Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism: Colonial Guyana 1838-1900 (review)

Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism: Colonial Guyana, 1838-1900. By Brian L. Moore. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press; Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xv, 376 pp. Paper, $55.00.

Historian Brian Moore clarifies his study's rationale by suggesting that there has been "no full scale or comprehensive cultural history of any Caribbean territory" and that his "book, therefore, is intended to fill a major lacuna in the historiography of the Caribbean" (p. 1). He then proceeds to "describe, explain and analyze" (p. 4) the cultural characteristics of each of the major ethnic groups of coastal Guyana (then British Guiana) during the post-emancipation nineteenth century. The first two introductory chapters are followed by chapters dealing with the cultures of the white British elite, Afro-Caribbean peoples, transplanted Asian Indians, Portuguese, and Chinese, in that order. The last chapter emphasizes the "cultural power" exerted in Guyana in the 1800s by the white elite, and Moore concludes by suggesting that "the theory of pluralism would seem to be relevant to Guyanese society at this stage of its development" (p. 306). Here he sides somewhat with M.G. Smith and his followers, whose "plural society" model of the multi-ethnic societies of the Caribbean contrasts sharply with the "creolization" or assimilation model associated most often with the work of Lloyd Braithwaite. Moore discusses these viewpoints early in his study, and he revisits these opposing stances in the concluding sections of each of his substantive chapters, after discussing each ethnic group. Moore draws on an impressive body of documentary evidence, including official correspondence, newspapers, and church records housed in Guyana and the United Kingdom. He presents his findings with a pleasing and graceful writing style.

The study is strongest where the written evidence is most reliable. The best part of Moore's book deals with the activities, possessions, pretensions, and foibles of what he refers to as "Elite Victorian Culture," personified by the leading white officials and planters. A number of well-selected drawings and photos of Georgetown, the capital city that dominated the colony, beautifully portray a wooden whitewashed opulence financed by the agro-industrial production of raw sugar. But the picture becomes murkier when Moore deals with the Afro- and Indo-Guyanese groups whose principal residential areas were mainly in the peri-plantation villages of the country's coastal mudflats. Here he relies on the relatively few descriptions published at the time by officials and clergy, as well as more recent anthropological work. He seems not to have conducted any village interviewing of older people to learn about parents' or grandparents' recollections.

The reader is at times overwhelmed with a welter of factual material, and some points need elaboration. If indeed (speaking of the Afro-Guyanese) "the Creoles were the only ethnic category within the plantation environment who consciously perceived their presence in Guyana as permanent"(pp. 151-52), how did these conscious perceptions play out culturally? And there are other ways Caribbeanists have viewed the region's remarkable ethnic diversity. Sociologist Nigel Bolland posits a dialectical unity of opposites, whose origins are found in the region's plantation system. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz suggests that a history of immigration from many places into the region has created a local acceptance and daily matter-of-factness towards different ways of doing things. Acknowledgement and incorporation of these and other viewpoints might have theoretically enriched Moore's well-researched study.

Bonham C. Richardson
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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