreflexively makes territories national.

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Operating with the same dynamic, the second sociological encounter of Chapter 3, the work-related task of complying with languages, also involves individuals routinely applying elements intended as national, in this case, with regard to languages. Because languages and language usages are to a certain extent defined by work environments, which are themselves to a certain extent defined by the states in which they are located, individuals using specific languages—those that are institutionalized—reify these as the national languages. They again empower actors defining political communities, in the sense that such practices legitimize on a daily basis the languages of a political community, which also becomes a linguistic community. In a national era, linguistic communities—those using languages that are institutionalized by states—are in many cases the most fundamental communities that representatives of political communities aim and claim to represent under a state. By investing and applying the institutionalized languages in workplaces, individuals make boundaries in a mundane way around them, and legitimize the premise that political communities are associated with and have power over linguistic communities. Practices of pronounced compliance with languages that are institutionalized by states legitimize and reify certain languages as national. The work task dynamic operated by nationhood unveils a relationship with nationhood that is concealed into routines. The work tasks that allowed me to shed light on this dynamic demonstrate how two of the most significant elements of contemporary nation states are unreflexively legitimized through mundane daily practices: languages and territories. The mode operated by nationhood, typically created by individuals enacting nationhood through routines, unreflexively reinforces the idea that we live in a world of nations. Individuals involved in this mode are compelled, to a certain extent, by nationhood, in the sense that alternative practices allowing them to easily carry out their activities are scarce. While this phenomenon allows accomplishing tasks—whether they be work-related or not—it goes unnoticed by the actors it involves, since actions stem from habits or traditions coming from individuals living in a world of nations. Through concealed routine practices, elements are legitimized and reified as national. In this mode, the making of nations is not only unreflexively accomplished, it is achieved because of a lack of choices. Through routines operated by nationhood, nations are made. Mode Operating against Nationhood? When constructing a typology, one always wonders if it will ever be complete or definitive. Even after publishing, “new types,” whether they be conceived with recent observations or previously misread or unreadable information, are always on the horizon. Although frightening, these new types should be welcomed. They are not signs of a deficient investigation as much as the evidence that scholarly work is an ongoing process.

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

When elaborating the types of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood, I often wondered if I could have missed any. While I believe that my typology does reflect what I have empirically encountered, an ethnography, as in-depth as it may be, is a picture taken in space and time, dependent of the contingencies of the fieldwork. As discussed in the introduction and in the chapter at hand, ethnographic methods have their merits when it comes to the investigation of everyday nationhood. They truly allow researchers to immerse themselves in the day-to-day activities of individual, account for a multitude of phenomenal manifestations of the nation and the ways these are experienced. Being reflexive on my work, however, I now ask myself: could a work task operate against nationhood? In other words, could someone ever be motivated to directly challenge the very idea of living in a world of nations? I have not empirically encountered such work-related activities. These could eventually suggest a fourth mode of operating nationhood: a mode operating against nationhood. Some authors do openly question the idea of a world of nations and its structuring aspect. In the 19th century, Ernest Renan (2012 [1882]) claimed that an era of nations would not be eternal and eventually come to an end. Although challenging to a certain extent the state of a world of nations, he deemed it beneficial for the time being. He reflected on the possibility that another way of organizing political communities or seeing the world would in due course succeed the era of nations. In so doing, Renan, in comparison to all of my participants, explicitly acknowledged and questioned the structuring aspect of living in a world of nations. He was not, in other words, doing nationhood. Also operating against the idea of a world of nations, anarchist and Marxists authors today still express their desire for a non-nationalist world. They convey that nationalism is a bourgeois and capitalist phenomenon that creates the illusion of an equal and bounded community that only serves the interest of an upper class, and thus argue for a different way of organizing political communities (Nimni, 1991: 4-16; see also Rocker, 1998; Anarchist Federation, 2009). Reflections directly addressing the structuring aspect of the nation never came close to being raised during my fieldwork, even by Philip. The main goal of Philip’s work operated upon nationhood, not against it. Whether it be through his writings or publishing activities, Philip, for the sovereignty of Quebec, was engaged in the nation building of Quebec. Although one could argue that he was deconstructing the nation of Canada, he was not—as was the case for all of my participants—working against the idea of a world of nations. He was rather actively sustaining the trend of organizing political communities into nations; he was doing nationhood in an active manner. While the idea found in the writings of Renan and the other above-mentioned authors remain marginal, they exist, and could potentially be located and explored further in everyday activities.

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*** In discussing the typology, I reiterated how I empirically identified five work tasks in which national elements were involved, three ways of enacting nationhood, and three work task dynamics and the way they each operate with regard to nationhood—which entails three modes of operating nationhood. The distinguishment between these three modes is a major contribution to the sociology of nationalism which tends to overlook the various dynamics through which nationhood is enacted and through which nations are made on a daily basis. Previous works on everyday nationhood always seemed to suggest that enacting nationhood was a homogenous practice. Legitimizing elements as national or making nations in day-to-day activities was thereby understood as one mechanism, whether an individual had a relationship with nationhood that was driven by—what I understand to be—a national cause, the will to successfully accomplish a task, or a routine action. Billig (1995), Brubaker (2002; 2006), Skey (2011) and many authors (Brinton and Nee, 2001; Edensor, 2002; Eriksen, 1993; Fox 2004; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008a; Linde-Laursen, 1993; Martigny, 2010; Miller-Idriss 2006) have significantly contributed to the sociology of nationalism and everyday nationhood studies. They have nevertheless ignored the different ways in which individuals are doing nationhood, and have thus failed to acknowledge the distinct mechanisms through which nations are made on a daily basis. In light of these results, how can the persistence of a banal form of nationalism, as Billig seems to suggest, be the affair of the state alone? My investigation brings nuances to Billig’s conclusions. Although I cannot deny that states are the main architects and beneficiaries of banal nationalism, I find Billig’s position to be deterministic. My research, indeed, showed how an author, Philip, as well as the production crew of a television soap, as examined in Chapter 1, also produced elements thought of as national. Moreover, I demonstrated how in both Montreal and Brussels individuals did business with nationhood by examining how they themselves take advantage of the common frame of references offered by nations so as to better promote and sell the products and services of their companies. They too have found a way to benefit from banal nationalism. While my study extensively provides the empirical material that Billig’s book lacks, it also suggests, by examining banality as a processual and social achievement rather than as a given fact, that on a daily basis, individuals actively participates in the making of nations and profit, in turn, from nationhood. Throughout this chapter, so far, I have not directly touched on the bi-ethnonational social constellations of Montreal and Brussels. While the ethnonational traits of the two institutionally privileged group of both cities were omnipresent in the discussions regarding the research design and the typology, I have yet to draw results on the bi-ethnonational aspects of my inquiry. The

