Competing Power: Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State 9781785339936

Citation preview

Competing Power

Competing Power Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State

Narmala Halstead

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Narmala Halstead All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Halstead, Narmala, author. Title: Competing power : landscapes of migration, violence and the state / Narmala Halstead. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018018978 (print) | LCCN 2018034900 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339936 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339929 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences)--Guyana. | Violence--Guyana. | Migration, Internal--Guyana. | Guyana--Social conditions. Classification: LCC HN330.3.Z9 (ebook) | LCC HN330.3.Z9 P653 2019 (print) | DDC 303.309881--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018978 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-992-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-993-6 ebook

For my parents and Roy

Contents

m Contents Acknowledgements viii

Introduction. Competing Power: Landscapes of Violence, Migration and the State

Chapter 1.

Amidst Illegality and Violence: Flight and the State

27

Chapter 2.

Illegality and Big Ones: Disengaging Structural Violence

52

Chapter 3.

Local Others: Residents, Bandits, Migrants

77

Chapter 4.

Local Lives, Global Selves: New Local Imaginaries and ‘Go-and-Come’

103

Chapter 5.

Re-presencing the Local

128

Chapter 6.

Co-occupying Public Power: Challenges, Abuse and Structural Violence

152

Chapter 7.

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local: Individuals, Migrants’ Experiences and Strategies of Governance

177

Chapter 8.

In and Out of the Local: Blame-Sharing, Faulty Persons and the State

200



Concluding Reflections

225

Glossary Bibliography Index

1

231 233 245

m Acknowledgements This book has benefited from a series of informal conversations over the years with academic colleagues as well as research participants, and friends and family members. These acknowledgements can only insufficiently note the many encounters with very warm hospitality as people variously invited me and/or made me very welcome when I turned up at the research sites (deliberately anonymised). I am grateful for being recognised and treated as an ‘ethnographic listener’ in these encounters and I thank all of them for sharing their lives and for ‘giving voice’ here. This book cannot be defined in terms of the starting point of my research. It is not unusual to hear anthropologists say they have ended at a different place from their starting position. Given that research is a process of finding out what is yet to be known, the ethnographic encounter allows for an open-ended focus that extends the original research idea and can lead to unexpected finds. I remain appreciative of the ways in which various participants have differentially interpreted my presence and research, which led me to deepen my engagement with anthropological debates in/of the field and to benefit from a methodological holism in sifting through different issues. Variously, participants ‘filled gaps’ on what they thought I should be researching and following up on; at times this was about the specific issues that interested or occupied them. One participant expected me very early on to be researching the deep structurally violent conditions he experienced and which he linked politically to a ‘bad space’, even as he sought distance from this history and was committed to both networking and doing land protection (spiritual) work to resolve his problems. His expectations of my work as focusing on such issues to document and change things travelled with me, as did the comments of others, at

Acknowledgements • ix

times briefly so, on violence and related issues. This was even as people endeavoured to evade such conditions and change their lives. Thus, the research began to shift. My earlier project of researching television and domestic settings had indications of the political settings in everyday lives; although my focus at the time was different and appeared separate from violence and migration, this could not be extricated from a setting marked by difficult conditions. I sat for prolonged periods in participants’s homes conversing with my hosts, watching television with them, discussing migration issues among other matters and, latterly, becoming their extended guest for many celebrations. I attended many wedding celebrations, on occasions meeting the wedding hosts for the first time when I was ‘escorted’ by a long-term host. Amidst the talk, the celebrations and the home-sitting was the shadowy and at times not so obscure presence of problems and difficult times – the issues that needed attention. This everyday situation provoked an idea of change as both possible and something that could be made to happen. In various encounters, where ideas of both hardship and celebration co-resided, my appearance with my notebook and camcorder also occupied spaces of a type of field preacknowledgement of how participants understood or tried to guide my role in the expectation that my presence would be interventionist in some way  – this was where some participants envisaged me as someone who could intervene to bring about change, and if not, at least tell their stories to wider audiences. These were also encounters with hospitality, and the co-sharing of power and knowledge, if in differing ways. One of my hosts, a research participant, on one occasion helped me to organise a ‘participant workshop’ to discuss my work and add new data in one of the Guyanese villages. After I expressed interest in holding a ‘research field-dissemination workshop’, she offered her bottom house (space under the house used as an open area to relax and meet people) as a venue and invited other residents who had been part of my research over the years to come and speak with me. I arrived with boxes of food pre-ordered from a popular restaurant, and my then staple notebook and camcorder to reacquaint myself with participants. I was also introduced to newcomers, and to one resident who made himself known as a teacher. On close enquiry from my host, I learnt that this resident appeared to have adopted the title of teacher after first conversing with me for my research as a participant more than a decade earlier. Based on the histories he had narrated to me then, he had apparently started to describe himself as a teacher because he had

x • Acknowledgements

featured in research and had thus appropriated this role through my presence as a researcher-in-the-field. This participant’s understanding of his role in research and the subsequent status he extracted to re-designate himself among other residents bears comparison with certain other encounters marked by self-reflexive individuals who understand themselves as knowledgeable people. Over the years, this category of knowledge emerged variously as people endeavoured to offer data and at times to ‘demand’ my presence to listen to their views and give voice. On one occasion, I was instructed to visit the home of someone who, in deciding that I was seeking knowledge of culture, sent several messages for me to visit him in a nearby village. When I did arrive, he mildly scolded me for the delay and then promptly invited his neighbour, with whom he usually conversed on matters that he felt were relevant to my research, to join us. This neighbour was someone I had to meet, he told me. This was not the first time that people had called upon me to visit or revisit them at home. At times these encounters were about finding out more about my research and finding out generally about the places I had come from, in some cases as potential sources of networking, in others as differing forms of hospitality. These particular encounters were in the Guyanese fieldsites, and mainly in the villages. Such research encounters and forms of hospitality were different among the migrant Guyanese community in New York, where many were often too busy to meet outside of collective events held away from homes. Nevertheless, I ended up at wedding halls, community events and even yard barbecues. I also thank participants who met me outside, telling me that their house was not yet ready to receive guests. On one occasion, this ‘outside’ was literally at the door of a very small structure where a migrant from one of the Caribbean islands resided; he told a sad story of having lost ties with his family as a reason for his new dwelling. On another occasion, it was a well-known fast food restaurant on the busy Liberty Avenue (a short distance from JFK Airport), a thriving commercial area where my host worked. She chatted with me during her breaks and promised she would ‘take me home’ when she obtained ‘her own place’ (i.e. bought a house). I acknowledge these shared moments marked by what was rendered both present and absent. Other encounters outside of the research sites, extending into lifespaces, are also of note. During one of these encounters, I was suddenly greeted by someone who appeared to be a complete stranger; this was while I was having lunch in a city (Georgetown) restaurant. He then told me he had once sat next to me on a plane and we had chatted

Acknowledgements • xi

throughout the flight. I could not remember this and told him so. He said he remembered because he had been about to enter his destination country to ‘just remain’ (overstay) and had been apprehensive – being able to talk en route had made all the difference. He told me his name, but I did not note it down. I never saw this person again and would likely not be able to recognise him with any certainty if I were to see him now, unless he made himself known again. His account lingers. There are other stories and accounts around migration and related life histories to be acknowledged, while untold. This work has benefited from six years of studies at Brunel University where I did my Master’s and PhD in the 1990s. I acknowledge the gains from the intellectual synergies of the Anthropology Department and various staff at Brunel  – a few later became colleagues  – who kindly became my ‘listeners’ in turn, and in varying ways contributed to this very lengthy research engagement. I thank Alison Shaw for many conversations and hospitable moments in discussing my research over several years and allowing me to teach on her module at Brunel in the immediate post-PhD period as I continued to engage with this body of research. I am infinitely grateful to my PhD supervisor, Eric Hirsch, who remained my research mentor post-PhD. I thank him for his critical and engaged approach to my work, his overall guidance and for reading seemingly endless article drafts and fieldnotes as such over the years, generously so. I remain grateful to Adam Kuper, whose comments at the upgrading viva for my PhD remained with me, and for later serendipitous/­ happenstance conversations, such as when I gave a research seminar or literally stopped him to talk as he was hurrying elsewhere. I acknowledge Judith Okely for her constant encouragement and support, over breakfast at her kitchen table and at numerous other sessions, some at her home and some at research conferences and seminars. I am grateful for her readiness to provide feedback on my work, on a number of occasions, on request. I thank Daniel Miller for reading and listening to varying accounts of this body of work at different stages, from informal conversations to critical feedback at University College London (UCL) research seminars. I am also grateful to Helena Wulff, as an attentive interlocutor at different times over dinner or lunch in Stockholm, Washington, DC or London. I also thank Ulf Hannerz for various discussions on work-in-progress. I am grateful to Heather Horst for giving feedback, often in late-night discussions at different American Anthropological Association (AAA) conferences. I thank students who have listened and engaged with some of this work in classrooms at Brunel, Cardiff University and the University of East London (UEL) as well as at guest workshops/summer events at the

xii • Acknowledgements

University of Vienna, Maynooth, National University Ireleand (NUI) and Mahakorn University, Bangkok. Over the years, I have given a number of research seminars on different stages of this work. These include research seminars at the anthropology departments in Brunel University, the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of St. Andrews, the University of Hull, UCL, the University of Oxford, Maynooth, NUI and at several sessions at the annual Anthropology in London conferences. I also thank colleagues at New York University (NYU)’s Anthropology Department for hosting me twice as a visiting scholar (2003, 2015). I thank Cardiff University for funding the 2003 visit to NYU under its Vice Chancellor’s Travel Scholarship, which provided a supportive atmosphere to further develop this work and add to field data. I am also grateful to UEL for funding several field trips at different times to collect additional material. Some of the case studies discussed in this work have featured in earlier articles as part of extensive data collected over a long period. I have drawn on several case studies in my 2008a article in Social Anthropology; data on police and related material have been used and extended in the book. Aspects of this work were presented at Association of Social Anthropologists conferences in the UK and at various European Association of Social Anthropologists conferences in Europe, a Caribbean Studies Association conference in Port-of-Spain, at various AAA conferences across the USA, and American Ethnologist Society conferences in New York and Vancouver, BC. I remain grateful to all who engaged with this work. Any errors in this work remain mine. I acknowledge my family, with much gratitude. I thank my dad, and note in particular the early opportunities to observe his vigorous debates with random visitors who would turn up at our door to tell him about their (different) faith and beliefs. I thank my mother for her vision, at the least. I am grateful to all my siblings and their families for their support and various inputs over the years. These acknowledgements are necessarily incomplete in the thanks that cannot be articulated or the moments in which ethnographic field research becomes entangled with both the sorrows and joys of domestic life. I thank those who are no longer here and I am grateful for the deep immeasurable gifts of support, kindness and love. The rest must remain unsaid.

m Introduction Competing Power: Landscapes of Violence, Migration and the State

This book integrates personalised accounts from research participants with a range of contemporary historical and other material to consider power relations amidst ongoing migration, violence, illegality and complicit relationships in Guyana. In accounts that are both ‘bottom-up’ and macro-oriented, the book considers the contemporary local through violence, agency, disempowerment and loss. This local emerges as and through competing sites of power. The accounts demonstrate the power relations as conflictual in relation to socio-political imaginaries of citizenship and state-making: these are issues of micro and macro dynamics, ranging from persons endeavouring to overturn conditions of structural violence in migration-related activities to external partners including diplomatic agencies seeking to intervene and reorder the local. The book provides ethnographic details on these differing and at times opposing forms of changes in bids for power. In considering migration dynamics, the accounts also demonstrate the reinstating of boundaries as various kinds of power relations. In effect, it considers limits being imposed (see Strathern 1996). The grounded accounts contribute to larger debates on the state, migration and globalisation. The accounts add to literature on an anthropology of geopolitics and mobility (see, for instance, Rapport and Dawson 1998; Hannerz 1996; Jansen 2009; Salter 2008) vis-à-vis specific power contestations in local sites heavily embedded in an outward migration ethos. The accounts consider that different actors mediate ‘unstable processes’ to gain power and negate structural violence (see Leach 1954). Minute bids for power are negotiated against a larger setting as forms of studying up and down through processes (Farmer 2003; Wolf 1972, 1990; Nader 1969). Eric Wolf, in considering a mode of power as useful

2 • Competing Power

to understand how world forces affect those being studied, calls it a ‘false romanticism that pretends that “real people doing real things” inhabit self-enclosed and self-sufficient universes’ (1990: 587). Power as differently negotiated in varying relationships is entangled in violence and bids to counter it. Latterly, the state’s renewed emphasis on bureaucratic refashioning of people allows for an emergence of explicit power in terms of state super-structures, newly privileged and accompanied by notions of mandating ordered bodies and identifying faulty individuals (see Foucault 1984a, b). However, this is also complicated where the state endeavours to be a voice, along with people, in an effort to publicly co-occupy multiply embedded fields of power relations, co-opting roles of ‘on-the-ground’ enactments of power and loss. The accounts, in considering minute processes and larger issues marked by ideas of both static and devalued forms of the local, unveil these landscapes of power where different perspectives come into view, relationally (Hirsch 1995, 2003). Such landscapes are constantly unmade to render visible the dynamics of actors of different status, in bids to compete for power, to limit loss and, where relevant, to evade victimhood. These settings appear through material presencing and physical movements interspersed with fixity, mobility, immobility and violence: settings of ‘untidiness’ cannot always be reordered (Bender 2001). The landscape, in and out of place, unveils relationships: it moves with the person and ‘acts back’ (see Tilley 2009). Vast outward migration continues to mark these processual landscapes of power relations in Guyana as embedded in different kinds of violence. It is distinguished significantly1 by outward migration of people to the point where it is often stated that more Guyanese live outside the country than in it.2 While in Guyana and the Caribbean it has been common over several decades for citizens, among others, to speak of migration as the norm, the fact of such prevalence, in itself, does not set the region apart. The banality of a local that is global is often examined and re-examined to offer varied understandings of change through globalisation issues and to contribute to debates on modernity. Today’s geopolitics recognisably can be encountered through the prism of the ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1964) as evocative of the ‘enabled communications’ so powerfully envisaged by Nikola Tesla (1915) in the early twentieth century. Scholars and practitioners both engage, if differently so, with the idea of the global as compressed space, evident in the blurring of boundaries between local and global.3 However, in considering how boundaries may be curtailed and redrawn, the book brings to the fore different conceptions of a local: a static devalued local co-resides and is often challenged through the local that is invested

Introduction • 3

with creative spaces for power and empowerment. This latter revalued local is less contradictory when grounded accounts are considered in which it oscillates in and out of what is deemed static and gains significance against the idea of a devalued status. Engaging with a mode of limits as a form of re-grounding and obtaining agency for and in the local, the book develops a focus on a recurring theme of external empowerment in Guyana: state actors and citizens seek to extract power and empowerment amidst settings of violence and abuse of official positions. This local occurs and re-emerges as specifically bounded while being a part of extensive global linkages. These are notions of drawing out and in, which follow Marilyn Strathern’s (1996) discussion of how limits can be set in relation to networks4 and particular forms of ownership. The book adds to the literature by considering a transnational approach to the state (Sharma and Gupta 2006). It does so by considering its re-territorialisation: the forms of personalised relations show that people and state engage in state-making and citizenship practices in ways that rebound the local through and as part of belonging in the extra-territorial. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) discuss changing forms of spatialisation of the state as modes of achieving legitimacy and governance above other systems and power centres. They note the socio-political spaces for drawing in the external and the roles of complicit relations5 (see also Sharma and Gupta 2006). In these varied settings often marked by complicit relationships of illegality and corruption (see Das 2004; Gupta 1995), the state is realised in everyday settings amidst discourses and understandings of its unhelpfulness and isolated presence. Certain changes, as challenges and new experiences of violence, emerge variously as efforts to reinforce workable governance and to allow for differing modes of governance (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1991; Jaffe 2013). Further, the state becomes re-presenced/‘legitimised’ through violence and complicity.6 The book considers contexts of professed alienation from the state and of externally led understandings of empowerment: people’s ability to migrate and globally network is also expressive of efforts to evade structural and other types of violence and to effectively demonstrate their agency. Variously, migrants occupy an automatic status and, in some circumstances, have to mediate this status in engaging with those ‘left behind’ and the poor conditions being averted. These interactions are often intertwined with understandings and bids for social justice understood in opposition to structural violence. Johan Galtung’s early work on violence goes into the distinction between physical and structural violence, where the latter is ‘built

4 • Competing Power

into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’ (1969: 171). Galtung (1969: 183) noted that structural violence may be referred to as social injustice. In highlighting structural violence, Paul Farmer (1996) points to the capacities of bureaucratic conditions and other political problems to deeply affect people’s lives (see also Farmer 2003, 2004, 2005; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Galtung 1969; Graeber 2012). Farmer (1996: 263) discusses the daily suffering in Haiti, where he notes stories that ‘illustrate some of the mechanisms through which largescale social forces crystallize into the sharp, hard surfaces of individual suffering. Such suffering is structured by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire  – whether through routine, ritual, or, as is more commonly the case, these hard surfaces – to constrain agency’. Allen Feldman (1999: 4) notes: Violence, here, expresses the deep victimage effects of systems of domination and/or the breakdown or leakage of those systems, but it also requires consideration as a process and performance where social actors enact or fashion agency and victimage within spaces of structural contradiction and discontinuity and systemic breakdown.

Other types of violence attached to notions of a distant state and a particular political setting add to disempowerment where people seek empowerment elsewhere in social imaginaries beyond these limitations. In doing so, however, they continue to engage with particular forms of the local. In re-engaging an overtly devalued local, people also demonstrate, variously, creative ways of dealing with structural and other types of violence amidst new problems that can extend such violence. The varied negotiations of power and disempowerment demonstrate particular people-centred experiences and larger efforts at state-making. A continuing role for complicit acts of illegality amidst notions of a revalued local and externally presenced ideas of empowerment offers particular insights of power as enmeshed in violence. This is also where bids against such complicity and violence can rely on how people and state are reimagined in the ‘new local’.

Local: Competing Sites and Grounded Accounts The local has been variously examined in terms of extensive interactions and movement of people, goods, services and multinational corporations. The idea of an extended local co-resides with predictions

Introduction • 5

of a ‘failed state’ concept and contentions on whether borders can remain pertinent. This term, thus, has been discussed fluidly in the literature on globalisation and state and has also been pluralised as transformative spaces where anthropologists and others point to lived social imaginaries that are both local and global (see Appadurai 1996). In commencing with the local, the book indicates interconnected settings of power, violence, migration and the state. These settings are considered in terms of lived spaces, extended through wider sociopolitical concerns. A body of scholarship has variously considered how people gain agency through migration-related activities (for instance, see Baumann 1995, 1996; Olwig 2007). In seeking social justice, people position the state as the problem, as various case studies show. Further, they locate themselves in external sites as imaginaries that will provide such justice, often, but not exclusively, in the forms of dignity and status as part of or alongside better living conditions. Thus, social justice in this regard encompasses ideas of how conditions and quality of life can change and is presenced against structural violence (see, for instance, Fraser 1998; Galtung 1969; Coutin 2001; see also Rawls 1971, 2001). A notion of social justice as one that is, at different times, part of the foreground and background returns to and extends people’s experiences in dealing with the state and with their local conditions. An often implicit desire for social justice accompanies their efforts to transform these settings through migration and minute status interactions. This notion of external empowerment, while prevalent and a dominant idea of interactions, is also differently experienced and scrutinised where social justice can remain an ideal to be realised. Latterly, the notion of social justice is co-opted as a moral project by the state to re-engage people as citizens and as those who can understand the language of global rights and responsibilities. These terms of framing the citizen in relation to rights bring new problems for those too easily convinced of meaningful change and who misread the level of their own power to bid for rights. This is also where the presentation of ‘externally led’ rights is unsubstantiated in terms of corresponding/ co-residing change that alters particular forms of structural violence. The contemporary context of rights bids amidst differential understandings of power is incomplete without close attention to the recent history of socio-­economic and political problems, as discussed in Chapter 1, for instance. This is where the turn to outward migration was i­ nterconnected with ideas of obtaining social justice.

6 • Competing Power

Migration and Socio-political Settings Many Guyanese citizens became part of an outward migration movement from the 1970s, amidst tremendous socio-political and economic decline in the country. This wave of ongoing outward migration was preceded by other periods of inward migration, which took place against the history of this former British colony in terms of colonial conquest, British plantation ownership, slavery and indentureship (see, for instance, Dabydeen and Samaroo 1996; Seecharan 1999; Smith 1962; Williams 1991). Guyana is geographically located on the South American mainland, with the distinction of being the only Englishspeaking country in South America and often ‘positioned’ as part of the Caribbean. Variously, scholars have considered the interface and presencing of the global to show, for instance, that residents in these countries are innovative creators through appropriation of global influences and artefacts and through their openness to identities (see, for instance, Drummond 1980; Miller 1994; Mintz 1996). Conversely, this emphasis on the agency of ‘local peoples’ can be overshadowed in other descriptors of disenfranchised people, in flight or being dominated by foreign influences, particularly through talk by politicians and in the context of anti-imperialism discourses in the region. In considering the current-day presencing of the global in Guyana and differing kinds of local in terms of citizens on the move in relation to micro and macro power relations, the book looks at both the recent historical period after the country gained independence and at more contemporary settings. Both of these settings are marked by different types of violence, from structural violence to criminal attacks. More recently, this setting has become enmeshed in political banditry as a type of criminal violence where criminals claimed an ethnic cause amidst accusations of extra-judicial violence. Guyana has six main ethnic groups. Indians are the majority and blacks form the second largest group. Hindus are the largest single religious group in the country at approximately 25 per cent in 2012; Christians of various denominations comprise approximately 63 per cent and Muslims 7 per cent.7 The claims and perceptions of the government of the day are presented as the most visible exceptional space where law is used to legitimise unlawful violence (Agamben 1999; see also Kerrigan 2015; Humphrey 2006). Giorgio Agamben’s (1999) work on the state of exception brings out how the production of emergency to act outside the law

Introduction • 7

by governments in the contemporary setting is part of the status quo. As discussed in Chapter 3, violence that was presented as an extrajudicial act, one heavily disputed by the then government of the day, was nevertheless seen by people as distant from their everyday lives. They were more interested in managing and opening creative spaces to evade their inclusion in such bio-political power bids made through violence. The accounts in the book add to scholarship disturbing the failed state thesis, which projects the state as an inadequate model of containment and empowerment. A growing body of research destabilises this failed state thesis (for examples, see Aretxaga 2003; Chalfin 2006; Gupta 1995; Heyman and Smart 1999). The state has a shifting presence in researchers’ foci; it can be deemed absent or present in the movement of people between and within borders and envisaged in terms of practices and discourses of power (see, for instance, Das and Poole 2004; Jansen 2009; Trouillot 2001). This further indicates that the local can be differently positioned in relation to permeable borders. In this book, how the state is realised in the everyday through ‘failed state talk’ and, in turn, a range of illegal and corrupt practices deemed possible by such talk returns to the anthropological work on the cultural production of the state beyond its objective status as an isolated entity so well critiqued by Timothy Mitchell (1991). The notion of power emerges in terms conflictual with understandings of socio-political belonging, if in different ways in countries that were former colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. In bids by people to change their local, a common factor is that of violence at various interpersonal levels alongside migration. In some instances, migration is internal, but more often outward. Such migration can often be perceived to be based on economic factors and is often inseparable from socio-political violence and quests for social justice. Susan Coutin (2001), in a related work on structural violence, shows the need to look beyond economic reasons for the flight of San Salvadorans and Guatemalan citizens from their homelands. Coutin documents how factors inclusive of structural violence and fear informed reasons for journeying to the US. In the Caribbean and Guyana, the problem of plural society, which ‘sanctions’ disunity of ‘opposed’ ethnic groups, is often used to explain ongoing political and politicised problems. This legacy of disunity by means of plural society8 is often expected to clarify reasons for economic problems, corruption and related issues. While Guyana was marked by a particular descent into civil interethnic violence in the lead-up to independence and in this sense ‘gifted’

8 • Competing Power

with a political trajectory that continues to dominate its politics, it was also seen as fortunate in being able to offer educational leadership and being rich in timber, gold and other mineral resources in its vast rainforest. As if unable to escape a ‘pre-determined’ path of political ethnic disunity, it rapidly ‘lost face’ in the wider Caribbean in terms of these advantages. A militarised dictatorship under the first independent leader, Forbes Burnham, and the notion of a people in desperate flight (see Naipaul 1991) would set the tone of reception for Guyanese travelling across the Caribbean, in particular, as people whose bodies had capacities to be mistreated at the regional airports. Simultaneously, many Guyanese were sought for skilled and high-level jobs across the Caribbean and North America. Overshadowed by the specific socio-political problems and historical legacies of inter-ethnic disunity, the country stood apart as a ‘failed state’ whose people were unable to benefit from its major natural and mineral resources, often attributed to the failures of a ‘plural society’ leader to govern well. Trinidad and Tobago, a twin island republic, stood at the boundary of this divide as a state that had succeeded, then buffered by its oil and related conspicuous display of wealth and status. Even more distant was Barbados, whose tourism industry contributed to its bounding off from any developing country persona of conflict and failure (the latter presuppositions of conflict and failure were easy labels for less fortunate neighbours). In more recent times, Barbados has obtained negative publicity for denying entrance to Guyanese and Jamaicans at its borders. In one infamous case, an immigration officer was deemed to have harassed a Jamaican woman on the basis of her nationality.9 Today, both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica are beset with political problems and criminal violence which bear some level of comparison with political issues in Guyana (Jaffe 2013; Kerrigan 2015). This level is suggestive of different dynamics of governance, state and people’s forms of locatedness in the nation-state beyond inter-ethnic divides. This is where such divides are much proclaimed to be the problems of ‘plural societies’. The book, in considering Guyana as a case study that contributes to understandings of the problems of belonging in a nation-state amidst continuing migration, corruption and illegality, moves from comparative possibilities of shared histories and contemporary experiences in the Caribbean region to consider the larger interconnected setting. It considers the social imaginaries that are also politically entangled through the efforts of governments and involvement of external bodies. In developing accounts from the ground, it also considers case studies that mark people’s journeys in the extended local as part of diasporic

Introduction • 9

belonging, particularly in relation to settlements in New York and interactions ‘back home’.

Power, Problems and Person-Centred Accounts Interactions in the contemporary Guyanese setting suggest a displacement in the immediate post-colonial history while rendering its continuing consciousness as part of a ‘problem local’. This local is projected to be necessarily about political disunity. Efforts to displace this history are bound with outward migration factors and social forms of belonging for ‘citizens on the move’. Notions of cosmopolitanism, openness and ‘matiness’ disturb basic ideas of concentrated plural society ­problems as the cause of presumed state failure and people’s flight. Briefly, matiness was imagined as an encompassing kinship idea for inter-ethnic groups who had experienced shared conditions of hardship under the colonial masters and on this basis were united into one group (Jayawardena 1963). This device of matiness has been used to proclaim inter-ethnic harmony in on-the-ground interactions and to counter the larger political narrative of disunity. However, at different times, it has at times come under pressure, particularly in terms of more recent migration changes where some have new cause for discontent. On this basis, a key issue returns to how power is perceived, lost, regained and negotiated at different levels in the larger political setting and in minute interactions. This focus on power draws on different settings marked by interethnic histories and informed by socio-political issues and changes to show that both individuals and state officials are engaged in power negotiations regarding how people wish to be in worlds of their ‘own making’ and people’s perceptions of how the state is enabled and dis-enabled in these worlds. On this basis, the discussion returns to people’s inhabiting of social imaginaries and self-constructions of being citizens of the world as forms of being cosmopolitan (Rapport 2012; Wardle 2010). It also returns to bids by the state to retain authority and provide effective governance. Powerful officials emerge in these accounts as agents for and against the state, where it is the idea of the isolated state that represents oppressive power and signals the devalued local. At the same time, this notion of isolated state is repeatedly disturbed as people and state officials ‘work together’ through differing experiences of violence and devalued conditions to negotiate their lives. In latter-day relations, the state endeavours to show individuals as complicit and part of the problem; this brings out a continuing role

10 • Competing Power

for corruption and associated corruption talk in these changing settings and power relations. As signalled, the presence of the global as the local and emphasis on external empowerment soon indexed these power relations to an extent where the state also drew on external notions of rights and empowerment to renew ideas of the nation-state These settings are fluidly envisaged in terms of how people are also seen to be on the move and efforts by the state to rebound the local and regain authority with citizens, in more recent times. The political period following independence becomes acutely relevant to ‘remember’ and explain the contemporary problems and change: this is where research participants will point to the period before the economy declined. Officials emerge as both oppressive agents and helpful negotiators, bringing out the spaces for complicity as forms of power against different types of violence in micro and macro contexts. In the mix, ideas of ‘big ones’ and ‘small ones’, as different kinds of powerful persons, resurface in ways that engage with contemporary politics of governance and changes in the local. Alongside powerful persons as big ones are also small persons at one level, visible in terms of the devalued local, which is marked by structural violence. Such small persons are considered to be visible without power. However, this construct of small persons warrants scrutiny; those deemed to be disenfranchised and without power constantly endeavour to change their conditions and latterly to bid, if at times unsuccessfully, for power. Each of the chapters reflects, variedly, on these dynamics with examples of people’s experiences at different periods and in relation to different aspects of migration-embedded settings. Ideas of power and rights as externally driven, and to be extracted in the local, have become common in these landscapes marked by illegality and different types of violence. The idea of extensive movement and interactions with an ever-expanding local as one that can be grounded through specific forms of interaction also indicates the relevance of socio-political understandings of the dynamics of competing forms of power. This is where both people and state are enjoined in state-making and governance through varied understandings of empowerment. The political history is one also marked by International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed economic sanctions,10 illegality and corruption,11 which impel particular experiences of loss and disempowerment. People constantly encountered a devalued local. This was experienced in ailing bureaucratic systems, which appeared to block their efforts to leave the country, and/or in the presencing of returned empowered migrants who achieve automatic status in their ability to depart and return. Thus, these social imaginaries, while rendered through minute

Introduction • 11

socio-cultural aspects of belonging and changes, are considered in this book in terms of the tension between political issues of governance, violence and corruption and people’s bids to contest loss and disempowerment. They endeavour to gain status through their positioned presence as those who are beyond the devalued local as a ready ascribed site of loss and to show deep contestation of such loss. These enjoined settings of a devalued local and efforts to extend and transform it as self-capacities for empowerment are variously discussed in this book in different periods of problems and changes. In discussing competing forms of power, the book incorporates everyday settings with socio-political and larger dynamics of people on the move and the state. The macro contemporary issues are reflected on by considering minute accounts of people’s lives against contemporary changes and historical material. The accounts bring out intersecting forms of belonging through instances of dramatic ongoing change, which is at the same time rendered commonplace in a frame of globalisation as the norm. The book, in the focus on power as relevant to understand both micro experiences and macro change, draws in the commonplace to bring out insights on other major contemporary factors of violence. It develops this focus to consider the ways in which people engage and shift localised loss and disempowerment.

Long-Term Research and Privileging Local Voices The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Guyana. This is further supported by research on Guyanese migrants in New York, a main migration destination for Guyanese. The book analyses this ethnographic material to consider the ways in which participants experience their lives amidst ongoing changes. Drawing on different periods of research from the mid 1990s to 2012, the book starts with migration accounts and socio-political and economic conditions. The research includes, to some extent, information being released virtually through various official sites and the media. Some of the material is updated to 2017 to signal certain public changes. The discovery of vast quantities of oil by Exxon-Mobil in 2017 and early 2018 is still yielding new dramatic discoveries of billions of barrels of oil. This adds a new dynamic in the local. The research uses a case histories method to illustrate accounts from these earlier periods (Mitchell 2006). The accounts are further supported by archival material as well as data from court documents, reports from commissions of inquiry and surveys of emerging social media sites.

