In the political crisis roiling Guyana presently, the ethnic divisions have become very stark. The need for a commitment to multicultural practices becomes imperative. A “multicultural practice” means there will be fair and equitable treatment of others by individuals, groups, and institutions.
Instead of racism and discrimination, there will be respectful and equal treatment of individuals and groups from any ethnic, racial, or immigrant background.
With the vast majority of Guyanese brought to Guyana in the last three hundred years, we do not have the tools to imagine a nation “looming out of an immemorial past”. But while we will have to accept the diversity we find ourselves with, we will also have to hone some kind of unity so that we may achieve what most modern states are expected to deliver to their citizens – at a minimum, civil peace.
The question of “national culture” has been the site of the contestation of power in civil society as well as the state. It has therefore been a wider struggle than the political. This is what multicultural practices address. The notion that some groups must reject or discard their cultural heritage to participate in the polity must be rejected. It arises from a barbaric past, when nations were forced to ‘assimilate’ by force. Even in these circumstances, ethnic bonds were never completely annihilated — witness Catalan nationalism playing out today in Spain.
Modern communications facilitate the dissemination and forging of ethnic bonds. Modern international norms of ‘equality’ and ‘self-determinations’ of peoples militate against cultural hegemony being accepted by even tiny minorities. Rather than the ‘melting pot’ ideal of integration, the ‘salad bowl’ model should be encouraged. Let each group discover their roots and shape their cultural practices in their own “modernity”.
It is a fact about the world that there are many multicultural societies. Each member of such a society is also a member of a particular cultural group. And each member of a cultural group will have different experiences from another belonging to a different cultural group. This is because our culture shapes and gives meaning to our life-plans. And the mere participation of each member helps to change the culture itself. Out of this relationship between people and their cultures arises a sense of identity and belonging.
The question as to whether “unity” or “diversity” should be privileged is partially a semantic one, caused by the conflation of “state” and “nation”. But at the bottom, the dispute has to do with power, as it almost always does. Political unity and cultural diversity do not have to be mutually exclusive. Each society, including Guyana, has to find the right balance between the demands of the two concepts that is appropriate for its own circumstances. We have shown that part of the problem was that the exigencies of the “state” were being conflated with those of the “nation”. We need political unity to guide the state, but that is not contradictory to “diversity” in terms of the “nation” – of diverse cultural expressions by the people of a given society.
We need to address the type of cultural integration that may be best for Guyana, in view of its evident cultural diversity. While the definitions of culture are legion, for our purposes, we have to see “culture” as, in the words of Ronald Dworkin, “a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention” by a group of people.
In the century and a half in which our plural society has been shaped, we are living a Guyanese culture that has given us at least an understanding of how easily we can tilt over the edge. Since each “shared understanding” may entail a different conception of the good life, compromise becomes the obvious imperative for the political viability of our culturally plural society.
And Guyana’s history has exemplified this. In each instance, the key aspect would be the position of the state on the policies it would execute vis a vis cultural practices. The state must be even-handed.