Chapter 4. Doing Nationhood and Making Nations

reason I have up until now omitted this dimension of my research interest is simple: the bi-ethnonational social constellations of Montreal and Brussels do not impact the modes of operating nationhood. This does not mean, however, that bi-ethnicity does not impact lived nationhood in any ways. I constructed the modes of operating nationhood in cities that I identified as bi-ethnonational milieus. Conceptually, Montreal and Brussels offer thought-provoking intersecting points: their mirrored social constellations8 entails a reflection on the impact similar yet contrasting sociopolitical contexts may have on lived nationhood. Exploring work environments in Montreal and Brussels in order to investigate, among others, the effect such contrasting social constellations may have upon nationhood, I focused on how individuals invoked and qualified such group representations, how they worked with ethnonational categories, and how such categories influenced work tasks and vice versa. Although Montreal and Brussels have mirrored bi-ethnonational social constellations, I quickly realized while accounting for my material that the relationships individuals have towards nationhood are similar in both contexts. In other words, the bi-ethnonational characters of Montreal and Brussels are experienced in the same way—an idea that I will develop in the following chapter. Taking mere “groups” as units of analysis into account, as I did when elaborating the mirrored bi-ethnonational social constellations of Montreal and Brussels, is often misleading when comes the time to investigate individual practices. Social constellations adopt a different scope. Examining groups in terms of ethnicity or nations—or any other categories such as gender, confession, or generation—tends to essentialize differences, and neglect subtleties and variations of everyday life. The social constellations, as relevant as they may be for drafting public policies or mapping the background of a population, do not take into account lived experiences. The larger view they provide, nevertheless, allowed me to have a macrosociological outlook on Montreal and Brussels. In this inquiry, social constellations helped me understand further and put into perspective some of the policies with regard to languages, territorial issues, and division of power between jurisdictions. The social constellations of the cities were throughout the research meant as contextualization tools for the empirical information. They were not an analytical tool—at least with regard to lived nationhood. This does not mean, however, that I cannot draw any conclusions pertaining to the social constellation of Montreal and Brussels in light of my research. The inductive approach I adopted for my inquiry simply leads 8 | I qualified the social constellation of Montreal as “officially” uni-ethnonational while leaning towards being bi-ethnonational “in practice.” Conversely, Brussels’ social constellation is “mirrored” to that of Montreal, with bi-ethnicity becoming “official,” and uni-ethnicity becoming “in-practice” (see the introduction of the book). I will summarize and discuss these social constellations in the following chapter as well.

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me to discuss the bi-ethnonational character of both cities in a different way than a macrosociological analysis would. The investigation of lived nationhood, unsurprisingly, tells a different story to that of the social constellations of the cities. The main interests of my study lies in individuals’ lived experiences of nationhood in Montreal and Brussels—including lived experiences with regard to ethnonational categorizations—and the ways individuals’ relationship with nationhood can be understood and characterized within everyday life contexts. While work tasks involving nationhood were at times conducted with the use of ethnonational characteristics from both official ethnolinguistic groups of Montreal and Brussels, bi-ethnicity does not appear to impact the work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood. In other words, the modes cannot help me discuss the particularity of bi-ethnonational contexts with regard to lived nationhood. Thus, in the following chapter, I discuss the implications of bi-ethnonational milieus on the relationships individuals have with nationhood—as to answer the second aspect of my research question.

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels: A Model Particular to Bi-Ethnonational Milieus In this chapter I focus on the sociopolitical contexts of Montreal and Brussels in light of my research. In leaving the work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood, I shift my attention to an aspect of the empirical material that is present and palpable throughout the book but that I have so far not fully examined: the inherent banality of bi-ethnicity in the workplaces of Montreal and Brussels. In exploring this aspect of the two cities with regard to lived experiences, I will also discuss what can be understood as its main consequence: the hegemony of bi-ethnicity. According to the classical theories of the sociology of nationalism, the state constitutes an ideology in the midst of the phenomenal manifestations of the nation that is “spread throughout the whole of society, determining not only united economic and political objectives but also intellectual and moral unity” (Mouffe, 1979: 181). From this perspective, the state is at the center of the modern nation and its inception process, shaping an ideology by “choosing” the specific ethnic traits—most likely the characteristics of the ruling class—with which to socialize its citizens. Rulers holding the means of the state privilege certain ethnic traits (often associated with those of ethnolinguistic groups) through public institutions, policies, and institutionalized practices. As a result, ethnicity becomes over time homogenized on a territory and facilitates the formation of what becomes thought of as an ethnonational group. In turn, contemporary political elites, whose legitimacy largely depends on their claim of representing the interests of a group, favors, defends, and promotes the ethnonational traits of its members to the detriment of other groups. Ethnic traits that are not supported by a central state become obsolete, forgotten, or “folklorized,” while those that are defended become the norms under a given state. The population thus becomes an ethnonational group possessing political power; it imagines itself as unified. Its ethnicity, or its ethnonational traits, become hegemonic on the territory it claims; the group represents, in other words, what is today understood as a nation.

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Although they cast light on many casesincluding those of Canada and Belgium, perhaps at an earlier stage of development in history—general theories of nation state formation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1964; 1983; 1991; 1997; Hobsbawm, 1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Hutchinson, 1987; Kedourie, 1961; Smith, 1987; 1991; 1998) do not always take into account “less successful” nation state formation. Countless states, federated states, or regions, recognize, and then favor, defend, and promote—in more or less official ways and through legal channels, depending on the country—what is thought of as two ethnonational groups or more. These states often result from failed assimilation after territorial expansions or from a state formation defined around other common characteristics than ethnicity—such as religion or a common colonial past. But what happens to ethnicity in such milieus? Are there eternal struggles between individuals who identify with different ethnonational groups? Do the ethnonational traits of one group eventually ostracize those of another, as the classical theories of nationalism seem to suggest? By adopting an institutional perspective “from above,” I qualified in the introduction of this book the social constellation of Montreal as “officially” uni-ethnonational, but bi-ethnonational “in practice.” While the Charter of the city states in its opening lines that Montreal is a French-speaking city, the document is available in one other language: English—as all of the official documents of the province of Quebec. The number of individuals using English at home and all of the public services available in this language clearly suggest that the English speakers of Montreal and of the province form, along with the French speakers, a significant ethnonational group, recognized and supported by federal as well as provincial governmental institutions. In Brussels, the social constellation is mirrored to that of Montreal: Brussels is “officially” bi-ethnonational while leaning towards being uni-ethnonational “in practice.” All institutions across governmental levels aim, by law, to treat Belgian French speakers and Dutch speakers equally by offering all public services in both languages. As the numbers and many authors suggest, however, Brussels is a city dominated by French as the lingua franca. Both cities, therefore, have a bi-ethnonational social constellation with mirrored dimensions. Yet, what are the implications of these social constellations on lived nationhood? While I do not pretend to offer a new theory about nation state—or any sociopolitical—formation, I wish to examine in this chapter what happens to ethnicity from the perspective of lived experience in sociopolitical entities that were not conclusive when attempting to ethnically homogenize the population of a territory, and have thus continued sustaining what can be thought of as two ethnonational groups through institutionalized channels. More precisely, I want to focus on the effects the social constellations of Montreal and Brussels have on lived nationhood and, in so doing, discuss the contributions of my research with regard to the sociopolitical contexts of both cities.