12 • Competing Power

Fieldwork was carried out over a sustained period from 1995 to 1999 in villages and the capital city, Georgetown, in Guyana. The accounts consider these changes and developments in settings marked by constant movement and by efforts of people to empower themselves amidst violence and corruption. It does so over a long-term period. Additional material was provided on more recent developments by participants and through research on documents and surveys. I was also present at some of the hearings in 2014 for a commission of inquiry into the death of Walter Rodney;12 the material from this commission related to the earlier historical period discussed in the book. The chapters include case histories of people who narrate experiences of an earlier period in detailing their socio-economic conditions and changes. The recent historical period provides context to everyday experiences to show a particular construction of illegality as being of the everyday and as distinct from hard-core criminality. Research on the Guyanese migrant locality in Queens, New York began in response to accounts by Guyanese participants who were involved in global networking and migration bids. Many constantly interacted with their relatives and friends who had left the country. The research on participants in Queens contributed grounded accounts to wider understandings of mobility, illegality and empowerment where people felt forced into illegal flight and/or saw migration – legal or otherwise – as a means of obtaining status and empowerment not present in their homeland. It adds context to the discussions on migration and related factors. Ongoing research continued with key participants and their networks from 1999 to 2012, so the case studies extend through this longterm approach to fieldwork as part of the ‘ethnographic presents’, to allow for material to be located within a particular present at any given time in long-term fieldwork (Halstead, Hirsch and Okely 2008; Hastrup 1995). As an anthropology of the contemporary, this work engages collaboratively with processes as they are happening – an ‘unfolding event’ (see Faubion. 2016). I have remained in contact with some of the participants and have drawn on various correspondence and visits to update material, for instance on views on the general election in 2015 and experiences of applicants for non-immigrant visas to the US during this period. This is ongoing immersion in an extended field where moments of data recognition occur as processual in and out of fieldsites (see Strathern 1999; also Okely 2008; Hirsch 2008; Schatz 2009). Jan Kubick, discussing the value of an ethnographic approach, considered how ethnographers examined the ‘exercise of power within the interstices of official structures, behind the veil of various officialdoms, and in ostensibly

Introduction • 13

apolitical spaces and domains’ (2009: 31). The accounts have also benefited from a new research project to examine new forms of legality in relation to ordering bodies and persons (see accounts in Chapters 7 and 8). In the immersive study of people’s lived contexts on a long-term basis, the anthropological approach as a core disciplinary one connects with related studies, where these knowledge transfers return to an epistemic base of understanding events and changes through the views of participants (see Strathern 2006). The accounts consider the field as extended and one where, as Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog Olwig (1997), among others, have noted, the site has shifted beyond the idea of a bounded locale.13 This considers the fluidity of people’s relations with each other in different aspects of their lives, which are grounded in specific understandings of space and place. Hastrup and Olwig (1997) look at this shift in terms of processual fieldwork, which allows for the ‘non-local relations’ to be explored within such studies. The book, in exploring a processual field of relations, is grounded in the particularity of research conducted on specific participants in homes in particular villages and city locations over a sustained period. This is through participant observation inclusive of attendance and participation in events, and informal conversations, interviews and other ethnographic methods. It benefits from an ethnographic holistic approach (Hirsch 2001): other issues became relevant beyond the immediate research focus of migration and change, thus allowing for a nuanced study on power relations, violence and complicity. By considering the extended processual spaces of fieldwork, participants were connected in separate locations to larger issues vis-à-vis violence and the state. The unifying themes bring out interconnected and co-residing experiences to consider participants’ concerns of everyday living, larger conditions of structural violence and related factors. Increasingly, anthropologists develop their work beyond envisaged theoretical limits. While such development emerges as part of ‘new ethnographies’ to consider the relevance of relationships and larger socio-political and economic contexts, it follows theoretical shifts. Such shifts, also, may be considered in terms of the historical turn in anthropology, which has offered related critiques (see Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Case studies of persons variously demonstrate aspects of their lives at different periods. Some of these accounts are detailed while others are deliberately fragmented and rendered anonymous as part of research approaches that offer anonymity to participants while privileging their views of their lives. The partial view is embedded in how lives can be understood in the processes of happening. This is a focus

14 • Competing Power

on processual spaces to bring out participant’s voices while anonymising them, and allows for approaches which are attentive to critiques and debates on representations (see Halstead, Hirsch and Okely 2008; Strathern 1991, Faubion 2016; Rabinow et al. 2008, for instance). I have published on ethnographic encounters and related issues on this fieldwork, in peer-reviewed articles and also in book chapters (see, for instance, Halstead 2001, 2006, 2008b). Given the intimacy of details and deep study over a period of years, it becomes important not to provide too much identifying detail in a full-length work, hence this approach of deliberate fragmentation as part of ethnographic attentiveness. Further ethnographic notes consider that given the depth of the study and immersive periods, the research encounters and knowledge construction processes are always joined. However, in the accounts, I endeavour to privilege the voices of the research participants where they themselves are visible and not visible in performative modes. Performativity is an ethnographic mode that allows for mutuality of voices (Sanjek 2015) so this is never an isolated perspective. This further relates to social constructedness of lived encounters. Further, the use of fragmentation and the partiality of lives may be considered as anthropologically set against fixity and ideal wholes (see Strathern 1991; Leach 1954). While both the issues of ethnicity and religion surface, with ethnicity also part of violent politics (see Chapters 2 and 3, for instance), the accounts do not offer a traditional focus on narrating ethnic identities. This also considers the broader focus on research participants being cosmopolitan, where their ethnic and cultural identities may or may not become relevant depending on context (see Rapport 2012). The book does draw in the history of ethno-politics, very much so, in the first three chapters. In Chapter 5, in particular, there is some reference to ethno-cultural issues to consider changing forms of belonging in relation to expertness. However, following Daniel Miller’s work in Trinidad (1994), and extending Lee Drummond’s work on Guyana (1980), for instance, the book focuses more on cosmopolitanism than ethnicity and incorporates ethnicity issues where this becomes relevant to particular issues and accounts. Nigel Rapport’s Anyone (2012) may be considered in terms of how people appear and reappear in cosmopolitan settings as relevant to different bids for power. As cosmopolitan, people have opportunities to display their skilled capacities beyond their ‘encircling’ in a particularised static local. In conducting long-term fieldwork over a decade, I formed longlasting ties with certain key participants, who met with me over a period of years. I sat in their homes; in some instances I was present

Introduction • 15

at both celebratory and sad events. I have kept in touch with some of these participants through virtual communication and return visits to their homes. In some instances, if they had left the country or were travelling, I had updates from their relatives and friends. Occasionally, I met with research participants in New York who then asked me to meet with their relatives in Guyana, reversing a trend whereby I would often meet migrant relatives in the Guyanese locations and/or be given details of how to contact them in their host country, usually the US. This book is only a partial account of these encounters given the depth of the research. The fieldwork on the villages and diasporic settings as well as city locations followed the residents in these areas. While they were often of one main ethnic group, their expressions/performative displays showed movements in and out of ethnicity. In one instance, I have described a participant as Host A – this is a key participant whose account at the time was heart-rending, and this approach of naming her as Host A was another effort at fragmentation. It became necessary in the specific account rendered both to acknowledge her host status and to endeavour to ‘de-familiarise’ her outside of other accounts. Note that such descriptors also relate to issues of privacy and/or particular problematic roles. This insufficiently accounts for the immersive encounters. The use of the term ‘host’ also conforms with other recent methodological challenges against the term ‘informant’, for instance (Halstead 2014). Another participant, LB, did not want a name, but giving her initials was about preserving her own expressed distance from ‘stuff’, where she was also an observer of happenings around her not dissimilar to the involvement and detachment of people witnessing or hearing of physical violence and seeking to demonstrate active agency against structural violence. Separately, I have described a participant as Passenger B, to denote less familiar space where the encounters were brief. Other long-term participants are named, where there appears to be less need to attend to extensive fragmentation to provide their rich accounts and to indicate their backgrounds. The style of an opening vignette has been chosen in keeping with contemporary approaches to developing ethnographic research that allows for focus on the participants’ voices. The anthropological example to open ethnographic work, always part of anthropological approaches, is now being made more visible, not least with the publication of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) special issue, ‘The Power of the Example’ (Bandak and Højer 2015). Residents such as Fatima14 (Chapters 1, 4 and 7) emerge as powerful voices to show their transnational presence as externally empowered

16 • Competing Power

persons in the local who can tell of their encounters with early political problems and their bids to migrate. The example of Fatima also shows the context of external empowerment for residents who are in the country, and visible through their external connections. There is also the example of Jean, a villager, who demonstrates her agency and self-empowerment in activities that raise her out of poverty and other bad conditions to become the main breadwinner. Jean’s aspirations are related to her ‘connections’ with an overseas US-based evangelist; the hopes of Ramesh, her husband, are tied to his ‘dream’ of setting up a small business once he receives overseas remittances from a relative (Chapter 4). Other examples demonstrate some of the dynamics of local lives within and outside territorial boundaries. Feroze, a successful local businessman, is always in a prepared state to leave the country, even without papers, and has a stated disinterest in extreme local violence; Lata and Raj are in an overly long sponsorship queue to migrate legally to the US and are similarly ‘distant’ from local politics (Chapters 3 and 7). Returned migrants such as Angela (Chapters 2, 5 and 6), with memories of past oppressive state practices, bridge this gap of distance from the state to show their power as that connected to powerful external passports, as a power imagined to be over and above the state. Those local residents caught between the dynamics of visibility within a devalued local and their self-presencing and networking in external sites become particular kinds of local-global experts as those who privilege their skills over any ascribed loss of status. They do so through the premise that their local is powerful rather than devalued, and this is joined with understandings of what they can offer in external sites in terms of their skills and expertise and as those who are already empowered and needed in the global. This notion of expertness relates to understandings of being modern as people who are competent and knowledgeable in a globally inscribed field of relations (see Trouillot 2003) and, thus, is expressive of agency in terms of what can be achieved through a particular set of actions and possibilities. In this manner, they ‘move’ between borders through the presentation of their self-capacities as competent people able to effectively compete in global settings. Conversely, some endeavour to attest agency by contesting isolated ideas of empowerment. They do so by denying and/or challenging the overwhelming interest in ‘elsewhere sites’ as a claiming of power through their deliberate stance of disinterest. Anand, for instance (Chapter 5), occupies a solo position of ‘not needing’ to migrate among his friends, who are all applying to migrate through a Canadian skills programme. His position relates to other

Introduction • 17

interactions where some began to talk of the spaces to ‘go and come’ as forms of non-desperate travel that allow for agency in the local. This agency, however, draws in the external through people’s overt presencing as ‘already empowered’. These co-residing and alternative bids for status allow for other challenges by locals, not always successful, and, in particular, as challenges to new big ones as migrants who return with power (see Chapters 2 and 5). This is where their very presence brings out the devalued local and positions residents as those without status. Yet these interactions do not change the focus on outward migration and global networking as embedded in a different, but very everyday local where political problems and extreme violence, deemed to be extra-judicial, become further distancing spaces (Chapter 3). A misreading of this power, where it is seen as specifically local in relation to rights, comes out where local residents endeavour to publicly challenge corrupt police and others, which emerges as an over-reliance on rights without connections to powerful ones (Chapter 6). This misreading can also over-rely on the idea of automatic rights as a result of changes whereby the system is expected to work for people without complicit arrangements: for instance, intending migrants such as Lata (Chapters 3, 5 and 7) and Host LB (Chapter 7) find it ‘enabling’ to work within the systems such as those prescribed by migration sponsorship rules. Although the idea of change is accompanied by notions that corruption is at an end and bureaucracy is there to make things work, complicity is still important to convert bad experiences of bureaucracy into enabling spaces – that is, against embedded structural violence (see Chapters 6 and 7). Corruption at state level references the idea of an unhelpful and isolated state and related political problems. Corruption has been seen to be a major scourge in developing economies, a status that emerges in isolation from modernisation approaches despite the spaces for oppressive rule that followed in many countries under these approaches. Various scholars have examined corruption and efforts against it as part of development initiatives. While some anthropological accounts have indicated unease with the use of the term ‘corruption’ in cultural contexts of gift-giving and exchange, for instance, research on the state, power and corruption is being increasingly situated in ethnographic accounts that deal with wider contexts and often incorporate historical analysis. Corruption talk takes on a mandate of dis-enabling particular forms of authority: the possibility of impacts on governance is indicated by Jonathan Parry in his work on India (2000: 28). Such accounts add to critiques of the failed state paradigm. In a setting of corruption and illegality as part of everyday practices, people engage

18 • Competing Power

with the state even as they profess their distance, as discussed in this book. While there is much international focus on countries that fall into failed state talk or are seen to suffer from post-colonial governmental mismanagement, high incidences of corruption are not unique to these countries (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Gledhill 1999). However, a general unease and regard for corruption talk as ‘cancerous’ (Harrison 2004) prevail in countries under sharp focus for development aid and initiatives.15 In present-day Guyana, corruption and corruption talk occur alongside and within bids for power and acceptance of a soft line of illegality. The competing forms of power that emerge bring out how people suffer in particular types of local and demonstrate different attitudes to systems that return to how power is understood, differently enacted and experienced. A particular local of problems and structural violence remains amidst changes when separated from arrangements of power as complicit arrangements between officials and persons. Consider, for example, the readiness of Seema (Chapter 6) to bid for rights publicly, seemingly uncaring of repercussions – Seema accosts a policeman on a bus. He is known to her. She harangues him on the basis that he has abused his power even though she is told by others that she might get into trouble. Another woman, Passenger B, actually gets into trouble through her open challenge to a policeman she believed to be corrupt (Chapter 6). Katy, who applies for a birth certificate in order to obtain a passport, decides that she will not engage in these arrangements and ends up waiting for a prolonged period to obtain her necessary documents. However, she feels very satisfied that she has ‘withheld’ a bribe from those who ‘need to do their job’ (Chapter 7). This attitude is inexplicable to others who feel that rights remain negotiable processes in the grey zones of complicity. However, it points to a latter-day space for public complaining where ‘powerless’ and powerful voices emerge in a local that has new spaces for rights and redress imagined in relation to social justice. A layer of complicity is retained in these bids. Further, individuals are brought into the project of governance as those who are morally at fault and those who ‘know better’ than to act against the law and ‘promote’ illegality and corruption: they are expected to know better through their larger engagement with the external. These negotiations of power bring people into the project of governance where they are also fashioned or fashion themselves as ‘world citizens’ and thus those able to belong in this new local. Here, the state is at work with external partners placing emphasis on universal rights and reform. These new forms of state-making, thus, endeavour to bypass people’s experiences of violence, corruption and

Introduction • 19

the political problems of the past, which resurface not as issues of governing people, but as problems with political opponents. This isolation of the devalued local as political and outside modes of governance returns to a starting point where people also saw the state as isolated. Further details of the chapters are provided below.

Chapters Chapter 1 considers the historical setting in relation to political problems, violence, corruption and outward migration. It considers case studies on people’s experiences in relation to migration bids, migration journeys and select historical material. The recent historical period brings out the context of flight and local devaluation; it also indicates that illegality became the norm whereby many actors sought to obtain status and or become visibly powerful in dealing with the local (as further developed in Chapter 2). The recent history in Guyana brings out different forms of corruption and violence that surrounded the Burnham administration; in the post-1992 era under the other major political party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), renamed the PPPCivic, this would be further complicated by other allegations of corruption and extra-judicial violence (see Chapter 3). It considers that this history also provides a background for a range of complicit relations as negotiations of power amidst quests for social justice. Chapter 1 explores the historical setting that led to extensive outward migration and global networking. It indicates that the dynamics of corruption work both to render the isolation of the state and to show its presence in structural violence. This cannot be separated from perceptions of political problems and the excesses of a then dictatorship government. However, the role of corruption shifts to mundane settings where illegality is splintered into two forms in the breakdown of the economy and the turn to border smuggling for basic food items and, more generally, in bids to depart the country, as further discussed in Chapter 2. These negotiations and complicit relations emerge, in Chapter 2, through particular and changing understandings of big ones, as terms for powerful persons, as noted above. Developing further accounts of power relations amidst illegality, corruption and experiences of structural violence, Chapter 2 turns to a particular local that was conceived as an unchanging devalued site. This was amidst and as part of efforts to migrate and network globally. The chapter develops understandings of a soft line of illegality that was normalised as an underground Guyanese

20 • Competing Power

economy emerged. This form of illegality blurred with various corrupt transactions facilitated by these particular state officials and their allies. It added to perceptions of a devalued local marked by structural violence and efforts by many to leave the country. The chapter considers that ‘big ones’ as powerful persons emerged in various ways and brings out that the illegal and varying expressions of violence continue to mark everyday and socio-political settings alongside the emphasis on the external. In such settings, where victims become agents and vice versa, the complicit spaces of different lines of illegality and how these are experienced in the everyday produce the state through both the moral and the legal and their blurred boundaries (see Gupta 1995, 2005; Shah 2010). This relates to Ferguson and Gupta’s contention that ‘an analysis of the imaginary of the state must include not only explicit discursive representations of the state, but also implicit, unmarked, signifying practices’ (2002: 984). Chapter 3 turns to the ‘local others’ – big ones and potential big ones and their presencing in the ‘problem state’ and in settings of criminal violence. The chapter explores an eruption of ethno-political violence as ‘bids’ to render the local really bad in suspect politics and to reclaim ‘absent’ citizens. This continues to be considered in terms of external ideas of empowerment and status. The chapter brings out understandings of external empowerment and selected politics that allow some to ignore violence or dissociate themselves from these explicitly violent spaces as particular permeable global-local spaces of being ‘present’ and ‘absent’ in the nation-state. The chapter considers that explicit violence occurs alongside the local-global interactions and re-isolates a local outside of people’s concerns. In the process, the local emerges as both devalued and revalued where local politics and violence compete for visibility in these status concerns. This is while people engage with and/or are visible through their external opportunities and connections. The ways in which micro relations occurred around larger sociopolitical factors as part of changing landscapes of power and movement are discussed in Chapter 4 (see Bender 2001; Hirsch 1995, 2003; see also Dawson and Johnson 2001, for instance). This chapter considers specific case studies on various families: their efforts to deal with local conditions and their varied experiences in relation to the emphasis on outward migration and global networking. The interactions variously mediate and challenge the notion of a static devalued local setting. In the changing power relations, ‘small ones’ also endeavour to overturn their visibility as powerless, as indicated. The chapter considers that people developed an idea of external empowerment to deal with problems of everyday living and obtain social justice as a concept which

Introduction • 21

they understood in terms of status and dignity. In considering case studies, this chapter further develops accounts on everyday settings where economic concerns are intertwined with social bids for status. These efforts are embedded in understandings of an external site outside of explicit political resistance or explicit law-breaking. Case studies variously demonstrate how returnees and/or other locals are visible through poor structural conditions. The examples bring out new settings of loss and bids for status in relation to an idea of a static local landscape, as further discussed in Chapter 5, which considers that migrants become powerfully visible in these dynamics of devaluation and new forms of status. The contestations of a devalued local incorporate accounts on migrants and perceptions of their bigness. This is where a new narrative of migration competes with efforts by some local residents to display competence and enact status in a larger social imaginary. Chapter 5 extends earlier examples to discuss how some participants began to show their sense of value and empowerment despite and as part of the ‘external presences’. This related to an increasing emphasis on being experts within understandings of sites beyond the local. However, a new space to bid for rights, which emerged as part of redefining and revaluing the local, led to misreading of power as considered in Chapter 6. New ideas of rights were related to activities of external agencies as well as to the understandings of newly empowered persons as those with external connections or status. Chapter 6 considers that some local residents misread this setting in terms of power relations, where they bid for rights in isolation from complicity and other status negotiations. Although locally resident Guyanese gained status in various ways to disturb ideas of the devalued local, this shift also led to some misreading of the extent to which power could be displayed against corrupt petty officers in public places. This differed from the ways in which migrants were seen as big ones, as discussed. A particular local remains visible through these negotiated spaces of powerful and powerless persons and brings out relations of governance and understandings of what makes things work. The local setting expanded sideways to include the new public displays of power involving different kinds of big ones and small ones; the latter constantly seek to upset understandings that they were without power. These interactions suggest embedded alternative systems that are structurally difficult to shift in practice, despite new complaint forums and a focus on change. An emerging emphasis on individuals as the problem in varying ways reveals a local that has to be corrected and suggests the spaces for action beyond the local. This chapter considers case studies and accounts that

22 • Competing Power

bring out the different bids for power where a local context of big ones and small ones remains relevant. Chapter 7 looks at experiences of external empowerment amidst difficulties and the ways in which this idea of empowerment can be inadequately present in new local initiatives to present better service that draw in ideas of universal rights and systems. The chapter considers that the enabling aspect of empowering people through and despite their difficult encounters with systems in migration and global networking activities is poorly presenced in bids for governance: these bids draw on a bio-political imaginary focusing on compliance and universal rights rather than on violence and a problem state. The chapter develops further case studies and related examples of migrants and local residents. It extends earlier discussions on how external empowerment, status and loss arise for migrants and their relatives to consider approaches to co-residing difficulties. While the emphasis on reform and order endeavours to force illegality and corruption underground, corrupt practices continue as modes of engagement between state officials and citizens. These further demonstrate that power continues to be joined with ideas of a difficult relationship with the state in these larger settings. The accounts consider that blame shifts to the individual as the problem; there is insufficient acknowledgement of their role in governance and corruption remains a problem. It shows that ideas of empowerment have to consider and/or shift power relations embedded in complicit practices as habits of realising the state. Chapter 8 further explores the theme of how faulty individuals are presented as a problem. This narrative of complicit blame-sharing and responsibility remains entangled with the new spaces of external empowerment and the co-sharing of power. The space for people to step up to share blame and responsibility shifts the state and/or government of the day from being explicitly blamed for all problems to co-occupying victimhood and bids for external empowerment. This is also where the state is seen to align with external partners to correct the problem as a mode of effective governance. The chapter signals the growing public interventionist approaches by external bodies, including diplomatic agencies, to engage the state and civil society to follow a particular universalistic mode imagined as being outside of the norm of rights and justice in the country. While the state can, in the form of various official outcries, contest that some of the problems exist as experienced by citizens, it can also become aligned with ‘external approaches’ to frame the problem and to right wrongs. In this setting, morality becomes an index for solutions where violence is seen to be caused by faulty individuals.

Introduction • 23

The chapter explores how these spaces arise in various case studies on domestic violence and public blame-sharing. It considers that various public reactions against wrong-doings by individuals rely on morality, which is being presented as a continuum between individual and state. These notions of morality allow for the individual to be seen as the problem to connect with complicit corruption practices. This chapter explores how citizens’ understandings of the language of external empowerment are being differently co-opted and how violence and problems have to be embedded in actions of people rather than of officials. In this regard, citizens have to take on ‘moral responsibility’ to make the law work given the histories and contemporary settings and as part of being ‘world citizens’. This is a language of universal rights, which becomes hyper-relevant, if oddly so. The chapter explores these sites of public blame-sharing and the idea of moral responsibility to bring out new endeavours for governance which re-bound citizen’s understandings of external empowerment in particular ways that are meant to show the state as effective and governance as workable. In the concluding reflections, the book considers how the field of research and compilation of person-centred accounts brought out competing forms of power. This is where power bids are entangled with experiences and contestations of violence in bids for social justice. Notions of power are further intimately linked with macro factors as forms of socio-political problems and interventions vis-à-vis extensive migration.

Notes  1. This is also similarly being noted of Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago.  2. A World Bank (2016: v) in its statistic for migration in 2016 noted: ‘Close to 93 percent of highly skilled persons born in Guyana lived outside that country, followed by Haiti (75.1 percent), Trinidad and Tobago (68.2 percent) and Barbados (66.2 percent)’.  3. The virtual forms of communication and latterly increasing use of social media, for instance, are a continual redefinition of Jürgen Habermas’s traditional public sphere ([1962] 1989).  4. Strathern (1996: 523) notes that in this approach, ‘Networks rendered contingent on people’s interactions turn out to have a fragile temporality. They do not last forever; on the contrary, the question becomes how they are sustained and made durable. They may seem to depend on continuities of identity (that is, on homogeneity). But heterogeneous networks also have their limits. I shall argue that if we take certain kinds of networks as socially expanded hybrids then we can take hybrids as condensed networks’.

24 • Competing Power

 5. Ferguson and Gupta (2002: 995) note: ‘Claims of verticality that have historically been monopolized by the state (claims of superior spatial scope, supremacy in a hierarchy of power, and greater generality of interest and moral purpose) are being challenged and undermined by a transnationalized “local” that fuses the grassroots and the global in ways that make a hash of the vertical topography of power on which the legitimation of nation-states has so long depended’.  6. See Abrams ([1977] 1988: 76) for a discussion of the state needing legitimisation.  7. http://www.statisticsguyana.gov.gy/census.html (accessed 12 January 2018).  8. This idea of plural society has been destabilised by various scholars. Eric Wolf (1990: 592) cites the work of Anthony Wallace, who argued that ‘all societies are, in a radical sense, plural societies . . .’ ([1961] 1970: 110).  9. See ‘Shanique Myrie Paid by Barbados Government’, Jamaica Observer, 24 June 2014, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/NEWS/SHANIQUE-MYRIEPAID-BY-BARBADOS-GOVERNMENT_16996057 (accessed 31 July 2014). 10. See Naomi Klein’s (2008) powerful account of related impacts in Latin America and elsewhere. 11. See George Danns (1982) for an early discussion of corruption in Guyana. 12. This commission of inquiry (2014–15) would be given a short time to conclude in 2015 by the new government which came into power following the May 2015 election. Thus, the inquiry was ended prematurely. Repeated calls followed by various bodies for the release of the official report into this inquiry. See letter from the ‘For Justice for Walter Rodney Committee’ in February 2016 calling for the APNU-AFC government to release the report, available at http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2016/02/23/we-​ call-upon-the-president-to-release-this-report/ (accessed 23 February 2016). The official report has not been assessed for this book. It was made available in March 2018 on the Walter Rodney Foundation site: ‘Report: The Commission of Inquiry on the Death of Walter Rodney  – February 2016’. http://www.walterrodneyfoundation.org/report-the-commissionof-inquiry-on-the-death-of-walter-rodney-february-2016/ (accessed 25 May 2018). 13. The book notes anthropological critiques of earlier small-scale studies that were affected by understandings of bounded participants in cultural units. These critiques brought out that the constructs of the isolated village as a cultural unit, minus the presence of political factors, in these instances the colonial presence, never existed (see Hirsch 2001; Stocking 1993). 14. All names are pseudonyms unless otherwise stated. 15. Elizabeth Harrison (2007) notes the burgeoning emphasis on corruption and efforts to stamp it out in ‘development talk’. She notes that the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Transparency International (TI) is active in eighty-five countries to work against corruption, and that organisations like the World Bank actively seek to eradicate it. Harrison points to the prominent positioning of corruption in the 2005 report for the Commission of Africa, for instance (see also de Sardan 1999). Steven Pierce (2006) identifies Nigeria as regularly obtaining top place in TI’s list of most

Introduction • 25

corrupt countries. He notes, however: ‘The way in which “corruption” has emerged as a category describing governance in northern Nigeria reflects a continuing interplay between the “local knowledge” of indigenous politics and the “local knowledge” of technocratic bureaucracy which are distinct though commonsensical modes of apprehending the world (Geertz 1983)’ (2006: 889). Olivier de Sardan (1999) points to the differential prevailing settings where corruption talk prevails amidst different levels and actors’ viewpoints (see also Sedlenieks 2004).

m1 Amidst Illegality and Violence Flight and the State

Introduction The man at the embassy gave us visas at different times. We did not apply for our children. It was one way to show we were coming back. —Fatima

This is the voice of Fatima. She and her husband Fazad, a Guyanese couple with two children at the time, applied separately for non-­ immigrant visas to the US. Discussing their bids to leave, Fatima noted that people had strategies to ‘get out’. The strategy employed by Fatima and Fazad was to avoid applying together as a couple to the US embassy in Georgetown, Guyana for US non-immigrant visas. She felt that their separate applications aided the granting of the visas. They spent short separate illegal periods in the US. They both subsequently returned home, but their only son, Sharief, greeted this return bitterly. He asked them: ‘What is over here [Guyana] giving you?’ The story of Fatima and Fazad becomes commonplace in the many efforts to leave the country, legally and illegally, as migration gained increasing momentum from the 1970s onwards. In a literary denouement of these changes, the writer V.S. Naipaul (1991) would describe with great flair how things had become rotten in the state. In the grip of a dictatorship, economic bankruptcy and IMF conditionalities, this decline was on ready display. While the life stories of Guyanese like Fatima and Fazad point to economic flight, their actions are also enmeshed in bids for social justice. This is difficult to disentangle from how they hold the state accountable as the problem and how they are emplaced in conditions of structural violence. Thus, their efforts to bring about change relate to and also

28 • Competing Power

move beyond the economic. Such efforts are centrally located in an engagement with an idea of America as a site that will provide social justice alongside economic benefits. The merits of the ideal of social justice are variedly disabused while remaining a constant in the efforts of many to leave the country. People will narrate their own stories of loss and displacement in migratory journeys. However, the larger and enduring status attached to migration and ‘obtaining America’, whether geographically or socially (in the sense that people talk of leaving for ‘America’, as an envisaged centre separated from other political images), speaks to local conditions and a devalued local site. The case studies of persons migrating or seeking to migrate co-reside with others ‘learning’ not to contest political violence and related banditry. The local becomes reimagined through distance from the state and an increasing turn to external sites as spaces for empowerment and status. Here, the case studies of successful and unsuccessful migration bids are considered in relation to Guyana’s turbulent political history. Accounts are provided from several participants from Guyanese sites and in New York, USA, which offer context and background on recent historical settings in Guyana. These accounts are considered vis-à-vis outward migration and different understandings of illegality and power. In further describing this local setting of power and disempowerment, the chapter integrates person-centred accounts of Fatima, Fazad and others. The case studies include those of Tikkaram, undocumented for many years in the US, and of Lall, an ‘accidental’ political activist who could see no good in chasing after stolen ballot papers in Guyana’s 1980 general election. These experiences signal the power relations that began to develop vis-à-vis the ‘disempowered local’ and indicate the role of the external in people’s lives as socially extended forms of belonging. The accounts bring out underlying settings of oppression and violence as those that help to contextualise subsequent bids for power and empowerment.

Fatima and Fazad Fatima and her husband, Fazad, were living with their two children in a Guyanese village when conditions began to deteriorate in the 1980s. Their life histories, like those of many others, are marked by recollections of the struggle and efforts to find solutions through migration and networking, and also bring out varied concerns with non-economic problems and issues. Fatima will discuss their ‘migration story’ and point to the political and economic changes that ‘enforced’ their

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 29

acceptance of living ‘without the right papers’ in another country, as many others were doing. She was extremely voluble. As I sat one day in her home, writing notes, her young daughter hovered, watching my pen with rapt attention – ‘Are you going to fill ten notebooks?’ she eventually asked. This was an indication of how much Fatima, like a number of other research participants in this book, had to say, and how receptive she was in telling her life story to an ‘ethnographic listener’. Her husband differed in that he did not have time to sit and chat for long. He was busy, trying to make ends meet. He was only occasionally at home, available for fleeting conversations as he moved back and forth to a farmstead he cultivated away from home. Fatima narrated her family’s story in the mid 1990s at her home in a Guyanese village, during my earlier fieldwork. She did not specify the dates of their journeys to the US or the overstays. However, she noted that the hard times and the emotive decision to overstay in the US followed on from the period when ‘pots became empty’ and ‘you could not feed your family’. She pointed to more stable times just before the political and economic downturn in the 1970s. Her recollections of her wedding day were some of the markers of these different times. ‘It was’, she noted, ‘the last big wedding in the village’. They celebrated with the usual displays of hospitality, which included a great display of food. Shortly after, she noted, many foodstuff items were banned by the government of the day. ‘Dhall [yellow split peas], flour . . . nothing was left to cook in wedding pots’, she told me. Fatima and Fazad, both Guyanese Indian Muslims, enjoyed a short period of relative stability before visibly suffering from the socioeconomic problems that had developed in the country. Contrary to practices that meant she would have had to join her in-laws’ household, Fatima had moved immediately with her husband to their own home in a distant village. Her husband was a teacher, and they had some financial independence. She was much younger than her husband and he acceded to her wishes to have their own home. This was in contrast to her contemporaries, who were living in extended families, as was the practice in these particular village settings. However, their financial independence did not last as the economy began to deteriorate. Fatima noted that they were never going to be able to make ends meet because the real value of her husband’s salary as a teacher quickly declined in the turbulence caused by socio-political problems and economic austerity. Things, she added, went from bad to worse. Together, they decided they would go to America.1 This decision appeared to be taken as a way to seek economic benefits but was inseparable from their understandings of what would provide a ‘better life’ and status.

30 • Competing Power

It was also inseparable from their own distancing from the state and ­government of the day. The accounts of both legal and illegal migration show that these choices were often presented in relation to difficult conditions in the country and, by extension, in relation to people’s distance from the state. However, migration and global networking activities became enmeshed with bids for status and empowerment, challenging rigid ideas of the economic migrant. A public instrumentalist emphasis on survival simultaneously produced a space that located the citizen in opposition to the state. In this socio-economic setting, many positioned the state as wrong in a way that families could never be; these understandings localised a contextual notion of justice that emerged in opposition to law and authority, as a routinising of corruption and illegality. As people left the country through legal and illegal migration, responsibilities and duties in the domestic arena shifted; individuals who left were expected to do everything to ensure a ‘migration chain’. Parents could leave their children behind. This violence and separation, the disruption to families and acceptance of illegal migration, in various instances, were seen as better than the locally devalued site, which had its own more dramatic instances of illegality, corruption and oppressive conditions. Telling their story, Fatima noted that while they looked for jobs in the US, it was not about getting ‘any job’. Fazad, as a teacher, expected this status to have merit and recognition to gain him status in America. This relates to the ongoing migration of skilled persons, whereby teachers and nurses, in particular, are in wide demand overseas and can obtain good jobs. Despite being undocumented, Fazad wanted the ‘right job’, and believed that he would be able to achieve this. He believed it would materialise because of his qualifications as well as his understandings at the time of ‘America’ as a place that would provide ‘social justice’, that is to say, enable him to have a life of dignity, and to do so with both social and economic opportunities. This understanding of social justice was marked by his experience of structural violence as part of daily living conditions. Increasingly, the idea of the American dream and justice acquired detractors in geopolitical and related debates in the rise of a security age, particularly after September 11 (see Mamdani 2002; Wilson 2005).2 The notion of social justice underlying migration is one adopted by many in various countries where people will pay tremendous sums to body smugglers in search of better economic and social conditions of living.3 While some of those who use body smugglers are able to pay off the sums in just a few years, as noted in various accounts by the Guyanese,

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 31

for instance, others spend their lives repaying these debts. Fatima and Fazad were to experience, like others, structural violence of a different kind in the migratory destination, which also meant they could not realise the ‘justice’ they sought and expected by journeying to the US. As discussed in later chapters, this poor treatment is not immediately visible in understandings of automatic status that migrants have in the local Guyanese setting, although some will contest who can receive automatic migrant status (see Chapter 5). Fazad remained in the US for ten months. The ‘right job’ did not materialise and he subsequently returned home, overturning his initial decision to become an illegal migrant as the ‘proper choice’ over local conditions in his homeland. Neither Fazad nor Fatima equated this illegal space with breaking the law. They did expect that they would have a better life. However, the experiences of being an illegal migrant in the US led to a new loss of dignity and poor conditions, which meant that Fazad had to accept low-status jobs, something with which he was ill-prepared to cope. Fatima noted: ‘He was too old to be ­starting over’. Fatima herself felt that she could accept these conditions since she was not seeking a high-status job. After her husband returned home, Fatima left for the US and quickly secured a job. However, she decided to give up these economic benefits and to return home – she, too, was faced with poor conditions as someone without documentation. She wanted her family with her; she wanted to see her father again before he died, and as an undocumented migrant it was a real possibility that she would never see him again if she remained in the US. Further, she wanted to see her children become adults. She also has a third child, the young daughter mentioned above, who was born after she returned home. Fatima, on her return, sought out activities to demonstrate that she had benefited from her time in the US, while Fazad adopted a low profile. He returned to a teacher’s position. He also set up a small business away from home, as noted earlier. Fatima engaged more actively with residents, using her time in the US as an empowering space. She began to extract status by displaying herself as knowledgeable and competent (see extended accounts in Chapter 4). However, their children were not happy with either parent’s return. The children had viewed their parents’ departure, despite the difficulty and separation that ensued, as an immediate achievement, a notion that has become enmeshed in tremendous status interactions in the country (see Halstead 2002, 2011; see also Jayawardena 1963; Williams 1991). Their children were dismayed that they had returned. In particular, as noted above, the couple’s son

32 • Competing Power

saw it as a loss. In this sense, ‘forced’ returnees also become attached negatively to poor local conditions and can serve as a reminder that people experience these local conditions as problems with the state. This loss of status by those who return or have never left the country, however, is extensively challenged, as discussed in this book.

Journeys ‘Underground’ Like Fatima and her family, many had stories about their efforts to migrate. In Richmond Hill, Queens, New York, one of the main migrant destinations, many Guyanese residents are focused on sending remittances4 to their families and trying to help their families migrate to join them in their ‘migratory homes’. One example is Tikkaram, who left his village in Guyana for the US when he was just nineteen years old. He had obtained help from a family member to travel via a ship and had eventually made his way to the US, where he remained illegally. Working over a number of years as an undocumented person in a shop, he acquired enough funds to pay for one of his brothers to join him. He endured difficult economic conditions to carry out these obligations to relatives. Tikkaram was the youngest in his family and noted that he had taken on the responsibilities that would usually be shouldered by the eldest, to look after family members.5 The brother he assisted subsequently arrived by ‘backtracking’, that is to say, using an illegal route. Tikkaram kept details about his mode of backtracking deliberately vague. He had also helped to arrange for his sister (who at the time was in Guyana) to marry a legal migrant; the sister had much to offer to the US bridegroom and was not marrying up (global hypergamy), but rather marrying in, that is to say, the marriage was equally desired by the groom (cf. Bélanger and Tran 2009; Constable 2005) (see also Chapter 5). This sister subsequently arrived in the US as a legal migrant, and would eventually sponsor Tikkaram for US residence. The family was also making plans for the other brother to gain legal documentation. Other similar stories brought out accounts of hardship and continual chains of sponsorship, across ethnic groups. One black city resident, Reny, talked about his extended family where cousins were ‘helping’ each other to migrate. His mother, Ruth, noted that her son had left to work on a cruise ship and there was an expectation that he would do well and be able to ‘make things happen’. Some people invariably had a relative or close friend who had made a ‘really difficult journey’ to the migrant destination and endured unimaginably horrific

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 33

hardships. Some of these accounts would emerge at celebratory events or at funerals in New York where relatives would speak of the hardships experienced by older family members (see Chapters 5 and 7). One legal migrant, Jacko, in Richmond Hill talked about how his uncle had left Guyana ‘on foot’, travelling to Venezuela, then to the Panama Canal and then to the US. He declared in initial conversations that he would like to have his uncle’s story documented. He then noted that it would be best for this uncle to tell his own story, and that he would arrange for the uncle to do so very soon. The uncle never materialised. The relative who was telling this man’s story presented himself as arriving legally with the correct immigrant visa and so was all the more moved by the hardships of his uncle’s journey ‘by foot’. He then noted that his uncle preferred to remain ‘underground’. The retelling was a continuity of this hardship experience, which seemed to require the uncle’s perpetual absence. It appeared symbolic of ‘people underground’ in these landscapes marked by movement and violence and attesting to numerous efforts by ‘ordinary people’ to empower themselves by making and speaking of o ­ vercoming difficult migratory journeys.

