Towards Modernization and Modernity in Guyana

Sep 12, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

The government of President Dr. Irfaan Ali has rightly made modernization a national priority, with ambitious plans for infrastructure, improved government services, and a digitalization of public services. These are crucial steps. But it is also important to recognize the distinction between modernization and modernity.

By modernization, we mean the observable, measurable structures of change: roads, hospitals, digital platforms, State institutions, and standards of service. By modernity, we mean the lived experience, the values, identities, and civic dispositions that citizens develop as they adopt and inhabit those new standards.

As Anthony Giddens explains in The Consequences of Modernity (1991), modernization alone does not automatically reshape social relations. Alex Inkeles and David Smith made a similar point long ago in their classic Becoming Modern (1974), showing that institutional reforms must be accompanied by programmes to change attitudes, practices, and civic consciousness if societies are to achieve full modernity.

Arjun Appadurai, in Modernity at Large (1996), emphasizes that modernity is performed, that people routinely traffic in modern symbols to display their modern selves. While this kind of performance is not yet widespread in Guyana, except perhaps among a small elite in Georgetown, the State’s modernization programme offers an opportunity to cultivate and nourish modernity as lived experience nationwide. It will allow new infrastructure and digital systems to be matched by new civic spaces, practices, and performances.

One effective way to promote this cultural dimension is through lifestyle tourism. Lifestyle tourism creates settings in which Guyanese mix and mingle without reference to ethnicity, while also providing opportunities for citizens to perform modern identities through fashion, style, leisure, and social life. From cafés, bars, and festivals to heritage trails and creative enterprises, such spaces can offer opportunities for people to display their modernity in everyday practice.

Domestic tourism can thus serve as classrooms in the air, linking schools and communities to Guyana’s landscapes, histories, and cultures. This reinforces civic education and helps young people build attachments to the nation that transcend ethnic boundaries. In this way, modernization would be more than technical and material progress; it would become the foundation for a civic culture and a shared consciousness of belonging.

In sum, if the government’s modernization initiatives are to achieve their fullest purpose, they must be accompanied by deliberate efforts to nurture modernity, so that our infrastructure and institutions are animated by inclusive values, modern practices, and a civic identity strong enough to replace divisive ethnic loyalties.

These are lofty ideals but this government has shown in its previous term that it does not shy away from challenges.

Respectfully,

Dr. Walter H. Persaud

WCD

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Dr. Walter H Persaud, Infrastructure, Modernity, modernization

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