By George Mentore
George Mentore teaches anthropology at the University of Virginia
I have three broad questions to discuss, each arising from the recent attempt by the Government of Guyana to relocate the Walter Roth Museum — an administrative effort which, I have to say, appears far more reflective of engorged political muscles unaware of the consequences of its ponderous movements, than the rational choice of a well-informed leadership. My first question is: “what does it take for a young nation like Guyana to know itself?” The second is: “what style of self-imagining do Guyanese people bring to the knowledge of who they are? And the third: “where is the informative thinking on such a topic to be located? I am not suggesting that all three questions directly relate to the wealth of anthropological knowledge housed in the museum or to the event of the decision to relocate the Walter Roth, but I do believe that they properly pose themselves within the intellectual space of untapped Guyanese resources and the now historical occasion of a revealing political pronouncement.
Why this question about knowing the self? Well, obviously, without any such knowledge, credit for decisions made by self cannot be properly claimed. What is at stake here is the very soul of the nation. Why the question on the style of self-imagining? The genre or medium of thinking, through which knowledge takes form, helps reveal and make more deliberately useful the shaping and re-shaping of selfhood. And, if no clear site for the deliberation of who we are can be established, the resulting obscurity delays and hinders the distribution of knowledge needed for self-making and remaking. Even with access to all the economic wealth in the world and the voluminous availability of western scientific thinking the squandering of such riches will be the inevitable result.
The knowledge I am primarily concerned about has to do with the collective understandings capable of informing, at the level of unconscious and conscious thought, what it is to be Guyanese. And for the purposes of this discussion, I am here speaking about the “nation” generally understood as a “limited communion,” that is, of people in common to the exclusion of all those not considered Guyanese. A people, of course, free within the political independence of the Guyanese state, thus keeping in mind the technical difference between nation and state — the former being what Benedict Anderson famously described as an “imagined community”, the latter that of the political apparatus of governance.
Given our past colonial history, our modern independent state, and our struggles to be an effective national community, it appears we have as yet not quite learnt how to develop what Anderson has described as “deep horizontal comradeship” which “makes it possible … for so many millions of people … willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” In other words, while it is possible that many people living in Guyana today would certainly sacrifice their lives for their mothers, family, even friends, and perhaps their neighbours, very few would do so for something called the Guyanese nation. The absence of this kind of imagining suggests a very different sort of collective sociality, one still unknowing of what it is to become a modern nation in the image of the Euro-American forms it so desperately seeks to emulate. Indeed, we all know the racial and ethnic fervor deployed in aping the foundational claims for collective communion and for the jostling of political power within the state. Some have argued that the shortcoming of seeking nationhood through the intractability of race and ethnicity is the very reason for the said lack of national unity. Feeling so much like the sentiments derived from the “blood” relations of family, extended out to claim expression in race and ethnicity but, disappointingly, never able to be the source for making the nation — because no single individual can know all members of the nation in the way they know their own family — the biological project of nation-ness will always fail. However, it seems that even the well-argued alternative for forging solidarity between thousands and thousands of people, without having to know each and every one intimately, has also eluded Guyana.
The strongly accepted view in current scholarship claims that universal literacy and print-capitalism have together enabled the achievement of modern national solidarities. Not having any intellectual centres in which to debate and discuss such styles of imaginings, Guyana continues to find it difficult if not impossible to experience the expression of simultaneity so necessary for the making of national solidarity. And I am here not simply speaking of the genre in which I am at this moment making use. For it is not just the inadequacy of getting newspapers and media coverage of national interests out to the wider population. As I know personally, my own family and friends in the deep south will more than likely never read what I have written here or, when and if they do, it will no doubt be weeks if not months before the contents of this newsprint even reaches them. Nor is it simply an inadequacy in the genre of museums, where language and not “blood” seeks to invite the fraternal horizontal community of Guyanese-ness. It remains difficult if not impossible to place in the map of ourselves, as Guyanese, the archaeological monuments and traditions of the nation. You can graphically print images of rock paintings and engravings onto maps of Guyana (as you can racial categories of difference into national censuses) but how much more difficult to register such realities into individuals so as to allow them to share in a sense of solidarity?
My point is that without a recognizable stable site for the discourse of who we are, we cannot forcibly take hold of our efforts to craft a useable sense of ourselves as Guyanese. Unilateral decisions from on top down, alienates. Inadequate distribution of civic concerns works against not in favour of solidarity. And, to be quite frank, even the expected site of the national university — where one should encounter debate on such subjects — shows little respect or interest for the liberal arts, the already legitimate intellectual space for cultivation of the necessary critical thinking of young minds. The recent narrow talk of moving the Walter Roth Museum from its familiar and accessible site, like the supposedly collective debates which never reach (or do so belatedly) those whom should be part of the discussion, express no more than a squandering of the intellectual riches required for the successful shaping of the Guyanese self. Increased economic wealth will not solve this problem. Indeed, without careful thinking about the self beyond the individual and in the collective solidarity of the nation, it will more likely be exacerbated.