Recent Histories: Political Violence, Corruption Talk These difficulties have little visibility against the really bad local, a situation in which police officers and politicians, among others, gained notoriety as criminals during the ‘Burnham days’. The image and knowledge of corruption of certain institutions have continued to the present day in Guyana. Some have fled or endeavour to flee what they deem direct political violence. This was seen, for instance, in the terrorising of the majority Indian6 ethnic group by a criminal faction known as the House of Israel, the ‘legitimising’ of the House of Israel to ‘handle’ dissenters, and the conducting of fraudulent general elections, as discussed further below. From the 1970s, the new visibility of citizens on the move in Guyana was complicit with their understandings of the state and government of the day as occupying a space in opposition to their aspirations, where this isolated role ‘effected’ structural violence rather than acceptable governance. At various public buildings, queues soon became more definitive of collective efforts to leave the country. The political setting of overt corruption, violence and complicity amidst on-the-ground experiences of socio-economic conditions can be historically referenced to the deep leadership challenges and divisions

34 • Competing Power

in the pre-independence period in what was then British Guiana. Two leaders,7 Linden Forbes Burnham and Dr Cheddi Jagan, initially united under one political party, would later move to lead separate parties, divided ethnically. This raced8 division today continues to have implications for the country’s troubled political settings. This division was fostered by the interventionist strategies of external agencies such as the CIA in local politics. Burnham became prime minister amidst violent secession struggles in 1964. Despite being considered an opportunist by the British (see Schlesinger 1965),9 Burnham won external support. He did so after the main Indian leader, Dr Cheddi Jagan, had emerged as Marxist (see Premdas 1994). Burnham led the country into independence in 1966 through a coalition with a Portuguese faction. This was a minority group. Burnham would seize power fraudulently in 1968. Various analysts felt that Burnham in those early years missed the opportunity to work for greater harmony. His sister, Jesse Burnham, in a pamphlet titled ‘Beware my Brother, Forbes’,10 noted that he was seeking power at any cost. The Burnham government became a dictatorship and relied heavily on media censorship, control of the military and political patronage. The government was heavily implicated in the breakdown of legal structures through its militarised dictatorship, as various scholars have noted (see, for instance, Danns 1982; Mars 2001; Morrison 1998; Premdas 1996; Rose 2002).11 Burnham died in 1985 after ruling the country for twenty-one years. Amidst public blame-sharing, the People National Congress (PNC) government under Burnham (1964–85) is seen by some to be the definitive source of corruption and violence in the contemporary setting. This attribution is subjected to many challenges, including from those who have called upon the renamed PPP-Civic government (which lost power in May 2015) to examine its own excesses. The challenges, as part of a political and civil society project to ‘deliver’ legality and expose abuse of power, are buffered by a vociferous media in the post 1992 setting. Ethno-political bandits (those who use violence in the name of an ethnic cause) inflame ethnic tensions and add to the increasing violence around the criminal activities of some police officers, including the feared black clothes police (see Chapter 2). The activities of drug criminals add to this setting. As discussed further in this book, extreme violence erupted around allegations of death squads, extra-judicial killings, police criminality and ethnic-led attacks on certain villages. Following an escape of five criminals from the country’s Camp street jail on 23 February 2002, a distinctive period of violence ensued until

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 35

August 2008 when security forces killed the feared criminal escapee, Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins. In the 2000s, corruption claims have escalated to the point where a coalition party, APNU-AFC (A Partnership for National Unity  – Alliance for Change)  – rooted in the PNC and Working People Alliance (WPA) political parties – publicly proclaimed the problems of corruption as a key part of their campaign. This party won the election in 2015. This emphasis on corruption endeavours to overturn ‘race’ and the idea of inter-ethnic problems as a prized twinned political product. Corruption talk is seen to have played a role in this 2015 general election, where after twenty-four years (following the 1992 election), the PPP-Civic lost to the coalition government. In present-day Guyana, corruption and corruption talk occur alongside and within bids for power and some continuation of a soft line of illegality. This also returns to the history outlined here after independence and to the changes in relation to outward migration. Some of the activities such as electoral fraud and violence are considered further below in discussions of both structural and physical violence. The country also faced a tremendous external debt and had non-existent foreign currency reserves at the time. Although it obtained loans from the IMF on what were considered to be easy terms,12 many experienced a harsh economic climate and suffered under the conditions for economic recovery, as discussed further below. During the period from the late 1970s to 1985, people were finding out to their cost the readiness of some to be violent for official causes amidst settings of corruption. The black historian Dr Rodney emerged as serious opposition to the Burnham administration.13 Dr Rodney founded and led the opposition party, the WPA, which attempted to splinter the raced politics of division. Using the discourse of inter-ethnic tension as a point of departure, Dr Rodney and his party focused on a cross-unity platform to render obsolete the over-reliance on ethnic stratification. Dr Rodney was killed in a bomb explosion on 13 June 1980.14 The bomb had been concealed in a two-way radio given to him by a Guyana Defence Force (GDF) solider, Gregory Smith,15 who was believed to be on a clandestine mission. Like the colonists, the Burnham regime used the military as a base to secure and maintain political control (Danns 1986; see also Griffith 1997: 275 and Griffith 1991). The military came to be seen as Burnham’s personal army: all appearances suggested that the primary aim of the GDF was to deter coups and the military would become significantly involved in electoral fraud. Two PPP (the main political opposition party) supporters would be killed for protesting the removal of ballot boxes.

36 • Competing Power

Intentional Violence: The Arrival of a Thug Burnham’s control was further based on an informal network of spies. A thug arrived in 1972 to extend this setting of fear and was seen to target political enemies of the administration. This man was Rabbi Washington, much feared by those with whom he came into contact. Washington was the assumed name for David Hill, a US fugitive who fled to Guyana after jumping bail on charges of larceny, blackmail and tax evasion (Rose 2002; see also Hope 1985: 65). Hill had formed a religious group, the House of Israel, in the US. He used the title of Bishop, a status he would also claim in Guyana. He viewed Africans as the original Hebrews. After fleeing to Guyana, he took the name of Washington, and established another ‘House of Israel’.16 He became known as Rabbi Washington. This group presented itself as a religious organisation and had a weekly radio broadcast. It came to be seen as a ‘black supremacist cult’, and deadly criminal. The coercive image of the Burnham administration was extended through links to the House of Israel. ‘The Rabbi’ gained a growing reputation as a thug, and his group became an enforcing body against anti-government protestors. The activities of this group extended understandings of gangs being used for political purposes. One Georgetown resident recalled a narrow escape from the attentions of this Rabbi. She noted how she had heard from an acquaintance that the Rabbi had seen her somewhere near the courts in Georgetown while she was attending to a civil matter and he had enquired about her. He wanted to talk to her. She had gone repeatedly to this area at the time and it seemed the Rabbi or his ‘followers’ also hung around in the vicinity and were known to have businesses in nearby areas. According to local beliefs, she noted, people belonging to his group were everywhere. For instance, some of the iterant vendors walking the streets selling nuts and packaged fried plantains belonged to his House, so he had ears everywhere. She was horrified about this interest and took steps to avoid the area for a while, believing that she was in imminent danger of being abducted or forced into his organisation. By taking due care she managed to evade any further attention. Others were not so lucky.

Silencing Dissent In 1979, a British citizen and Catholic priest, Father Bernard Darke, was among those who suffered from the House of Israel’s deadly violence.

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 37

Father Darke was chased in the streets by thugs from the House and stabbed to death. He had been taking photographs at the time, and the incident occurred before members of the press. His killer was Bilal Ato, a member of the House of Israel. A photograph of Father Darke fleeing from the criminals has been memorialised and is on the cover of a book written by the Portuguese Jesuit priest Father Andrew Morrison, believed to have been the intended target (Morrison 1998). Father Darke had been mistaken for Father Morrison who led a fearless investigative journalistic crusade against the regime as editor of the weekly ­publication, the Catholic Standard. Amidst heavy media censorship, this small newsletter from the Roman Catholic Church17 had stepped into the breach. This religious publication became intensely political in writing against the excesses of the Burnham administration and became known as ‘opposition news’. Father Morrison died in 2004, aged eighty-four. He was awarded the Pedro Joachim Chamorro Award for Freedom of the Press by the InterAmerican Press Association (IAPA) for outstanding journalism. He also received the Guyana Arrow of Achievement. Father Darke had been taking photographs of anti-government demonstrations at the time of his murder. It was believed that he had been photographing Washington and a policeman who were together at the time. He was killed in the presence of press members who filmed the incident. Despite this evidence, however, it took three years before Ato was brought to trial for his murder. His charge was reduced to manslaughter and he was sentenced to eight years in prison. At the 2014 state-led commission of inquiry into the killing of Dr Walter Rodney, a former priest of the now defunct House of Israel, Joseph Hamilton, confirmed that he was at the scene of the pursuit of Father Darke. He said he had played an active role by fleeing with Father Darke’s camera after it had been grabbed by members of the sect. He said he took the camera to the sect’s headquarters in the city. At the inquiry, Hamilton named a then government official as a provider of guns and ammunition to the House of Israel. He testified that the House of Israel was approached by the government in 1978 to disrupt activities by the WPA. He testified that he himself as a student priest had been involved in meting out violence to political opponents. Hamilton had joined the ruling party, the PPP-Civic, and was one of its MPs at the time he testified. Counsel for the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R) at the inquiry sought to discredit his testimony. In the post-Burnham era, in 1986, Rabbi Washington and other associates were also charged with the murder of another Church member, James Lamaizon. Washington’s charge was reduced to manslaughter

38 • Competing Power

and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He died in New Jersey, USA in 2005. This targeting of Roman Catholic Church members and priests marked other efforts to close off dissent, with the regime using differing means at its disposal in addition to violence. Variously, the Burnham regime sought to undermine opposition that was religiousbased through arrests, co-optation of leaders and through brutal violence. People were killed across ethnic groups. The Burnham government made efforts to ‘integrate’ other groups as efforts to silence critics and likely dissidents. It first obtained support from the opposition PPP for its undemocratically elected government through its nationalism strategies.18 It made alliances with certain elite Indians and with Indian religious organisations,19 while House of Israel’s members roamed as ‘kick-down-door’ bandits to terrorise Indian homes in the countryside (see Morrison 1998). The House of Israel gangs, in roaming the countryside to propagate violence, professed an ethnic cause as a political emphasis on interethnic tension and propagated the idea that they could deliver massive bloodshed for the cause. They came to be seen as ethno-political bandits through the ways in which they targeted Indian families, and joined their activities with claimed political recognition for this line of illegality (see Chapter 3). Conversely, the politicised inter-ethnic tension saw consequential efforts to portray a particular ethnic group, the Indians, as a problem. Separated from the space of helpfulness, the state was experienced through what was professed to be unintended violence against an ethnic group – Indians – or alternatively through those who carried out brutal acts of violence in its name, targeting other groups, including the Portuguese Jesuit priests. People experienced this violence in differing modes. Both political discrimination and violence often crossed group boundaries. Amidst cultural-specific fears, many Guyanese across ethnic groups also suffered, as Walter Rodney would document (Rodney 1990: 78–79). The military helped with fraudulent elections. The following shows how several villagers got caught up in the messy political scene and believed they had rights, that is to say, could challenge what they saw as a criminal act by the military. They learnt to their cost the ‘foolishness’ of this endeavour. Three of the men subsequently left the country.

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 39

Chasing Boxes: Agency and Bad Politics It is 1980 and everywhere in the country some are turning up to vote. Also, suddenly arriving at some polling stations are men in army vehicles. Four villagers at a polling station in a village, having just voted would not make any immediate sinister connection when they saw one army vehicle arriving. However, they act,20 without thinking of the consequences immediately; something was amiss and they could sort it out. —Fieldnotes

The men, all Indians, were standing in front of the polling station when they observed the arrival of an army truck. Men attired in the uniforms of soldiers emerged and collected the boxes. Lall, one of the men who subsequently narrated this story to me in the mid 1990s at his home, noted that they all became immediately alarmed. They had heard rumours of ballot tampering. It seemed these rumours were true; they felt there could be no other reason for these soldiers to turn up in force and collect the ballot boxes. The 1980 election was deemed to have been ‘massively rigged’;21 a team of international observers led by the British former MP Lord Avebury noted that this electoral fraud was perpetrated to an extent that made it difficult to hide the fraud within or outside the country (Avebury and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group 1981). A separate on-the-ground account came from a Georgetown resident who described how a soldier, who was a distant acquaintance, was standing in the marketplace on the eve of the voting day. She passed him on her way to do her shopping and he stopped her in a rather distraught manner. He could be overheard as he told his story and he showed his hand to her and a few others who hovered. She noted that he expressed his own horror at what had happened, and seemed to want to confess, describing how he had been forced to ink many ballot papers. She, like others who heard the account, then carried on with her ‘everyday activities’. She did not see the soldier again. The role of the military in maintaining the power of the ruling party has been variously documented. Ivelaw Griffith (1997: 275), for instance, has noted: ‘The ruling party used the military to help subvert elections, harass critics and often as scab labor, where there were politically-motivated industrial disputes. The military pledged loyalty to the PNC and Burnham . . .’. At the time, Lall and his friends decided that they could not simply let the removal of the ballot boxes by the military men happen. At this stage, they had not thought it through and they believed they would have recourse to rational-legal processes embedded in the state (Weber

40 • Competing Power

1958) in stopping the men from whatever illegal action they were embarked on. They believed they would be able to rescue the ballot boxes or that they would find authorities who would be impressed by their evidence of the situation. On that basis, they decided to follow the army truck to the city. He noted that they followed the truck to Queenstown, a Georgetown sub-district. At that stage, the men in the army truck intercepted them and took them to a police station. They were then stripped to ‘we buckta’ (underwear) and held in a police cell until morning. They were never told of any charges or had any discussion on the matter with anyone at the police station. They were released in a semi-naked state. Accounts of police wrong-doing (see Chapters 2 and 6, in particular) abound and there is currently ongoing emphasis on corrupt practices and abuse of power alongside efforts to institute reform of the police force. The treatment of these villagers can also be compared to other kinds of stripping of male prisoners. Horrific accounts of stripping male prisoners as part of cultural shaming practices gained worldwide attention in the Abu Ghraib disclosures, detailing how US soldiers participated in acts of torture on camera (Caton and Zacka 2010). However, while in Guyana, historically, the political ethno-landscape had a narrative of altering the majority vote held by Indians and silencing the political opposition, the abducted men were not rendered semi-naked for cultural reasons; this attention to captive men in terms of stripping, and also mutilating, is a disempowerment tactic across cultures. It is used to gain power against those who might protest or affect a particular political order. The treatment of the four villagers was mild compared to more publicly known recent cases of people being tortured in police custody in the country, an infamous one involving burns being inflicted on a black young detainee. Images of these burns, including those inflicted on his genitals, were widely circulated and endeavour to overturn the idea that only Indians are tortured by politicals.22 This more recent case of police torture suggests that it is used against men to subdue them rather than against men of specific cultural orientation. After Lall and his friends were able to obtain clothing, they decided they needed to complain to the political opposition party, believing that they would be able to do something to address the seizure of the ballot boxes. Although a parallel economy flourished on the basis of lawbreaking, the four expected that the law would still be upheld when it mattered. This anomaly of the invisible presencing of the law as effective remains alongside what has emerged as ‘normalised illegality’, that is, a soft line of illegality (see Chapter 2). However, their report was received and ‘filed’; the persons they spoke to gave no encouragement

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 41

about legal redress. The men felt discouraged by their reception. This lack of response helped to detach them from politics. Three of them were subsequently successful in permanently leaving the country. At that time, many were already turning to outward migration and avoiding explicit involvement in politics. Some paid with their lives for such involvement, as the accounts further below demonstrate. Experience of manipulating votes was gained in the 1968 election.23 The 1973 election, also, was deemed fraudulent (Hintzen and Premdas 1982). The regime wanted a two-thirds majority in the 1973 election, and there would be massive irregularities to obtain this ‘mandate’. The Library of Congress records note the fraudulent processes of the 1973 election and the questionable involvement of army members (see Merrill 1993). Ballot boxes were taken to the army base, Camp Ayangama, and held beyond twenty-four hours without explanation. Burnham admitted on a radio broadcast that there had been some electoral irregularities: his government pointed the finger at greedy registration agents motivated to fabricate numbers because they were paid on a head-count basis. The main opposition party, the PPP, had refused to take up their seats24 in parliament in 1973, although they would later be manoeuvred into critical support of the Burnham government, as noted further below. As the Library of Congress country studies documented, two PPP members were also shot and killed for protesting the removal of ballot boxes in 1973 (Merrill 1993). In the early 1970s, electoral fraud became blatant in Guyana. PNC victories always included overseas voters, who consistently and overwhelmingly voted for the ruling party. The police and military intimidated the Indo-Guyanese. The army was accused of tampering with ballot boxes. (Merrill 1993: 24)

Amidst criticism by external observers (see Avebury and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group 1981) and some resignations by senior GDF officers, the Burnham government continued to preside over a militarised dictatorship. Following Burnham’s death in 1985, certain changes occurred following pressure by external donor agencies, associated agencies and ‘concerned observers’. Desmond Hoyte took over the presidency. The initial commitment by the Hoyte government to the Burnham government’s policies could not be sustained and it had to change course in order to address a worsening economic crisis.25 Prior to the 1992 election, the Hoyte government would also effect economic reforms and other changes, which saw the relaxation of media censorship, for instance, with the establishment of a private newspaper, the Stabroek News, founded by the Portuguese David de

42 • Competing Power

Caires. The attention of the Hoyte government to external creditors was a radical departure from the Burnham years and shifted the visibility of the government from a closed space of politics. External intervention in politics became an increasing possibility for positive change. The Hoyte administration also relied on the military to maintain power. The army chief of staff, Norman McLean, proclaimed that the army would take charge of ballot boxes for the impending election. Various civic groups, including the Guyana Bar Association and the Guyana Council of Churches, condemned the violent role played by police and army members in securing a victory for the PNC. The Hoyte government had presided over another undemocratic election. However, external observers were gathering force in addition to changes in global settings, with explicit US intervention through former US President Jimmy Carter. He was seen as an interventionist figure, a ‘big one’ (see Chapter 2), in effecting electoral change; this would lead to the first free election in 1992 won by the PPP, which renamed itself the PPP-Civic, as already noted. As discussed in Chapter 3, new concerns about extra-judicial violence followed in the post-1992 setting. Intervention by external ‘observers’ and others can thus be considered part of everyday settings, as discussed further in this book.

Ethnic Violence: Political Constructions and Cross-ethnic Discrimination The problem of race as another orchestrated publicness of inter-ethnic division added to the political setting, with some families believing that economic decisions to ban certain food items under the Burnham administration were acts against ethnic groups. Alongside this publicness of ‘kick-down’ pillage led by the House of Israel thugs were other types of inequities against all ethnic groups. This was largely reflected, for instance, in scarcity of essential food items, which was also marked by criminalising of shopkeepers through price control of goods and the exercising of ‘absolute power’ by some petty officials. The country struggled to import food items deemed by many to be essential, including wheat flour. While some felt the banning of food items to be politically motivated and directed at particular ethnic groups, people across ethnic groups would talk about the banning of food items; wheat flour was a main topic. People were forced to use rice flour. As Pearl, a black resident in one of the villages, would note, this diet ‘punished children to grow’. Without flour, some blacks wanted to know: ‘How can we eat bread as Christians?’ Hindus and Muslims asked: ‘How can

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 43

we eat roti [staple flat Indian-type bread]?’ One Hindu in the same village noted: ‘Can’t make prasad/manbodh [religious sweetmeat offerings] without flour . . . How can you come to my wedding without having prasad?’ Although Indians felt targeted, all groups suffered as a result of the banning of wheat flour. Substantial plans were made for an agricultural programme to produce food in sufficient quantities for nationwide consumption. Meanwhile, widespread shortages of food items prevailed. Anthropologist Terry Roopnaraine (2001: 52) noted: ‘In the 1970s, the Guyanese government pursued a programme of economic isolationism designed to enhance national self-sufficiency. One element of this was a ban on nearly all imported foodstuffs and trade goods’. In placing an emphasis on ‘growing local’, the government wanted to move towards self-sufficiency. The localised saying, ‘While the grass growing, the horse starving’ became even more popular as food items became scarcer. The country’s economic coffers soon emptied. It was not possible to finance any significant foreign imports. One of the stories that circulated involved a ship that had turned up loaded with items and had to be turned away because there was no money to pay for the goods. Another story that surfaced told how, in the midst of the crisis, offers for foodstuffs were made but were refused by the Burnham government as they wanted people to ‘grow local’. People began to believe stories that showed the government was against them and wanted them to suffer. Burnham was keen on nationalisation (see, for instance, Bartilow 1997, Premdas 1982). He ‘sent home’26 famous stores: Bookers27 became Guyana Stores and, one after the other, foreign banks closed operations. In some instances, their owners sold their entities for one Guyana dollar (see, for instance, Lakhan, Lakhan and Singh 1990: 70) to the government and were never seen again. The statue of Queen Victoria was consigned to rest among foliage in one of the city’s gardens in a rather disreputable manner.28 The situation was entangled in complex exercises of power. Thus, the politics of the 1970s and 1980s relied on divisive approaches even while there was a national call for unity on the basis of everyone being ‘one people, one nation, one destiny’, the national motto. Stanley Tambiah (1989) has discussed ethnic conflict in countries such as Guyana to identify different phases of nation-building marked by particular periods being produced through labels and sloganeering. Brackette Williams (1991) was told of these slogans by participants in her anthropological study: the slogans were represented as a ­commitment to national unity and the singularity of groups.29

44 • Competing Power

The image of the two main political parties added to the construct of ethno-divisive politics. The political and cultural histories of the main ethnic groups30 have been exploited at a political level; at various times, this was seen as extreme (see Premdas 1996; Rose 2002). Various scholars have drawn on this history31 to illustrate the nature of the ‘raced politics’ as voting became stratified according to the ethnic affiliations of the two major political parties that emerged in the lead-up to independence. The state-led commission of inquiry into Rodney’s death in 2014 saw a number of key WPA activists providing testimonies about this historical period. Accounts came out of intensive state surveillance of political parties and the disappearance/lack of official records by the state entities involved in such surveillance. The exclusionary spaces that emerged eclipsed everyday relations and constantly suggested that the nation-state could only be realised through attentiveness to ethnic tension and consequential problems. These spaces became mapped in relation to violence attached to the state and committed against the people. Some sought to seek asylum status on the basis of ethnic violence and this would be a recurring focus following the 2002 jail break mentioned above and the deadly violence which followed, particularly on residents in several villages. The criminal escapee, Ronald Fineman Rawlins, would claim credit for the Lusignan massacre in January 2008 when eleven Indian residents were killed by gunmen armed with AK47s.32 This would be followed by another deadly attack in February 2008, the Bartica massacre, which was attributed by security forces to Fineman and his gang. Three police officers would be among the twelve people across ethnic groups killed in the one-hour rampage by armed bandits.33 The Lindo Creek massacre later in July 2008, which saw the death of eight miners would also be attributed to Fineman and his gang, although this was disputed by others. Further killings include the government Minister Satyadeo Sawh, his sister Phulmattie Persaud, brother Rajpat Rai Sawh and security guard, Curtis Robinson. They were killed on 22 April 2008 at Sawh’s home on East Coast Demerara. A commission of inquiry (COI) was ongoing in 2018 into the Lindo Creek massacre event. The current government has stated that other COIs into the various incidents of deadly violence from 2002 will follow.34 From the 1960s to date, spaces for ‘sanctioned’ violence are seen to be part of the socio-political setting. The police are implicated in an increasing abuse of power. From the early periods under the PNC, as the economy went into decline and socio-political conditions deteriorated, segments of the police force would mandate their own law.

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 45

These officers collapse the idea of ethnic discrimination by dealing with anyone who wanted help against the ‘oppressive laws’. While these policemen were not the only complicit partners, they were the most visible in these spaces of corruption and in relation to violence, as this book demonstrates. The issue of inter-ethnic tension has continued to dominate a particular political agenda. It has also been experienced in ‘ordinary settings’ in selective ways vis-à-vis more intensive engagement with imagined external sites for empowerment. This is distinct from political tension generated around the country’s general elections post-1992. Talk of race problems at various levels insufficiently accounts for the ways in which people’s emphases on outward migration and global networking co-resided with or shifted spaces for inter-ethnic tension that were heightened politically from the Burnham years. Corruption claims – where politicians, officials and ‘ordinary people’ are presenced in corruption in multiple public spheres  – variously separate or join with these understandings of race problems (see later chapters). This is where corruption, its problems and the need to eradicate it enter performative modes facilitated by multiple public spheres and where external partners and others discuss ‘workable governance’. As noted, it became a successful electoral platform in 2015 to unseat the PPPCivic government, which had been in power since 1992, first obtaining power on a pro-democracy mandate. As many became more involved in global networking, the space of inter-ethnic tension became another ‘annoyance’ that some had to put up with as part of their understandings of the state. These understandings emerge as variously shared across ethnic groups. However, in a more contemporary setting, the mode of delivering citizenship through inter-ethnic tension has gained new leverage. The ‘lack of realisable benefits’ from the state is increasingly being publicly positioned by civic and political actors as mired in ethnic exclusion (see Chapter 3). This is often overshadowed – apart from explicit criminal violence seen to be political – by continuing bids to migrate, acceptance of a soft line of illegality and new concerns about corruption of politicians and other officials in new public spheres. Some citizens continue to find their solutions outside of these politics, where migration and global networking activities are part of everyday settings. New understandings of power and status circulate: the state and state officials became only one part of power bids. Narratives of violence through inter-ethnic tension, for instance, lost and gained significance in tandem with experiences of outward migration and status and empowerment. Despite significant changes after the Burnham era,

46 • Competing Power

there is ongoing illegality and corruption marked by differential bids for power and status, which cannot be extracted from the presencing of the global in forms of people moving in and out physically and socially. This is where the landscapes are constantly in process as external imaginaries of belonging (see, for instance, Hirsch 1995; Bender 2001). Further, people act on understandings of being ‘world citizens’, as discussed in this book. The illegal became part of fluid landscapes marked by distance from the state vis-à-vis experience of violence and processes of outward migration and global networking. Amidst the reforms, illegality of different kinds continues to be part of the setting.

Conclusion The socio-political setting has developed through illegality and violence vis-à-vis the turn to outward migration and global networking. A case study showing how a family began to distance themselves from the state through their engagement with an external site and their acceptance of the need to break the law related to other examples of problems in the local, flight of people and differential quests for social justice. Both historical material and accounts by participants, variously, contextualised different types of violence, the turn to illegality and general interest in outward migration. This chapter has considered a local setting where the state, through different settings of violence, was often presenced in people’s everyday lives as experiences of hardship. It brought out some of the recent political history in relation to the Burnham years to indicate structural conditions that marked the turn to outward migration and which were embedded in different understandings of power. The state was seen to be apart from the external space for empowerment and, in some instances, without power to enact the law, a position that has new challenges in current-day settings, as discussed later in this book. Illegal migration, as signalled through accounts by Fatima and others, and related illegal activities were normalised as part of survival approaches. However, these activities became enmeshed in understandings about and bids for status and were markedly extended forms of belonging. The next chapter adds to this discussion on bids for power and agency by different actors amidst the publicness of a devalued local setting. It considers other kinds of violence, the emergence of a parallel economy and various displays of agency. This is where actors along the socio-political strata continue to bid for power, empowerment and status. This continues the theme of a globally presenced local through

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 47

understandings of external empowerment vis-à-vis social justice and against ideas of structural violence.

Notes   1. ‘America’ was the common term used locally to refer to the US.   2. See also the recent situations relating to the Calais camp in France. People in this camp sought to reach Britain from a European country. ‘EU Migrant Crisis: Clashes as France Clears Calais “Jungle”’, BBC, 29 February 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35686209 (accessed 29 February 2016).   3. Unrelated examples can be found of persons who flee their homelands to a geopolitical West imagined in relation to justice and better socioeconomic opportunities. How this is differently experienced has also been documented (see, for instance, Griffiths 2013; Khosravi 2007; Ticktin 2006, 2011).   4. For some statistics on remittances, see the World Bank report (2016) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report (2009). Note that remittances are often under-reported. See also Agrawal and Horowitz (1999) and Orozco (2003).   5. Some of these young people suddenly assumed new responsibility for the family as part of a collective emphasis on familial duty. Some were ‘left behind’ as main members of their family departed to neighbouring islands or North America and they had to ‘take care’ of the family house, for instance. Young family members who migrated also had this ‘duty of care’.   6. Indians are also referred to as East Indians, the classification used in the census.   7. Black and Indian, respectively.   8. This term brings out the social construction of ethnic identities.   9. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ([1965] 2002: 778) noted in his book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House: ‘Thus far our politics have been based on the assumption that Forbes Burnham was, as the British described him, an opportunist, racist and demagogue, intent only on personal power. One wondered about this, though, because AFL-CIO people in British Guiana thought well of him . . .’ 10. Jesse Burnham wrote: ‘. . . Behind that jest, that charm, that easy oratory, is a certain dark strain of cruelty which only surfaces when one of his vital interests is threatened. There are two Burnhams: the charming and the cruel. I say BEWARE both. [I do not want to see my country become a police state, where a power-hungry man can sacrifice our liberty for his personal gain. Many men love power. The world can tolerate such a man as an individual. But our beloved country cannot. Would he, the supposed nationalist, become the victim of his pet phrase, “I will not sell my country for a mess of pottage?”] That his love for personal power is so great he will trade anything to achieve it. That nothing is safe, no person, no liberty that stands in his way’ (as quoted in Singh 1996: 112).

48 • Competing Power

11. Perry Mars (2001: 361) noted: ‘The Burnham regime which succeeded the 1964 events was most draconian and repressive in methods, and imposed the colonial-inspired National Security Act, which in effect extended indefinitely the national emergency and gave the police sweeping and arbitrary powers of search, seizures, and arrest’. 12. Horace Bartilow, for instance, has noted how IMF terms were mitigated by political factors inclusive of external interventionist strategies. Bartilow (1997) noted that while the IMF was sceptical of the Burnham regime’s level of accountability, it was influenced in its relending strategies to keep the other main party, the PPP, which was Marxist-Leninist, out of power. In 1981, there was a change when the Regan administration policies also affected IMF lending conditions. Burnham in a coalition with the PPP turned to the Soviet bloc, China and Cuba for financing and ignored the IMF loan. IMF arrears mounted and the country became ineligible for further credit in 1985. 13. Rodney (1979) called Burnham the ‘national champion’ of three-card con artists and would also describe him as King Kong. The three-card con game was prevalent on Water Street, Georgetown, where swindlers would establish their games on the pavement in hope of luring the unwary. 14. Premdas (1996: 61) notes: ‘Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 but, prior to and after his death, Guyana had become a land of horrors. . . . State terror had become entrenched and pervasive as a mode of maintaining the PNC power. . . . Rape, burglary and arbitrary arrests by the security forces had become so prevalent that Indian villages became places of terror’. See also Premdas 1994. 15. Smith later surfaced in French Guiana. He was charged in absentia with the murder of Rodney. He died in 2002. A commission of inquiry into Walter Rodney’s death was launched in April 2014.The report was published on the Walter Rondey Foundation site in March 2018. 16. Euclid Rose (2002: 210), writing about this period, noted: ‘Some of the most brutal acts of violence were carried out by members of the House of Israel, a private black religious cult, headed by Black American Rabbi Washington . . . [T]he cult, which boasted a membership of 8000, had developed very close ties with the PNC regime and became part of its coercive apparatus against political opponents and any form of anti-government dissent. The House of Israel acquired a reputation for ruthlessness after its violent attacks against anti-government demonstrators, strikers and protesting high school students. It was linked to several political assassinations . . .’. 17. Roman Catholics were of a small denomination in the country (see Guyana Census 2012, 2002), with Hindus the largest single majority, as noted in the Introduction. Overall, Christians of various denominations are in the majority. See http://www.statisticsguyana.gov.gy/census.html (accessed 12 January 2018). 18. In particular, a move to nationalise the Demerara Bauxite company could not succeed without support from the PPP to secure the parliamentary two-thirds majority that was needed to make appropriate constitutional changes for compensation. This support was eventually obtained. The subsequent agreement between the two political parties specified certain

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 49

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

conditions, which included PPP representation on the boards of all state corporations. A general failure by the PNC to live up to the conditions saw a breakdown of the agreement. In 1975, however, the PNC once more manoeuvred the PPP into a position of ‘critical support’ despite the latter’s denunciation of the 1973 general election and refusal of its parliamentary seats, as noted above. The PNC had taken the line of becoming more obviously socialist and feared ‘external intervention’ (Milne 1981: 27–29). This was, in particular, the Maha Sabha and the United Sad’r Islamic Anjuman, the major Hindu and Muslim organisations, respectively, at the time (Milne 1981: 34). Some followers of these organisations recognised that such alliances were political ploys. This was reflected in the membership decline of the Maha Sabha, for instance, following the co-optation of its leader into the PNC. This activism locates those who varyingly bid for their rights in mundane settings as human rights defenders, a term widely defined. The Declaration on Human Rights’ defenders advocate: ‘Perhaps most importantly, the Declaration is addressed not just to States and to human rights defenders, but to everyone. It tells us that we all have a role to fulfil as human rights defenders and emphasizes that there is a global human rights movement that involves us all’. See http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SRHRDefenders/ Pages/Declaration.aspx (accessed 10 March 2011). See the report by Lord Avebury and his team of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group (1981) who observed the national election in December 1980. See ‘Gov’t Pays Tortured Boy $6.5m’, Stabroek News, 11 February 2013, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2013/news/stories/02/11/govt-pays-tortu​ red-boy-6-5m/ (accessed 6 March 2013). See, for instance, World in Action (1968). Again in 2015, this party delayed taking up seats and claimed the elections were rigged. This was not supported by international observers. See Worrell et al. (2000) for an account of how the value of Guyanese currency declined on the parallel market before officially being devalued from 1987. In 1995, exchange controls were removed. The first phase of Hoyte’s programme led to a 70 per cent Guyana currency devaluation which also meant price increases. At the same time, there was a 20 per cent ceiling on public sector wages. In 1989, the rate was around G$33 to US$1. The Guyana currency rapidly lost value. It went to to a street rate of G$200 to the US dollar and has been at this rate for a number of years with some fluctuations. In 2017, Cambios were offering between $200 and $210, and at times $218 to US$1. The street and Cambio exchange rates fluctuated between $200 and $220 in 2018. Note that this relates to a street and cambio rate rather than a bank rate. The Economic Reform Programme (ERP) that was instituted during the Hoyte government marked the end of the socialist model introduced by the Burnham government. The ERP was aimed at reestablishing workable relations with external creditors, eliminating arrears on a huge external debt and the debt itself, achieving real GDP growth and incorporating the parallel economy into the official one. Different versions

50 • Competing Power

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

of the parallel economy continue despite the reform measures. Note: ‘The Guyanese government’s efforts to ration foreign exchange proved increasingly ineffective, and a widening range of activity was switched to parallel markets. Small adjustments in the official exchange rate in 1984, 1985 and 1986 had no impact. In 1987 Guyana embarked on a comprehensive economic reform program to restructure the economy over several years, revive production, resuscitate the infrastructure and balance external payments. The program included a large devaluation and a relaxation of import controls’ (Worrell et al. 2000: 14). Stores which had been established in the colony and were seen as ‘colonial entities’ based in the UK, USA and Canada. Burnham had declared Guyana a co-operative republic in 1970 and proceeded to nationalise major foreign companies. These included commercial banks, the British groups Booker McConnell and Jessel Securities, which dominated the sugar industry, the Demerara Bauxite Company (Demba), a subsidiary of the Aluminium Company of Canada (Alcan), and the Reynolds Bauxite Company, a subsidiary of the Reynolds Metals Company of the United States, which dominated the mining sector. Over 80 per cent of the economy became government-controlled by the late 1970s. This was ‘rescued’ after 1992 and restored to a prominent position in the city. Williams’ work (1991) focused on similarities across racial and cultural boundaries as an argument for inter-ethnic harmony. There is passing reference to the political situation and Burnham’s politics, although the book argues against inter-ethnic harmony where group boundaries are unstable. The Population and Housing Census – Guyana National Report (2002: 27) stated: ‘The largest nationality sub-group is that of East Indians comprising 43.5 per cent of the population in 2002. They are followed by persons of African heritage (30.2 per cent). The third in rank are those of Mixed Heritage (16.7 per cent), while the Amerindians are fourth with 9.2 per cent. The smallest groups are the Whites (0.06 per cent or 476 persons), the Portuguese (0.20 per cent or 1497) and the Chinese (0.19 per cent or 1396). A small group (0.01 per cent or 112 persons) did not identify their race/ ethnic background’. See http://www.statisticsguyana.gov.gy/census.html (accessed 12 January 2018). These parties, the PPP and the PNC, were perceived to be pro-Indian and pro-black, respectively. Scholars have also documented the civil unrest, violence and forms of apanjhat politics (vote for your own) which followed. The situation escalated to social violence, with Schlesinger ([1965] 2002: 604) noting that, ‘in February 1962, frightening race riots broke out in Georgetown’. The scale of rioting and looting saw British troops being called in. Guyana gained independence from the British in 1966. ‘Lusignan Massacre’. Reposted from Kaiteur News, 26 January 2009, http:// www.guyana.org/massacre_lusignan.html (accessed 2 December 2017). Gaulbert Sutherland and Alva Solomon, ‘Hard Times for Those Scarred by Bartica Massacre’, Stabroek News, 16 February 2009. Reposted at http:// www.guyana.org/bartica_slayings.html (accessed 2 December 2017).