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

As Section 1 has already hinted at, the fieldwork shows that the relationship individuals have with nationhood is similar in Montreal and Brussels. Based on these observations, in what follows, I first argue that bi-ethnicity is—or has become—banal in both cities, because it is part of ongoing everyday experiences involving acknowledgements, negotiations, collaborations, and confrontations with what is thought of as the ethnonational traits of the two institutionalized groups of each city. Second, I argue that in both Montreal and Brussels, in spite of their contrasting bi-ethnonational social constellations, bi-ethnicity is hegemonic, as it is constantly legitimized as such by individuals’ day-to-day activities.

5.1 The B analit y of B i -E thnicit y : A cknowledgements , C onfrontations , C oll abor ations , and N egotiation s Nationhood did not often matter during the hours I spent in the work environments of my participants. The same goes for the representations and references of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups. In my empirical observations, individuals rarely explicitly brought up bi-ethnicity, in the sense that they seldom made a detailed statement of the bi-ethnonational situation of Montreal and Brussels—the exception to this is Philip, the author and publisher involved in the work task of cultivating nationhood, whose job often requires him to use and, thus, objectify ethnonational categories.1 I suggest that the reason is that within work environments, bi-ethnicity is most often experienced as banal in each city,2 not unlike the way banal nationalism has become an endemic condition of contemporary societies of the West (Billig, 1995: 6). In this section, I examine the banality of bi-ethnicity through the ways in which individuals acknowledge, confront, negotiate, and collaborate with what I understand to be the ethnonational traits of the two ethnonational groups institutionalized in each city. While these particular situations were readily observable throughout Section 1, I wish to explore them apart from the typology I have constructed in order to pinpoint what I perceive to be an aspect particular 1 | The absence of accounts of bi-ethnicity does not necessarily indicate that individuals cannot articulate a discourse on the sociopolitical context of both cities that could be qualified as insightful. I develop this idea later in the chapter. 2 | This does not mean that ethnic and ethnonational traits from other groups that are not institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels were not present. They occasionally were, especially those of Americans, but they most often were not as central as those of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups of the cities in which I conducted my fieldwork. Moreover, the impact of “others” on the social constellation of the cities under investigation is different in the two cases, as I will discuss below.

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to lived nationhood in the bi-ethnonational contexts of Montreal and Brussels. In what follows I juxtapose observations made with individuals present in the previous section of the book with those made with other participants that I have so far not introduced. These observations do not necessarily focus on work tasks so much as on sporadic practices or expressions. Before negotiating, confronting, or collaborating with what is perceived as references from the institutionalized ethnonational groups of Montreal and Brussels, one must first acknowledge such differences. Although such occurrences were rare, I encountered practices or expressions which were mere acknowledgments of bi-ethnicity during the fieldwork. For example, Sofia, the Montreal-based nurse, simply acknowledged the presence of a French-English lexicon in the binder she works with without, at first, commenting further; just like Quentin, the human resource manager of a public transport firm in Brussels, simply recognized, when asked, that his company was bilingual by a hasty “yes.” Such acknowledgements could have led both participants to confront references of what is understood to be two groups. At the moments of observation, however, the statements remained mere acknowledgements marking the presence of two institutionalized ethnonational groups in each city—or at least their linguistic aspects. Another participant, a carpenter I was shadowing on a construction site, told me on the day that we met that he had recently moved to Repentigny, a borough that is part of the Montreal metropolitan area located on the east shore of the island. He added that he liked his new neighborhood better because it was more francophone and less anglophone than the previous one. Earlier during the day, he had mentioned previously living in the West-Island, a region of Montreal in which 70% of the population speaks English as their first language (Corbeil et al., 2010: 102). By these remarks, my informant acknowledged that French speakers are not the only prominent linguistic group in Montreal. In qualifying an area as francophone by referring to another one as less francophone and more anglophone, differences, but also preferences, are made explicit. They are based on the acknowledgement and then on the confrontation of references regarding the two ethnolinguistic groups that are institutionalized in Montreal: the “officially” institutionalized French speakers, and the “institutionalized-as-a-facilitation” English speakers. Without further engaging himself in a detailed reasoning on such preferences by stating, for example, the historical assets of Montreal or population surveys, he simply confronted these two Montreal areas and the two groups they represent to convey his preference for his new neighborhood. By his comment, he asserted and marked the significance of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups of Montreal. At the time I was conducting my fieldwork in Brussels in 2014, a political decision of the federal government became a communitarian issue—as had happened many times earlier in Belgium’s history. The federal Belgian gov-

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

ernment had modified the flight paths of the Brussels International airport in Zaventem, which is actually located in the Flemish region. The decision resulted in airplanes flying over the southern boroughs of Brussels early in the morning, instead of flying over what many French-speaking participants of my investigation referred to as crops fields in Flanders—although people also live in the area. The first time I heard of the issue was while I was with Jeroen, the journalist from Chapter 2; it was a topic mentioned in the morning brainstorming session. At the time the controversy was not yet a major issue. But as I walked in the streets of Brussels later during the year, especially in the boroughs located in the south of the capital, signs saying Plan Wathelet Pas Question/Geen Sprake Van—at times bilingual, but mostly unilingual French—covered facades of houses and stores. A summary was sometimes distributed in the form of flyers that could be found with the signs and that was also available online in French, Dutch, and English. It explained the reasons why the group behind the mobilization rejected Minister Wathelet’s plan. It summed up their position as follows: Since February 6, 2014, the Wathelet Plan has modified certain flight paths from Brussels national Airport: on the one hand, the “left turn” flight path from Zaventem has been enlarged. As a consequence, 35,000 planes now fly at low altitude over densely populated areas like Schaerbeek, Etterbeek, Ixelles, Woluwe-Chand d’oiseau, Auderghem, and Watermael-Boistfort. On the other hand, the so-called “route du canal” flight path goes over Brussels from one side to another, and is used by thousands of the heaviest carriers and night take-offs. This entails a strong and brutal deterioration of the quality of life in Molenbeek, Bruxelles-Ville, Anderlecht, Forest, Saint-Gilles, and Uccle. All of this, in the name of a “fair” distribution of disturbances. In reality this plan saves certain neighborhoods located east of the airport (Woluwe-Saint-Pierre/Stockel, Wezembeek, and Kraainem) and move them over a capital city of 1.100.100 inhabitants! This plan is absurd and must be immediately withdrawn (Pas Question, 2014).

