168 Douglas J. Glick
problem that not only explicitly blamed Russian youth for the problem (as well as the
influence of their parents on them), but did so without any concern for politically correct
language. Such causal propositions, however, were only found in informal ̳neighborhood
talk‘, house visits with neighbors after the Sabbath, barbeques with friends and family, and
dinnertime conversations.^75 Whereas in public forums such claims ran a stronger risk of
indexing a kind of racism in the writer/speaker, in informal settings the assumption seemed to
be that everyone knew each other well enough not to come to that kind of conclusion and/or
the racism was explicitly formulated or implicitly present and accepted as such. That such
claims about this issue appeared to be normatively present only in informal settings is partly a
result of the fact that they were not yet ideologically tolerated, at least officially, by any
institutional voice in Israel. As above, in the discussion of the Israeli‘s agitated psychological
state, this is due in large part to the fact that it opposes more dominant ideologies. In this case,
the relevant ideologies are the dominant state discourse about the importance of a Jewish
nation and thus the need to successfully absorb Jews from all parts of the world at whatever
cost.
CONCLUSION
This case study has argued that isolating out any particular discursive construction is thus
to be looking into a house of mirrors. It is an analytical nightmare unless one recognizes that
there is not an unmediated, objective representation of any particular discourse or of some
overall system of societal discourses. Indeed, the general semiotic study of the indexical
interrelations among the component parts of discursive constructions described and
demonstrated above seems a fruitful way in which to understand the social life of language
and society. That is, the conclusion should not be that their relativity pushes them beyond
human study and thus renders academic efforts futile. Rather, it should have the effect of
forcing analyses to be specific (but not pedantic) about both their methodological design and
the analytical goals for any particular kind of representation. In the present study, for
example, two particular goals should be stressed in closing.
First, this empirical case study was designed to demonstrate general theoretical traits of
̳discursive constructions‘ as well as methodological principles for their study. That is, it
empirically documented the reflexive and relative nature of discursive constructions as well
as the utility and interdependence of propositional (or denotational) and indexical approaches
to their study. Second, it suggested in the terms of a single case study some of the general
semiotic traits of discursive constructions and, as such, detailed some of the general ways in
which language and culture work to give shape to human practices. Indeed, building on a case
study such as this one, one can envision a kind of comparative semiotics of discursive
constructions, wherein the study of different kinds of societies are likely to reveal different
and fascinating types of reflexive interrelations of support and opposition as well distinct
types of change over time.
(^75) The city in which I lived over the two years of this study, Karmiel, was one that was quite well known for having
absorbed a very large number of these ̳new Russians‘. As such, the topic of their place in Israel (and Karmiel
more specifically) was a commonly encountered one in everyday life.