Amidst Illegality and Violence • 51

34. ‘Lindo Creek COI Will Begin to Unravel Tapestry of Criminality from 2000– 2008 –President Granger as Justice Trotman Is Sworn in’, The Presidency, 31 January 2018, https://motp.gov.gy/index.php/2015-07-20-18-49-38/2015-0720-18-50-14/2735-lindo-creek-coi-will-begin-to-unravel-tapestry-of-crimi​ nality-from-2000-2008-president-granger-as-justice-trotman-is-sworn-in (accessed 31 January 2018).

m2 Illegality and Big Ones Disengaging Structural Violence

Introduction Before I go way, I went to GPO [General Post Office] many times. The people did not have my birth certificate. You believe that? I go again and again and join plenty lines . . . I found someone and give him an envelope [with cash]. I had to give another envelope before I uplift my passport too. —Rajin

This account comes in an animated form from a migrant, Rajin, who is visiting relatives in their village home. He gesticulates, sharing his experience as something not easily forgotten. Rajin’s account is one of ongoing encounters from the mid to late 1990s in which people complain more openly about corruption and other related issues. However, at the time (1997) that Rajin was trying to leave the country, there was quiet rather than public complaining. Some were often ready to pay to have less hassle or no hassle in obtaining services. In turn, these settings became negotiated spaces of citizenship where persons and officials were momentarily, if constantly, negotiating and renegotiating the power of the state to offset particular kinds of structural violence. The spaces for power negotiations draw on the idea of a presenced devalued local as well as embedded violence and corruption at state and other levels. Co-residing in these settings are understandings and displays of power in which different types of relational persons emerge. These occur as alternating forms of big and small persons. Some overtly claim this space of being a ‘big one’, which can be continually shifted and extracted through particular demonstrations of power. Big ones such as John, a city professional, emerge on these landscapes and retain

Illegality and Big Ones • 53

their status through their capacities to offer a ‘free gift’. Rajin is among those who continue to feel oppressed through being forced to offer money. Despite his migrant status, he emerges with less power than John in these particularised spaces of giving money. Further, he has to complain to retrieve a sense of power (see Scott 1990). John, on the other hand, will give money without being asked and, in this way, knows that he will maintain his status as a ‘big one’. John and Rajin are differently placed in these power negotiations: Rajin, before becoming a migrant, did not have the ready visibility as someone outside of the daily conditions of hardship; John, however, is a professional and known to the police as someone in a ‘high job’, and thus not overtly located in bad conditions. However, his status as a big one also had to be reaffirmed. In one encounter, John is travelling in a car when a policeman waves him to a stop. The policeman recognises him (knows him as a big one) and attempts to wave him on. Unasked, John takes out some money and gives it to the policeman. It is a gift that affirms and will continue to reaffirm his status in future encounters. The policeman had hoped for the money. Even though he had indicated that John could continue his journey, the policeman knew that money from John would be forthcoming; big ones are expected to find it easy to give. Such gifts supplement the salaries of these police officers. However, more explicit demands by some of the state’s petty officers render such interactions as overt negotiations of power. In the absence of particular kinds of ‘big ones’, those officers who are ready to take money will force transactions with people in numerous settings. This is where people have to be seen to need help and must ‘pay up’. While some who engage in these transactions will seek out the facilitators among police and other officials, various others can be forced to offer the bribe. The transactions bring out a range of alternating power negotiations between persons who appear, variedly, as big ones and small ones. More recently, the advent of a new kind of big one in the form of certain returned migrants has added to opportunities to obtain more ‘towels’1 and ‘top-ups’, all local terms for money given on the side to police officers and others. In these arrangements they – givers and takers – also constantly presence the state in modes of corruption and disorder. Many, including migrants, rely on these spaces to negotiate their daily settings. As the example of John shows, some explicitly understand and visibly locate themselves in these power relations. However, these settings are complicated by those who act on the basis of a remembered local, as a static site of oppressive state officials. This is particularly so with some returned migrants, such as Angela, discussed further below. Case studies of Angela and others are considered in this

54 • Competing Power

chapter to show that these settings emerged in relation to structural violence, migration and corruption. The chapter, in considering how power at an oppressive level was encountered, also looks at recent histories and transactions in which certain officials re-emerged as both oppressors and facilitators. In alternating expressions of power, a soft line of illegality became normalised. Further details are provided of a particular local, conceived as an unchanging devalued site amidst and as part of efforts to migrate and network globally. Illegality and violence continue to mark everyday and socio-political settings alongside the emphasis on the external.

Big Ones Much tension can ensue over who has power. These interactions cannot be disentangled from changes in relation to the extensive ongoing outward migration and global networking. The state ‘bids’ for such power and sees it necessary to invoke ideas of the moral citizen (see Chapter 8). The state also appears mired in corruption as a mode of power and as an agent, variedly, in overturning or mediating conditions of structural violence. As indicated, different types of big ones emerge where small ones must necessarily be evoked, for instance, through a denial of the abuse of power by officials, or the production of persons and histories that must be rendered visible as a static remembered landscape. John, as indicated, acts on self-understandings of his role in gaining power as a necessary negotiation with officials and others needing to be ‘topped up’. Certain officials are seen to be in a position to make the state apparatus even more difficult in dealings with people; the gift of money by John serves to express his own power in this space as someone who should be treated well. In effect, in gifting his way through these difficulties, he renders the space of power separate to that occurring through the bureaucratic hassles and, thus, appears as separate to the state. The histories remain relevant to understand the processes of change, different levels of illegality and bids for power. The term ‘big one’ was initially used to refer to someone perceived as very influential, often someone able to provide access to benefits and advantages inside and outside of community settings. In this sense, the term incorporated a politicised usage. Government ministers were big ones. It also came to describe people who had wealth and, thus, influence: in this regard, they were those who did not suffer immediately from poor conditions and could help others. Big ones were thus not seen as overly oppressed

Illegality and Big Ones • 55

and were seen as those managing to evade structural violence. This also further indicates the connection between evasion of structural violence and power. Under socio-economic decline, petty bureaucrats who were in a ‘real’ position to mediate and assist were seen as big ones. In this early period, ‘big one’ could also be used negatively to describe someone distant from mati, those who were show-offs and were, generally, not kin. Thus, government ministers as ‘distant others’ could be dismissed as ‘big ones’. The idea of big ones as people of position, status and influence who could also be deemed of no consequence relates to understandings of egalitarianism in a former British colony with colonial histories of slavery and indentureship. New types of big ones began to co-occupy power and, variously, to present themselves as being able to make things work. Powerful persons known locally as big ones appeared in various ways, from the corrupt official to the ‘trader’. Bigness became visible in activities of corrupt state officials where ‘unhelpful’ bureaucratic processes had to be transformed through actions of citizens. However, these power modes later extended to the extra-territorial space that became presenced in these local settings. This extended site, perceived as powerful against both the state and the devalued local, allowed for new big ones and for ‘small ones’. Small ones, as those less powerful or overtly disempowered in terms of particular visibility, could, however, act as facilitators. As noted, the idea of a big one relied on the presence of small ones and, as socio-political problems continued, on the positioning of the devalued local as static. This local was imagined at one level in relation to the state and government and at another in people’s daily interactions. This local setting was experienced through problems encountered with bureaucratic systems and other forms of governance, as discussed further below. However, the importance of knowing really ‘big ones’ was not as significant in these transactions, where many ‘small ones’ emerged to mediate and help against poorly functioning state systems. In this sense, big ones and small ones were part of shifting relations mired in talk about leaving the country and, in this earlier setting, in ‘quiet discontent’ with bureaucratic difficulties. A host of relations between big ones and small ones followed. External partners also became part of these landscapes. The context also emerges in relation to the ways in which the state is presenced in settings where people privilege external sources of empowerment. The US embassy in Georgetown is also conceived as a big one, in certain contexts, over and above the state (see Chapter 3). As a particular

56 • Competing Power

type of big one, the US embassy is considered a ‘major external’ power-broker in local settings. It is seen to be more powerful than the state in certain everyday discourses. It is conceived to have, on one hand, enabling power to limit the excesses of the state and, on the other, frightening power to limit people’s ability to move. In recent years (2012–16) it has been seen to mediate some of this fright with public forums to explain visa-granting rules. Some state officials also speak out against the US embassy and US power in local settings (see Chapter 8). In 2001, the US would withhold visas from Guyana government officials and their families after the government refused to accept criminal deportees from the US. The government acceded within two months: the ban on such visas was removed after criminal deportees were accepted.2 A US official, Thomas Carroll, who conducted a fraudulent visa scheme to issue non-immigrant visas for bribes at this Georgetown embassy (as discussed further below) made use of local police as his enforcers to safeguard his operation  – this mediation ‘joined’ the embassy with the local spaces of corruption and power. He fraudulently issued ‘hundreds of visas’ between 1998 and 2000. Carroll, a Vice Consul in the non-immigrant visa section at the embassy, recruited certain police officers as his security enforcers, building on the view of their corrupt and oppressive presence (see also Chapter 4). Carroll was to claim later that he had drawn on rather than created new spaces for local corruption. This ‘extension’ relied on subverting the power of the embassy by making illegal visas accessible through the help of local corrupt officers.3 The view of the US embassy as a big one is shared widely and leads to ready assumptions of its power to act over and above the state (see Chapters 3 and 8). When a self-confessed member of a death squad and police informant, George Bacchus, in 2004, took ‘sanctuary’ in the US embassy in Georgetown to make claims of extra-judicial involvement in this squad, some local residents and analysts perceived this to directly relate to the power of the embassy as a big one. News of extreme violence in the form of the death squad emerged in January 2004, with reports that ‘big ones’ were involved (see Chapter 3). This shift from everyday relations of co-existence to problems of political tension mired in inter-ethnic divisive strategies became a power struggle at a different level. The shift to this macro setting, as shown in the next chapter, can allow for a more public emphasis on migration and external partners where the external becomes located as more visibly interventionist. A close understanding of the notion of the big one and its varied emergent types returns to the interactions within communities

Illegality and Big Ones • 57

and between individuals and officials in everyday settings. It is further contextualised in relation to the recent historical setting.

‘Slowed’ Systems and Complicit Arrangements The forms of ‘everyday illegality’ are related to socio-economic decline and the imposition of IMF conditionalities, as signalled in Chapter 1. However, various negotiations in and out of this ‘survival space’ brought out other concerns. Part of the acceptance of everyday illegality was the positioning of the state and the Burnham government of the day in a separate ‘illegal space’ and as unable to deliver particular responsibilities owed to citizens. While the Burnham government was experienced in militarisation, inclusive of electoral fraud, as discussed in Chapter 1, bureaucratic hassles that connected people more intimately to the apparatus of the state were seen to be a major interference. This was distinct from militarised and other political violence. The spaces for such hassles and related activities as part of an ailing bureaucracy located the state as a problem and a hindrance. Conversely, various state officials presented themselves as mediators/victims who were ‘able’ to transform this problem and thus be helpful to people, as already indicated. This form of illegality blurred with other corrupt transactions facilitated by these particular state officials and their allies. It added to perceptions of a devalued local marked by structural violence. These perceptions were intertwined with bids for migration as quests for social justice understood in terms of dignity and an exclusion from structural violence. Outward migration was bound with these understandings of evading structural violence. In the very attempts by many to leave the country from the 1970s onwards, many suffered. These experiences of structural violence were, in turn, to be alleviated by state agents seen as those who were helpful against the system. These settings were further aided by an ailing bureaucratic system that issued official documents and in which, generally, citizens could ‘confirm’ their view that ‘transactions’ with the state would allow for extortions and other bad experiences. State institutions such as the General Registry (General Register Office, known as GPO, which is the building where its offices are located), which issues certificates for marriages, deaths and births, were inundated with applications for documents needed by citizens in their efforts to migrate. A Ministry of Homes Affairs report for 1995 on the delayed applications to the General Registry spoke of the ‘problem of backlog’

58 • Competing Power

while noting it had successfully reduced the number of applications pending in comparison to those which were pending for previous years. The Registry, along with the passport office, became a key site of petty violations; as the example of Rajin showed, applicants had to act to disentangle themselves from continued suffering of poor or non-existent service. The 1995 Ministry of Homes Affairs report, while noting efforts to computerise the system, acknowledged ongoing loss of records due to ‘insects and rodents’.4 The computerisation of the operations of the activities of the General Register Office commenced in October 1995 and should be completed by mid 1996. However, it must be noted that no preservation programme has yet been implemented. Meanwhile, the deterioration and destruction of materials continued at alarming rate during 1995. The loss of vital materials, such as entries of births, deaths and marriage statistics was regrettable.5

Many considered that the actions of various officials amounted to de-humanising treatment and forced people to become complicit. Some will argue that this remains the case, despite changes. The Registry continues to attract a constant flow of applicants: a large number are seeking to obtain ‘supporting documents’ for their sponsored applications to emigrate to the US or Canada and/or to obtain passports in order to leave Guyana. A move in 2014 in Guyana to institute a new requirement for applicants to present birth certificates within six months of issue in order to be eligible for passports met with a furore and was eventually overturned (see Chapter 6). People also went through a complicated bureaucratic process to obtain birth certificates, and were told that records were not available or had never been documented. The difficulty in obtaining ‘simple documents’ epitomised people’s understandings of the state. Within this setting, many learnt of ‘non-system’ ways of getting along with bureaucracy. Many learnt to challenge the ways in which they were (being) treated. In a different way, David Graeber (2012) writes about learning to be stupid as part of his experiences of bureaucracy when he was involved in trying to obtain Medicaid resources for his ailing mother in the US. He noted: ‘Bureaucracies public and private appear  – for whatever historical reasons – to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected’ (2012: 107). Graeber tells of drawn-out processes of filling in forms and dealing with clerks. Referring to one stage of this process, he noted:

Illegality and Big Ones • 59

As an intellectual, probably the most disturbing thing was how dealing with these forms somehow rendered me stupid too. How could I not have noticed that I was printing my name on the line that said ‘signature’? This despite the fact that I had been investing a great deal of mental and emotional energy in the whole affair. (Graeber 2012: 108)

Graeber goes on to explore this production of stupidity as a consequence of the structural violence embedded in the system. However, alongside the slowed encounters, many Guyanese also gained knowledge of the system to become complicit in subverting structural violence, converting these bureaucratic hassles into ‘creative spaces’ to demonstrate agency and render new versions of their relationships with the state. While the state was imagined and repositioned as separate and a problem, people engaged with state officials and systems to show its messy presence in their lives. These bureaucratised spaces allowed citizens to engage and disengage with the state as particular forms of ‘active citizenship’ and amidst a host of power negotiations. Public buildings such as GPO and the passport offices became sites marked by people filling in forms and trying ‘to find someone they know’ to help. These became major institutions for such practices where people were embedded in acts of ‘passing money’ on the side as necessary exchanges for documents. Some of those who formed queues at these and other government buildings learnt about a particular official who could be paid to expedite an application. These particular officials also made their ‘terms’ for services known in various ways. Certain officials and state institutions came to represent the economic and sociopolitical decline where illegality and corruption became the norm (see Chapter 6). Jonathan Parry’s work on India has some relevance (2000). Parry discusses case studies that bring out how people are entangled in corruption practices in India as systematic spaces for getting things done and obtaining jobs, for instance, and moral positions of those who endeavour to resist such practices. Parry also notes the idea of gifts and maintenance of social relations in these practices.6 During this pre-1992 period in Guyana, practices of finding someone to ‘help’, while generally known, were also conducted with some discretion. However, strangers visiting these public buildings would often talk to each other to offer and share information about obtaining help. The forms of ‘stranger-talk’ from the contemporary historical period to post-1992 demonstrate that people experience a particular imagined community of the nation-state (Anderson 1983), where the strangers are insiders against their understandings of an unhelpful entity. Strangers share familiarity because they are expected to have knowledge of the difficult and unhelpful sites and are expected to know how to act to

60 • Competing Power

get things done. This is expressed in the mode of public complaining that gained momentum in the post-1992 years, when it was perceived as ‘safe’ to speak out against the system or to express varied discontent in public sites, although, as discussed in later chapters, this also had its own difficulties. In the post-dictatorship years (after 1992), some people began to complain more publicly about officials seeking bribes even as the practices continued (see Chapter 6).

Parallel Economy Amidst the despair of those who ‘could not get through’ (i.e. obtain the documents they needed), there were those who knew how to make the process work. Gradually, a system of illegality emerged as part of an ‘acceptable’ informal economy. This alternative economy developed in response to the inadequacies of the socialist model of governance in the 1970s and 1980s. People used the phrase ‘parallel economy’ to describe this alternative economy, which thrived as economic and political conditions worsened. Both state officials and ‘ordinary people’ were seen to be operating in the parallel economy. Subsequently, the Financial Times and the Economist in 1989 featured this informal economy, also naming it the parallel economy (see Merrill 1992; Worrell et al. 2000). Its worth was estimated between US$50 million and US$100 million annually in the 1980s. A soft line of illegality was normalised as an underground Guyanese economy emerged. Described locally as a parallel economy, this informal system was positioned as necessary for daily survival to intersect and co-reside with related efforts of people to leave the country and/or network globally. In some instances, the ‘easy’ acceptance of a soft form of illegality – that which was believed to make things work – became part of new landscapes of movement and migration forming new social imaginaries. What was illegal and who was powerful became differently defined in a setting of extensive socio-economic and political problems and beyond functional ideas of corruption and illegality, as indicated in Chapter 1. This alternative economy was seen to be a mode of existence for ‘ordinary people’ who needed to get things done despite the declining state of the official economy. The ‘sanction’ for illegal activities provided understandings of a functional mode of corruption which is, however, embedded in power relations. It is also separate from what is seen as ‘dead criminal’, that is to say, serious criminal activities by those who are considered to be professional criminals (see Chapter 3). The parallel economy became part of a larger setting that encompassed external

Illegality and Big Ones • 61

sites as sites of empowerment in opposition to the state. The parallel economy has been interpreted in different ways by multiple actors. Various interpretations of the parallel economy have also allowed for particular legal forms of global trade, in which the outward flow of people and the inward flow of their remittances are key to the economy. The parallel economy had various mediators. These included big ones such as the figures of the official and the bureaucrat, who were visible as both enforcing borders and opening borders. Back-tracking persons (illegal migrants) and traders – those who were able to bring in overseas goods and generally those who traded against the state – also became part of these landscapes. In this period, traders of all descriptions emerged and many engaged in ‘everyday illegality’ as part of the parallel economy. In effect, the word ‘trading’ first described what occurred in the parallel economy. It referred to ad hoc activities by those who engaged in inter-border trade to illegally bring essential food items and other goods into the country from the 1970s onwards. In ‘importing’ essential food items, for instance, which were banned foreign imports, they were breaking the law. Trading in potatoes and foreign currency were all part of one extended black market, conducted with similar ‘openness’ and with the complicity of officials. These items rendered the presence of an external site in ordinary interactions. People knew in the process of purchasing ‘Irish potatoes’7 that one or more traders had gone to extraordinary measures to have the item available in the country: the displays of potatoes as mundane had become an achievement. The displays also signified the presence of the state in illegality through actions condoned by certain officials. Trading became a general word to describe people’s ability to access goods and services from overseas for commercial purposes and to have these goods for resale or to assist others in global networking. Some traders became successful not only in trading in Guyana, but also in selling goods to neighbouring countries. The presence of traders and their activities in Guyana signalled a particular space for gaining empowerment through an external site. These joined spaces of the external and local were visible in various forms, including displays of goods brought in from other countries and, in the 1980s, ‘displays’ of ordinary citizens being harassed by some officials for having or selling contraband. In a related way, unlicensed foreign currency traders appeared on the landscapes. They stood on main Georgetown streets, openly trading currency. Their activities were in response to desperate demand in the parallel economy. As foreign currency became officially scarce in the early 1980s, heavy restrictions were placed on travellers, including money restrictions, which meant the sums allowed out of the

62 • Competing Power

country – less than US$20 in cash and a very small bank draft (under US$50, which was not immediately convertible on arrival overseas) – did not even cover taxi fares at the destination airport. This was apart from travellers on government-sanctioned trips and other ‘official’ trips who could request release of funds for their activities. The restrictions extended spaces for illegal activities. The unlicensed money-changers on the streets, whose clients were numerous ordinary citizens seeking to change or obtain foreign currency, became part of what was normal and everyday. Male moneychangers continue to stand with wads of foreign currency in their hands on the aptly named America Street in Georgetown, the capital. They also move between America Street and the nearby busier Water Street (also aptly named through its proximity to the nearby Demerara River), identifying themselves through the display of packed thousand-dollar notes. From 2013, these stacks included the newly introduced G$5000 note. These unlicensed money-changers operate not very far away from two licensed cambios (foreign exchange outlets): one is on America Street, the other on Water Street. The street traders keep strategically away from these establishments, seemingly uninterested in competing for the same customers. In some instances, they transact with cambios to source funds. They also have ‘handlers’ who fund them to trade. On these busy commercial streets, the men assess passers-by, approaching those who look as if they are returned residents or have a prosperous connection ‘outside’ (a local term for anywhere outside Guyana). They also stand and wait to be approached, while displaying huge sums of money. In 2009, one of these street traders who spoke about this ‘changing money’ street industry noted that it was best not to talk about it.8 It was an entry point, he noted, to ‘anything’. This trader worked alongside another trader who resided in one of the villages in which I conducted research from the mid 1990s. He talked about how much knowledge he had of the informal economy, without naming names. Some of the traders had handlers who were ‘serious money lenders’ and connected to other illegal activities, which ‘crossed a line’, he noted. Yet these traders, like many others who emerged in various industries, were seen as indispensable to ‘making things work’. The idea of another line of illegality that should not be crossed was not readily present in these settings. The lack of emphasis on this ‘hidden’ line of illegality returns to people’s understandings of the need to break the law to make things work, as the economy declined in these early years. The power relations that also ensued, and the more serious criminal activities that flourished, inclusive of new drug-related crimes, inform complex settings in recent years of increasing publicness about

Illegality and Big Ones • 63

corruption and the need to curb excesses, as discussed in later chapters. The interactions extended people’s knowledge and experience of how things were made to work, drawing on the modes of breakdown of the economy, a slowed bureaucratic system and recognisable appearances of ‘brokers’ and ordinary citizens in complicit partnerships. People attempting to obtain services, those attempting to obtain basic items and becoming or aiding smugglers in the process renegotiated with bribe-taking officials what was meant by enforcement of the law and, thus, renegotiated the power of the state. In these everyday settings, with many power-brokers managing illegality, questions of what was illegal often only arose when certain officials could not be adequately paid off. Numerous examples of complicit partnerships were offered by research participants who narrated their experiences and those of others, noting that these incidences were common knowledge, part of the everyday. However, people would invariably point out that it was useful to be able to bypass unhelpful systems and to have the space to pay some money to a ‘friend’ in a powerful position. As outward migration and global networking increased, these complicit partnerships moved in and out of easy labels of corruption and victimhood to incorporate various levels of power, empowerment and status. As indicated earlier, various state officials were seen as both part of state oppressive practices and separate; in this latter space, power could be renegotiated to offset violence and oppression. This is where persons without influence needed the help of big ones and powerful small persons (persons who were not big in the traditional sense – with obvious wealth and influence  – but had a position of power within the system, as noted earlier) to mediate their experiences of the local setting. In the recent historical period, while various corrupt officials and ‘government supporters’ became the faces of ‘state oppression’ through their abuse of power, they were also part of a reimagined ‘kin’ network of people sharing hardships and finding solutions to the ‘problem state’. This might be considered in a different way to the idea of mati: in this idea people across ethnic groups saw themselves as sharing conditions of hardship and suffering under colonialism and thus being equal (see Jayawardena 1963; Williams 1991). In an extended notion of matiness, small powerful persons who occupied roles in bigness also claimed kinship with others through understandings of ‘shared suffering’. These minute power relations of complicity in socio-political settings relied on both shared suffering and explicit hierarchical positions where ‘big ones’ emerged as powerful. In this continuum of power, the state was seen as distant. Its officials were all-powerful and also victims. People

64 • Competing Power

as ‘explicit victims’ were also able to subvert varied forms of oppression in efforts to overturn this publicness of victimhood and change their conditions through complicit arrangements. The appearances of different types of ‘big ones’ point to the messy forms of power relations and victimhood that ensue to be about both structural violence and agency.

Police and Forced Complicity As indicated, the image of the police became deeply associated with corrupt practices, even as some emerged as facilitators and ‘double ­victims’  – those who suffered through poor conditions and were perceived by people as rogues. The police came to be seen as the major institution embedded in forced complicity. Their role was considered to be mired in abuse. This was a key and unwanted product of complicit relationships where the abuse of power by petty officers overtly victimised ‘ordinary people’ as favours to ‘friends’. The figure of the policeman was understood generally to represent the type of official who finds common ground with people – part of their communities – and aids both complicity and official abuse. Some police officers dispute this complicity and their presencing in corruption and have variously noted the difficulty in disentangling themselves from this image despite their commitment to duty and law. On this basis, they claim a form of matiness (shared kin under conditions of suffering); the shared practices incorporate big ones and small ones where ‘friendships’ ensue to facilitate ‘liveable spaces’. This also descends into other types of violence (apart from the structural violence being addressed in such practices). A practice of (be)friending allows for abusive police officers to support vindictive acts of those who need to ‘settle’ an issue. Thus, a key and unwanted product of complicit relationships is the abuse of power by petty officers who victimise ordinary people as favours to ‘friends’ (see also Chapter 6). These powerful friends could be counted on to deliver their own form of justice to deal with pesky neighbours, for instance, or to duck a ‘court jacket’ (docket, file particulars on a court case) where such ‘interventions’ were deemed to be necessary. Repeatedly, in village settings, accounts came out of residents negotiating with certain police officials to ensure their children were not targeted, in some cases to deal with troublesome neighbours and, generally, to keep the police ‘sweet’ as a local term of ensuring good will and help through ‘gifts’. Some residents also noted efforts in later periods, with varied levels of success, to act against police abuse and corruption. These occurred as minute ‘negotiations’ of power, abuse and different types of challenges

Illegality and Big Ones • 65

in village settings and on public roads. This also brought out the presence of the police on roads as oppressive. Examples of traffic policemen collecting money are multiply embedded in everyday settings, to the point where then Minister of Home Affairs, Clement Rohee, named these corrupt policemen ‘travelling magistrates’ in 2014, that is to say, those who collected on-the-spot ‘fines’ to look the other way on the basis of claimed transgressions of the law by drivers. The police are seen to have ‘earned’ this reputation as ‘travelling magistrates’ with the power in practice to stop vehicles, randomly, in negotiations for money. This practice has been recently challenged with new directives in 2015 (see Chapter 6).

New Big Ones These so-called travelling magistrates provide an open example of complicit partnerships that are also oppressive. This is evident in perceptions of how such policemen deal with minor traffic violations. It has been the practice for many years for some policemen to stand strategically on streets, waiting to stop cars as ‘traffic officers’ whose presence is instantly interpreted by some citizens as potential spaces for extortion. Until recently, any policeman could appear as a traffic officer in terms of how power was exercised, so there were no easy distinctions between a traffic officer and other policemen (see also Chapters 6 and 7). Policemen stopping vehicles on the road would redirect them to ‘lodge’ (local term) at a main police station, that is, literally take their person and vehicle to the police station. The practice of lodging vehicles at police stations on the oral instructions of the police who stop these vehicles randomly has been one of the most pervasive acts, and can amount to intimidation, petty harassment and extortion. ‘Hapless’ drivers are stopped and told to lodge themselves with their vehicles at a main designated police station as the ‘official’ procedure for dealing with minor traffic offences. The presence of these particular lawmen and lawwomen as powerful is an everyday demonstration of landscapes of illegality, power and violence.

Black Clothes Police, Violence and Complicity As indicated, some police officers vehemently protest their inclusion in such practices and seek, in turn, to extract themselves from the corrupt spaces, as those who are always doing their duty and doing so as a

66 • Competing Power

service. It is not easy for such police officers to extricate themselves from the image of abusive and corrupt officials. US State Department country reports on Guyana, issued through the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, regularly list significant human rights abuse by police.9 Those police officers who are corrupt are known to harass ordinary people with requests to be ‘topped up’. The ‘I Paid a Bribe Guyana’ website statistics showed that by day eight of its launch in May 2013, it had ‘recorded a total of G$6,426,70810 being paid in bribes’. It provided reports on bribes being taken by three agencies and seven departments, with the largest number of bribes received by the Guyana Police Force (GPF), the second largest by the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the third largest by the Public Works Ministry.11 In 2002, several members of the police force would be implicated in the visa for sale scheme led by the US embassy official Carroll as indicated above. Carroll entered a blind guilty plea on several charges. United States District Judge Blanche Manning12 would note in the written memorandum and order on the sentencing13 that Carroll enlisted ‘several corrupt Guyanese police officers’ to safeguard his visa scheme and that these officers ‘were members of the notoriously corrupt, brutal, and feared paramilitary arm of the police force, often referred to as the “black clothes” and the “death squad”14 because of their black uniforms’. The memorandum and order have details about coercive action carried out by black clothes members against named individuals on separate occasions and noted that a cooperating witness ‘testified that the headquarters is “one of the most feared place[s]” in Guyana because of the beatings that occur there at the hands of the police’.15 The cooperating witness was a former police officer and one of Carroll’s security enforcers. As noted in the appellate court’s decision, the Assistant United States Attorney at Carroll’s trial felt that had Carroll accepted the plea bargain, the cooperating witness would not have been left exposed: the witness ‘would not have had to testify against Carroll at his sentencing hearing and thereby incur the risks associated with implicating other corrupt Guyanese police officials’.16 This view indicates the local dynamics involving the police. Its image was entrenched in corrupt practices, with its officers seen to be enforcing criminal activities rather than the law.17 Former Police Officer Axel Williams was allegedly the leader of the death squad, the existence of which was disclosed by the informant George Bacchus, as noted earlier. George Bacchus made his revelations about the existence of a phantom death squad after his brother, Shafeek Bacchus, reportedly mistaken for George Bacchus himself, was killed in an execution style in January 2004.

Illegality and Big Ones • 67

George Bacchus would also be killed in 2004 (see Chapter 3). Amnesty International noted in its report which covered the year 2004 in Guyana: Three people were charged with the murder of Shafeek Bacchus on 5 January, of whom two were former police officers. His brother, George Bacchus, a self-confessed ‘informant’, alleged that the ‘death squad’ had killed Shafeek by mistake. One of those charged, Mark Thomas, died in February in police custody in disputed circumstances.18

The two former cops in above report were Mark Thomas and Shawn Hinds – Hinds was subsequently cleared by the high court of the charge. He would go on a television programme to become a self-confessed member of a death squad. The television programme was posted on Youtube. Hinds claimed that there were different death squads19 and alleged that former cop Axel Williams had been his boss in this death squad. He made allegations which were widely circulated through local media. This type of illegality was seen as separate from ‘everyday’ complicit activities, apart from where it denoted the spaces for abusive behaviour as a continuum. People’s experiences of structural violence were marked by views of the state as isolated and oppressive even as they experienced its presence through its officials. The image of the corrupt police officer was a pervasive presence as part of structural and everyday violence, which encompassed people across ethnic groups (see, again, Farmer 2003; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004 for related discussions of structural violence). Conversely, these police officers also presented themselves as ‘helpful’ to citizens when their actions were in opposition to laws they were meant to uphold. In the contemporary period, from 2011 in particular, these practices are being subjected to intense scrutiny. This scrutiny is part of efforts that have gained new momentum in recent years to impose new understandings and relevance of the law as a different visibility for the state (see later chapters). However, the different kinds of illegality continue to mark the contemporary setting amidst stringent efforts to reclaim the law to the point of fetishisation. The entanglement of law and disorder and high incidences of corruption by police and others is not unique to Guyana, the Caribbean or indeed the ‘postcolony’, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2006) have noted. They go on to point to similar and better concealed if differently known examples in countries like the US and Britain. Of significance is their view that in these sites, power was being concentrated from various areas in efforts to make it ‘visible, accountable and effective’ in the contemporary. In the Guyanese setting, the idea of accountability returns to complicit practices, but where in more

68 • Competing Power

recent times there is increasing emphasis on challenging abuse. This is a space for small ones to also emerge as powerful, if with different results (see especially Chapter 6).

