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Paper short abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec led me to emphasize evolutions in partisan polarization as well as Quebec’s relationships with a wide variety of political spaces and cultural traditions. This enabled me to question received knowledge about my field site and context.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I will show how my ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec led me in an initially unexpected theoretical direction that coincidentally and simultaneously became a way to raise questions not asked during partisan political debates. By chance, I ended up focusing simultaneously on the interactions in practice between (1) a context-specific evolution in political polarization and (2) the manifestations of the parliament’s relationships with a plurality of political spaces or cultural traditions. Both of these matters were observable ethnographically. Firstly, during my fieldwork, I saw how Quebec’s parliamentary polarization evolved from two political parties on opposing sides of a singular constitutional cleavage to four elected parties representing an ever-expanding multiplicity of cleavages depending on the immediate political context or the specific issue under debate. Secondly, the Parliament provided me with a vantage point on the intersections of Quebec’s historical and present-day relationships with the rest of Canada, the Commonwealth, the Francophonie and, less systematically, with other parts of the world. By theoretically comparing Quebec to initially counterintuitive parts of the world—Europe, international organizations—I was able to produce anthropological knowledge that complemented the polarized partisan debates within my immediate (parliamentary) field site and questioned received knowledge about my broader cultural context.