While the latter document is careful not to directly connect the Belgian linguistic communities to issues of the Plan, another section of the website is not so cautious. It points towards policy issues by mentioning that the “plan […] denies democracy”: the webpage states that “it [the plan] has been discreetly negotiated by key political players and advisers. It was adopted without a correct study of the impact and without concerting with Bruxelles Region [sic], the bourgemetres [sic] and citizens of the interested communes” (ibid.). Negotiated at the level of the federal government, in which Flemings had a majority of ministers at the time, the plan aimed at guiding flights over the southern boroughs of Brussels—instead of the Flemish region, as mentioned above—which are of course only French-speaking. This is also where Carl, the veterinarian of Chapter 3, lives and works.

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At the peak of the conflict in April 2014, I visited Carla for two days. The Plan in question was a frequent topic of conversation with many of her clients. Clearly a strong supporter of the Pas Question movement and their arguments, Carla not only prominently advertised the flyer in the window of the clinic, she often used the arguments of the flyer in her conversations on the matter with her customers. In addition, she often complained about being woken up every morning at 6 a.m. by departing aircrafts. She was always politically neutral with clients and mainly mentioned what she referred to as the nonsense of the project. She did, however, once tell me on a private note that she hoped French-speaking politicians would one day have “the balls” to speak firmly to Flemings. Confrontations between political communities of this sort over this question, and many others, were recurrent throughout the fieldwork—but also with among my French-speaking friends—and figured in many discussions. Carla’s opinions on the matter clearly show that she acknowledges the two institutionalized ethnonational groups through their political representatives. She also confronts the latter to make sense of a potential solution to the issues— which also, although she was most likely speaking in an ironic and figurative way, includes a gender component. Through this situation, Carla firmly confronts the political representatives of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups of Brussels and asserts the “official” bi-ethnonational character of the city, as well as of the country.3 Acknowledging references to what is thought of as ethnonational traits of the two institutionalized groups of Montreal and Brussels did not, of course, always lead to a confrontation. On many occasions during the fieldwork, these references led to collaborative interactions. In Brussels, the two work environments related to media in which I had the chance to shadow individuals offered great opportunities for shedding light on such collaborative interactions with regard to the “official” bi-ethnonational stance of the city. The corridor described by Jeroen as the great “Berlin Wall” that separates the Dutch-speaking side from the French-speaking side of the television station is in fact much more porous than the analogy would suggest. During my days at the station, we visited the French-speaking area on two occasions. The second time, Jeroen gave me a short history of their station. He mentioned that some fifty years ago, the differences between the two sections were smaller, and that the station was divided along the linguistic line of the country after the first federaliza3 | The plan was modified a second time and ended up redirecting planes over the Flemish region once again, hence canceling most of the changes effected by the socalled Plan Wathelet. The Flemish government intervened. The project was then put on ice. Federal and regional elections precipitated in the meantime the formation of new governments on both levels, which never ended up reworking flight paths, leaving them as they were before the Plan Wathelet, for now.

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

tion of Belgium in the 1970s. After introducing me, in French, to some of his colleagues, he later added in private that the French speakers work a little differently. Their method is more, in his words, à la française, meaning that their anchormen and anchorwomen work apart from the rest of the crew and that they have their own offices, whereas in the Dutch-speaking area of the broadcaster, they work in the same environment as all of their colleagues. In stating the differences between the French-speaking and Flemish-speaking sections of the television station, he also added that they often collaborate by sharing, for example, footage and archives. On the day he covered the death of Chabert, it was actually with the help of these colleagues that he found some of the archive footage to complete his story. In following a Brussels-based journalist from a Dutch language economical periodical, I observed another and perhaps even more lively collaboration between employees working in an environment divided along the linguistic line of Belgium. In the main entrance of his workplace, that we travelled to together, there was a large sign indicating the name of the company in English. Underneath it, all of the journals and magazines they publish were listed. Most of them had both a French language and a Dutch language version. When arriving at the desk of my informant, he went to fetch issues of their journals and handed them to me in a pile. The one on top, he said, was the periodical he used to work for, which had by then become a section of the publication for which he now worked. He then added that this former periodical was special, in the sense that it was created in collaboration between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking journalists. He also said that there was a bilingual Dutch and French version, with articles first written in one of the two languages and then translated into the other. He added—in a somewhat nostalgic way, it seemed to me—that this type of collaboration between Dutch speakers and French speakers in the media is rare in Belgium, and that in their company today, but also in their very own journal, everything is now simply divided between the two languages, although they sometimes take an article from the French language version of the periodical to translate it into Dutch and vice versa. In the interview, I asked him about his experiences with the journal, and also about the way it used to function: For me it was really interesting, I really enjoyed working in a bilingual team, and actually all my colleagues, both Dutch and French-speaking who were in that team, they’ve always been really happy with things that were going on in that periodical so, we had a good team, if you’d ask the others they would say the same thing. It’s, let’s say that, when I say that to people, sometimes they’re surprised that we never had conflicts or big discussions, but of course the reason is that it’s not, we were not writing about politics or anything. So we tended to discuss politics sometimes at lunch, but in a very informal way, and it was quite rare, so we didn’t really feel that there were big differences in