Big Ones and Migrants The notion of the ‘big one’ emerges in a new space in terms of perceptions of migrants’ status and the actions of some migrants, as indicated. This returns to understandings embedded in the histories of structural violence, bureaucratic conditions and changes relating to ongoing migration. In recent years, migrants as big ones are seen to display status and power as a result of their overseas credentials, which might be a foreign passport, a manner of speaking or dressing or other related overseas appearances. These displays aid the idea that those who have obtained migrant status through residence overseas are automatic big ones. Note that alongside these status enactments and dynamics of the ‘bad local’, migrants contribute significantly to the economy in general. Further, migrants are understood to be supportive of their families and extended networks. Many migrants relate to family members as those they can help through their departure. Many regularly send remittances back home (see World Bank 2016;20 see also Agrawal and Horowitz 1999; Halstead 2012; Orozco 2003; UNDP 2009). Overseas remittances from migrants to their relatives in Guyana are a significant source of income and revenue for the country, and bring out, in general, both migrants’ contributions and their deep familial ties ‘back home’. Migrants are also closely involved in family events and will often return for weddings and funerals. Many of the weddings I attended had numerous migrant-relatives in attendance. It is now usual for migrants to provide gifts, which often include clothing for the bride and groom. Incoming migrants for such celebrations would often have filled suitcases with gifts for their relatives. In 2015 and 2017 I attended two weddings, at both of which overseas relatives brought the clothing for the brides. These are not isolated accounts and, at any given time, migrants will be returning/ visiting with suitcases filled with gifts and/or sending barrels (these are barrels made of cardboard type paper with aluminium rims or made of plastic which can contain goods of all descriptions) as an ongoing practice in these migration-embedded landscapes. More recently, residents in the homeland are travelling and returning with their own suitcases and become incorporated in this setting as also empowered (see later chapters). Some of the case studies in this

Illegality and Big Ones • 69

book bring out, variously, the depth of family bonds between migrants and their relatives. The discussion here does not detract from those ties and the efforts of migrants. It focuses on particular understandings in the local context vis-à-vis status and changing conditions. While migrants might not show their passports or intend to ‘show off’, their migratory status evokes and suggests such interpretations by their local counterparts: individual instances of ‘migrant bigness’ can become representative as imagined spaces of ‘showing off’. Some migrants, such as wealthy businessmen who are doing business in the country, endeavour to act out power quietly. They have ‘connections’ and, as necessary, will invoke those connections. This was the case with Robert, a migrant businessman. When Robert was stopped by a policeman, allegedly for speeding, he was able to successfully block action by making use of his connections (see Chapter 6). In many instances, migrants who return, including temporary migrant workers, do not necessarily look for situations in which they can demonstrate ‘bigness’ in conflict with corrupt officials or seek to deliberately extract status from those who appear less fortunate, although understandings of the landscape as mired in activities by ‘bad cops’ and other problems suggest their readiness to ‘do something’ whether quietly or vocally. The complexities of the local setting of facilitators endeavouring to mediate structural violence, and the appearances of empowered persons through migration or migration-related activities, mean that some will assume the roles of ‘big ones’ in ways that render them ‘involved’ in local power negotiations.

Angela Angela returned to Guyana in the 2000s. Her husband had died and although Angela, who was in her late seventies, had a large family network in a ‘rich country’ with many ‘talented grandchildren’, she decided to return to live in Guyana. She had a number of casual workers around her and also, at times, ‘incorporated’ others into this retinue, including waiters at a hotel and a taxi driver whom she used regularly. Thus, she would refer to the taxi driver as ‘my driver’. Angela arrived with substantial funds and noted that she immediately opened a bank account with over twenty million Guyana dollars (at the lowest rate of G$200 to US$1, this was approximately US$100,000). The bank’s officers had asked for certain documents in order for her to open the account, but it had not been unduly difficult. They had been pleasant, she noted, and she believed that having so much money helped, as well

70 • Competing Power

as the fact that she was ‘not just local’.21 She had been well-connected locally; she had not endeavoured to remind people of these connections as she felt her overseas status was enough to ‘open doors’. For her, in this non-governmental sector, she expected automatic status and did not see any need to ‘act out power’, that is to say, show herself as powerful. It was, for her, a different setting from that occupied by those state officials who ‘gave people a hard time’ and who would treat citizens badly. In more mundane settings, there were different interactions, where she noted she was constantly made to feel she had to give money. People with whom she dealt often expected her to give them money because she was a migrant. This also encapsulates her understandings of the local as inherently devalued. On one occasion, when she encountered a policeman she believed to be corrupt, she felt that all she had to do was wave her British passport. Angela was in the taxi when a policeman stopped the vehicle and began to ‘bother’ the driver. Angela noted: He just stopped the car and wanted money. Then he wanted the driver to go to the [police] station. Really! I showed him my British passport. I told him I would report him. I told him a lot of things. He did not take me on. He called me Granny. Then he told my driver to drive on. I believed it was about my passport [that he did not pursue the matter].

Angela says that the policeman was ‘overdoing things’ and she had to put him ‘in his place’. She believes that she effectively stopped the policeman from attempting to extract money from her driver. She believes the policeman was ‘persuaded’ to drop this extortion attempt by the mention of her foreign passport and that he made a reference to her age in order to save face. As she saw it, he had recognised that she was ready to take action against him and thus he had to be careful about not abusing his position to extract money. The understanding of particular types of passport as extended agents having power to reverse structural violence is not isolated to Guyana. The recognition of powerful passports relies on the perceived power of the states issuing these documents. This relates to post-colonial understandings of geopolitical power centres that can retain singular understandings of the ‘powerful West’, despite the extensive changes and given that this singularly has never existed, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) has noted (see also Carrier 1995). More recently, with the growing focus on radicalisation of persons in Britain and widespread understandings of ‘home grown’ terrorists, a British passport in certain places can attract new understandings of suspicion; general stereotypes attached to persons

Illegality and Big Ones • 71

with ‘powerless’ documents can be extended to the British passport. Stef Jansen (2009) provides an example of a particular lack of power attached to persons through their documents where newly embedded forms of structural violence occur through one type of ‘red passport’ in the post-­Yugoslavian setting.22 However, for Angela, the passport can be used against structural violence. She has significant understandings of the power of her British passport in terms of mobility as more powerful than the local state. In the encounters with corrupt officers she is enabled to ‘speak up’. She does not feel the need to be careful in her challenge to the policeman: the success of her action confirms her view that buffered by her passport she has more power than the state’s corrupt officers. In Chapter 6, a different example shows a challenge against a policeman by a local resident that went wrong. In Chapter 8, related interventions by diplomats indicate efforts at a different level to intercede in local politics and governance through externally led power. The view of police corruption has a particular consciousness for migrants such as Angela whose memories of the country include the abuse of power by petty officers in their encounters with citizens. Thus, Angela’s intervention is deliberate, based on understandings of her power over that of an official of the state who has to be corrupt by virtue of his position. Her belief that the policeman is unable to do anything to her is directly related to her understandings of her status as a returned migrant with a powerful passport. The passport is part of her identity as a person and acts to render her visible above local conditions in the particular episode discussed (see Gell 1998). In this regard, she feels it is necessary for migrants like herself to intervene in such situations (see also Chapter 6). Thus, Angela is watchful and ready to pronounce on corrupt police. As indicated, Angela’s actions draw on a memoried landscape of structural violence and related forms of oppression: her views of migrant power are constantly reinforced by what she feels has not changed. This returns to the recent historical settings where poor economic conditions aided the appearance of victims and facilitators, as noted. The socio-political setting is enmeshed in claims for and challenges against the ideas of shared suffering that unite people across groups. This notion of shared suffering is one that has to be constantly splintered; structural violence must be displaced through larger political acts that attract ethno-political banditry and target matiness (see Chapter 3). Thus, these power negotiations at both community and larger socio-political levels differentially relate to the ways in which the colonial past of inter-ethnic division and disunity retains leverage where violence accompanies bids for power.

72 • Competing Power

Equality and Status Issues These issues about equality, forms of shared matiness and lack of matiness occur against the backdrop of Guyana being described as the country most ethnically polarised, according to the political scientist Ralph Premdas (1996). Further, the problem of plural societies was envisaged to be that of the difficulty of peaceful co-existence, as indicated in the Introduction. The notion of inter-ethnic division was significantly presenced in the break-up of the two main political leaders, Dr Jagan and Burnham, Indian and black, respectively, in the pre-independence period, when the main political party splintered into two main parties along ethnic lines. This splinter was further developed through politics that continue to rely on orchestrated tension in various ways, as noted in Chapter 1. On the ground, matiness was constantly expressed as a strategy for inter-ethnic harmony despite these political tensions and emphasis on ethnic divides. Brackette Williams, in 1991, pointed to some of these bids for status as struggles to ‘become somebody’.23 Chandra Jayawardena (1963), discussing the concept of ‘eyepass’ in his work on Guianese plantation, captured certain nuances of how this egalitarian setting developed, whereby to eyepass someone was to insult them. To eyepass, in effect, meant to treat someone in a hierarchical manner that was belittling. These nuances of becoming somebody, eyepass and other post-colonial status bids illustrate some of the difficulties in the emergent power struggles as socio-political interactions. The earlier history and colonial construct of matiness, along with the erosion of caste, offers a background to these varied power relations and indicates the level of changes. In community-led settings,24 people from different ethnic groups would use terms such as ‘sister’ and ‘brother’ to include the ‘other’, particularly in ceremonies, and also in some everyday usage. This mode of orchestrated inclusion reinforced the emphasis on peaceful co-existence and the idea of matiness as formalised acknowledgement of a larger imagined social kin group beyond ethnicity. It was seen as necessary in the face of political oppression from colonial times and distanced rulers. This idea of matiness over-rode any idea of disharmony and explicitly emphasised peaceful belonging outside of ‘bigness’ and other overt displays of dominance. Contradictions where status enactments and knowledge against ‘real’ kinship were experienced at different levels of insidership also relate to the egalitarianism espoused by the colonial rulers. This was despite their essentialised reliance on plantation labour and the conditions of obtaining that labour from slavery to

Illegality and Big Ones • 73

indentureship. However, indentured labourers who came  – through voluntary and involuntary processes – went on to claim egalitarianism, which also ‘suited’ the newcomers, drawn from many different cultural and caste backgrounds (Dabydeen and Samaroo 1996, for instance; see also Vertovec 1992). Some were kidnapped or randomly selected for the indentureship programme. The notion of equality is further extended with the majority East Indian population distancing themselves from caste systems and even the very idea of caste. This is apart from the caste classification of Brahmin for Hindu pandits (priests) (see also Vertovec 1994, Jayaram 2006: 162), which was retained to facilitate religious practice and to affirm the standing of these pandits. More generally, caste became a pejorative word. In some settings, talk of the high caste Kshatriya, spoken of locally as chatri (Khatri), and low caste, chamar, resurfaced. Chatri became translated as a position of merit and achievement, grounded ancestrally; proclamation of being ‘chatri’ would often be about both reaffirming this higher worth and committing to equitable behaviour. In 2014, the claims for chatri as a particular kind of big one became satirised in the media after claims by one public official of holding this high caste. In other satirical ways for and against bids for status, the idea of the untouchable caste of chamar resurfaced in song and everyday talk  – with the emphasis on making fun, the idea also operated to show that people were equal rather than of a lower caste. The idea of the chamar became exotic and separate from the everyday. In this performance of egalitarianism, there was no need to compete on the basis of higher or lower caste. Amidst the disavowal of official caste were various interactions that privileged equality, but there were also bids for status and higher status.25 This was incorporated in understandings of and concerns with not committing eyepass, whereby people constantly endeavour to obtain status and to empower themselves. In present-day settings, these issues differentially intercede or are referenced in efforts that remain bids for power where entrenched political issues move between the rhetoric of divide and rule and its accompanying physical violence. This is alongside and part of the process of migration and bids for status in relation to ideas of a devalued local.

Conclusion This chapter has considered how particular power relations emerge in a recent historical period. It brought out certain contemporary

74 • Competing Power

understandings of power, complicity and victimhood. It explored power relations expressed through ideas of big ones and small ones. Socio-political and economic settings further draw out these relations: the chapter has explored the spaces for complicity, power and abuse of power against the poor bureaucratic systems, economic decline and the presence of corrupt officials. Further, it looked at how migration and global networking became inserted into these spaces as particular bids for status and empowerment and brought out understandings of a static devalued local in these bids. In more contemporary times, post-1992, and with the stronger insertion of extra-territorial ideas of power and empowerment in the local, there are different dynamics of inter-ethnic tension and hostility. This relates directly to the construction of new types of big ones, and structural and, latterly, physical forms of violence. The next chapter looks at further case studies in terms of how this local was experienced and contested. It further considers how people engage and disengage with the devalued local, which is presenced through banditry and related violence. New developments in the local rely on both fixed ideas of devaluation and new forms of violence, amidst the ongoing engagement with external social sites. The next chapter considers various accounts to further develop the co-residing settings of devalued local and empowered people on the move.

Notes   1. ‘Towel’ is slang for a thousand Guyanese dollars (US$5), a term used by criminals and adopted by some policemen as code to demand money from people. The phrase is believed locally to have started with criminals’ code terms for money, with ‘thou’ as a short version of a ‘thousand’ becoming disguised as talk about a towel.   2. ‘Guyana: Information on the Treatment of Criminal Deportees’, Query to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, 4 February 2004. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2013/06/13/GUY04001.pdf (accessed 12 December 2017). See ‘Guyana Risks Losing Funding Visas from US if Deportees Not Accepted’, Guyana Times, 27 February 2017, also https://guy​ anatimesgy.com/guyana-risks-losing-funding-visas-from-us-if-deportees-​ not-accepted/ (accessed 10 July 2017). (See also Premdas 1982: 190)   3. ‘US v Carroll  – Memorandum and Order,’ 12 June 2002. https://casetext. com/case/us-v-carroll-46 (accessed 8 March 2018).   4. ‘Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report’ 1995, p. 6. http://parliament.gov. gy/documents/documents-laid/6218-ministry_of_home_affairs_-annual_ report_1995.pdf (accessed 24 March 2018).

Illegality and Big Ones • 75

  5. ‘Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report’ 1995, p. 18.   6. Further, Parry (2000) notes the particular construction of corruption as universal as distinct from specific cultural approaches to values against the practice (see Chapter 8).   7. This term is used in the country to distinguish potatoes from ‘sweet potatoes’, which are locally grown.   8. I was in the vicinity to meet with a participant whom I knew from the village, when this street trader put himself forward as someone equally knowledgeable, as a colleague of the other participant, and asked to be part of the research.   9. ‘The US Country Reports on Human Rights Practices’, 2005, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor would note both the unlawful killings and the allegations of extra-judicial killings in 2004, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2013/06/07/guyana_6.pdf (accessed 12 October 2008). 10. If calculated at the lowest rate of G$200 to US$1, this amounts to US$32,133.54. The street and some Cambio rates fluctuate between G$200 and G$220 in 2018 to the US dollar, as noted earlier. The lowest street rate of G$200 to US$1 from the 1990s is used in the book; indications are given of increases and fluctuations as relevant. 11. This website is no longer available. Some details are in this article: ‘“I Paid a Bribe” Website Subject to Regular Monitoring-Home Affairs Minister’, Guyana Chronicle, 1 October 2014. See http://guyanachronicle. com/2014/10/01/i-paid-a-bribewebsite-subject-to-regular-monitoringhome-affairs-minister (accessed 10 October 2014). 12. ‘U.S. v Carroll’, 12 June 2002. See https://casetext.com/case/us-v-carroll-46 (accessed 8 March 2018). 13. A US appeal court in 2003 would later make recommendations which saw a reduction in Carroll’s sentence. ‘United States v. Carroll,’ 7 October 2003, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1370173.html (accessed 8 March 2018). 14. This black clothes police identified as one of the death squads is seen as separate from the phantom death squad. At different times these terms have been used interchangeably by officials and others; the terms also signal different death squads in operation and varying ideas of these squads being within the ‘law’ while operating in the shadows or operating ‘openly’. See also ‘Sean Hinds says force still has phantom and black clothes squad,’ HGPTV, 25 July 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJt3kGwUfuE (accessed 25 July 2015). See Guyana Parliamentary proceedings in 2016 for mention of various kinds of squads: ‘Official Report - Proceedings and Debates of the National Assembly of the First Session (2015–2016) of the Eleventh Parliament of Guyana under the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana Held in the Parliament Chamber’, Public Buildings, Brickdam, Georgetown, p.124. http://parliament.gov.gy/documents/han​ sards/45th_sitting_-_eleventh_parliament.pdf (accessed 25 February 2018). 15. This was stated in ‘UNITED STATES of America, Appellee–Cross– Appellant, v. Robert SIMELS, Defendant–Appellant, Arienne Irving,

76 • Competing Power

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

Defendant–Cross–Appellee’, 11 August 2011, Court of Appeals. https://case​ law.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1577386.html. (accessed 8 March 2018). Ibid. ‘From COP to CRIMINAL’, Kaieteur News, 30 January 2017. https://www. kaieteurnewsonline.com/2017/01/30/from-cop-to-criminal/ (accessed 30 January 2017). Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2005 – Guyana, 25 May 2005, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/429b27e31a.html (accessed 20 February 2015). ‘Death Squad Revelations by Shawn Hinds, ’HGPTV, 22 July 2015. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEGYEo6k_wU (accessed 22 July 2015). ‘“I Was Part of Death Squad”  – Shawn Hinds tells HGP’, Stabroek News, 22 July 2015. https://www.stabroeknews.com/2015/news/guyana/07/22/i-waspart-of-death-squad/ (accessed 22 July 2015). ‘Police say Shawn Hinds Not Cooperating’, Kaieteur News, July 27 2015. https://www.stabroeknews. com/2015/news/guyana/07/27/shawn-hinds-turns-himself-over-to-police/ (accessed 27 July 2015). The World Bank (2016: v) report noted: ‘In 2015, worldwide remittance flows are estimated to have exceeded $601 billion. Of that amount, developing countries are estimated to receive about $441 billion, nearly three times the amount of official development assistance. The true size of remittances, including unrecorded flows through formal and informal channels, is believed to be significantly larger.’ By 2010, it became more difficult to open bank accounts with money laundering legislation in place. He noted: ‘. . . in terms of its power to certify one as worthy of legal mobility, a Bosnian- Herzegovinian or a Serbian (FRY) passport was first and foremost a millstone that would prevent crossing borders. These documents were thus experienced as becoming part of persons by classifying them into collectivities, proud or not, certified as unworthy of mobility and requiring visas to overcome this individually’ (Jansen 2009: 821; emphasis in the original). Williams (1991) also considers East Indians’ locatedness in purity, while dismantling this concept, to signal inter-ethnic disharmony and political problems. See Vered Amit (2002), for instance, on anthropological constructions of community. See also Daniel Miller’s discussion of inter-caste obligations in Trinidad when discussing a village meeting by Indians to adjudicate on community matters (1994: 31).

m3 Local Others Residents, Bandits, Migrants

Introduction Sorry to hear . . . people suffering too much. Bandits everywhere – they [the bandits] and some political people mix-up. I have to do another set of documents, you know. I had a call from the States [US] last night. Now I have to get some more things done. —Lata

Lata, a housewife, who busies herself with sorting out documents as part of an over-lengthy sponsorship chain for legal migration to the US, acknowledges recent brutal violence and news of a death squad. She does so to offer sympathy for the victims before moving on to her own ‘problems’, those of following up on sponsorship documents for migration to the US. In their village home, as migrants-in-waiting, Lata and her husband, Raj, have received another setback in obtaining their sponsorship documents. It would be more than a decade after the applications were first filed by Lata’s parents, US citizens, that they would eventually obtain their ‘papers’. In 2004, Lata was busy sending a document to relatives to ‘sort out’ this latest issue. Lata and various other residents in this village and elsewhere had differing reactions to the news of extreme violence that erupted in the country in January 2004 when it was revealed that the death squad was executing bandits. Lata felt that they (the politicians and bandits) would sort it out among themselves. Beyond expressing sympathy for the victims of these and other acts of banditry that were taking place, they felt that it was a matter for others to address. The attitudes of these local residents and others showed a constant layer of ‘performing’ distance from the socio-political setting of

78 • Competing Power

violence as ways of evading the ‘bad local’ while being present in this setting. Feroze and his wife, Ameena, run a ‘dry goods’ (grocery) business in a busy city area and live in a city sub-district. They, too, are occupied with migration issues, as the time has come again for Feroze to make plans to leave the country. Unlike Lata, this couple are in a different category of impending outward migration; they can be described as ‘not-waiting migrants’, that is to say, they are not in any sponsorship queue for legal migration to the US. However, they plan to journey to the US to overstay. This will be for the second time, as they have already overstayed at an earlier stage. In a similar manner to Lata, they expressed disinterest in the news of the violence, noting that it was a political matter. Feroze said: ‘What death squad? Those people  – they all know what they doing’. Feroze was among those who were more interested in ‘amnesty news’ for illegals than in the item about the death squad. This related to a news announcement that then US President George Bush Jr was granting ‘amnesty’ to illegal migrants.1 Among local residents in various areas, the general interest and activities in relation to migration co-reside with an idea of being separate from violence deemed to be political; they are already entangled in everyday conditions of structural violence. The case studies and accounts bring out interrelated settings of banditry/violence vis-à-vis the locally devalued site. These illustrate experiences of those who are migrants or can be described as either migrants-in-waiting or notwaiting migrants. Explicit violence occurs alongside the local-global interactions and re-isolates a local outside of people’s immediate concerns. The examples demonstrate efforts by local residents to empower themselves through external connections and global networking; these occur as spaces of belonging amidst and/or through the violence. This chapter considers how ethno-political violence re-entered and/or was bypassed in the local setting by those more concerned with ‘external sites’. It brings out understandings of persons who, in performing distance to local violence, are also signalling an ‘impersonal space’ where they cannot be claimed through violence; this extends their capacities as experts and ‘citizens of the world’. However, their efforts have to be disentangled from a memoried landscape brought into being through apprehension about events in relation to criminal violence by some migrants living outside the country. This site is also constantly evoked and coerced into public consciousness by political bandits who espouse ethnic causes as the reasons that violence should materialise the ‘really bad local’.

Local Others • 79

Violence and Exceptions As indicated in Chapter 2, news about the death squad, also described as the phantom death squad, circulated after George Bacchus made allegations that it had been established to kill criminals outside of the judicial process. George Bacchus was murdered on 24 June 2004 and was found in his bed in his Georgetown home.2 Some suggestion that there might be a phantom death squad surfaced as early as 2002 when Guyana’s cabinet secretary at the time, Dr Roger Luncheon, indicated that a phantom group might be in existence given the high level of execution-style killings.3 The news about the death squad dramatically added to speculation about high-level vigilantism and unlawful violence to counter certain acts of ‘ethno-political banditry’, which intensified in Guyana following the escape of five criminals from the Georgetown jail.4 Allegations would later surface that this death squad was involved in extra-judicial killings, which would be refuted by the government of the day.5 A subsequent commission of inquiry would clear a then government minister, Ronald Gajraj, accused of leading this squad (see, also, Chapter 8). While the government refuted allegations of action or sanction in the extra-judicial claims, the notion of exception (cf. Agamben 1999) was varyingly applied or presenced in these settings by particular ‘politicalcriminals’ and criminal actors. The return of criminal deportees from the US to Guyana from 2002 was also seen to have an impact.6 The violence escalated following the escape of five criminals from the Georgetown jail on 23 February 2002, the republican anniversary of the country. The five escapees called themselves the ‘five for freedom’ and wanted to defend blacks.7 Their support, however, came from extremists. The violence that followed was also seen as either politically selective or criminal in the sense that some criminals, led by the five escapees, were using politicised ethnic division to commit crimes, not dissimilar to earlier gang activities in the 1970s and 1960s as discussed in Chapter 1, if at a more public and sporadically violent level. They became ethno-political bandits to justify brutal acts of violence as proclaimed bids to provide ethnic representation. By aligning themselves with an ‘ethnic cause’, they also endeavoured to show that their illegal activities were acceptable and not extraordinary. In this sense, they drew upon a political narrative that claimed it was acceptable to be bandits to promote an ethnic cause. Given the perceived level of the inter-ethnic problem, they existed in a constant mode of ‘allowable exception’, that is to say, that it was acceptable to

80 • Competing Power

break the law beyond a soft line of illegality. Their activities, in some instances, contributed to fears about ethnic cleansing as a result of brutal violence against Indians in certain villages. Some felt that state officials were condoning a space of exception (cf. Agamben 1999). The high level of crime that had erupted in the country and the new disclosures about a phantom death squad allegedly rooting out these ‘new age criminals’ all seemed to be aligned to this type of deadly politics. The violence was also seen to include a type of gang warfare mired in drug crimes. The news that the phantom death squad had emerged as the ultimate vigilante group to wipe out the ethno-bandits and other criminals competed with the aforementioned announcement by US President George Bush. Various persons who discussed the phantom death squad did so either through public settings in the media without declaring their names or in ‘private’ settings as part of insider circles. Thus, some of the apparent lack of interest in talking about the death squad also related to concerns to keep out of the violence as well as to attitudes that it had already become part of other kinds of exceptions of ‘the everyday’. This is where poor bureaucratic systems and related other forms of structural violence as part of state practices are routinised, as indicated in Chapter 2. Thus, the different reactions to George Bush’s announcement and George Bacchus’s disclosure were indicative of these dynamics as contracting and expanding spaces of the local.

Power through and beyond Violence As indicated, Feroze and others were more interested in the news about amnesty than the news about the extreme violence. This significantly related to interests in migrating and further signalled Feroze’s engagement with an external social imaginary. While being ‘dismissive’ of the news about the phantom death squad, Feroze was also indicating that ‘something’ (related to the activities of the death squad) was going on that did not really concern people like him. Feroze was echoing perceptions held by various others that this matter of banditry, and alleged state-sponsored vigilantism, had very little to do with ‘ordinary people’ like him, in the sense that he was unable to act and, thus, unable to do anything about the matter. It encompassed his interest in migrating. It also linked with perceptions he shared with many others that a group of criminals had deliberately targeted Indians and mislabelled it a political project (see also Chapter 5). The factor that was of some interest to Feroze was that the ‘American embassy’ (the local term) had featured in the story about the phantom death squad. The self-confessed death

Local Others • 81

squad informant had ‘run from the shadows’ to the American embassy with his lawyer as ‘added protection’ to make his startling disclosures. Feroze suspected that the choice of the American embassy by the informant as one of the venues8 in which to tell his story meant that ‘people had to listen’. This was a ‘natural’ development, confirming general views of the American embassy’s powerful local presence as a ‘big one’. Feroze thought the politicians, the bandits and the US embassy would all sort it out in a manner that suggested that the particular type of disclosure and bargaining that was occurring still had to do with local politics and the extended space of embassy involvement rather than with migration and his own activities to leave the country. He was also reconfirming a ‘social fact’ – which he believed everyone knew – that the US embassy as a ‘big one’ had the power to intervene in these types of local politics and occupied this political space of perceived justice in a way that meant Feroze did not have to give it further thought. The US embassy could intervene with the state, he believed. The insertion of the American embassy by the alleged phantom squad informant, Bacchus, indicated for Feroze a particular public space of power in relation to upholding the law. An example of such an interventionist approach involved a US embassy employee in Georgetown, Steve Lesniak, who was kidnapped 13 April 2003 and taken to the village, Buxton. He was the Regional Security Officer at the time. Lesniak was released one day after he was kidnapped; his release came after the payment of an undisclosed ransom by friends and relatives. It was commonly believed that externally led power via the American embassy had been exercised in the successful release of Lesniak. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US State Diplomatic Security Service joined local police to investigate the kidnapping. The swift release of Lesniak and US agencies’ involvement confirmed perceptions as indicated by Feroze of the embassy’s power as a transformative space that shifted the local.

Involved and Separate Lata, Raj, Feroze and Ameena, among others, act uncaring of political violence because they are living through it and can assess differing levels of alarm when situations change and violence becomes explicit. Both couples – one residing in a village, the other in ‘the city’ (Georgetown) – are relatively well off. They both have relatives in the US. Feroze, like Raj, had his own business as a small entrepreneur. He also looked forward to leaving the country even though it would mean

82 • Competing Power

leaving close relatives behind. Lata and Raj, unlike Feroze and Ameena, as discussed below, did not have immediate family members who were undocumented. In Lata and Raj’s case, their successful relatives were also US citizens and as a result they were in a legal sponsorship queue to migrate to the US, as noted. Lata and Raj were looking forward to finally ‘getting through’, that is, obtaining their non-immigrant visas to the US. The violence appeared as another everyday issue they could bypass. Outwardly, Lata took in extraordinary and ordinary stories with similar distraction. Lata’s reaction to the news about the phantom death squad was also an acknowledgement that such news was always likely where things go wrong; at the same time, violence of all types is part of an everyday she can ignore. However, Lata, along with others like her, expect ‘big ones’ – in this instance certain officials and other types of powerful people/institutions – to address the violence. This ethnoviolence and related acts such as drug crimes were being made explicit in a setting already known to Lata, Feroze and others like them as one of hardships, embedded in structural violence. Variously, they were focused on networking and remaining closely connected with their overseas relatives. Lata and Raj were concerned with obtaining their sponsorship documents without any further undue delay. In Lata’s case, she had understandings of herself as a person who was both suffering daily conditions and could act to maintain a household that ‘belongs’ in a sponsorship queue. This sense of belonging indicated her partial citizen mode and her experiences of structural violence. Lata was inhabiting an imaginary where she counted her days until the time came when she would really be absent; yet having to leave her grown children meant that she would never really ‘leave’. However, in the midst of all the reports on the phantom death squad and the related violence, Lata was focused on her sponsorship documents as her way of dealing with the local.

Connected Status: Visas and Plans The city businessman Feroze and his wife, businesswoman Ameena, also have US non-immigrant visas, which made a difference both to their level of worry and to their status. As indicated, Feroze in discussing the news item on amnesty for undocumented persons in the US wondered whether it could be ‘for real’. He noted that he did not believe, really, that it was genuine. He declared that he was sceptical that it would actually work out in favour of the undocumented persons.

Local Others • 83

The discussion was more than speculation; he was closely involved. Early in the morning, he had picked up the telephone and rang two of his sons who were undocumented persons in the US. Feroze spoke of others who had followed up Bush’s announcement to make phone calls to relatives in the US. Bush’s announcement had been publicised live on local television via the CNN network and prompted conversations in domestic settings, markets and some restaurants. Some said this news was ‘big’, ‘very big’, ‘important’, and hoped it was true. Feroze, discussing Bush’s announcement in some detail, said that he ‘hoped for the best’. Although Feroze and his wife were doing well and had not directly suffered from the criminal spate of violence as some others had done, they still had ongoing plans to leave. Feroze noted that his reasons for leaving were not directly related to the public news of the phantom death squad’s existence and significant banditry discussed above, although his plans to depart would be accelerated after the news about these matters. During this period of banditry, a number of professionals and business persons left the country. One city worker, whose role as an administration staff member involved processing complaints against officials, noted that the ‘real stories’ were not readily known in official spaces. She spoke of people in village settings who had suffered horrendous violence and survivors who had fled the country as a result. More generally, reasons for departure were presented through mixed understandings. Some people had relatives in the US and/or elsewhere and were leaving to join them. Evading violence became a pressing reason for some to leave immediately, but for many it extended an idea of a migration journey that had begun long before 2003. This was the case with Feroze and his family who had long been involved in migration plans and felt accustomed to incidents of ‘political crime violence’ in the sense of seeing such incidents as separate from their everyday lives. Their interest in leaving had begun several decades earlier. The businessman and his wife told how they had lived as undocumented persons in the US in the 1980s for a short period but had decided to return home for ‘family reasons’. Feroze, in planning to re-enter the US and to overstay, noted that his wife was likely to remain in Guyana for a period and would not immediately join him, although she had the requisite non-immigrant visa to travel. His plans to re-enter the US were also for ‘family reasons’. He was hoping to join his two sons who were in the US; in doing so, he would be leaving his adult daughter and wife behind. He noted that whichever way he looked at it, there was likely to be family separation. Feroze himself had a thriving grocery business and did not have financial problems. They had

84 • Competing Power

convinced the US embassy that they could never be economic migrants (see also Coutin 2001) and, thus, had obtained visitors’ visas. As ‘notwaiting’ migrants, they were part of a growing number of people who had become mobile. However, this concept of ‘not-waiting’ was a different phenomenon to that of ‘go-and-come’, as discussed in the next chapter; through the mode of go-and-come, people wanted to show that they were tourists rather than desperate travellers in flight. Feroze and his wife already had status as those who would go-and-come, people who were mobile travellers as ‘citizens of the world’. Already known as those who could go-and-come, they were more concerned with staying in the US for longer periods. This idea of the ‘longer stay’ was separated from the need to seek work. Others would remain in the US for six months (the longest period they could remain as visitors) to work and then return home to rejoin families with ‘remittances’ they had earned through their direct labour. From 2017, amidst much talk about curbing certain types of migrants, and the issuing and overturning of travel bans in the US, for instance, some visitors report having a ‘hard time’; they may only get a few weeks stamped in their passport on entry as visitors to the US. For Feroze and his wife and others like them, the idea of being ‘notwaiting migrants’ was attached to ideas of justice in which their local was always extended in terms of another site that could offer more. Factors leading them to seek outward migration include the presence of their grown children in this migrant destination. But it was also about their self-aspirations to be elsewhere. This, as Feroze noted, was not about money. Indeed, they earned more at home than they could earn in the jobs that would be available in the migrant destination. Further, when Feroze departed on his next journey out of the country, he would do so with funds and with the expectation that funds would be sent to support him from the local city business that would continue to be managed by his remaining family members. On this basis, this family was another example of extended forms of belonging. As not-waiting migrants/persons of ongoing mobility, they were already socially part of their destinations. These bids for migration, as discussed earlier, included and went beyond economic reasons and were enmeshed in wider social imaginaries. Feroze could never be described simply as someone seeking to leave only for economic reasons. This family’s bids to leave were entangled with conditions of structural violence that affected their lives; their lack of interest in political and criminal violence was also about the conditions under which illegality and poor systems prevailed. They were interested in a more ‘impersonal space’ where they would not have to witness poverty

Local Others • 85

and always be part of varied known levels of corruption as common shared settings. The plans to depart were inseparable from how they understood these external spaces as offering a sense of worth and value without having to encounter/be forced into the problems marked by bad conditions vis-à-vis a seemingly static devalued local site. Although Feroze planned to leave his close family members including his wife behind when he departed, he did not have the same level of fears as earlier migrants or those who had been gone for some time.

