Unity and diversity

Jan 30, 2011 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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It has been asserted that at Independence, we “inherited a state but not a nation”. With the vast majority of Guyanese arbitrarily dumped into Guyana over the last few hundred years to join the Indigenous peoples already here, we simply do not have the collective wherewithal to imagine a nation “looming out of an immemorial past”, as one writer proposed. We will just have to deal with the bricolage that we are.
We hope that in the upcoming elections campaign the question of “national culture” will be discussed. The question has formed the site of a contestation of power in civil society as well the state and cannot be deferred. It has therefore precipitated a wider struggle than merely the “political”. Ever since the beginning of European colonisation, the model of the “nation” imposed onto the Guyanese population – notwithstanding some rhetoric to the contrary over the past few years – has been for our peoples to “assimilate”. This stance totally privileges “unity” over “diversity”.
Its premises, which are accepted as common sense, are that the people within a state must all share values and a common culture so that they would feel a sense of oneness – to better work towards achieving the “national” goals. The sixty-four thousand dollar question, of course, is who decides on what constitutes the “national culture” into which everyone is to be assimilated?
There have been several variants of the assimilationist school: ranging from the demand that individuals entering such societies jettison their “old” cultures and practice the new – to such individuals being exhorted to intermarry with others from the “mainstream” so that they physically disappear.
The American “melting pot” remains the most famous example of the assimilationist school, even though their state, especially through its school system and its very explicit “Citizenship” examinations, couched their values to be assimilated in ideological, rather than cultural” terms. This was feasible because the WASP cultural ideal was so deeply imbedded in the state structure that there was no need to emphasise them.
In reality, for American citizens to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, they had to conform to the “societal” culture – which was overwhelmingly British. The French, following Rousseau, have been the most faithful to the model in terms of explicitly demanding French culture as the standard.
The sad fact is that the assimilationist project has only worked at the price of great suffering and even then, never very successfully. America has had to concede that instead of a “melting pot” it has had to accept that it can only be a “salad bowl”. Britain has had to grant autonomy to Scotland and Ireland in cultural as well as political terms. Recently however, under threats from Islamic radicals, the US and Britain (as well as the rest of Europe) are beginning to re-invoke the old demands for assimilation. In Guyana while everyone was told to assimilate into British culture, there were always snickers from whites when “natives” talked about Britain as “home” – as was very common as recently as the sixties.
Ultimately, assimilation can only work under the extreme demand that there is complete physical intermixing between the various populations. But this is very unlikely – even though recently some PNC presidential aspirants extolled the virtues of this path. Modern communications facilitates the dissemination and forging of ethnic bonds. Simultaneously, modern international norms of ‘equality’ and ‘self determinations’ of peoples militate against cultural hegemony being accepted by even “subordinate” groups. Witness the new militancy of our Indigenous peoples.
It is rather ironic that multicultural societies are actually the norm in a world of “nation-states”. Individuals from the several cultural groups will have different experiences and will become different to the extent that culture shapes and gives meaning to our life-plans. Significantly, the participation of members 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 fundamentally a question of power. But political unity and culturally diversity do not have to be mutually exclusive. Each society has to find the right balance between the demands of the two concepts that is appropriate for its own circumstances so as to have a political system that is cohesive and stable, while facilitating the cultural aspirations of all the peoples.
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 have elaborated previously on the type of political unity necessary such as Federalism.
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 may see culture as, in the words of Ronald Dworkin, “a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention” by a group of people.
To repeat, each culture in Guyana gives its adherents a shared understanding of life – how to live it and how to organise it. Since each “shared understanding” may entail a different conception of the good life, there are obvious implications for the political viability of a culturally plural society.
We have proposed before, the creation of institutions to promote an ideological notion of “Guyaneseness” for a nation based on equality, which incorporates all our present cultures. Having one’s social institutions embody one’s culture means that they will be immediately comprehensible to us, and therefore easier to use. The mutual intelligibility will promote relationships of solidarity and trust for all Guyanese.

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