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Nationhood at Work the way that we did our jobs. The interesting part was that when we were then writing articles, we always had to bear in mind that the articles would be read in the whole country. So if I would for example, interview, if I would be writing an article on authentic marketing and I would like to interview a Dutch-speaking marketing manager and some other Dutch-speaking guy, we would then also like get a French-speaking expert in the article to balance it a bit, and my French-speaking colleagues would do the same when they had interviews with French-speaking people, then they would try to like get a Dutch-speaking angle on it. So that was always interesting, we always discussed it in meetings like how to make the article interesting for both sides of the country. So that’s always something additional we did, which of course we don’t do now, and which is like it added an extra effort. Sometimes we have to rework articles a bit, to put the focus more on something like Flemish for the Dutch-speaking version, or Wallonians or Brussels for the French-speaking version, that’s then a job for the editors who kind of like, you know, think of them, with their own cultural background, and they adapt the article a bit to make it as interesting as possible […] for me of course [it was more interesting], I did interviews then in Wallonia, which I don’t do anymore, so I’ve met a lot of people from the French-speaking part of Belgium which I otherwise would not have met. And the other way around for my French-speaking colleagues. Also language-wise there wasn’t really a problem, everyone at least understood the other language. So when we had meetings everyone would also just speak their own language. It didn’t always happen but you know as long as you can always speak your own language when you want to, it’s fine (05/04/2014). 4 4 | Voor mij was het ect interessant. Ik genoot ervan om in een tweetalige ploeg te werken. Voor mijn collega’s was het ook zo. Zowel voor de Nederlands- als voor de Franstaligen in de ploeg. Ze werden altijd erg blij over dingen die ze zouden in dat tijdschrift gaan schrijven. We hadden een goed team. Als je dit aan de anderen vraagt, dan zouden ze hetzelfde zeggen. Het is, laat maar zeggen: “opvallend dat we nooit conflicten of grote discussies hadden gehad”. Als ik dat tegen mensen zeg, zijn ze verrast. Maar natuurlijk ook omdat we niet over politiek of iets dergelijks geschreven hadden. Vaak hadden we de neiging om over politiek, op een informele manier, tijdens de lunch te spreken. Vandaar dat we niet echt het gevoel hadden dat er grote verschillen waren op de manier waarop we ons werk uitvoerden. Het was toen interessante dat we in gedachten hadden een artikel te kunnen schrijven dat in het hele land zou worden gelezen. Dus als ik bijvoorbeeld een interview afleg, of als ik een artikel over ‘authentic marketing’ zou schrijven en ik interview een Nederlandstalige marketing manager en enkele ander Nederlandstaligen, dan zouden we dan ook graag een Franstalige expert in het artikel betrekken om het evenwicht een beetje te houden. Wat mijn Franstalige collega’s betreft, zij zouden hetzelfde doen. Dat was altijd interessant. Hoe het artikel interessant te maken voor beide landsdelen was het onderwerp van de vergaderingen. Dus, dat was iets dat we altijd extra deden, die wij natuurlijk nu niet meer doen, omdat dit een extra inspanning vraagt. Soms moesten we onze artikelen een beetje herwerken om onze

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

In shadowing this journalist for two days in his work environment, I observed many collaborative exchanges between French speakers and Dutch speakers. During the two days I was there, they worked on a bilingual issue of the periodical—in the way they made them before with his old journal—which honored the most promising Belgian entrepreneurs: thirty French speakers and thirty Dutch speakers. This annual publication, that they prepared months in advance, appeared to necessitate regular exchanges between what was previously described as two groups of colleagues that nowadays barely talk to each other. Despite my informant’s description of them as separate from each other, these two groups nevertheless shared the same office space. Some employees, such as a secretary with whom my informant met twice during the day to coordinate tasks with regard to the special issue, also worked for the two groups. In asserting the differences between work groups, each based on one of the two languages that are institutionalized in Brussels, the media workplaces were in this individual’s mind separate—and probably also to a certain extent separate on the administrative level. The “other” group—the French-speaking one in both cases—was, however, always seen as a potential partner, readily available to collaborate on the basis of its proximity and administrative ties. In Montreal, collaborative interactions involving references of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups were more seldom. I believe this was, however, due to the contingencies of the observed work environments. Collaborating with Canadian companies—or those from another country—that were not from Quebec, Sofia, a nurse from Chapter 3, but also Sarah, an environmental technician, also from Chapter 3, had to work with linguistic references of the two institutionalized groups present in Montreal: French and English. In both work environments, the collaboration did not appear as “fluid” as in the cases of Brussels: Sarah and her colleagues were struggling to understand some of the terms that were translated from English into French, whereas Sofia had to translate symptoms of her French-speaking patients from French to English, and thus used the lexicon found at the beginning of the binder she worked with to make sure she used the correct words. Although neither of them tenddoelgroep. Voor de Nederlandse versie moest de focus verlegd worden op Vlaanderen en voor de Franstalige versie op Wallonië en Brussel. Dat is dan een job voor de redactie. Een job met zijn eigen culturele achtergrond. Ze passen een beetje het artikel aan om het zo interessant mogelijk te maken […] Voor mij, ja [was het echt interessant, ik deed interviews toen in Wallonië, die ik niet meer doe. Ik heb veel mensen uit het Franstalige gedeelte van België ontmoet, die ik anders niet zou ontmoet hebben. Idem voor mijn Franstalige collega’s. De taal begrijpen was niet echt een probleem. Iedereen kon in ieder geval de andere gesproken taal begrijpen. Dus, toen we bijeenkwamen kon iedereen zelden hun eigen taal gebruiken. Het gebeurde niet altijd. We waren er van bewust dat we onze eigen taal op elke moment konden spreken. Dat was prima. (05/04/2014).

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ed to refer to the two ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal, the necessity for French- speaking individuals to use the English language created collaborative—yet in this case imposed—interactions between the two groups of Montreal. Collaborations may previously have necessitated negotiations. Considering Quebec’s legislation with regard to languages in the workplace, the inclusion of the English-French lexicon in Sofia’s binder appears to be a negotiated maneuver by her employer allowing the use of English in the clinic. Knowing that by law an employee has the right to work in French, Sofia’s employer may have introduced the lexicon in question in order to find common ground or a compromise that accommodates the unilingual English-speaking clients using the services of the clinic. In Brussels, I regularly observed negotiating with what was understood as references to the two institutionalized ethnonational groups on a linguistic level. Whether with Quentin, the human resource informant from a Brussels public transport company, or with the the journalist from the periodical on economics, they mentioned that colleagues were welcome to speak their own language on the work floor or in reunions. Once again, considering the linguistic situation of Brussels, this practice appears as a negotiated common ground or compromise aiming to accommodate colleagues of the institutionalized linguistic groups of Brussels—although my empirical observations clearly show that Dutch speakers switch to French more easily than French speakers do to Dutch. English, as a conceivable “third voice” negotiated as a language of compromise, however, seems to have become legitimized by Brusselers in work environments—as observed in chapter 3 with Quentin. In facing the institutionalized traits of two ethnonational groups on a daily basis, bi-ethnicity, in Montreal and Brussels, has shaped individuals’ everyday interactions, their practices and expressions. Bi-ethnicity, as part of everyday life, has come to be experienced as banal. Individuals never forget that they live in a bi-ethnonational context, in the sense that it is part of everyday acknowledgements, negotiations, collaborations, and confrontations. But they mostly forget when, where, and how they are constantly reminded of this context on a daily basis—as is the case with banal nationalism (Billig, 1995: 47). This does not mean that individuals cannot articulate a discourse on the sociopolitical context of Montreal and Brussels that could be qualified as insightful with regard to their bi-ethnonational contexts. Rather, it suggests that for most individuals living in both cities, bi-ethnicity is a factor within their everyday life to which they have become accustomed. Interactions, practices and expressions that are shaped by bi-ethnicity may be reflected upon, and even considered exceptional as was the case with the journalist of the economical magazine in Brussels. But the exception of such a situation is only seen as such once it is no longer in practice to the extent it once was, for it was embedded in banal activities.