Migrants and the Violent Local Migrants like Angela (mentioned in Chapter 2) who had left Guyana at the height of the political and economic problems also tended to recall the earlier years as an ongoing and unchanging site. Some level of unease about ‘back home’ surfaces from time to time in Guyanese migrant settlements in New York, for instance, and is kept current through talk and news about migrants being robbed; this is alongside the larger accounts of the ethno-political banditry and general crime.9 This disquiet was particularly acute when the news of the phantom death squad emerged publicly in 2004. Migrants advised their relatives over the phone and expressed doubts and fears when people they knew – their relatives or friends – were about to visit. Such impending visitors often felt that visiting at this time of extreme violence was unavoidable. This signalled the interconnected migratory spaces marked by constant travel and exchanges to include people travelling or returning to be with relatives, attending weddings or funerals or other events that ‘necessarily’ required their presence.10 Several visiting migrants who were in the country at the time of the news about the phantom death squad noted the warnings from their overseas relatives about visiting Guyana because of all the horrific accounts of violence. One noted: ‘. . . a bit scary. All the stories. You just don’t know. But people don’t seem bother. It seems to be happening somewhere else’. These visitors were then relieved to discover that what was ‘going on’ was separate from everyday life; this site of the everyday seemed to be more about people visiting their relatives and going about things in a routine way than about being at great risk of attacks from the bandits. In more recent years, there has been some deliberate targeting of migrants, including armed robberies by criminals pretending to be or first carrying out duties as policemen, setting up roadblocks to

86 • Competing Power

intercept migrants and other travellers on their way to the main airport. However, during this period of extreme violence and phantom death squad news, those who came and did not immediately perceive this violence felt relief and then were able to declare that it was separate from the everyday, contrary to all the talk in the New York migrant destination.11 This idea of separation occurs repeatedly to connect wider understandings that people have of power and empowerment and where brutal criminal violence in the name of the ethno-political appears to be more aligned to a distinct political life than to routine settings, in general. This is despite some random occurrences of violence against civilians. The perceptions of distance engage the complex socio-political settings. These dynamics suggest the significance of attending to how people understand their locatedness in wider social imaginaries. The accounts demonstrate that people while suffering from local conditions endeavoured to avoid their explicit visibility in a ‘static devalued local’, particularly when it ‘changed’ to accommodate deadly criminal violence and claims of extra-judicial killings. People managed their invisibility in regard to structural violence. This was rendered through complicity with officials, as noted in Chapter 2, and efforts to become persons who were more than this local as a site that constantly represented loss of status. A notion of personhood through extended sites comes out through impersonality as distance. This occurs as distance from both local conditions and shared suffering. On this basis, ideas of mobility allow people to ‘travel away’. Further, perceptions that alleged extra-judicial actions are enmeshed in ethno-political violence and political banditry affect ideas of rights and justice in ‘everyday talk’, which emerge variously while people get on with their efforts to migrate and/or globally network. Exceptions, as discussed below, are where it becomes unavoidable to ignore the violence, for instance in the case of taxi drivers. This is also where understandings of victimhood can be converted into an expert space of providing information; this returns to the ways in which people endeavour to change their locatedness in the local and where the local becomes extended beyond static narratives and violence. The attitudes and experiences of various residents who were taxi drivers in some of the villages and city locations discussed here show that these people tried to evade violence but were at times forced into it. In the midst of the crime spree, the taxi industry became visible, adversely, in the ‘separate zone’ of criminal violence and ethno-political banditry, with attacks on some taxi drivers and kidnappings of ‘random’ persons. Some of these taxi drivers also thought that the news of the

Local Others • 87

phantom death squad was a separate issue; they felt that through their work and ‘talk’ by certain people, enough was known to understand that it was, indeed, separate – a matter between bandits and those who wanted rid of them. Others spoke of ‘bandit-cops’ (a separate notion from that of cops as travelling magistrates) relating to claims about police officers who had joined criminals and taken sides within criminal factions, and so were part of the violence. This connected with the reports which would surface about the involvement of police officers in death squads (as noted in Chapter 2). The taxi drivers could not avoid keeping a close watch on situations around them. Their concerns about the news of the existence of a phantom death squad killing people were tied to their concerns about taxi drivers being a target. They also talked about the news of Bush’s announcement in relation to granting ‘amnesty’ to illegals. One driver pointed out that he did not care about the ‘whole thing . . .’. He added, ‘everyone knew what was going on. They knew who responsible. It will settle down, you know, settle down. Look, I not working nights anymore’. He said that those who did work nights looked out for each other. He knew of two drivers who had a special sound they would make when they passed each other at night as a call to show that all was well. Being part of an established service also helped with the safety issue. In 2011, taxi services had to change the colour of their cars to yellow as part of a government directive. This colour would be associated with ‘registered taxis’. Before the news about the phantom death squad became officially public through the media, several taxi drivers spoke about the killings as ‘an occupation’ for some people, providing complicated details of certain ‘names’ involved in bandit gangs, a prominent businessman and politicians. The taxi drivers were disturbed by the sudden attention in relation to explicit violence. Like others, they were concerned with ‘making a living’. Some were trying to migrate, while others noted that they were ‘making good money’ carrying overseas visitors and so they were more interested in travelling overseas as tourists than in migrating permanently; thus, they saw themselves as people who just wanted to go-and-come. With the public disclosure of the phantom death squad and certain targeting of particular taxis, the taxi drivers felt they had been drawn into a private political war, where criminals were claiming and making their own law and using people’s fears to make the country look violent (see Jaffe 2013). One taxi driver noted: ‘You have to understand why taxi drivers are being targeted; it is one [taxi] business that is involved in a big way. They kidnapped a driver to settle a score with the business’.

88 • Competing Power

Their status of being separate was challenged, however, through the increasing possibility of becoming victims of the banditry: this was through their work as taxi drivers. This vulnerability as taxi drivers was not the same as an ethnic category of people being identified for attacks, such as when Indian residents of one village had been subjected to deadly violence. It was more about taxi drivers in general being visible through the involvement of one particular service running for and by bandits, they noted. The taxi drivers noted that adverse visibility for the taxi industry vis-à-vis the violence was partly because a bandit gang had been running a taxi firm at the time. Persons who had sought employment with this firm without knowing of the criminal connections had placed themselves in danger. Accounts surfaced of kidnapped and murdered taxi drivers. Cars belonging to other taxi drivers had also been mistakenly targeted in the general banditry. The taxi link with the bandits made it important for the taxi drivers in this research not only to know what was occurring but also to want to discuss it. Another participant noted: Taxi drivers see everything; they hear a lot. Generally, we keep out of the problems, but, you know, now we have to see because they are targeting us. They use white cars – some people mix up the colour because taxis are also white [before the change to yellow] – so taxis have gone right in the middle of the problem.

These discussions co-resided with their other concerns around migration and hopes for the arrival of more overseas visitors who would need their services, among other likely contributions of such visitors to the economy. Invariably, they would discuss migration prospects, note the success of their relatives abroad and/or their expectations (or difficulties) in departing the country. Some also felt that they had it ‘good’: through their work, they could earn ‘good money’, particularly when providing services to overseas visitors. A few had left and returned and noted that they could ‘go-and-come’: they did not have to leave permanently.

Migration-Embedded Changes This idea of the local as a desired site contrasted with the ethno-­political acts of violence. The different set of dynamics includes migrationembedded changes and people’s ongoing interest in global networking and outward migration. In this setting, there are differing experiences of violence as mediated by other factors and in which people have to be

Local Others • 89

forcibly made to reappear as ethnic bodies of violence and victimhood. Thus, the bandits, contrary to statements by politicians, claimed political support; in this regard, their public position relied on the orchestrated inter-ethnic tension as necessary to invent and imagine the socio-­political nation. The guise of ethno-political banditry obscured other factors of general crime including drug-related crimes against citizens. In the recent history of professed ethno-political violence and banditry, criminals terrorised particular Indian villages.12 In these politics, Indians were both subjected to violence and seen as the cause of this violence by criminal factions. Some will point to the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, when bandits roamed the countryside, kicking down doors and finding opportunities in ceremonious Indian events such as weddings where guests could presumably be a source of elaborate gold jewellery and other riches. The lavish and public nature of these ceremonies helped to produce them as a site deliberately chosen by the bandits on the basis of cultural and ethnic displays. In this sense, ethnic considerations became attached to the ‘politics of empty pots’. Without any similar publicness of attacks on other groups at the time, Indians were able to point to ethnic discrimination at ‘wedding houses’ and other ceremonies through criminal raids by the bandits and the search and seizure exercises by policemen looking for contraband goods. In the 1970s and 1980s, the ‘kick-down-door bandits’ were inextricably linked to state officials and, in turn, demonised these officials who were implementing unpopular state policies of price controls on goods and looking for smuggled food items in domestic settings, as indicated earlier. Some of these officials also exceeded their role as representatives of the state to engage in criminal acts, but where people saw them in ‘natural roles’ as ‘state criminals’. Such officials were seen to be performing within expectations and understandings that ‘presenced’ the state in illegality at differing levels meant to impose hardships on people. The officials were believed to be both police officials and ‘special forces’  – the latter term meant to strike fear among citizens. In the dictatorship era under Forbes Burnham, various officials became bandits, roaming the countryside and targeting Indian families as part of an imaginary of ethno-inspired state violence. Their activities added to perceptions of an unhelpful state enmeshed in illegal practices and, conversely, an isolated entity (cf. Abrams [1977] 1988: 82). Across ethnic lines, some of these officials become the public faces of these types of ‘legal-illegal’ tyranny. Thus, the state and the government of the day were seen to be represented by particular types of criminals embodied through corrupt officials where notions of isolated state shifted in practice (see Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1991).

90 • Competing Power

The insertion of ethno-political violence through political banditry is attached to law and disorder, variously occurring as challenges to governance; this further renders the continuing production of a problem local. A 2003 World Bank report noted:13 Guyana’s ethnically polarized political system constrains governance reform in three key dimensions: it gridlocks the mechanics of parliamentary decision-making; it undermines respect for the rule of law by allowing considerations of ethnicity and party affiliation to take precedence over impartial treatment by the state; and it erodes social capital. (World Bank 2003: iii)

However, key players in ethno-political violence and political banditry were presenting a new narrative of empowerment by accusing the state and government of marginalising sections of the population. This narrative of empowerment and its delivery through violence struggled to gain attention from those citizens accustomed to structural violence and those who were engaging extra-territorial spaces of empowerment. The apparent ease with which bandits were able to co-opt an ethnic cause relates both to the ethno-political history and current political disaffection. From 1992 to May 2015, the PPP-Civic party, perceived to be pro-East Indian, was in power. As noted, the PPP-Civic took power from the PNC in 1992, in the first free election after twenty-five years of electoral fraud. Former president Desmond Hoyte, leading the pro-black PNC, talked of rendering the country ungovernable after losing that election. The PNC was renamed the PNC/R , as noted in Chapter 1, and later became the APNU. In 1997, the PPP-Civic again won the election under Janet Jagan, who took over the leadership after the death of her husband, Dr Cheddi Jagan. Hoyte refused to accept the results of the election (see Mars 2001: 362). Unrest followed.14 In 1998, the government declared a state of emergency. A public service strike in 199915 was linked to one in the 1960s.16 This period of unrest included an attempted coup against the PPP-Civic government in July 2002. After the 2002 jailbreak, mentioned earlier, the marauding bandits attacked certain coastal villages and were known to seek refuge in Buxton, East Coast Demerara. Indian residents from adjoining villages were frequently attacked and robbed. Residents of Buxton, who publicly distanced themselves from the violence, strongly protested ‘victimisation’ tactics by law enforcers. Some Indians who travelled past Buxton daily narrated how they were ‘terrorised’ on their bus journeys through fears of being attacked. In some instances they encountered unruly behaviour; they had expectations (fears) of such behaviour from those who took on ‘mandates’ of

Local Others • 91

representing the cause while being ordinary travellers. Several women from a nearby village who were employed in the city provided accounts of being robbed, and in some cases molested. Stories involving drugs and the police flowed into others, involving myths of who was wealthy and resentment towards a large Indian private business sector. The attacks aided a politicised narrative of inter-ethnic violence mired in a history of ethnic politics, as signalled earlier. The bandits claimed an ethnic cause in their rampages of crime. Their espousal of this cause engineers efforts to deliver a nation-state that will pay attention to inter-ethnic politics on the basis that these politics will provide benefits and empowerment for citizens. The concept of ethno-political violence in the post-1992 setting extended to the activities of these criminals, who claimed to commit violence as a bid to deliver ethnic empowerment. The accounts bring out this notion of empowerment as flawed and inseparable from extreme violence against civilians of all groups. This is a forced position that ignores the tremendous interactions vis-à-vis migration and global networking, with some citizens becoming absent from direct political engagement in the processes. As indicated in Chapter 2, strategies of matiness alongside everyday friendships allow for inter-ethnic harmony on the ground.17 At this time of banditry, while political bandits were pushing violence, blacks were generally presenting themselves as peaceful people interested in co-existence: a number expressed horror at the collective ownership of their ethnicity as a cause for violence. This attitude is evident, also, among some who seek employment in the private sector, which has a large number of Indian-owned businesses. Local residents spoke of big ones who offered support, yet the political landscapes meant that intra-group relations were also mired in group struggles. On this basis, promises for ethnic support by big ones were often delayed because there was too much in-fighting among political groups to offer effective representation. Matiness has re-emerged as a device to counter politically orchestrated ethnic tension, but the interactions with external sites have also altered its effectiveness, leading to non-matiness and new forms of tension. These forms are additionally mediated by stereotypes of who has wealth, professed to be the Indian demographic, and particular reactions to displays of the benefits of global networking. Democracy as the proclaimed post-1992 change is over-burdened with providing solutions and, in turn, has limited capacity to ensure financial benefits in the ongoing conditions of hardship. In this regard, inter-ethnic tension gains mileage on the ground and as part of new public spheres in which

92 • Competing Power

multiple voices emerge. Ethno-political violence is also an attempt to re-engage the absent citizen and to readdress poverty and inequality without adequately considering benefits and wealth obtained through overseas remittances, migration and global networking. In addition, the rise of criminals in the drugs trade affects wealth distribution. These issues are not immediately foregrounded by citizens who see themselves as being on the move and seek empowerment elsewhere. Ethno-political violence insufficiently considers that citizens who are on the move empower themselves through distance from a devalued local, which includes local politics and the state. What this violence raises, however, are new questions about the law to connect with other changes in relation to illegality, power and empowerment. As indicated, Jaffe’s (2013) work on Jamaica engages with the presence of criminal dons to offer alternative governance. The rise of ethnopolitical violence in an explicit public space is an engagement with limited local benefits and efforts to reclaim citizens through violence. The cause also finds arenas of essentialised ethnic identities where groups and activities on ‘both sides’ are vociferous about rights and abuses. This emerged particularly, but not exclusively, around the phantom death squad and allegations of its contested extra-judicial nature. Questions of protection for vulnerable ethnic groups emerged. This became part of the context vis-à-vis the role of the phantom death squad and its human rights violations. Amidst the outcry and call for investigations and redress were the varied reactions of citizens, who experienced and tried to evade different kinds of violence as a consequence of being caught in political and criminal fights for power. In 2006, a Guyanese Indian, Shaheed Roger Khan (known as Roger Khan), was being sought by police. He was wanted by the US drug enforcement agency on drug-related charges. He was eventually arrested in Suriname and extradited to the US. On 12 May 2006, Khan posted whole-page advertisements in newspapers in Guyana to declare that he had provided support to law enforcers and worked closely with top police to help stem the crime spree that erupted in 2002.18 His advertisements followed allegations that he was the leader of the phantom death squad.19 Further information on the phantom death squad’s activities came to light in the case by the US government against Khan’s attorney, Robert Simels, on charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice and related charges; details emerged in a subsequent appeal by Simels against his convictions.20 Khan pleaded guilty in New York court in 2009 on conspiracy to import cocaine into the US and related charges and his plea bargain agreement was accepted by Justice

Local Others • 93

Dora L. Irizarry. He was sentenced concurrently to forty years, which means he will serve a minimum of fifteen years.21 Khan was seen as deeply enmeshed in the violent era of the phantom death squad. He self-supported a space of protecting Indians from violence by ethno bandits. At the time, Khan emerged dramatically in public consciousness as an alleged leader of this squad, epitomising contradictory spaces of heroes and victims in the context of the ethnopolitical setting, which, as discussed, increasingly sought to polarise people post-1992. Claims of extra-judicial killings circulated. The claims of extra-judicial action were contested by the then government of the day. As discussed below, there was a mixed reaction by some to news about the alleged leader of the phantom death squad.

Violence and More ‘Indifference’ As the idea of the phantom death squad - as a ‘separate’ political issue and enmeshed in inter-ethnic tension - circulated and became an identifier of ‘non-mati’, some like Kamo began to occupy an ‘expert’ role that remained connected to migratory journeys, always in process. Kamo became interested in talking about the violence as someone collecting information for overseas relatives in Canada. She said these relations would be interested to hear about the news. Kamo is a migrant-in-waiting who was preparing to depart legally to Canada. She travels from her village home daily to a Georgetown city market stall and she appears to do work, although it is more an occasion to meet other vendor acquaintances and chat with people. Kamo also believed the news of a death squad to be a separate political issue. She felt, too, that it showed how Indians were being targeted by bandits. She referred to other Indians who told of those who had suffered at the hands of the bandits. She said that these were bandits who were being targeted by the phantom death squad, and that such bandits were being targeted to protect people who were not being protected. Kamo noted that her village was close to one that had been raided by bandits and that several villagers had been killed – this was a reference to the Lusignan massacre mentioned in Chapter 1. For her, it was a good thing that the bandits had received ‘justice’. Urgent action was needed to prevent their violent, criminal activities in Indian villages, she added. She noted that other people shared this view, because people needed to feel safe and the bandits were targeting one ‘kind of people’ (Indians) so it was ‘all political’. Her views and similar views by others were that criminals were being targeted for these attacks as

94 • Competing Power

reprisals by a ‘super-vigilante’ group. Such perceptions were separate from the criminal activities of the phantom death squad as outlined in the Robert Simels’ case,22 for instance. Partly as a result of this proximity to victims and her regular communications with family members in Canada, Kamo is prepared to discuss the violence. In effect, she was developing an ‘expert’ space to communicate with relatives overseas about what was ‘really happening’, and in this way extending her visibility as a ‘world citizen’. Khan’s advertised protestations of not being a ‘real criminal’ because he was providing a public service by getting rid of deadly bandits have become enmeshed in claims about extra-judicial violence. He sought to promote an ambivalence that ‘splintered’ his image – as a convicted criminal on conspiracy to import cocaine into the US and other charges in one context and, allegedly, as someone who helped the law to be effective in times of political banditry in another. While the case against him was ongoing in a New York court, his relatives called on the then Guyana government to offer him a pension as a reward for this ‘hero status’. This hero label is much contested by the families of those who died, human rights organisations and other groups. Activists draw on the law and Guyana’s position as a democracy to express great outrage and call for enquiries. The tag of ‘hero’ circulated at the time, controversially, as part of Khan’s image, supported by his paid advertisements. This image was in addition to that of confessed drug-conspirator and alleged killer and in this regard obscured other allegations that the squad was exterminating enemies in connection with the drugs trade.23 Kamo discusses her perceptions of Roger Khan’s role in helping to stop attacks, as distinct from the above crimes, as those which echo the full-page advertisements placed by Khan. In her discussions, Kamo also wanted to highlight the fact that she was about to migrate to Canada. She was looking forward to leaving the country and joining her grown children. But the incidents relating to Roger Khan and related banditry were matters she could also talk about. She knew about the matter, she said, and could talk about it. She had heard details from her acquaintances in villages which had been attacked. Not everyone, she noted, was interested or wanted to talk about it. She noted: ‘people, many of we living good, like mati . . . the bandits don’t care. They kill, they rob’. Kamo’s voluble statements on the banditry were related to her imminent departure for Canada; she was ‘assembling’ information to tell her overseas-based children and other relatives. In a sense, she had already left the country.

Local Others • 95

Celebrations Others who were involved in the country through everyday routines and ceremonial occasions had differing levels of separateness. On this basis, everyday activities also signalled the co-residing political violence. Such violence drew in ethno-causes claiming intimate involvement with ordinary citizens in the sense of acting for and against them. In considering the everyday of ‘ordinary people’, wedding celebrations offer rich examples of routines that occur separate from and in some instance despite the violence. Different dynamics of wedding celebrations in the 2000s included displays of the outside and the spaces of being in and out of the violence as those that show how people reengage these settings. Wedding ceremonies are held throughout the year, but certain auspicious times lead to simultaneous wedding celebrations in particular months. During auspicious months, wedding tents in various stages of construction mark the landscape, in a particularly festive manner, along with the appearance of relatives from overseas and gift-laden suitcases. Weddings were occurring in villages that were ‘generally’ peaceful (not subjected to systematic violence by bandits); some celebrations also occurred in the city, at the height of the banditry. Wedding celebrations by different ethnic groups were occurring at various sites in the city; a main Georgetown hotel was a key venue for wedding receptions for several black and Indian families. A ‘dig dutty’,24 which is a ritualistic Friday night women’s event, was held for one of the Hindu weddings in the city. This was done in a more sedate manner than that which occurred in some of the villages where the celebrations were more robust. The different levels of celebrations seemed to be more to do with differences in village and city locations than with banditry; there were more opportunities to play music loudly and to conduct rituals in the villages in roadside venues. A reception following the ‘city wedding’ was on a grand scale and held at an elite city venue. A number of Indian families attended this reception, which included many blacks and guests from other ethnic groups. The guests did not appear unduly perturbed by their vulnerability in this public gathering, despite news of horrendous attacks by bandits on some business persons in the city and in some villages. Several Indian ­businessmen, in particular, were targets of the violence, as indicated. Lata and Raj held a wedding ceremony for their son Dinesh two years after the news first emerged about the phantom death squad. Lata, who, as noted, had reacted to the news of the death squad in a

96 • Competing Power

manner that showed her as separate from the local and deeply involved with preparing to leave the country, became concerned for those she was leaving behind. In this regard, she occupied a liminal space where unlike some migrants she was not overly concerned with the death squad news and other physical violence in the country. However, like other migrants, she began to worry about relatives ‘left behind’.

Remaking the Local For their son’s wedding, Lata and Raj invited many guests who were accommodated in the spacious yard space at their home. This home became converted into a ‘wedding house’, as was usual for the occasion. Present at the wedding were some of their black neighbours who called Lata ‘sister’; this was not an unusual form of greeting between these ethnic groups in the rural settings and marketplaces (as distinct occasions of insiderness among strangers or ‘familiar others’), as noted in Chapter 2. The neighbours and other guests came dressed for the festive occasion and brought many gifts. Neither the celebration nor the attitudes of the guests suggested or offered any reminders that the country was being torn apart by inter-ethnic violence, despite the activities of political bandits, terror-filled attacks on certain villages and the public execution-type killings linked to the phantom death squad, which became public in 2004. Lata, her family and guests were not ignorant of this violence, as noted. The wedding for Lata and Raj’s son was one of several occurring in this village and nearby localities. The celebrations were, in each instance, ‘lavish’ with a number of overseas guests in attendance. Lata’s family had been sponsored by her parents. However, Lata’s father subsequently died. This meant a delay as Lata and her family’s sponsorship documents for US immigrant status had to be adjusted. The couple have two daughters and one son. The wait was tedious, with consequences for two of the three children – the eldest daughter and the son – who changed status by becoming adults. This meant they were no longer eligible for sponsorship as dependent children as part of this sponsorship application. Only the youngest daughter remained eligible and would later be successfully sponsored along with the couple. Lata, narrating her story at different times in her village home over a period of many years as she waited for the ‘papers to come through’, was sad when first her daughter, Ritu, then her son, Dinesh, had to be taken off the application. She reflected on how the death of her father meant a further delay as the sponsorship documents were

Local Others • 97

revised and resubmitted. It was this delay that made things too late for her son, Dinesh, to be included. Although sad about leaving their son behind, both Lata and Raj dealt with this setback through practical arrangements, which recognised the likely pitfalls of the son remaining behind. Thus, they facilitated efforts to mediate these conditions. Lata and Raj agreed to the wedding of their son to a local resident in another village whom he had chosen. Lata and Raj did not have the same concern about their eldest daughter, Ritu, who had married locally and lived along the same coastline. They had agreed to this daughter’s marriage after she went out of status on the sponsorship application. Ritu accepted a suitor who had waited very patiently and without any confirmation that he would be successful in gaining as a bride the beautiful girl with prospects whom he courted from a ‘respectable distance’. The burden felt by the young of waiting in a US immigration sponsorship queue puts ‘relationships on hold’, which find mixed relief when someone goes out of status by becoming an adult. This release from the sponsorship queue can lead to new unhappiness as families become separated, with some able to depart and others not. It inadequately caters for deep familial ties. Now that Ritu had married, Lata and Raj left it to her husband’s family to sort out any further migration plans while remaining willing to facilitate these plans as much as possible. Ritu entered a setting in which her husband and his family would have a say in her plans to leave or stay in the country. Ritu did obtain a visitor’s visa to the US and found it easy to enter the mode of ‘go-and-come’ (touristic nondesperate travel, as noted), but more immediately focused on looking after her child and being a part of her husband’s local business. She had become part of a setting in which she was able to achieve certain mobility to leave the country but was also involved in local activities. Ritu’s changed circumstances are an indication of how people find reasons to remain in the country even while being involved in extensive overseas-based family networks. In this regard, this daughter represented another space in which people were getting on with their lives despite the violence and related understandings of a devalued local. Lata immersed herself in preparing for Dinesh’s wedding. It became important to hold a big wedding celebration. The family’s home was to be converted into a ‘wedding house’, a local phrase which inadequately captures the level of preparations and celebrations for weddings in these domestic settings. The family paid minute attention to hosting a lavish wedding ceremony, which included building a large wedding tent, repainting the fence and hiring huge cooking pots to prepare food for the guests. Before the wedding, various family members arrived to

98 • Competing Power

help with the preparations. The invitees include overseas relatives who came with gifts for the wedding, as was often the custom. This also displayed the connections the family had with their external relatives and served to display their status further in relation to outward migration prospects and global networking. Lata noted that she had thought of sending her son to one of the ‘Islands’ (Caribbean countries) to live until she found a way for him to reunite with the family in the US. In the end, however, she and Raj had agreed to the marriage (as was customary with families in these villages, parents’ consent was sought informally; however, consent took on new meaning when local youths had options to marry partners indicated by overseas relatives in extended diasporic relations). Lata and Raj were worried that Dinesh might have a hard time and get into difficulties when they departed the family home for the US. The couple endeavoured not to rely on a particular relative who works as a policeman to solve certain local problems. Instead, Raj minutely attended to making friends among police officers in the right places . He followed up on any of Dinesh’s activities that might attract police attention, in order to smooth over any likely difficulties that his son might encounter with the police in village settings. For example, it is easy for young people to be arrested for fighting at discos or for riding a bicycle without lights. It seemed that young people often attracted the attention of police through their ‘night limes’ (regular evening groups ‘hanging out’ together  – see Halstead 2017, Eriksen 1990) and some young people were angry both about police ‘over-attention’ and about the poor local conditions. An example of this from another village is that of Sharief (the son of Fatima and Fazad mentioned in Chapter 1), who became angry when he was stopped by a policeman one evening for riding his bicycle without lights. Boyo, discussed in Chapter 4, found it necessary to develop what he described as a sanctuary for young boys related to his family to keep them out of trouble. Policemen were also seen as members of families. This returns to and indicates other understandings of matiness as a shared network that connected ordinary families to socio-political settings and abusive officials. However, complicity and attention to friendships allowed some to enact distance from the larger socio-political setting of violence even where this was professed to be about the problem of people as ethnic bodies. Lata and Raj felt it was now important to make sure that things continued as normal, that their son remained part of a family atmosphere, would avoid the attentions of those officials who were abusive and evade any explicit political banditry. Dinesh had learnt to be careful;

Local Others • 99

also, remittances would be sent once the couple had left. Unless things changed in a major way, Lata would expect ‘life to go on as usual’ for Dinesh and his new bride. Lata and Raj planned to give the family home to this son on their departure to the US. Dinesh and his bride would in fact live with his parents after the marriage; as noted in Chapter 1, it had been the practice among Indians for sons to live with their parents after marriage, with some exceptions. While there were many changes, with many new couples moving into their own homes after marriage, no-one thought it made sense to set up a separate residence in this migration setting. In this instance, in addition to continuing family relations through this residence, Dinesh and his wife would also look after the home. It would remain a base for extended family members. The house would become empty on the family’s departure to the US, so it was also important for the son to remain in residence. Increasingly, as people departed through legal sponsorship and other forms, this sharing/gifting of homes became a general practice whereby departing family members would invite relatives to move into their homes following their departure. Generally, there were examples across ethnic groups of extended families living in the same homes; in particular, outward migration often meant that a relative would benefit by being ‘left’ in the family home after the main house-dwellers departed. In some instances, the property would be rented out; some have also ended up paying people to live in sections of their homes for security purposes if they did not wish to let the property or had no family members who could be ‘left’ in the house. This was particularly the case when migrants returned regularly. On rare occasions, houses were left abandoned after their owners/occupants departed and such buildings have become noted ‘sights’ on the landscape for their state of disrepair amidst well-maintained houses. These concerns oscillate the local, which is mediated through different kinds of violence and differing presences of those who inhabit it, marked by activities and displays.

Conclusion This chapter has considered a local setting with different understandings of empowerment newly marked by explicit ethno-political banditry. Amidst the violence, both citizens who have to engage with a devalued socio-political setting for economic benefits and those who are involved in and benefit from migration networks are being hailed by the violence. This is also an attempt to change or return the terms of

100 • Competing Power

‘empowerment’ to spaces where politicians can act to bring out benefits for ethnic groups needing representation. Through the reactions of citizens on-the-move as well as those Guyanese in general who dissociate themselves from the violence, this ethno-political banditry is revealed as outdated while in the process of happening and outside of understandings of rights and empowerment. Conversely, ‘acceptance’ of violence in different settings cannot be separated from illegality; at the same time, people empower themselves in settings which they imagine to be free of both structural violence and explicit ethno-political violence. In evading political violence, the residents discussed here endeavour to display self-understandings in terms of being particular kinds of persons in extended sites and as bids to transform the local through their self-capacities. In this way, they engage and disengage a local setting of differing kinds of violence in which they bid variously for power and empowerment. The next chapter considers some of the earlier case studies in relation to the locally devalued site and bids by people to overturn their conditions through varying forms of empowerment.

Notes  1. Then US President George Bush had actually announced a temporary guest worker’s programme. He had noted, at the same time, that he did not believe in granting amnesty, which would allow undocumented persons to gain automatic citizenship. He noted: ‘I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs. This program will offer legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here. This new system should be clear and efficient, so employers are able to find workers quickly and simply’. In this speech, made on 7 January 2004, he also noted: ‘I oppose amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship. Granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws and perpetuates illegal immigration. America is a welcoming country, but citizenship must not be the automatic reward for violating the laws of America’. See ‘George Bush Proposes New Temporary Worker Program’, Press Release, The White House, 7 January 2004, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releas​ es/2004/01/20040107-3.html (accessed 12 July 2012).  2. ‘In June George Bacchus was killed two days before he was to give evidence. The magistrate presiding over the case resigned, citing reports that she was on a “death squad” hit list’, as noted in Amnesty International, Amnesty International Report 2005 – Guyana, 25 May 2005, (for the period January to

Local Others • 101

 3.  4.

 5.

 6.  7.

 8.  9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

December 2004). Available at http://www.refworld.org/docid/429b27e31a. html (accessed 20 February 2015). ‘Is the Phantom Squad Still Lurking in Guyana?’, Stabroek News, 5 October 2008, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2008/archives/10/05/is-the-phantomsquad-still-lurking-in-guyana (accessed 10 November 2010). In ensuing years, there would be other escapes from the Camp street prison, with a major jail break in 2017 when the prison was burnt. See for instance https://www.stabroeknews.com/2017/news/guyana/07/10/ prisoners-ambushed-camp-st-guards-witnesses/ (accessed 10 July 2017). ‘Official Report  – Proceedings and Debates of the National Assembly of the First Session (2015–2016) of the Eleventh Parliament of Guyana under the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana Held in the Parliament Chamber’, Public Buildings, Brickdam, Georgetown, p. 124. See http://parliament.gov.gy/documents/hansards/45th_sitting_-_eleventh​ _parliament.pdf (accessed 25 February 2018). https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2013/06/13/GUY0​ 4001.pdf. (accessed 12 December 2017). ‘DOP Labels 2002 Jailbreak “the Mother of All Calamities”  – Blames Society for Aiding, Abetting Escapees’ Guyana Chronicle, 21 July 2013, http://guyanachronicle.com/2013/07/21/dop-labels-2002-jailbreak-themother-of-all-calamities-blames-society-for-aiding-abetting-escapees (accessed 10 August 2013); ‘Official Report – Proceedings and Debates of the National Assembly of the First Session (2015–2016) of the Eleventh Parliament of Guyana under the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana Held in the Parliament Chamber’, Public Buildings, Brickdam, Georgetown, see pp. 19, 27, 100–102, 104. See http://parliament.gov.gy/ documents/hansards/45th_sitting_-_eleventh_parliament.pdf (accessed 25 February 2018). George Bacchus also made police statements. Crime would continue to rise, with security of businesses becoming a key issue. Note that more recently there has been some acknowledgement by the US embassy of such close connections when a non-immigrant visa refusal was reversed to allow a Guyanese resident to visit her chronically ill brother in the US. This is not to discount robberies committed against visitors and returned migrants. On the other side of the political pendulum is the East Indian radical, academic Ravi Dev, who wants East Indians to find their voice. Ravi Dev was also acknowledged by the then pro-black opposition as an anti-government East Indian figure. This report was first circulated in draft form in Guyana to support claims of a ‘failed state’ and was also challenged by the government. Caricom intervened in the dispute and the political agitation/unrest that followed the December 1997 elections. Under the Herdmanston Accord of January 1998, the next general election was agreed for 2001, which brought the date forward. Elections are due every five years.

