Canadian Content and the Nationalism of Applebaum-Hebert
The Applebaum-Hébert Report is principally concerned with the question of Canadian cultural content. This essay uses a perspective from symbolic anthropology to show that the notion of a distinctive national culture rests on two mistaken assumptions: first, that political boundaries enclose a homogeneous culture; and second, that the content of that culture can be definitively recognized as the expression of a fixed national character. It is argued that a distinctively national culture cannot exist, that policies designed to realize it must therefore fail, and that the unintended consequence of such policies is to favour the interests of cultural workers and cultural industries.
