The recent appeal for renewed civic responsibility, public order and moral awareness

Dear Editor,
The recent national appeals by President Irfaan Ali and Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo for renewed civic responsibility, public order and moral awareness represent an important moment in Guyana’s development.
Both leaders recognize that physical progress alone cannot sustain a nation; values must accompany transformation. Their message resonates deeply across Guyana: respect for others, pride in community, and responsibility for shared spaces must be restored.
However, if the State is to successfully foster a new moral culture, it must begin by understanding how communities themselves interpret the social changes unfolding around them. Rules, policing, and infrastructure projects cannot carry the full weight of moral renewal.
The question we must confront is not only what people are doing, but what those actions mean to them in context. Anthropology is the discipline specifically concerned with that question.
Anthropology seeks to understand behaviour from “the native’s point of view,”as the eminent scholar Clifford Geertz once wrote. It studies the meanings embedded in everyday practices: how people negotiate norms, status, belonging and enjoyment; how they justify behaviours that might appear contradictory; and how they construct moral worlds that are sometimes different from the values promoted by the State.
When we look at a West Coast corridor -Leonora, Anna Catherina, Cornelia Ida – we see communities struggling with issues of noise, disorder, declining sports infrastructure and the rise of commercial leisure. These challenges are visible. But their underlying moral significance is less visible and must be interpreted.
Consider the cricket ground in Cornelia Ida. On the surface, its disuse appears to reflect neglect or indifference. Yet this is a village that has produced national cricket talent and once rallied around that field with deep pride.
Anthropology invites us to ask: What has shifted in the aspirations of young people? What meanings are now attached to sport, competition, and public achievement? Why does the nightlife venue attract energy that the cricket ground once commanded? The answer cannot be found in maintenance schedules alone.
Similarly, in Leonora, complaints of disruptive nightlife are regularly framed by authorities as simple failures of enforcement. But for participants, the noisy weekend space may represent freedom, status, escape from economic strain, or pride in a modern social scene.
In Anna Catherina, the dominance of a nightclub is not merely the absence of alternatives; it is the presence of a particular vision of youth identity, one shaped by music, fashion, and the thrill of urban belonging.
And when residents express concern about litter and environmental disrespect, yet participate in the very practices they denounce, they are navigating complex tensions between desire, convenience, community norms and collective responsibility.
These examples remind us that moral decline is not merely a deficit of discipline. It reflects contested meanings: what counts as enjoyment, what counts as respect, what counts as progress. Anthropological inquiry enables government and stakeholders to understand these meanings before designing interventions. Without such insight, solutions risk chasing symptoms while the causes remain untouched.
Moral renewal is therefore not a call for bureaucratic expansion, but for intellectual expansion. It requires the State to partner with researchers, educators and communities in a collaborative effort to decode the cultural logics shaping behaviour.
Public order will become sustainable only when it aligns with how citizens experience dignity, pride, leisure and hope. Youth will embrace alternatives to disorder only when those alternatives resonate with their understanding of success and belonging. Spaces like cricket grounds will come alive again only when they are reconnected to the symbolic aspirations of the people they serve.
The West Coast corridor, with its vibrant cultures and very real pressures, presents an ideal setting for a research-and-action initiative to model a new approach. Understanding must precede engineering; meaning must inform planning. Guyana’s government cannot try to transform community life while overlooking or failing to understand the interior life of community culture.
Our leaders are right to call the nation toward higher values. Anthropology offers a disciplined way to discover how those values can take root, not as instructions, but as lived commitments.
If we hope to restore civic pride and rebuild the social foundations of our villages, then the work must begin with listening, interpreting, and learning from the people who are living the change. This is the work of experts called anthropologist no less that building bridges require the expertise of engineers.
Moral renewal requires sound cultural knowledge. The place to seek that knowledge is in anthropological research.

Sincerely,
Dr Walter H Persaud