102 • Competing Power

15. The 1999 strike and political activism connected with historical problems affected a small investment base in the country. Property rentals declined, marked by the departure of small investors, mainly overseas residents, who initially invested in the country after 1992. 16. The 1963 strike lasted for eighty days and allows for a collective memory of hard times. It was also about the power of ‘ethnicity politics’ to enact ‘violence’ aimed largely at Indians, but which affected all Guyanese. 17. A significant display of cross-ethnic amity was made in 1997 when Guyanese across ethnic groups came out en masse to pay tribute at the funeral of East Indian President Dr Cheddi Jagan. 18. ‘Shaheed “Roger” Khan: Drugs, Dirty Money and the Death Squad’, Stabroek News, 20 August 2009, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/guy​ a​​n a-review/08/20/shaheed-‘roger ’-khan-drugs-dirty-money-and-the-​ death-squad/ (accessed 14 October 2012). Khan also made a claim that he had assisted in freeing kidnapped US diplomat Steve Lesniak. This claim was contested by Lesniak. See ‘United States of America v. Shaheed Khan. 20 January 2008, p. 4. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USC​OURTS-​ nyed-1_06-cr-00255/pdf/USCOURTS-nyed-1_06-cr-00255-6.pdf (accessed 15 December 2017). https://www.stabroeknews.com/2008/news/guyana​ /06/07/ex-us-diplomat-unaware-of-any-roger-khan-role-in-release-fromkidnappers/ (accessed 15 December 2017). 19. ‘Death Squad Revelations by Shawn Hinds’, 22 July 2015. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=MEGYEo6k_wU (accessed 22 July 2015). 20. Simels was convicted on twelve charges. His convictions on counts of importation of electronic surveillance equipment and possession of electronic surveillance equipment were vacated by the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals. ‘UNITED STATES of America, Appellee–Cross–Appellant, v. Robert SIMELS, Defendant–Appellant, Arienne Irving, Defendant– Cross–Appellee’, 12 August 2011. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2ndcircuit/1577386.html (accessed 8 March 2018). 21. This followed a plea bargain by Khan on three charges: he was jailed for fifteen years for conspiracy to import cocaine into the US, fifteen years for witness tampering and ten years for illegal possession of a firearm, all to run concurrently. See also ‘Roger Khan’s Jail Term Sparks Division in Brooklyn Courtroom’, 17 October 2009. https://www.kaieteurnewsonline. com/2009/10/17/roger-khan’s-jail-term-sparks-division-in-brooklyn-court​ room/ (accessed 17 October 2009). 22. ‘UNITED STATES of America, Appellee–Cross–Appellant, v. Robert SIMELS, Defendant–Appellant, Arienne Irving, Defendant–Cross– Appellee’, 12 August 2011. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-2nd-circuit/1577​ 386.html. (accessed 8 March 2018). 23. See ‘Shaheed “Roger” Khan: Drugs, Dirty Money and the Death Squad’, Stabroek News, 20 August 2009, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/guya​ na-​review/08/20/shaheed-‘roger’-khan-drugs-dirty-money-and-the-deathsquad/ (accessed 14 October 2012). 24. This is also known as a matakor.

m4 Local Lives, Global Selves New Local Imaginaries and ‘Go-and-Come’

Introduction Really, Cee should have just said she was going to do trading, you know. Was foolish to let it out ’bout the backtrack [let people know she was travelling to enter another country illegally] . . . now she come back for some reason. She should ah just say she was a trader, that she going to go-and-come. —Bets

Bets is a village resident commenting on another resident, Cee, who became known in the village as unsuccessful at backtracking. She opined that it would have made sense for Cee to have told people she was a trader from the start, as this would have covered other activities and given her the status to be mobile and even backtrack, while living locally. Backtrack is a term for departing the country to enter another country illegally. This could be a journey through several countries before arriving at the desired destination with the help of backtrackers or body smugglers. Cee had come into a considerable sum of money, which led her to contact the backtrackers and offer to pay for her ‘passage’. She came from a small village and everyone in the village knew her story and how much money she had spent trying to leave. Something went wrong and Cee returned to the village almost as suddenly as she had left. After a while, she began to trade. She did not tell anyone what had happened en route or why she had returned despite having paid the required sum to backtrack. Cee, however, notes that she will tell her story at some stage; for the time being she is busy with her trading. Cee’s story and other related accounts bring out dynamics of status performances in local settings where people endeavour to shift their

104 • Competing Power

locatedness in a devalued local site that is marked by conditions of structural violence, as noted in earlier chapters. The accounts here concern villages along a coastland which is seen as less subject to political violence. Two of these villages, discussed here in some detail, had a relatively low crime rate in the mid 1990s to early 2000s although with more visible signs of prosperity this rate would change at a later stage. From the mid 1990s, villagers were variously involved in bids to migrate: some journeyed as labourers to neighbouring countries and/or travelled to become undocumented migrants. A few, like Cee, went through backtrack routes. Others waited in lengthy sponsorship queues to migrate, like Lata and Raj, as noted in Chapter 3. More generally, people found ways to make connections with ‘outside persons’ and generally to network. Different levels of success are illustrated through the attempts to contest the devalued local, facilitate change and gain empowerment. The specific accounts of various families show their experiences as part of widespread changes. Details of remittances, efforts to secure arranged marriages with overseas partners and various goods including fake American brands and electronic items, particularly television sets, illustrate some of the extensive global networking and outward migration bids. The accounts highlight the phenomenon of go-andcome, as touristic travel instead of desperate flight. Case studies of Boyo and his family in one village show that they empower themselves through external trading and global networking activities. Through their success in global networking and trading, they talk of their ability to go-and-come as holders of non-immigrant visas. In the second village, Jean, as the main breadwinner in her family, shows how it is possible to deal with their poverty and, in effect, find solutions to change ‘the impossible’ through her readiness to take on any task and through her ‘calling’ as a spiritualist. Yet at the same time, both she and her husband, Ramesh, look to the external in differing ways as ultimate solutions to change their conditions. The various activities and bids for status by these local residents further bring out different layers of a devalued local and efforts by people to contest their visibility as disempowered persons in this particular construction of the local. Their efforts demonstrate another side of the socio-political setting formed through structural violence. The case studies are drawn from research from the mid 1990s to 2012 and focus on families in several villages along one coastline. Mundane settings expanded or contracted in relation to different experiences with migration and global networking, and in some instances illegality. The accounts return to and further ground understandings of a soft line of

Local Lives, Global Selves • 105

illegality, which is presenced as part of or alongside structural violence in these changing landscapes. However, while certain forms of illegal practices have become part of the everyday, the examples show forms of social and economic survival that are not automatically integrated with ‘everyday illegality’. ‘Empowerment activities’ relate to migration and global networking. The case studies bring out how these locally resident Guyanese endeavour to upset their overt positioning in this setting as being of low status; their efforts indicate attempts to redefine the local.

Village Settings Cee had made her attempt to backtrack in the late 1990s. She was already part of a setting in which outward migration and global networking had become the norm. As noted, when she decided to make the bid to leave by backtracking (using illegal routes), money was not the primary motive. In other words, she could not be described as a traditional economic migrant, unlike some from her village and other nearby villages, who were journeying to become temporary migrant labourers for instance. She paid a huge sum1 of money to journey to the US in this manner. The fact that she felt it important to make the journey and pay for it is also indicative of the importance attached to outward migration, several decades after it first gained momentum in the country. She had left for Florida via Barbados. Something went wrong and she returned home. I first heard of Cee’s efforts to migrate from several other villagers, who were interested in providing minute details of stories in circulation to aid my ‘research focus’. I subsequently met with Cee and other family members; she noted that someday she would really tell her story, or tell her real story, to all in the village. Meanwhile, she was busy with business activities. Subsequently, as noted, she became known as a trader and in this manner sought to regain her status. Cee was a ‘proper trader’, that is, someone who was travelling between countries and bringing back goods from these countries. This held status among villagers and others. Repeatedly, in these villages, people showed their status through global networking activities and trading. The residents discussed here lived in villages that were in varying stages of development in the early 1990s. One of these villages was a squatting area in which residents literally turned up and built houses on apparently disused state land. It was ‘settled’ through people arriving and taking up house-lots without

106 • Competing Power

legal title, i.e. squatting on the land. The houses in this village are of various sizes and shapes, indicating varying levels of construction. In another village, while there are a few houses in a poor condition, including one, at an earlier stage, that appeared to be falling apart on one side while still being inhabited, most of the houses are wellkept and modestly built. Despite the status of the first village as a squatting area, it is difficult to tell by appearances, or by considering the legal ownership of homes, the levels of prosperity and poverty among villagers. While in some instances such levels of poverty and lack of prosperity appear obvious, the activities of people, variously, to change their local conditions and bid for status affect ‘easy’ ideas of ­impoverished conditions. Village secrets in relation to migration and global networking contributed to status displays and bids to provide or confuse ready understandings of residents’ local conditions. These conditions, thus, have to be deemed secondary vis-à-vis the compositions of status performances and other related factors. People sought to change their appearance from those who were impoverished  – a condition exacerbated through or attributable to the policies of the state – to those who were able to access external goods and to become empowered in relation to the external. Some, like Jean, as discussed below, dealing in local goods, struggled to achieve the same kind of visibility as a trader, but made up for this through other competences in dealing with local problems. In the mid to late 1990s, Jean, who was in her forties, began work as a vendor of fresh fruits and vegetables, placing a basket on her head and walking from village to village. She called out details of the goods she had for sale, to attract housewives to come out and buy from her. Jean was ‘walking and selling’: her activity in this regard signalled extreme need, as women at that time rarely conducted this activity inside these villages. She had a different visibility from two other youths, Peter and Hanif (part of Boyo’s household described below) in a nearby village, who were also walking through the villages vending goods, and who described themselves as ‘daytime traders’. This latter description was an important distinction, as was the manner in which Peter and Hanif carried their goods. Although on occasion they used push-carts, they generally had items of clothing thrown over their shoulders. They did not view these items as ‘ordinary’, and those who would buy from them shared their understandings of the desirability of the goods. The clothing, shoes and other accessories were ‘fake brand name’ items brought in from neighbouring Brazil. The items were known widely to be imitation brands, but the appeal of the items related to shared

Local Lives, Global Selves • 107

understandings of engaging and being part of the ‘foreign’, embedded in aspirations to belong competently in wider settings and, particularly, in relation to ideas of America. Thus, Peter and Hanif, by selling ‘American brand name’ items, were seen as traders. This term presented them as capable ‘global networkers’ whose goods had come from somewhere outside the country and were desired by their local consumers. Jean was not the same kind of trader. As an older woman, walking through village streets, she came out of the gendered protection of homes (see Bourdieu 1977; Halstead 2009. She was not generally hassled by men; however, she occupied a space with certain negative connotations as a lone woman walking and selling goods, which also affected her status. Doubly, this occupation revealed her need and, by implication, her poverty. She could not immediately be described as a trader in the same sense that Peter and Hanif were understood to be. Yet Jean actively endeavoured to change the perceptions of those who met with her in villages and on ‘night limes’ (hanging out/socialising). Jean saw herself as both ‘ordinary’ and a ‘spiritualist’. While she separated these two occupations, in both settings she saw herself as someone with power, who could do ‘impossible’ things despite local conditions. Sometimes, when she met with housewives to sell them fruits and ‘provisions’ (plantains, cassava, eddoes) at their homes, she would enter into discussions about other things: for instance, she would discuss her skills as a cook. She was also ready to offer, on demand, services as a hairdresser, seamstress, caterer and spiritualist healer. Jean noted that she did not always put forward her services as a psychic healer, but on occasions she would meet someone and suddenly she would need to pronounce on things that had happened to them, usually bad things. As a spiritualist, Jean is a powerful woman. There are a number of these powerful men and women in the country whose services are called on in different ways to deal with bad luck. Yet Jean did not understand herself to have this kind of power, that is to say, she did not consider herself an obeah woman (sorceress), but a spiritualist healer. However, she did feel that she had an empowering presence. She saw herself as someone who could help and who was able to deal with ‘impossible problems’ in her own life. She also believed she was helpful to others. Her neighbours supported one view of her lack of power in particular ways through their awareness of personal misfortunes that had befallen Jean and her family members at varying times. Yet Jean was not powerless and did not see ‘bad luck’ as affecting her ability to do things; the misfortune was ‘trial by fire’, occurring for her and her family to overcome and thereby gain greater power. This idea of power

108 • Competing Power

related both to her spiritualism and to the many opportunities she drew on to empower herself and help others. Jean noted that as a spiritualist she has been curing people for a long time. They would come to her home and to the nearby healing church in the next village looking for help for all kinds of troubles and ailments. Jean firmly believed that she was helping people spiritually with the aid of Dutch and African spirits. She noted that her relationship with Dutch and African spirits was not a problem for her Christian beliefs. Jean came from a mixed religious family, but then adopted Christianity. She married a Hindu, Ramesh. Jean noted that religion did not affect ‘the calling’ that has been in her family for several generations as one that allowed her to practise as a spiritual healer to cure people and foresee the future. In her role to empower and heal others, there is always an explanation for bad luck wherever it occurs. She thus has explanations for things that have happened to her children and to her husband. These explanations transform issues that might be construed as problems into situations that need spiritual intervention. For instance, complaints from neighbours against her children transform into spiritual issues as things beyond their control, afflictions that have to be suffered as part of the ‘family calling’. Jean’s family was very poor in the late 1990s. At the time, they had no electricity, seemingly unable to afford it. The TV set was powered by a 12-volt DC battery unit, which Ramesh had brought home one day from his workplace. At night, they would use kerosene-powered lamps. Although Jean and her husband, Ramesh, suffered particularly hard times as ongoing impacts of economic decline from the 1980s, she would not dwell on the problems in the economy. Both Jean and her husband focused on changing things through their own efforts as well as through assistance from a family member who had migrated. This was one of Ramesh’s sisters who had migrated to Canada. The family expected remittances from this family member and hoped it would be sufficient to open a small business, such as a beer garden (a bar). These expectations were not unrealistic and money would later be remitted, although not sufficiently at the time to make significant changes to their lifestyle. Overseas remittances have been and continue to be a major source of funding within the country, as noted earlier. Ramesh was a seasonal worker, often obtaining work as a driver with the rice factory; this also meant there would be employment gaps of four months at a time. Ramesh noted that he would remain at home ‘while the rice grows in the fields’. When he did work, in addition to his driving duties, he would dry the paddy (the unshelled rice) on the road, drive throughout the country for his boss and even do gardening.

Local Lives, Global Selves • 109

He would spend the unemployed months cultivating the back garden at his home but noted that he would have been happier with more employment. Ramesh kept hoping to leave his poorly paid job in the rice industry and his hard life by opening the beer garden. He expected these plans to materialise as soon as the sister in Canada was able to remit sufficient funds for this venture. He talked proudly of another sister in Venezuela, holding down a big job, with a better life than she could possibly have had in Guyana. He was convinced that life would always be better away from the country, evidenced by the reported successes of his two sisters, yet his immediate aspirations were to open a small business and to show his neighbours that he could do better. Over the years, as more and more people began to migrate, Ramesh also began to make migration plans in addition to his beer garden plans. In this earlier period, however, it was about visibly ­demonstrating success to others who viewed him poorly. While the couple made efforts to transform their lives locally, this should not be equated with explicit physical transformation of their local conditions in this instance. However, as discussed further below, some families were able to build better houses after successful global networking and temporary migrant work. In some instances, these economic benefits extended their social status to enter into the larger setting of belonging where people appear visibly status-enhanced through migration-related activities. When I first met this family in the mid 1990s, they were intensely involved with the evangelist TV programme, Benny Hinn. Although Ramesh, a Hindu, would view the programme for entertainment, Jean, a Christian, felt that Benny Hinn was kin, since they shared healing powers, and in this sense she made use of the programme to aid her image as a spiritualist healer and to further affirm her work in this regard as effective. She believed that Benny Hinn was indeed a miracle worker as he professed to be on his television show, with the ability to perform miraculous cures. Jean believed that, in time, through much praying and fasting, she would achieve similar power to that of Benny Hinn. She noted that although she had some power, Benny Hinn’s far outstripped hers. Her husband, however, was very sceptical and did not believe Benny Hinn was ‘for real’ He noted that he would remain sceptical unless Benny Hinn was before him, performing all the various miracles so he could judge for himself, and even then it might take a while to accept such evidence. He believed that Benny Hinn’s power could not really compare with genuine persons (his emphasis on authenticity) such as his wife. Ramesh was convinced that his wife as well as his children had spiritual powers; he felt proud of this even

110 • Competing Power

while expressing some doubt about others in nearby villages who professed to have similar types of spiritualist power. He took pleasure in articulating his view of Hinn in a similar way to how he derided people around him whom he deemed to be ‘show-offs’ or ‘secret millionaires’, who were already benefitting from overseas remittances, as those who did not have the same troubles that he and his family had. These interactions were strongly embedded in status performances. Yet Ramesh had a regular group of friends for evening limes. This mode of engaging with others through ridicule and derision also materialised in other encounters as a form of agency that helped him to make plans based on the promises of remittances. In these night limes near his house, Ramesh would talk with others about cricket on television, which he and his friends enjoyed watching. Around the mid 1990s, they gained access to a television and were able to watch the cricket, instead of having to listen to the radio and depend upon their imagination for visual play. Television played another part in comparisons. For instance, one street resident was nicknamed ‘Flintstone’ after the American cartoon, because he drove an old battered car and always ‘wore a sunshade’ (sunglasses) even when it was dark. The night group had much fun in finding new ways to deride this man. In the evenings, Jean and two of her friends who visited her house every day to view a televised American soap opera, The Young and the Restless, would go off in one group to the main road for their evening lime, often to talk about this soap opera and other TV programmes. This was a separate space from Jean’s ‘healing time’. Yet for both settings, Jean appeared empowered as the person who was seen to actually look after the family. This was evident through her ability to earn more money, through her skills in ‘curing’ people whose lives had become too much for them, through selling vegetables and doing any of the number of tasks that she was always ready to take on. In all of these activities, there was very little interest in the politics of the country or in talking about how things have gone wrong. As a psychic, Jean offered ‘solutions’ within her lived settings to the problems and hard times experienced as part of socio-economic conditions. She did so through her advice and healing abilities. Yet at the same time, her role model was not another local and more powerful spiritualist, but the American Benny Hinn, beamed into her home via her recent access to television (mid 1990s); he was central in these reimagined spaces against hard times. The family also had hopes of establishing a beer garden funded by overseas remittances, as noted above. What conferred status could not be extricated from global connections and networking. Ramesh noted

Local Lives, Global Selves • 111

that the ‘millionaires’ in his village could help others if they chose to do so. This also related to the varying levels of global networking and migration activities in which some were more successful than others and neighbours understood that impoverished conditions on display (in terms of size and quality of buildings or low-skilled jobs) were no longer an indicator of levels of poverty or wealth. In some instances, the interactions with television programming and external goods provided for a different kind of success and extended this landscape beyond obvious poverty as fluid and where people’s external connections were presenced, as discussed further below.

Fatima: Bottom House Counsellor Another case study involving Fatima, also discussed in Chapter 1, shows related interactions on agency vis-à-vis external empowerment. Fatima returned from the US to open a ‘bottom house’ shop. This local term often describes an unenclosed section under the house (which is on pillars), where people will ‘breeze out’ (a local expression for relaxing) in their hammocks and pass the time. However, bottom house shop is also a term used to describe enclosed businesses that start in domestic spaces under the house, with the house often understood to be located one floor up, thus the term ‘bottom house’ for the ground space. In Fatima’s case, she and her husband, Fazad, redeveloped their lower floor to open a bottom house shop from which to sell groceries. Fatima thus sold local items in a converted section of the ground floor of the family home; in this activity, she could not be described as a trader, the local term for those trading in some form of outside goods. However, she extended the meaning of trader through the ways in which she drew on the American soap opera The Young and the Restless to advise young people. Fatima noted that things remained difficult and that they would never manage without the assistance of migrant relatives overseas. She became empowered as an informal bottom house counsellor, a term she used to denote the fact that she was sitting in her bottom house, providing informal advice to young people. Fatima, in telling her story, was also highlighting her achievements; this was despite her struggles and unsuccessful bid to migrate. Fatima had chicken for sale in a freezer in the bottom house shop. Her husband, Fazad, started a weekend farm, as noted in Chapter 1. He also had a job during the week and was rarely at home. Fatima noted that without the help of overseas relatives they would never make ends meet: things remained tough despite the

112 • Competing Power

economic reforms of the late 1980s and the political reforms that led to free elections in 1992. These benefits could not be equated with an immediate rise in standards of living for Fatima and Fazad. While they worked tirelessly to make a living, overseas remittances remained a significant source of help. Their home was well-decorated with flowers and other objects, but very sparsely furnished. Fatima was proud of her bottom house shop, which also allowed for social opportunities to demonstrate her agency in the locality; these spaces were based on her brief stay overseas and on her readiness to give advice freely, as indicated. Fatima ‘counselled’ young women in the locality and drew on their interest and avid viewership of The Young and Restless to do so (see Halstead 2009; Miller 1994). She had a sense of specific control as a local ‘Young and Restless counsellor’. Fatima felt that the opportunities were there, present in the many connections to the ‘outside’ and through global networking. She felt that the young, in particular, were able to use their skills and education to make a better life, with outward migration remaining the preferred option for many. She expected that her son would find ways to eventually leave the country. She did not expect her daughters to have the same resolve, although many women were making lone migration journeys, as her own case had demonstrated. She had journeyed to the US to overstay on a visitor’s visa, as noted. However, Fatima was disappointed that her elder daughter had selected an uneducated man to be her life partner. She noted: ‘If you tell me a boy cannot help choosing an “unedicated” girl, I would understand. But not a girl [doing the same thing]’. She was able to follow up on her views that young people can do better (despite her daughter’s choice) in her counselling sessions. Out of her failed migration bid, she recreated a life for herself in which she worked at feeling worthwhile, in particular through her role as a counsellor. Despite the setbacks and disappointments, which included concerns about her grown children, Fatima empowered herself in her role as a counsellor. In this way, she ignored local conditions. Although the government changed from a dictatorship to a democracy, Fatima had no interest in discussing politics. This is related to the earlier accounts of the city businessman, Feroze, and his privileging of an external site over that of his local life, for instance. Fatima’s local setting was constructed through efforts to survive poor conditions where she inhabited a social imaginary as a particular kind of local-global expert. In this small village, she already knew from young people some of their personal issues, as they would chat with her and seek her counsel. She noted that their stories were already in circulation as ‘village secrets’ (where things were hidden but also known), but she was

Local Lives, Global Selves • 113

able to help. In some instances, they began to confide in her about relationships that were not going well. She would also endeavour to guide them away from ‘immoral behaviour’. As someone who had actually been ‘outside’, despite the status-diminishing circumstances, she nevertheless gained a certain amount of ‘status by association’, so people were ready to take her advice. In this informal role, she was able to make connections to her time in America and to the widespread interest in the American soap opera The Young and the Restless, which the young people viewed, as noted above. As someone who had also visited America, Fatima was ‘able’ to speak confidently about this American soap opera and to advise the young girls who visited her shop to make better choices about their lives. She would also tell them of opportunities they actually had, despite difficult times: these opportunities were present in the many connections to the ‘outside’ and through global networking. In her informal role, Fatima inhabited a social imaginary marked out through external connections. In this way, she also changed her visibility as someone who could not actually leave the country despite her wishes to do so to someone who had skills to offer in relation to the external. Cee, Fatima, Fazad, Jean and Ramesh have differing but related experiences of structural violence. Their efforts to evade this violence and to empower themselves are ultimately entangled with efforts to migrate and globally network in varying ways. They are, in effect, seeking and realising forms of social justice. Below are further accounts of how changes were being experienced in the village settings and varied efforts to further transform local conditions amidst structural violence. The accounts also bring out, in some instances, how new choices and experiences co-resided with ‘basic activities’ of ‘going backtrack’.

Physical and Social Landscapes: Village Residences, Migration and Empowerment In the squatting area village under discussion, there was no piped water or electricity from the mid to late 1990s. In the 2000s, much changed; land titles were granted and residents obtained piped water in their homes, along with electricity. The most visible change was in the number of large houses that were being built. Alice, a black resident who had taught herself to be a contractor/mason, began to travel to Barbados as a temporary migrant worker to offer masonry skills. On return trips she would spend time ‘building up’ her very small house. Eventually, she transformed this house into a two-storey building;

114 • Competing Power

this had been achieved during time off from several trips to work in Barbados over a number of years. At some stage, she also obtained a visitor’s visa to the US and began to talk about ‘keeping her house’ (retaining it as a gift) for her children and grandchildren as a marker of her absence. In this village, Alice’s gradual transformation of her house into a bigger physical structure, her success as a temporary overseas worker and, subsequently, her ability to obtain a visitor’s visa to the US are indicative of how some residents became changed in appearance as status-enhanced persons in relation to the external. Through her departure to work temporarily overseas, she had both presented herself as a skilled person and obtained specific material benefits that allowed her to transform a very small building into a two-storey one. These transformations occurred over a period of time between 2001 and 2010. Amidst these temporary overseas labouring jobs, Alice endured ­various difficulties as ongoing experiences of local conditions. She told me she had begun to rely on dreams to help her make decisions. Some of these dreams guided her into spiritual offerings in order to deal with difficult conditions, but things as she saw it could not change until she was able to ‘refashion’ herself as a skilled migrant labourer and to obtain work in Barbados on this basis. She subsequently began to travel between Guyana and Barbados, to work in the latter country and return with money to develop her house and provide gifts to relatives. In the village, Alice and other residents noted incidences of domestic violence and activities by some policemen who were abusing their position as part of the problems affecting villagers. However, there was no open collective focus on police abuse or domestic violence in the mid to late 1990s. This would follow later. In this earlier period, a few villagers including Alice made efforts at separate times to obtain piped water and electricity as well as land titles. A main focus was on leaving the country and demonstrating various material benefits in relation to outward migration and global networking. As indicated, during this period, villagers’ efforts to migrate and network globally were village secrets, in the sense that residents generally knew who had gone legally and who had left the country by backtracking (the illegal route). They knew who was going overseas to trade (whether legally or illegally) and who was ‘waiting to go to ’merica’ as part of long sponsorship queues. This knowledge was not necessarily always grounded in actual facts, but part of the information in circulation as one kind of publicness. The appearances of different sizes and styles (some very impoverished) of houses, alongside muddy dams and pathways that gave poor

Local Lives, Global Selves • 115

access to the houses, as well as a lack of amenities, were part of the physical landscape. However, some residents were able to extend their dwelling houses by using overseas remittances or monies obtained from trading. A number of other residents also similarly constructed larger buildings. The attentiveness to building larger houses allows for a building phenomenon in various parts of the country. In this village and others where I conducted research, these building works became part of status displays connected to people’s ability to successfully trade, access overseas remittances or to partner with migrant relatives to build homes. In some instances, returned migrants were also ­building these houses. One migrant, Tessa, who had become a Canadian citizen, had disclosed that she intended to build a house that was likely to cost G$40,000 million (US$200,000)  – she had already purchased the land for G$5 million (US$10,000). She was a professional earning a high salary in Canada. However, the 2008 global crash affected her plans and her building works were somewhat delayed. One resident noted how, over a period of years and with the help of relatives overseas, she rebuilt her home from a very small structure to a spacious two-storey building. The physical changes were also occurring in a context in which a vast source of revenue arises from overseas remittances to the country, as in the example of Fatima, and the expectations of Ramesh and Jean, discussed above. As Manuel Orozco (2003: 18) has noted, overseas remittances are often under-reported (see also World Bank 2016; Agrawal and Horowitz 1999). Details from some participants indicated significantly higher amounts. One youth noted in 2014: ‘I need a mobile phone, so I call up my cousin and he send the money’. Another said that with the advent of WhatsApp and increasing use of Skype, money was often sent for phones, and in some instances the actual phones or tablets would be sent. Not everyone benefits from remittances or benefits in the same way. Some residents, for instance, obtained monthly overseas remittances from relatives in order to care for elderly relatives or to pay for their care; this was the case in different villages. As an example, one resident in one of the villages was looking after an elderly relative whose children were overseas in different countries and were collectively sending money every month for his upkeep. Another resident2 who improved her house over a period of years noted that she would call various overseas relatives; they would chat, she would discuss an important occasion – in one instance this was a wedding – then they would chat some more. The offer would not come immediately, or sometimes it

116 • Competing Power

would come much later, through another member of the family, after being discussed with an elder family member. She noted that there have been occasions when she has made direct requests, particularly following a family illness. On another occasion, when one of her overseas relatives was planning an imminent visit, she was able to request a sum to carry out some building works deemed immediately necessary to facilitate the visit – this was the construction of an indoor washroom so the visitors would not have to go out of the house for toilet facilities. This relative was able to return the gift (Mauss 1967 through local hospitality. In some instances, she took care of an unwell relative who lived in another village. The care of this relative was a collective duty and her contribution placed obligation on other family members to do their part by assisting her. Meanwhile, with the ‘occasional’ remittances and local work, she was slowly building her house, which was eventually transformed into a very spacious two-storey building. A family member would later obtain a bank loan to build an even more spacious home. Other and more recent financial avenues include bank loans, with the government’s emphasis on home ownership and the related financing. However, overseas remittances and, more recently, temporary work in neighbouring islands are significant sources of funds. More recently, people are increasingly finding temporary work in the US, where they visit for short periods. In addition to building larger houses and holding ostentatious ceremonies, residents in these villages variously talked about outward migration efforts and foreign television programming. They interacted with and displayed migrant relatives and overseas goods (see Appadurai 1990). These interactions brought out their attentiveness to the external, and to associated status concerns. Consider further the example of Boyo, mentioned earlier. Boyo originally lived with his wife, Farah, and four sons in a very small one-flat building that was at ground level (as indicated, most houses whether one-flat or more are often on pillars). Over the years, this family has achieved various benefits that epitomised some of these interactions in relation to status and global networking. In the 2000s, this extended family would become very wealthy through their trading activities and would turn to building more ostentatious houses for family members, with the buildings situated alongside each other. Over the years, the four sons of the family have all had their houses constructed around the family home. More recently, these houses have extended into various spaciously arranged physical residences. Below, these accounts are further developed in relation to everyday activities, local conditions and status performances.

Local Lives, Global Selves • 117

The Household of Boyo and Farah: Traders and Tourist-Travellers The family of Boyo and Farah is a strong example of how some residents in this village and others were able to benefit through connections with overseas relatives and empower themselves in their global networking. Boyo is in the fishing business. His wife, Farah, is a trader. Farah originally conducted trading by taking goods to sell in Trinidad and returning with goods from Trinidad to sell in Guyana. Later, she would extend her trading activities to include New York, where the family also had relatives. Farah became very successful in her trading and eventually obtained a house in Trinidad. Boyo also had an uncle in Canada. This uncle sent him a television set in 1990 on the basis that Boyo would repay the customs duty of G$10,000.3 The gift of a TV set was not an insignificant gesture: its arrival in the household immediately changed Boyo’s visibility in the village. Boyo notes that he was one of only two persons in the area to possess a TV set at that time. In 1990, television sets were not yet widely accessible. Television was delayed by the Forbes Burnham government4 to curtail foreign programming as part of cultural imperialism fears.5 Access to television from 19926 was widened amidst the interactions in relation to outward migration and global networking: ‘television talk’ became intertwined with understandings of belonging beyond an impoverished local. Meanwhile, Boyo was the proud owner of the only 19-inch TV set in the village; the other resident who owned a TV set had a 13-inch one. The size of Boyo’s set added to its attraction for other residents and provided him with immediate status. Many of his neighbours began to congregate for group viewing at his home. They began to gather there to watch the American soap opera The Young and the Restless, which was being televised locally. Boyo and his family’s new status was evident in the regular arrival of these viewers at their house to form groups. Further, ‘Boyo’s house’ regularly had evening sessions where various youths would congregate to watch TV, lime outdoors, enjoy the music from Boyo’s massive sound systems and even to sleep. With these gatherings, Boyo and Farah’s home became extended in a very wide sense: two of the youths were Hanif and Peter, mentioned above, who were casually adopted by Boyo and Farah (without going through a legal process). Hanif and Peter’s casual belonging within the household, not as visitors but as claimed kin, relates to practices of hospitality and extended forms of kinship in which people will informally claim relatives out of

118 • Competing Power

acquaintances within the same ethnic group. This is not the same form of mati as discussed in Chapter 2, as it is based on ethnic insidership. However, it relates to shared hardship; Boyo noted his sense of accomplishment in being able to help the youths and, generally, having his place seen as a refuge,7 as he believed he provided a kind of sanctuary for these youths. The understandings of being family also related to the youths’ extended usage8 of kinship terms such as auntie and uncle and their constant presence at Boyo’s family home (cf. Baumann 1995). To explain this relationship to the ‘outsider’, family members will say that the youths are their adopted brothers. This also helps them to explain the shared space and growing ‘familial bonds’. Although their own homes were nearby, they would gather in a dining room in the small house, sitting in various fashion at the dining table to watch TV. Boyo is Hindu, his wife is Muslim; the two adopted youths are Christian. In the house is a Hindu altar: some family members make use of the altar to pray daily; Hanif and Peter, on a daily basis and along with others, would also view the US televised evangelist programme, Benny Hinn, which was being regularly televised in the mid 1990s, as noted above. Often, they would discuss these programmes. Some residents noted that the music at Boyo’s house was too loud. The loud playing of music in residential spaces was to be identified in the 2000s as a major problem, with intervention by government officials to enforce the law in this respect and in relation to a new publicness for enforcing law and order. In the mid 1990s, however, Boyo was to narrate with some pride how his evening sessions kept the boys out of trouble (with the law). He disclosed that there had been some delinquent behaviour by some of the youths and they had got into trouble with the law. This invocation of the law was one where policemen could charge people and take them before the courts, and where the courts would deal with them accordingly through a judicial process as distinct from possible negotiations with some law enforcers to keep matters out of the courts (see also Chapter 6). However, in ‘residential settings’,9 what were seen as ‘minor problems’ with the police were handled through negotiations where possible. The public image of the police became that of facilitators to aid corruption and break the law, as noted in the last two chapters. But policemen were also part of families: issues of ‘over-zealous’ policemen abusing their power as part of policing duties did not gain explicit prominence, although with the new emphasis on law as a process to be rigidly enforced, this has changed dramatically (see Chapter 6). Boyo, however, believed that he had managed to create new spaces to avoid possible negative attention from policemen in relation to likely

Local Lives, Global Selves • 119

delinquent behaviour. This was also aided by the family’s successful global networking activities. Boyo felt that his refuge for the young also represented a space of protection from over-zealous police. Although the family relied on an overseas relative to obtain a TV set in 1990, six years later they had achieved some prosperity, and Boyo was able to pass that TV set on to one of his sons and buy a new one for G$49,000. Boyo’s fishing business helped, but the money came mostly from Farah’s circular trading activities between Trinidad, Guyana and New York. Members of Boyo’s household, including the adopted youths, have all become involved in some form of trading. One of the sons is a street foreign currency trader in gold and foreign currency. Another is in clothing retail, particularly American brand names, trading in the current demand for such items as Nike boots that have become popular in Guyana. The adopted sons, Peter and Hanif, have also become involved in this brand name trading, capitalising on the popular appeal of ‘wearing brand’ by purchasing imitation products for resale and passing these off as ‘brand name’. The young people at Boyo’s have named the fakes after a local plastic product that soon ‘becomes rubbish’, noting for instance that the fake Nike boots will ‘mash up quick’ and ‘bend when you wear it’. But they also value the real product and were deeply appreciative whenever gifts of ‘real’ brand name items came from relatives and friends in New York. In the mid to late 1990s, the two boys had hopes of migrating to America, through the eventual sponsorship of a sister who was resident in New York. They also had other relatives in the US and believed they had good prospects for ‘going ’merica’. Meanwhile, barrels of goods would be sent regularly by the relatives from the US. Hanif did eventually leave for one of the neighbouring islands, where he ­currently resides.

New Forms of Status More recently, family members in this multi-religious household emphasise their achievements and status through lavish Hindu religious ceremonies and celebrations for special events. The emphasis on performing Hindu ceremonies is a select activity that is not seen to be contradictory to their everyday ‘anyone’ status (see again Rapport 2012; see also Drummond 1980, for instance). Now living in newly built ‘mansions’ and known to have done very well through their trading activities, this family has achieved considerable status interlinked with global networking activities. General interest by all family members in

120 • Competing Power

leaving the country has given way to talk about their connections and trading activities and their emphasis on their changing fortunes. Farah tells me that she might have been interested in ‘migrating to America’, but ‘life is good in me hammock’; her comfort is aided by her global trading activities. She has also, at various times, provided gifts of overseas holidays for family members. Farah, a frequent traveller, understands some of the difficulties faced by people who backtrack. Her reluctance for family members to face these difficulties is also related to her own successful trading activities and the efforts of other family members to trade. Thus, she has gone past this emphasis on everyday illegality as something to be professed or publicly drawn on for solutions. She endeavours to extract status, despite the presence of an ever-static devalued local, further marked by new big ones and new types of banditry and violence, as signalled in earlier chapters. Although her overseas relatives would have been able to offer sponsorship for Farah and Boyo to migrate legally to the US, the sponsorship rules would have excluded her grown children from the application. To have accepted such sponsorship would have led to eventual separation. While many families have indeed gone through these separations to migrate legally and illegally, as indicated in earlier chapters, Farah and Boyo did not want to consider this option. Later, her family members also obtained visitors’ visa to the US. However, Farah noted that one of her sons at the time had no US non-immigrant visa, and if she and Boyo were to start looking to migrate (that is, to overstay in the US on their non-immigrant visas), he would be the first to be left behind. Other things have interceded in this idea of permanent migration to do with their growing prosperity and the arrival of grandchildren. In addition, many family members are able to travel to neighbouring islands. A granddaughter would eventually marry someone in a neighbouring country in which Farah had previously bought a house. Farah also noted that she was able to pay for her son and his wife to holiday in Canada after they were able to obtain the necessary travel visas.

