In the ongoing debate on the merits and demerits of “ethnic” representation by some of our politicians and public intellectuals, those who insist there are specific “ethnic” concerns and issues that must be articulated and represented are dubbed “tribalists”. Now, I have always been deeply offended when this particular term is used in odium, and contrasted with being “nationalist”.
First, it connotes the image of societies that have tribes, especially in Africa, as irredeemably backward and needing to get on with it to become “modern” and develop into a “state”. But what is the modern “nation” – constructed in Europe – but the “tribe” writ large? And which tribe has been more violent than, for instance, those same nations as they fought their “world wars”? Witness the survival of European “tribalism” in the Brexit brouhaha through the different reactions of the English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, not to mention the expelled Eastern Europeans.
Rather than condemn the phenomenon, therefore, our elite and opinion-makers ought to try to understand the wellsprings of ethnicity and ethnic aspirations – even as we have become a nation of ethnic minorities. The norm of not publicly conceding the pre-eminence of ethnicity in Guyana is one result of the ideological blinders imposed by a Eurocentric scholarship to which most of the opinion-shaping elite still subscribes. Modern social science developed in a Europe that had already ‘solved’ its ethnic problem by transmuting it from a ‘national’ problem into an international one when it formed more or less ethnically homogenous states. “State” and “nation” were generally synonymous to the early European theorists, who focused on economic cleavages rather than ethnic ones, which were peripheral to their reality. The few who did, such as J.S. Mill, pessimistically concluded that: “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities”.
The dominance of ethnicity over class in most multiethnic societies does not imply that class is negated; they both exist objectively and subjectively. The two interact dynamically, and as to which preponderates depends on the situation. The transformation of class and ethnicity from analytic categories into social groups is a contingency that involves the same set of actors, where the class and ethnic motives may either conflict or reinforce each other. In multiethnic, multi-class societies such as Guyana, situations that pose perceived threats to the survival of a group, be it violence or domination by other groups, tend to evoke “ethnic” responses, while local economic issues which pose threats at the individual level may evoke a “class” reaction. The lived experience of individuals will determine to which type of group they perceive their fates to be linked, and they will react accordingly.
Ethnicity is particularly susceptible to politicisation, since it fulfills the instrumental economic demands of “class” while simultaneously satisfying the affective, emotional, cultural, and moral needs of its group members (ethnic interests). In a world of scarce resources and all-pervasive governments, ethnic political entrepreneurs do not find it difficult to persuade fellow group members that their economic interests are better served if their group controls the state. The affirmation of themselves as a people, and the economic interest served, mutually reinforce each other.
Ethnicity is based on the perception by a group that it possesses common traits, primarily cultural and ascriptive, and common origins, which taken together make them distinctive from other groups. Objectively, when, as in Guyana, the ethnic groups are from different phenotypical “races”, the exclusiveness of each group is intensified as the cultural markers of different religions, mores, and social institutions become reinforced by the disparate racial characteristics of skin colour, hair texture, etc…
The cultural basis of ethnicity – tied to identity – makes it impossible to compartmentalize from other aspects of life – political, social, and economic. Instead of disappearing, as most had postulated, the opposite has occurred with ethnicity, as modern man searches for meaning, struggles against atomization, and seeks transcendence. ‘The ethnic group is the only social institution that defines and accepts persons for what they are, and not by what they do’.
Subjectively, the individual’s perception of self and identity is formed in the early years of socialization, when typically, the ethnic markers themselves become a part of the individual’s identity. In our estimation, therefore, political and other leaders have to acknowledge the legitimacy of ethnic concerns, and deal with them objectively, rather than pretending that they are distasteful and must be swept under a rug. Even within a “multi-racial” party, this must be demonstrated. Ethnic caucuses anyone?