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

The constant reminder of bi-ethnicity can be “official,” as in Brussels, or due to facilitation, as in Montreal. Yet despite the difference, these reminders stem from multiple types of everyday interactions that have rendered this aspect of each city a fait accompli for many individuals. Most people, as demonstrated with the accomplishment of work tasks and the above-mentioned situations, address bi-ethnicity as any other dimension of everyday life. The “bi-ethnonational flag” is most often unwaved, to use Billig’s term. Living in Montreal and Brussels, individuals are for the most part unconsciously reminded of the bi-ethnonational quality of each city. When noticed, or waved, bi-ethnicity rarely appears out of place or abnormal, it rarely sparks a passion or raises suspicions. Of course, there are people or groups that aim to reverse the current bi-ethnonational social constellations of each city, as the political party DéFI in Brussels5 or the pressure group Mouvement Montréal français in Montreal.6 While such initiatives may describe bi-ethnicity as unacceptable, they nevertheless demonstrate the prominence and anchorage of the bi-ethnonational aspect of both cities.

5.2 The H egemony of B i - e thnicit y in M ontre al and B russels : A S hared E xperience of N ationhood Lived nationhood in bi-ethnonational contexts does not necessarily refer to a form of belonging in the sense Philip Van Parijs is referring to when arguing that the political representation of citizens in Brussels “rests on the assumption that all Brusselers belong to one and only one ‘nation’ with segregated educational and cultural institutions, and that the Brussels subset of each of these two nations needs to have its own separate political space” (Van Parijs, 2013: 4). Although this representation may indeed be adequate from an institutional point of view, individuals’ lived experiences of nationhood as explored in the workplaces of Montreal and Brussels rather points to a much more complex social reality. This reality may appear obvious to anyone who has spent years in

5 | DéFI (Démocrate fédéraliste indépendant) was formely known before 2015 as the FDF, which first stood for Front démocratique des francophones, from 1964 to 2010, and then Fédéralistes démocrates francophones, from 2010 to 2015. The FDF was born in 1964, two years after the linguistic border was settled. Its main aim was to defend the French language and the linguistic rights of the French-speaking citizens of and around Brussels (Wills, 2005 [1992]: 302-303; Destexhe, 2008: 97). 6 | The Mouvement Montréal français is an extension of the Mouvement Québec français. Their aim, as stated on their website, is to make French the only common and public language of Montreal and Quebec (Mouvement Québec français, 2017).

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either city, but it is perhaps not as easily apprehensible to someone who has not experienced living in a bi-ethnonational milieu. As Section 1 clearly hinted at, none of the ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels has become hegemonic. While this statement challenges classical theories of nationalism, which assume that in bi or multi-ethnonational sociopolitical contexts one ethnonational group always marginalizes the other(s) (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1964; 1983; 1991; 1997; Smith, 1987; 1991; 1998), I wish in what follows to state more than the obvious: the idea that none of the ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels have become hegemonic is necessarily an unproblematic aspect or even fact for many people—especially for those living in Montreal, and perhaps also Brussels, yet to a lesser extent. In this last section of the chapter, I suggest that it is not what is thought of as the ethnonational traits of one group that have become hegemonic in Montreal and Brussels, but bi-ethnicity itself. Notwithstanding the contrasting social constellations of each city, individuals living in both Montreal and Brussels legitimize bi-ethnicity on a daily basis through their day-to-day activities. In so doing, they are legitimizing bi-ethnicity as hegemonic. As highlighted above and in the conduct of work tasks in Section 1, individuals throughout the fieldwork often used what is thought of as the ethnonational traits of—or identify with—one of the two institutionalized ethnonational groups of Montreal or Brussels. These usages were often observed when individuals contrasted the traits of what is understood to be one ethnonational group with its institutionalized counterpart. Other national groups, as theories of nationalism underline, are always necessary to the identification of one’s group, for its specificity depends on elements that are thought of as unique or genuine to the group in question and not to the “others” (Smith, 1991: 69). But asserting the differences with another group that is institutionalized to some extent by the same sociopolitical entity, as in Montreal and Brussels, is necessarily an action, I argue, with different consequences than asserting the differences with another group that is not institutionalized by these sociopolitical entities. Of course, there are individuals living in Montreal and Brussels who have ethnic or ethnonational backgrounds that are not those of the two ethnonational groups institutionalized in each city. Under certain circumstances depending on situations and activities, for these individuals, it is these “non-institutionalized” traits in either city that become most meaningful. The significance and frequency of the circumstances in which they do become more meaningful are all the more noticeable when a diaspora becomes large enough in a concentrated area.7 Such issues are contingent on the social settings of a 7 | In Vancouver for example, where 30% of the population has a Chinese background, debates on unilingual Chinese (Cantonese and/or Mandarin) signs (Campbell, 2014;

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

given context, and should not be—or at least were not in my investigation— treated as ontological categories of belonging but of practice. In exploring nationhood in two cosmopolitan cities in the framework of my fieldwork, I frequently observed the acknowledgment of differences with other groups than the two institutionalized ones of Montreal and Brussels. For example, the paramedics I was working with in Montreal, while talking about the difficulty of gauging individuals’ pain when they are being asked to evaluate it on a scale from one to ten, mentioned that Asians are always very tolerant and may wait for hours before complaining, while Haitians and Latinos are very sensible and express their pain very easily. In Brussels, when I asked an entrepreneur I was shadowing on different construction sites how he hired the people who worked there, he mentioned that he had simply gathered different contacts as time passed. He added that one of them, from the last place we visited, was an entrepreneur as well and that he sometimes had his own projects, but that since he did not speak French very well, it was harder for him to find contracts. I responded with surprise, thinking that his knowledge of the French language was actually very good. This reaction led my informant to say that he does indeed speak French well. In referring to the previous encounter with the worker in question, my participant mentioned that they understand each other, and that he does not consider him a foreigner (étranger) because he is well integrated, but that communications with potential customers may be more difficult for him, which is why he has to rely on another form of income. Asserting difference with the traits of groups that are not institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels was not as frequent as that of the two groups that are institutionalized. Moreover, it never appeared to be a significant action in the accomplishment of work tasks—although this is perhaps mainly due to the contingencies of the work environments visited. Nevertheless, the assertion of the traits of groups that are not institutionalized does not have the same consequences as asserting those of groups that are: it does not empower in the same way the representatives of the political communities in which Montreal and Brussels are located. In legitimizing public figures, events, products, services, businesses, territories, landmarks, or languages as national, as aspects of the Wood, 2015) or strata (condominium) council meetings in unilingual Chinese (Cantonese and/or Mandarin) (Eagland, 2015) are commonplace. The British Columbia government website, in addition to English and French, also offers their pages in Cantonese and Mandarin, and in Punjabi and Korean (British Columbia, 2016). In this case, hence, ethnic or ethnonational boundaries may be drawn with other ethnic group than the (main) institutionalized one, but most often, boundaries of the sort are created around the population with an immigration background in general since this is often the social category states create for them, disregarding the specific ethnic or ethnonational background.

