Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic study of the Parliament of Quebec, this paper seeks to extend arguments that the nation-state is not the necessary form of the political. On this basis, we can view the state as both distinct from its political institutions and as one of several forms of sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I seek to expand our knowledge of the diversity of places of the political through an ethnographic study of the everyday life of a legislative institution of a federated entity, namely the Parliament of Quebec. Through such a focus, we can establish two broader analytical distinctions, firstly between the state and its political institutions and, secondly, between the state and independence or sovereignty. Regarding the former differentiation, anthropologists have long emphasized the existence of deliberative bodies for collective decision-making that are not linked to a nation-state. However, in-depth ethnographic studies of such institutions remain rare. Doing fieldwork in a legislative body reveals the diversity and heterogeneity within such institutions, which are far from synonymous with the positions and decisions taken by a majority of elected officials at any given time and even less with a singular common will of "the state". As concerns the second distinction mentioned above, whilst an expanding number of anthropologists have argued that the nation-state does not rank hierarchically above all other political entities, they have largely done so through a focus on transnationalism or non-governmental organizations. Ethnographically studying a constituent entity beyond its pro-independence movement shows that such polities coexist, without any analytical hierarchy, alongside other forms of the political. This leads to a relational view of federated entities within and beyond their federal contexts and reveals that state formation is far from a universal.