Living Cultural Companion - Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the introductory installment of my Living Cultural Companion. I hope that, through this project, I will be able to make available to you a useful (albeit somewhat unwieldy) resource through which to understand Guyanese culture. I am, of course, a newcomer and outsider to Guyana, and trust my betters among the readers, Guyanese, American, or otherwise, to judge and identify errors or deficiencies in my work, of which there are sure to be several, despite my best efforts. I must also preface this material with the disclaimer that my writing here is wholly reflective of my personal views, and in no way reflects the views or policy of the United States Peace Corps. 

To begin, I hope you will forgive me a lengthy interlude, which I believe is necessary to contextualize my forthcoming writing on Guyanese language and culture.

In his ethnography of the Nuer of Sudan, published in 1940, E.E. Evans-Pritchard famously wrote that the Nuer’s “social idiom is a bovine idiom”—that their social world could not be understood or maintained without reference and return to the cattle they lived and died, raided and wed for. In the 1930s, when Evans-Pritchard conducted his research in the Sudanese floodplains at the behest of the Anglo-Egyptian government, the Nuer were as yet largely unfamiliar with the idea of currency; rather, cattle constituted their medium of exchange, and it was precisely the living, breathing, and bleeding entity of the cow that legitimized patterns of ritual and obligation that formed the basis for Nuer society itself. 

This is how cultures are built, fed, and come to be bounded, and these boundaries are often defended with a feverish intensity that the Nuer were undoubtedly possessed of. A pastoral, raiding culture feared by many of their neighboring peoples in the Nile Valley and a constant thorn in the side of the colonial administration, from whom the British could neither extract satisfactory cooperation nor taxes without fierce retaliation, the Nuer appeared well-prepared to resist outer influence to the hilt, and perhaps even succeed in doing so. Surely, there would not have otherwise been such a compulsion on the part of the colonial administration to enlist a young anthropologist from the University of Cairo to demystify these obstinate and troublesome “natives.” 

It is remarkable, then, that in the 1980s, in her efforts to revisit and contribute to the intellectual tradition and body of ethnographic work established by Evans-Pritchard, anthropologist Sharon Hutchinson finds a Nuer society nevertheless utterly transformed by its colonial legacy, perhaps most noticeably and troublingly through the adoption of cash. In her ethnography, Nuer Dilemmas, she quotes one young interlocutor in particular, who captures the essence of the titular “dilemma” with striking eloquence: 

I was once asked by a highly intelligent and unusually well-traveled eastern Gaajak youth, who had ventured at one point as far as Iraq in search of profitable employment, whether I knew the source of money… [He] went on to say: “But there’s something I still don’t understand about money. Money’s not like the cow because [the cow] has blood and breath and, like people, gives birth. But money does not. So tell me, do you know whether God or man creates money?”

It is plain to see that Hutchinson’s counterpart is no ignoramus or passive recipient of change; rather, he is actively articulating in no uncertain terms a cultural crisis of monumental proportions, even if he is not aware of it. What happens when the boundaries of culture crumble and become impossible to maintain—when cattle are supplanted by near-inscrutable, bloodless money of intangible value? How do ritual and obligation maintain themselves; how can society itself endure? Hutchinson proposes an answer, and in doing so, illuminates the impressive creativity with which human beings have always responded to such cultural “dilemmas,” whether externally or internally induced.

Of course, I have not been placed in Khartoum or the Sudanese floodplains, but in Guyana, a country of rich culture, history, and tradition in its own right, whose people bear little resemblance to the Nuer of Sudan, except perhaps through a loosely-shared colonial history under the British. Why, then, do I go on about the Nuer?

Evans-Pritchard’s findings, when examined alongside those of Hutchinson’s, illustrate a fundamental lesson to all students of culture around the world: it is in our nature to man the battlements, patrol the walls, and lock the gates around the social fold we call our own. Culture demands a sense of permanence (and it really does demand—see the coercive power of Émile Durkheim’s “social fact”), and under its influence, it can be easy to forget that boundaries have a funny way of being permeated. It is precisely in such moments that we are called to innovate, refashion, and rebuild, often under desperate circumstances, as humanity has always done—that is, until the next exogenous shock or Bronze Age Collapse, each unique in its iteration but not in the social process it triggers. And thereupon, the cycle repeats itself. 

I arrive here in Guyana in an election year, at a time of great economic change and upheaval. I believe it is quite possible—as I have heard among the people of this country whom I’ve spoken to and whose words I will later discuss—that Guyana is at a key, one-of-a-kind crossroads in its history and development, from which similar “dilemmas” and cultural innovations to those so-carefully outlined by Hutchinson may appear. I will record notable aspects of my day-to-day life here, and attempt to learn this country’s language(s) and ways of life. At the same time, I intend to examine my data and experiences through several of the same questions that drove Evans-Pritchard and Hutchinson in their studies of the Nuer, which I believe find relevance in the Guyanese context in the present moment:

1. What is “Guyanese culture,” how should one describe it (social idiom(s)?), and where does Guyanese culture find its roots?

2. What is valued in Guyanese culture?

3. What crossroads or “dilemmas” is Guyana currently facing? What do people think the country’s future holds, in their own words? 

As I add to this project, I will be drawing on anthropological, sociological, historical, and other literature to analyze and inform my observations as I see fit. I intend to describe and contextualize, but not comment personally on my material and findings, insofar as analysis will allow. 

Once again, I hope this resource will be useful and enjoyable to you, unwieldy as it is. Thank you for reading, and thank you to the Guyanese people and the United States Peace Corps for this opportunity.