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two ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels, individuals also legitimize what is thought of as the two ethnonational groups that the representatives of the political communities in which Montreal and Brussels are located wish to represent and defend. They therefore sanction the legitimacy of the ethnonational groups the political representatives sustain through institutions. Bi-ethnicity, in so doing, is hegemonic, for it is accepted by both political representatives and individuals living in either city as legitimate. Bi-ethnicity, as my investigation demonstrates, is part of lived nationhood in Montreal and Brussels. Individuals, whether they be in officially uni-ethnonational Montreal or bi-ethnonational Brussels, are constantly legitimizing bi-ethnicity in their day-to-day activities, notably when accomplishing work tasks. The ethnonational traits of one of the two institutionalized groups have not become marginalized on the basis that they are not official—as those of the English speakers of Montreal—or that they are numerically insignificant—as those of the Dutch speakers of Brussels. The hegemony of bi-ethnicity has created among the inhabitants of Montreal and Brussels a relationship particular to the idea of living in a world of nations in which practices and expressions as observed through lived nationhood legitimize the two cities as bi-ethnonational milieus—in spite of their contrasting social constellations. Significantly, again, lived nationhood does not necessarily entail belonging to one group; it rather reflects experiences of nationhood, which in Montreal and Brussels are lived through the ethnonational traits of two institutionalized groups. Philip, the writer and publisher from Chapter 1, when challenging, creating, dissolving, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements of Quebec-related issues as national, often did so on the basis that, in his eyes, the English-speaking group was criticizing or undermining the well-being of the French-speaking one. Jeroen, the current affair journalist from Chapter 2, created a national context in order to make sense of Chabert—the politician central to his story of the day—as a communitarian gatherer who aimed to make Brussels a truly bilingual city. In the same chapter, Damien, the television satellite representative, went from one Belgian region to another based on the idea that he would help or find new customers for the services he offers in both French and Dutch. In Chapter 3, both Quentin and Sofia had to address issues regarding the language of both ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels. Whether it be through the accomplishment of these work tasks or the situations in which individuals acknowledge, negotiate, collaborate, or confront what is understood as the traits of the two ethnonational groups institutionalized in Montreal and Brussels, my work demonstrates that bi-ethnicity is not only banal, it is legitimized as hegemonic and part of the relationship individuals have with nationhood in each city. There is in both sociopolitical contexts a shared experience of nationhood that does not only involve the traits of one ethnonational group, but two. Lived nationhood in Montreal and Brussels does

Chapter 5. Lived Nationhood in Montreal and Brussels

not reflect the hegemony of one ethnonational group and its particular traits defended at the expense of the other as much as the ongoing sharing of experiences in which what is thought of as the traits of the two ethnonational groups institutionalized in each city are central. In legitimizing on a daily basis the ethnonational traits political representatives intend or pretend to defend and represent, bi-ethnicity, in Montreal and Brussels, can only be understood as hegemonic.

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Conclusion In this book, I wanted to explore how nationhood is experienced in Montreal and Brussels. Noting that I was not interested in master national narratives and grand stories of nationalism so much as in the insights into how people experience nationhood, by investigating how they address this phenomenon on a daily basis, I elaborated in the introduction of the book a conceptual approach to investigate what I refer to as lived nationhood, or the experienced meanings of living in a world of nations. After delineating the social constellations of Montreal and Brussels as mirrored, I explained how I made my way into 20 workplaces in order to explore lived nationhood. I discussed how I came to exclusively examine work environments rather than various everyday life settings as I had first planned. I also discussed the methods mobilized, such as the ethnographic tool of shadowing. More generally, I depicted how the research is constructed: how I elaborated the fieldwork; how I empirically investigated lived nationhood; and how I arranged the empirical material. This led me to formulate the main question the book aims to answer: How can the relationship with nationhood be understood and characterized in the bi-ethnonational milieus of Montreal and Brussels? In the first section of the book, Five Work Tasks and Three Modes of Operating Nationhood, I examined five work tasks involving national elements that represent typical cases of lived nationhood. In line with the feuilleton approach, which consists of a story-driven writing style that remains grounded in empirical material, I accounted for these tasks through the construction of narratives in which I shadow my participants in their work environment. By unveiling the motives of individuals accomplishing work tasks, I shed light on the relationships they have with nationhood in the workplaces of Montreal and Brussels. In characterizing these relationships under three ways of enacting nationhood, I also identified three work task dynamics and the ways in which they each uniquely operate with regard to nationhood. With the help of a typology, I established a nexus between a specific way of enacting nationhood while accomplishing a work task and the way this task operates with regard to nationhood. Each work task dynamic corresponds to a mode of operating nationhood: a

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theoretical construct also applicable outside work-related activities that entails a unique way of enacting nationhood and legitimizing elements as national. In Chapter 1, the first chapter of the empirical section, I explored the work task dynamic operating upon nationhood. This empirically rare dynamic was elaborated on by following a Montreal-based writer and publisher whose work specializes in producing Québécois literature and disseminating knowledge about Quebec. Throughout our encounters, I examined how he construed public figures as national and events as part of the master national narrative of Quebec, and how he produced arguments for the independence movement of the province that are often reused by politicians and other activists of the sovereignist cause. This is the work task—the sole one of this dynamic— that I identified as cultivating nationhood. I argued that the dynamic created by this work task unveils a relationship with nationhood that is driven by a cause aiming at (re-)structuring the characteristics of specific nations—in the case at hand, that of Quebec but also, to a certain extent, Canada. While so doing, however, the very existence of the idea of a world of nations was never questioned. The mode operating upon nationhood deliberately reinforces the idea that we live in a world of nations by purposively engaging in challenging, dissolving, creating, restructuring, or actively maintaining elements as national, hence legitimizing them as such. In enacting nationhood for a cause, the first type of work task dynamic entails a mode of social action with regard to the idea of a world of nations most people associate with nationalism. The individuals it involves correspond to the common sense term of nation-builders. In the scope of an investigation into lived nationhood, this mode allows me to show that although it is rare in everyday life, it remains observable in the banality of a day-to-day context such as the workplace. Also, the mode operating upon nationhood helps me to contrast its fairly well understood characteristics with the two following work task dynamics and modes. In Chapter 2, I examined the work task dynamic operating with nationhood. The chapter is constructed around two distinct work tasks. In the first one, I shadowed a Brussels-based journalist and a Montreal-based teacher of French literature. I explored how they both strategically elaborated a context around public figures in order to make sense of their presence in the content of a news program and a lesson, respectively. This is the work task I identified as nationhood as context for staging public figures. The second work task of this chapter unveiled how individuals do business with nationhood. It was composed of two sub-tasks. First, I drew on the stories of a television satellite company representative based in Brussels, and a Montreal-based fruit stand manager. I explored how nationhood as knowledge was methodologically used to guide marketing choices that are meant to help them promote and sell the products and services offered by their respective companies. Second, I worked with a Brussels-based piano seller and a Montreal-based building engineering techni-

Conclusion

cian in order to investigate how national references were added onto products or services as a strategy that helped my participants to better promote and sell them. The dynamic created by the work tasks of this chapter revealed a relationship with nationhood that is driven by strategies. Inserted into national constructs so as to make sense and convey meaning, public figures, products, and services were legitimized as national through the construction of national contexts and business strategies. The mode operating with nationhood legitimizes national elements that were already existing as such and were part of common sense. For the sake of convenience, this mode of social action intuitively gathers and adapts elements thought of as national into national constructs—such as national contexts and business plans—which are elaborated as parts of strategies in order to better accomplish the tasks at hand—whether they be work-related or not. In the process, elements are being legitimized as national. Enacting nationhood through a strategy, the second work task dynamic entails a mode of social action that uses the idea of a world of nations in a way one could perhaps describe as opportunistic. In contrast with the first mode, the actions involved in the second one do not purposively “nationalize” elements. Individuals involved in a mode operating with nationhood merely use elements—that are already thought of as national—to achieve a given goal and are thus, in so doing, reifying the legitimacy of these elements to be recognized as national. In Chapter 3, the third and final chapter of the empirical section of the book, I explored the work task dynamic operated by nationhood. This dynamic is constructed around two work-related tasks. In the first one, mapping land with nationhood, I shadowed a Montreal-based environmental technician and a Brussels-based veterinarian. I investigated how nationhood appeared through landscapes and landmarks mapping land to other individuals in order to display, communicate, share, or complement the required information with regard to spaces and their qualities. I also elaborated this third dynamic by working with a Brussels-based human resources employee of the city’s public transport firm and a Montreal-based nurse working for a company that tests pharmaceutical products on voluntary patients. With these stories, I examined how my participants and their coworkers complied with specific languages and language usages in workplaces in cities in which linguistic legislation exists. This is the work-related task I identified as compliance with languages. This third work task dynamic unveiled a relationship with nationhood that is concealed through routines. I demonstrated how two of the most significant elements of contemporary nations are reified and legitimized through mundane daily practices: languages and territories. Without reflection, as well as out of a lack of significant alternatives, the mode operated by nationhood routinely uses elements that are already thought of as national, allowing tasks—whether they be work-related or not—to be

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properly accomplished. There are no observable motives associated with this mode of social action. The actions are solely conducted in a specific way with elements thought of as national because of nationhood. They are practices that form a part of routines; the routines of individuals living in a world of nations. Enacting nationhood through a routine, the third work task dynamic entails a mode operated by nationhood in which elements that are already meant to be understood as national are unreflexively reified and legitimized as such. In the second section of the book, titled The Unquestionability of a World Divided into Nations, I discussed the results of the research through two chapters. In the first one, Chapter 4, I focused on the contribution of the study to the sociology of nationalism, and more specifically, to the often overlooked “subfield” of everyday nationhood. First, I reflected upon the empirical investigation of nationhood in work environments by revisiting the research design of the inquiry and the methods. I suggested that the concept of lived nationhood and the approach I have developed to investigate it leads to a better understanding of the wide variety of the phenomenal manifestations of the nation in banal activities of everyday life. A sociology of lived nationhood, I argued, allows to fully explore the implications of nationhood on lived experiences, because it suggests to not only investigate the use of the category nation, but to also seize the “constitutive sense” of actions, as well as objects in their contexts, i.e., in one type of everyday life environment exclusively. I argued that investigating nationhood in one social context—rather than in multiple environments—by examining processual activities with a specific aim—such as work tasks— leads to better identify and understand the multiplicity of nationhood phenomena and their various dynamics in everyday life. Second, I discussed the results of the typology of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood. I suggested that enacting nationhood is implicit in the accomplishment of certain work tasks. Whether it be for a cause, through a strategy, or through a routine, I argued that individuals are “doing nationhood” at work, and thus banally “making nations” through three work task dynamics, which revealed three modes of operating nationhood. The modes of operating nationhood—also applicable outside work-related activities—disclose distinctive ways of legitimizing elements as national through three unique mechanisms. I argued that distinguishing between these three mechanisms constitutes a major contribution to the sociology of nationalism, which tends to overlook the various dynamics through which nationhood is enacted and through which nations are made on a daily basis. In conclusion, I raised the possibility of a fourth mode of operating nationhood by asking: could a work task dynamic ever directly operate against nationhood? While I have not empirically encountered such work-related activities, I discussed how some authors have directed their writings at questioning the very idea of a world of

Conclusion

nations and its structuring impacts. I suggested that a fourth mode of operating nationhood, though certainly empirically marginal, is conceivable. In Chapter 5, the second chapter of Section 2 and the last one of the book, I discussed the contributions of the research regarding the sociopolitical contexts of Montreal and Brussels. The modes of operating nationhood, as suggested, did not seem to be affected by the bi-ethnonational milieus of each city. Therefore, they could not help me to discuss the particularity of bi-ethnonational contexts on lived nationhood. This did not mean, however, that my investigation does not contribute to a better understanding of the bi-ethnonational aspects of Montreal and Brussels. In order to characterize the implications of bi-ethnonational milieus on the relationships individuals have with nationhood, I took a step back from the typology of work task dynamics and modes of operating nationhood. I argued that despite their contrasting bi-ethnonational social constellations, the relationship individuals have with nationhood are similar in both Montreal and Brussels. These relationships appear to have created among the inhabitants of each city a specific shared experience of nationhood. I demonstrated that facing the institutionalized traits of two ethnonational groups on a daily basis, bi-ethnicity had become banal in the eyes of individuals, and that the lived experiences of nationhood in each city are not shaped by the hegemony of one ethnolinguistic group and its traits defended at the expense of the other, as much as by the ongoing sharing of experiences involving acknowledgements, negotiations, collaborations, and confrontations with traits of the two groups. I suggested that in officially uni-ethnonational (Montreal) and bi-ethnonational (Brussels) cities alike, bi-ethnicity is not only banal. It is also hegemonic, because it is constantly legitimized by individuals’ day-to-day activities.

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Social Sciences Carlo Bordoni

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!