To ‘Go-and-Come’ Given the emphasis on travelling overseas and the hardships some experience to make this happen, the gift of an overseas holiday is a dramatic intervention which changes the image of would-be fleeing citizens into tourists with the means to ‘go-and-come’ (travel in and out of the country casually, rather than as part of desperate survival, as noted earlier). This idea of becoming visible as a tourist is one that

Local Lives, Global Selves • 121

others have mentioned as something to be achieved. ‘If the embassy could just give people visa, people would go-and-come: they would not want to stay.’ I heard this comment or a form of it too many times to recount. In the 2000s, others have taken up or drawn on this notion of ‘non-desperate travel’ to intercede in public images of their local settings by noting, for instance, that people who have left the country are still interested in local goods or that people overseas are desperate for the skills local people have (see Chapter 5). To go-and-come occupies part of the imaginaries embedded with migration-related violence in which people acutely visible through a publicly disempowered local endeavour to re-extract agency and empowerment. The idea of go-and-come is also a challenge to the power of the US embassy to grant or refuse visas. These perceptions of power, while enmeshed in visa-granting powers, are representative of larger understandings in which a criminal sought refuge in the embassy against the state, as discussed earlier. As indicated, as a ‘major external’ power-broker in the local setting, in some instances, the US embassy is seen to be more powerful than the state in certain everyday discourses. On occasions, in evening gatherings or ‘indoor limes’, residents would discuss the ‘known stories’ encompassing people from different localities trying to obtain visas through legal application. This route was perceived as a process of luck and chance: applicants are often explicitly treated as intending immigrants. Some would also discuss stories about the treatment of applicants, offering ‘fascinating’ descriptions; they would talk about the stories in circulation that involved subverting the official processes. These understandings are not limited to these villages. People also talked of of ‘visas for sale’ through the embassy before the disclosure in 2002 about US official, Thomas Carroll, selling non-immigrant visas in the US embassy in Georgetown. At different times, I also heard talk about visas being sold through the US Embassy. On one occasion I was with a local cashier in the city, Georgetown, who claimed she had been offered a US non-immigrant visa if she could ‘pay’ for it. The offer to her had been made by a ‘well-connected local’ who had stated that he had direct access to the embassy. She was discussing this with one of her friends in my presence. The friend was sceptical of the idea and felt it was a scam to obtain money without delivering any visa  – the friend wondered if the US embassy could become part of local corruption in this manner. However, the cashier was adamant that the local person had access. This local person was selective in his offers to provide visas directly from the embassy and approached people very carefully. He had approached

122 • Competing Power

her because he ‘knew’ her through his visits to the food establishment. Also, through her job, she had opportunities to ‘observe’ him when he visited the establishment for food or drinks and, thus, she believed that he was not making a false claim. Others also spoke of visas to be obtained for a payment directly from within the US embassy. When I heard these stories, there was invariably someone expressing doubt that the illegal visa could come from within the embassy – this appeared also to be an uneasiness with the publicness of being too closely identified with such a scam and the knowledge that it was prudent to be on the alert for fraudsters. As noted in Chapter 2, US non-immigrant visas were confirmed to be illegally for sale by Carroll, and Guyanese, Halim Khan. They were charged in relation to visa fraud in 2000. They were subsequently convicted10 and jailed.11. In 2013, another US officer, Edy Zohar Rodrigues Duran, was also accused of selling US visas; it was reported that he was using the Guyanese visa allocations quota to sell visas mainly to Chinese and Indian nationals who were using the country as a transit point and were able to obtain Guyanese passports to facilitate the transactions. This is one example of a changing local setting in terms of criminal activities said to involve transnationals who are using the country as a transhipment point. The US embassy also confirmed by email, following my request for information, that they no longer required documents from applicants in support of applications for non-immigrant visas. The widespread view was that the embassy had finally realised the notion of Guyanese innovativeness in the modes of producing documents (see Miller 1993; Prentice 2009). However, various applicants were to later relate that they would put together documents and have these ready in the event of being questioned. The actual visa application has additional questions and is processed online, which indicates a focus on particular types of answers/information rather than on documentation of assets and related matters. New talk that the embassy is ‘giving away visas’ also relates to efforts by people to show their disregard of this power, or that they internalise an idea of being desirable travellers/tourists as a status to be accepted by the powerful US embassy. In the pre-election period leading up to the election on 11 May 2015, some long-term research participants noted how they were moved to tears at the ease of receiving a nonimmigrant US visa, as suddenly it seemed the embassy was handing out visas to everyone with little scrutiny. While some applications were still being refused, these successful persons felt that finally the embassy was recognising that people could go-and-come, and they were just

Local Lives, Global Selves • 123

people like others elsewhere. Some opined that the ready allocation of visas at this time changed the demographics of voters present. Others noted, however, that although they did obtain visas at this time, they were still able to vote physically as they did not travel immediately. Another view was that Guyanese, as hard-working persons, were ‘preferred illegals’ over others seeking low-skilled employment without documentation from countries that had status in relation to terrorism or where internal politics in the US was rendering traditional sources of illegals even more undesirable. Yet another view was that the discovery of oil in 2015 in commercially viable quantities meant that Guyanese were ‘new desirables’. Reports have confirmed billions of barrels of oil reserves, as noted.12 In 2018 yet more significant quantities of oil have been discovered. These views of ‘new desirables’ were attached to the ongoing interactions in relation to global networking and migration. In part, the perceptions that visas were easier to obtain over the past five years (up to the Donald Trump presidency) also relate to the changing local setting in which people travel more frequently and alter understandings of their exit from the local. In particular, a growing number of older persons with resident or citizenship status travel back and forth from the US to Guyana. They would often note that they do not really want to be in the US, or they would cite the importance of being back home when the place (their migrant home) ‘turns cold’ and/ or the importance of being with loved ones, particularly those who could not travel. While the phenomenon of older migrants travelling back and forth is a strong indication of revaluing of the local, various other migrants of differing age groups would also travel frequently to be with relatives, among other reasons for travel (as also discussed in Chapter 5). However, the idea of go-and-come is more about contesting the stigma associated with the devalued local and with those who do not have legal means to migrate; this also relates to how people seek to contest the idea of always being presumed to be intending migrants in interviews for non-immigrant visas, as standard embassy practice (stated on official forms). The bids of local persons to limit this assessment and devaluation emerge in the growing talk of go-and-come, and, in this regard, they appear as those who can empower themselves without needing to overstay as ‘not-waiting’ migrants do (discussed in Chapter 3). The imagined tourist from a wealthier and powerful country becomes real in this talk and in the varying forms of limiting and overturning poverty through understandings of the ability to travel out of and to return to the country. The talk of go-and-come helps to unveil the status negotiations and bids for empowerment at different levels, where the local is extended

124 • Competing Power

and reclaimed through minute ‘status and loss’ interactions with migrants, temporary travellers and other global networkers. The talk of go-and-come publicly limits loss, extracts status at different levels and redraws/alters a static local which by association devalues people visible through it. This local is thus conceived not just as a point of ejection, but as a site of multiple movements where persons and their goods can travel freely in a manner that is also imagined without constraints and as leisure. In this regard, people display on a devalued landscape the ‘luxury’ of being a tourist instead of someone engaged in desperate flight. This ‘intervention’ points to efforts to change status. It renders more visible the ways in which locally resident Guyanese contest their devalued presence in the local, as further discussed in the next chapter. This envisaged fluidity of the local signals efforts to re-engage the external. These are also endeavours to shift the notion of local devaluation and images of persons by association who are visible through this devaluation. In this sense, the local is rebounded to be shown as being of value (see Strathern 1996) and rebounded to contest the power of ‘external partners’ or the loss of power as rendered through the departure of people for other countries (see Chapter 7 for different types of rebounding of the local). While people continue to leave, to join overseas relatives, to overstay on temporary visas and to backtrack, ideas of go-and-come become inserted to bring out other impacts on status negotiations in relation to the local and spaces for re-empowerment by local persons. Farah’s gifts of overseas holidays to her family, as mentioned above, come with the acknowledgement that she would not want them to leave through ‘backtrack’. Casual references to backtrack as part of everyday knowledge presence the acceptance of this practice among people in general. This research has not included actual backtrackers (body smugglers). However, their presence was part of local talk and embedded in the line of illegality that was ‘acceptable’ in relation to ‘everyday survival’, as discussed previously. Like Farah, many of the villagers I met with in the early stages of my research did not actively pursue illegal migration as an option in the sense that they were not meeting with backtrackers to pursue illegal routes for outward migration. They understood that there were people ‘going backtrack’ and a few indicated deeper connections. While accounts are given of people known to have travelled backtrack, the details provided are deliberately sparse and, in turn, fragmented here. As the example of Cee shows, residents often knew of people who had overstayed on non-immigrant visas.

Local Lives, Global Selves • 125

However, many Guyanese residents also had or sought legal means to migrate. Many were in decade-long chains of migration, as the example of Lata and Raj (discussed in Chapter 3) indicates. Some became active in arranging marriages for their children through overseas relatives and in exploring possible jobs overseas, by becoming temporary overseas migrant labourers and, generally, by networking. These various efforts brought out their agency against local conditions. Note, however, that these efforts co-exist with difficult local conditions, as already discussed. Although Farah and her family had found ways to go-and-come, and people would talk about returning and not needing to overstay, this option of ‘touristic travel’ was not in these years readily available to major North American destinations for those who were not migrants. Increasingly, it was available to neighbouring countries: this access drew on the years of casual ‘non-border’ travel between Guyana and Suriname and Guyana and Brazil, for instance. Note also the example of various villagers and their relatives in the mid 1990s who travelled to Suriname without a passport. In journeying across the river border, they avoided the need to present documents to enter another country. Miners from Brazil, among others, have been a source of some contention among local residents through their ease of incursion across the borders to mine for gold and diamonds in the Guyana mineral-rich hinterland. More recently, some of these concerns relate to diamondsmuggling from Guyana to Brazil to facilitate re-entry into Guyana to circumvent ‘blood diamond’ rules of exploitation.13 Many others were also keenly interested in migrating and, to a large extent, people began to network to offer themselves as skilled labourers in neighbouring islands. These networking efforts and bids to migrate continued amidst difficult local conditions. The changes occurring reflected concerns with the external and, in this sense, a disengagement with the state, as discussed here. The appearance of persons who had status through global networking and related interactions contradicted a local marked by structural violence and illegality. A different type of local person emerged as someone who was proud of being local in particular discourses and had the ability to competently access the outside in differing ways as spaces of empowerment that did not rely on their local devaluation. This kind of person became a supra-local person, as discussed further in this book. This type of person was seen as ‘not part’ of political problem settings marked by physical violence, banditry and inter-ethnic issues as discussed in previous chapters. Status and ideas of new big ones were entangled in people’s mobility in and out of the country and related interactions as processual spaces of power relations.

126 • Competing Power

Conclusion Various accounts have brought out the ways in which people encounter poor local conditions and endeavour to transform their lives through particular forms of engagement vis-à-vis social imaginaries. These forms are embedded in changes occurring in relation to the tremendous emphasis on outward migration and global networking. The accounts further demonstrated uneasy local settings and transformative spaces: the suggestion of a soft form of illegality is present alongside the efforts of people to both evade structural violence and change their local lives. The idea of the local as devalued emerges in relation to the construction of empowerment as embedded in the external and as spaces for social justice. The accounts also brought out minute displays of agency within this static local to overturn its visibility and/or show an engagement and incorporation of the external presence as empowering. The chapter noted this agency in new efforts to go-and-come as an idea and a new goal beyond the efforts to become migrants and reside elsewhere. Chapter 5 considers the newly empowered local person and the returned migrant to show the local setting as further transformed vis-à-vis particular power relations. The transformation occurs in the ‘performances’ of a new setting of local power. Certain dynamics of small and big persons remain to mark disempowerment in the visibly devalued local, which shift in and out of externally presenced spaces.

Notes  1. In the 1990s, the backtracking fee per person was US$10,000. By 2012, this had risen to between $15,000 and $20,000.  2. A participant who is being deliberately further anonymised by being described as a resident rather than a named person.  3. Street value of the Guyana dollar was approximately $139 to US$1 at the time, as noted, as a massive devaluation. This changed in 1999 to G$179 to US$1. The would subsequently be further devalued, at G$200 to US$1.  4. The idea of establishing television was considered and vetoed by the Burnham government in 1967. Neighbouring countries such as Trinidad and Tobago established television in 1962, Jamaica in 1963, Barbados in 1964, Antigua in 1965 and St. Kitts-Nevis in 1975. From 1967 until the death of Forbes Burnham in 1985, the establishment of television remained an idea to be relegated to feasibility committees.  5. Similarly, an emphasis was placed on local rather than foreign goods.

Local Lives, Global Selves • 127

 6. Two private television stations, VCT 28 and WRHM 6&7, did emerge in the first half of the 1980s, but their offerings were very limited.  7. In recent years, this extended claiming of kin is particularly strong around the practice of women claiming brothers by tying a sacred thread (Raksha Bhandan) on their hands, a Hindu practice that has gained momentum.  8. It is common practice, particularly in village settings, for youths to address elders in respect terms such as ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’. However, the youth’s use of these terms in the domestic setting went beyond the respect terms accorded casually to others. Such constant usage, addressed to the Boyo and his wife, emphasised the youths’ inclusion within the family as adopted members.  9. Deliberately vague here to encompass a number of ‘unsupervised settings’ between some police officials and citizens. 10. ‘Carroll and Khan were arrested in March 2000 and each was charged with (i) conspiracy to defraud the United States, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371; (ii) production and issuance of false United States visa documents, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028; and (iii) bribery of a public official, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 201’. An appeal judgment in favour of Carroll in 2003 vacated his sentence of 262 months with instructions to the district court to ‘sentence Carroll in a manner consistent with this opinion’. The Appeal panel concluded: ‘the final offense-level calculation of 27, which corresponds to a sentence ranging from 70 to 87 months’ incarceration, adequately reflects the seriousness of and will provide a just punishment for Carroll’s offenses, see 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(2)(a), and will avoid an unwarranted disparity between the sentences of Carroll and his coconspirator, Khan’ (ibid.)’. United States v. Carroll’, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1370173.html (accessed 8 March 2018). Khan was sentenced to thirty-eight months in prison and three years of supervised release. 11. The evidence disclosed that Carroll had amassed a significant fortune by collecting US$8,000 for each non-immigrant visa and that his local partner, Halim Khan, sold each visa for US$12,500. ‘U.S. v Carroll’, 12 June 2002. See https://casetext.com/case/us-v-carroll-46 (accessed 8 March 2018). 12. ‘With a Major Oil Discovery, Guyana Is Poised to Become a Top Producer’, The New York Times, 13 January 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/ business/energy-environment/major-oil-find-guyana-exxon-mobile-hess. html?_r=0 (accessed 30 July 2017). 13. See also recent media reports about diamonds being smuggled from Guyana to gain origin stamps in Brazil and then returned to Guyana. For example, ‘Diamond Smuggling in Lawless Amazon Mocks International Pact’, Reuters, 6 December 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venez​ uela-mining-idUSBRE8B511G20121206 (accessed 12 January 2015).

m5 Re-presencing the Local

Introduction Who cares . . . what is the outside? Why would I want to leave here? I even quarrelled with my mother – don’t know why she thinks outside is everything. I told my friends. I am not leaving. —Anand

Anand, a skilled technical consultant, is vociferous in his expressions about his lack of interest in migration and simultaneously notes that this is an unusual position. Anand as a high-skilled person had a ‘decent’ job in Georgetown in the 2000s. He was part of a group of friends who are similarly high-skilled and employed in the same field. His friends were all interested in migrating through a Canadian skilled programme. Among them, Anand stood out through his expressed disinterest in this programme and generally through his proclaimed interest in remaining in the country. While Anand was positioned as exceptional by friends who cannot understand why he would not want to migrate, his attitude extracts status through this ‘disengagement’ with external sites. This is not dissimilar to the activities around go-and-come as discussed in the previous chapter. However, this expression of disinterest as a means of extracting status relates to wider enactments in which some locals can be made to feel at an acute disadvantage in relation to those who are successful migrants or accomplished global networkers. Thus, some, like Laila, a city businesswoman, will talk about the stigma of ‘outside status’ as a loss felt by local residents in relation to those who have obtained status through external sites. Others talk about how they put up with certain migrant relatives who ‘act big’. This is amidst

Re-presencing the Local • 129

other interactions in which migrants are part of separation and loss and where family members acutely feel the absence of a loved one on different sides of the diaspora. The examples in this chapter continue to bring out contestations of a devalued local through further case studies on power relations at micro levels. Variedly, the case studies bring out perceptions of shifting power. The chapter looks at how these shifts are experienced and contested. As indicated in Chapter 4, locally resident Guyanese variously endeavour to contest poor local conditions. These everyday conditions are compounded by loss of status in relation to the perceived inability of some to migrate from the country. This loss is attached to an idea of a static local landscape. Amidst the socio-political and economic conditions, this loss of status became a new narrative of migration competing with efforts by some local residents to display competence and enact status in larger social imaginaries. The recurring theme of external empowerment intercedes in poor local conditions, as discussed in previous chapters. The case studies are considered as part of ongoing changes vis-à-vis continuing outward migration and global networking. The emphasis here on the status negotiations further illustrates the efforts to displace the visibility of poverty and related conditions where locals achieve status and can empower themselves despite an ascribed devalued visibility. This ascribed visibility increasingly became part of ‘local experiences’ as people continue to leave. The chapter thus extends the earlier examples in the book to discuss how some participants began to show their sense of value and empowerment despite and as part of the ‘external presences’. This related to an increasing emphasis on being experts. The chapter considers the negotiations that demonstrate new limits to remake the local. Thus, following Strathern (1996), a notion of limits and associated new boundaries apply to the interactions between the locally resident Guyanese and their migrant counterparts, as indicated earlier. This combined sense of movement, instability and stillness also demonstrates these residents’ various efforts to counter the lack of value in the local and to demonstrate agency. Certain transformations further engage with the local, which is re-presenced while extended. The relations unfold an integrated setting in which residents variously endeavour to demonstrate agency and/or limit its loss. This loss can be experienced through the presence or invocation of a particular global as a new type of structural violence.

130 • Competing Power

Migrants and Locals The behaviour of Anand and others like him relates further to understandings of how people see themselves as skilled persons, as those who are experts and can offer something of value to others, including migrants. As noted earlier, experts in the local signify those who visibly make skilful use of knowledge, goods or qualities, which demonstrates their agency in practice.1 The term ‘expert’ is further applied here to show the changes whereby some saw themselves as experts in navigating their visibility as skilled, empowered persons outside of a devalued local and where a self-definition is often present. This is not dissimilar to the activities and efforts of Jean, Fatima and others discussed earlier. However, the examples in this chapter show some explicit challenges to loss of status, which also demonstrate power negotiations within an extended local. Anand acts to show his status by refusing to be visible as an intending migrant and is particularly dismissive of the idea that someone only had to be resident in the country in order to be deemed to be an intending migrant to North America. Anand and his friends had the good fortune to be eligible for legal migration through their skills, as indicated above. The group of young men, who belonged to different ethnic groups, were highly skilled as technical engineers. They worked for a prestigious local firm and earned a very high salary by local standards. Apart from Anand, as noted, they were all actively planning to migrate. They had initiated these plans under the Canadian skilled programme for emigration,2 seen by some locals to fast-track immigrants into Canada. They noted that many skilled Guyanese were departing under this scheme. However, this is alongside illegal migration activities: various others take more hazardous routes of ‘going backtrack’ (leaving the country illegally), as indicated in earlier chapters. Anand, however, did not care for this ‘good fortune’ of being able to migrate legally and with relative ease. Anand, in his ‘debates’, was explicitly challenging the automatic status given to migrants and seeking to claim this status, in turn, for his local. One of the young men, Fazal, constantly debated with Anand, trying to get him to see that it was a good thing to leave the country. Anand, however, resisted this effort. He did not only argue about this with Fazal; he had also quarrelled with his mother about his decision not to leave the country. His mother was ‘speaking’ to him constantly and could not understand his attitude. Anand said that he was ‘fed up’ with people acting as if the ‘outside’ was everything.

Re-presencing the Local • 131

His friends were preparing themselves for migration by learning about Canada and taking various courses, even though they were already highly skilled. He distanced himself from this process. Anand admitted that it gave him a lot of satisfaction to tell his family and friends that he did not want to migrate. Unlike many others, it would have been easy for him to apply for the above programme with a high chance of success or to find another feasible way to migrate. Anand’s attitude could be linked with that of some offspring of prosperous returned migrants who are ‘happy’ to be at home (although in some instances they were born overseas and are children of migrants), but Anand had never left the country. A growing group of young people would also express political reasons for not wanting to migrate. This might also be further considered in terms of new political power attached to wealth in some instances, obtained from migration-based work and/or global networking. These provided new spaces for such persons to show their mobility to travel in and out and generally be more present in the country in terms of non-desperate travel. Some migrants also return to the country to do business with locals and are not always able to enact status because they need the business. These varied ‘groups’ are not readily visible in the settings in which there is a constant emphasis on departing the country. Thus, Anand’s position against those of his family, friends and acquaintances sets him apart; he gains satisfaction in telling people he does not wish to migrate. This explicit challenge occurs alongside other less visible forms, where people contest the automatic status attached to outward migration and can feel at a loss in the encounter with some migrants. In these interactions, ideas of external empowerment remain apart from the efforts of those who deliberately choose to show their status by positioning themselves outside of these general interactions, not dissimilar to owning a particular form of cultural capital to stand apart from common practices (see Bourdieu 1984). These disavowals, however, relate to and thus acknowledge the tremendous status interactions in relation to understandings of external empowerment, as examples indicate. A local businesswoman, Laila, described the experience of loss of status as ‘outside stigma’. Dismissively, however, she noted: ‘The outside stigma is changing. More and more people are going away. They don’t feel so bad now’. She expected ready understandings of what she meant by the ‘outside stigma’. Yet the term ‘outside’, used in the country to reflect an external site (anywhere outside the country), as noted, is often more about status than stigma. Laila noted that stigma was attached to those who have to ‘put up with outside people’ (returned

132 • Competing Power

or visiting migrants) who ‘show off’. She also talked about how some locals lose status by being ‘left behind’, as those who have not been able to migrate or are still waiting to do so. She noted, however, a change: she said that although there was a loss of status because of ‘outside stigma’, this loss was being countered. Laila runs a beauty parlour and often deals with clients from overseas (returned or visiting migrants). Not dissimilar to the views of Fatima and others in Chapter 4, she seeks to claim a shared space of obtaining status through travel and noted that many locally resident Guyanese were also travelling outside the country, and in this way they were also obtaining status. Laila has experienced arrogant clients; some clients also complain about her behaviour. However, her beauty salon cannot be described as local in the sense of a ‘stigmatised site’. As several of her clients, including migrants, have noted, she has a dual charging system and charges a higher rate for overseas visitors and those who behave as if they have arrived from overseas. This higher pricing system establishes her salon as one that can compete with similar businesses overseas. She herself has travelled extensively and has relatives overseas. She chooses to reside in the country, runs a successful business and uses her knowledge of this particular divide between outside and local to succeed in her business endeavours. In related work, Richard Wilk (1999) provides an account of being invited to dine by locals at two different periods in his research in Belize. In the first period, he was presented with food that was expected to match the familiar. Years later, on the second occasion, Belizeans had learnt to privilege the ‘local authentic’ and knew to serve particular local food to someone who could be deemed non-local. In Laila’s case, her business is ‘more than local’ in terms of facilities and the ways in which she promotes the quality of her services. She has become an expert in knowing what ‘outside people’ want: her salon has high demand with a mixed clientele of locally resident Guyanese and ­visiting migrants. Another example of such expertness comes from Host A, a village resident who initially distanced herself from some of her overseas relatives as she did not want to be positioned as a needy person. She subsequently found ways to highlight the fact that she was also giving to these relatives. This was evident, for instance, in a leaving party for a sister who had obtained her ‘papers’ to migrate to the US. Present was another sister who was also awaiting sponsorship papers and so was about to ‘get through’. The sister about to leave had visible status and indeed was the focus of the celebrations. Another sister was visiting from New York and they also wanted her to have a ‘good time’.

Re-presencing the Local • 133

Host A herself had not been sponsored and was not in a migration queue. A preference had been given to two sisters in terms of migration sponsorship. Although this preference appeared naturalised in the way everyone acted and emphasised their family ties, Host A had been somewhat excluded. Much later, in the election period in 2015, she would obtain a non-immigrant visa to the US, and by 2017 she had become someone able to go-and-come, travelling on several occasions to visit her relatives. However, at this earlier stage, she had suffered refusals for such temporary visas and was unsure whether she would actually be able to obtain a visa. Her ‘outside family’ did not immediately give her preference in their plans to sponsor relatives and this may have also been about resources for applications as well as relations between different family members. In an earlier period, Host A had kept her distance from some of her family members. This attitude later changed as she began to network with her overseas relatives. At this gathering, she focused on what she had to offer the extended family. She took charge of the kitchen and helped to manage the guests. She even helped to cook some of the food. Host A was able to help orchestrate a leaving party that was ‘really local’ in terms of what was sought by those who had departed the country. She and other guests explained to me that the sister who was visiting from New York would have to work when she returned to New York. She would not be able to sport again like this. New York was also a very difficult place by all accounts and people were not finding it to be a ‘bed of roses’ as some had imagined. Also, they felt – although this was not really the case3 – that New Yorkers did not have the space to have a party of this kind, held outdoors in the yard where people could play music loudly and sport after dark. By hosting the party/feast, they were also doing a favour to the US visitor. They were countering the idea that her ‘automatic status’ as a migrant would necessarily evoke the devalued local and their lack of status as those ‘left behind’. They were also celebrating the imminent journey of the sister who had ‘finally got through’, that is, obtained her immigrant visa after a lengthy wait. In an earlier period of research, in the mid to late 1990s, no-one talked of doing favours to returned migrants in this way. I sometimes mentioned difficult conditions experienced by migrants, but this was not received well. Some people told me that they felt certain relatives did not want to help, hence the talk about difficult times. In recent years, as noted, there are more opportunities to travel out of the country, as part of global networking and outward migration. In addition, Guyanese are increasingly becoming temporary workers in nearby countries.

134 • Competing Power

Accounts, in particular, of how workers are treated in Barbados have added to new understandings about hard times. Barbados is currently a main destination for temporary migrant workers and some horrendous accounts circulate of mistreatment of such workers, ranging from reception at the airport to exploitation at varying levels. Recent accounts by Jamaican women of being mistreated at Grantley Adams Airport break the ‘silence’ on these issues, as indicated earlier.4 A Jamaican, Shanique Myrie, successfully sued the Barbados government at the Caribbean Court of Justice following her treatment at Grantley Adams and was awarded US$38,000. In her lawsuit, she claimed she had experienced a ‘dehumanising cavity search by a female immigration officer at Grantley Adams International Airport, locked in a filthy room overnight and deported to Jamaica in March 2011’, as reported in regional media.5 In the Guyanese setting, despite understandings of ‘hard times’ experienced by migrants, and the ways in which some migrants seek the ‘really local’ as desirable, it is not easy to change the general idea of ‘automatic migrant’ status. In minute settings, such status competes with family bonds and changing understandings that provide knowledge of hard times in migrant destinations. However, the idea of the migrant is on ‘constant display’ as a solution against structural violence and, thus, is embedded in the quest for empowerment and social justice. On this basis and others, the idea of automatic status, while disentangled in minute settings, operates in macro contexts to evoke as its opposite the ‘problem local’ and people’s positioning within it. Further, the ongoing emphasis on outward migration, continual global networking and related interactions inclusive of migrants’ remittances add to the construction of automatic status.

Migrants, Locals and Loss While the idea of the migrant as a big one can lead to distaste expressed variedly, at the same time migrants are part of a kinship continuum, as indicated in previous chapters. Thus, the discussions do not detract from the close ties between migrants and their local relatives and others. As noted, overseas remittances from migrants to their relatives in Guyana are a significant source of income and revenue for the country, which brings out, in general, both migrants’ contributions and deep familial ties ‘back home’. Some migrants are torn apart from spouses, parents and siblings through the processes and rules of migration sponsorship and resettlement, as the discussions so far in this book indicate.

Re-presencing the Local • 135

Further, frequent travel by some to reunite with family members adds to understandings of non-desperate travel, as discussed earlier, which also contribute to emerging landscapes of being powerful in the local through fluid travelling. The research includes a number of families in these predicaments; family members have heart-rending stories of separation and loss. Many of the accounts show that loss of status is implicated in other kinds of losses, family separation and related issues. Family members in this migration continuum demonstrate tremendous warmth for each other. This is particularly evident in some of the encounters when migrants returned to reunite with their relatives. However, in some instances, family members were hierarchically reordered in terms of migration and related issues. The accounts focus on particular understandings in the local context vis-à-vis status and changing conditions. The following accounts in an earlier period of fieldwork on village residents demonstrate processes of being devalued through their perceived inability to move and, thus, their ‘fixed presence’ in the local. This fixity was ensured by others who had migrated or were in sponsorship queues. One of these Guyanese was Lall (see Chapter 1), who did not have obvious prospects of migrating and often emphasised ‘community activities’ through professed efforts to change local conditions, including ‘lobbying’ people he knew for titles to lands in the squatting area. He had a close long-term friendship with another resident to the point where they were ‘like family’. However, his friend slowly stopped speaking to him. They had not quarrelled and the only thing that had changed was that the friend’s daughter was about to migrate. Lall believed that it was these changed circumstances that led to his friend’s behaviour and the reason he was suddenly excluded from the ‘family relationship’. Lall noted that he lost all contact with this friend, who also eventually migrated. Rosie, another resident, who had a ‘hostile’ welcome from her husband’s family, spoke of how she was always treated badly by her mother-in-law. She added that after her mother-in-law left the country for the US she felt coerced to accept the gifts this mother-in-law sent for the children. The mother-in-law generally ignored her. Rosie felt it was prudent not to upset her mother-in-law despite this ill-treatment. Yet another resident, ‘Host H’, expressed his own disinterest in migrating, noting that he preferred ‘home’ (Guyana). Yet despite this disinterest, he wanted his children to migrate. Much later, it emerged that his wife’s mother, a US citizen, had sponsored his wife to migrate to the US, but Host H had not been named on the sponsorship application. Host H actively tried to get my help by asking me if I knew of any potential

136 • Competing Power

bridegrooms who resided overseas and who might be interested in his daughter. As discussed further below, bride-seeking migrants were often ‘expected’ to arrive from overseas looking for ‘good girls’. Each of these residents’ accounts contributed to the ways in which status was attached to outward migration achievements. In the emphasis on having relatives who were migrants, access to overseas goods and competence in global networking, ‘status loss’ and related experiences were not given much publicness. Lall, for instance, revealed his story to tell me what was happening with migration in his village and the ways in which he felt people were changing. In a way partially related to that of Fatima, in Chapter 4, he saw his own status to be in his activities of upholding ‘cultural ideals’ and trying to organise various village activities. He had tried unsuccessfully with the friend mentioned above and another resident to participate in politics and had an active interest in what he described as ‘community matters’. Lall and his friends had become a closer group through their earlier interest in politics. One of these men (mentioned above) migrated. Lall himself did not have any immediate prospects of migrating and continued to focus on the community issues. As noted above, he lost touch with the remaining friend when the sponsorship documents came through for that friend’s daughter to migrate to the US. Lall, himself, was interested in migration possibilities, but more for his daughter than himself. As he did not have many opportunities, he tried to show that he could change things locally by engaging with state officials in efforts to obtain benefits for the village. At the time, this did not have much status as other villagers were more concerned with migration plans. At this stage, Lall, while known for his activities, was seen to be of lower status than those involved in migration activities. This is indicated by his friend’s attitude towards him, for instance. Rosie, a businesswoman, did not generally advertise her relationship with her mother-in-law and her forced acceptance of gifts from her. She was seen as being well-off with prospects to migrate. Her mother-inlaw had sponsored her son (Rosie’s husband) and Rosie for immigrant status in the US. However, Rosie’s husband died while the application was still being processed. Rosie’s mother-in-law then withdrew the application on the basis that she was constrained by migration rules and could not sponsor Rosie who was a relation by marriage rather than by descent. Rosie knew the mother-in-law was disinterested in her and would make little effort to help. She was bitter about this sponsorship withdrawal. She had looked forward to joining a daughter who was in the US.6 She felt that her mother-in-law could have found ways to help her if she really wished to do so. Rosie, however, began to network with

Re-presencing the Local • 137

friends from overseas and to visit neighbouring islands, showing her disdain for what she saw as exclusion by her overseas relative. Host H, like Lall, promoted his interest in local issues and saw himself as a well-read individual who could help others. As mentioned above, it was later revealed that his wife’s mother had only sponsored her for US permanent residence and Host H had been excluded from the sponsorship application. This exclusion of Host H had deeply divided the family. He and his wife had two children who had married locally by then; they had come of age and it was no longer possible for them to be sponsored as dependent children. Young people going ‘out of status’ – becoming adults and thus no longer eligible to be sponsored as dependent children – is not an isolated incident, as noted in Chapter 3 with the case study on Lata and Raj. The adult children would both subsequently explore other options to travel out of the country to visit neighbouring islands. As discussed in Chapter 4, this was touristic travel: it occupied a space of self-agency where people felt empowered and less excluded from general migration opportunities by being able to talk of go-and-come. As noted, this was different to seeking permanent migration. However, in the encounters between migrants who had sponsorship rights and their local counterparts, the focus was on travelling out of the country for permanent migration. This had related status and loss interactions. Host H’s mother-in-law’s disapproval was felt through her power to sponsor or not sponsor family members. Her disapproval of Host H related to issues around his drinking. She used her ability to sponsor to express this disapproval in the strongest terms by ‘leaving him behind’. His wife noted that she had not agreed with this sole sponsorship and did not want to leave her husband. However, she had accepted sponsorship in the hope that this would continue a chain of migration for the couple’s two children and their families.7 As the above suggests, the migrant status of relatives and their abilities to sponsor their locally bound relatives for immigrant visas to the US can be seen as also being used to mediate ‘issues’, express disapproval of particular family ­relationships and/or efforts to alter the nature of these relationships. One migrant, while ‘back home’ on a short visit, revealed to me how badly she had been treated by her in-laws before she left the country to become a temporary migrant worker (on a long-term basis, although she would generally be known as temporary) in a neighbouring country. She acknowledged that they would not have realised they were treating her badly by expecting her to cook, clean and generally act in a submissive manner in the shared home, as this was ‘what women did’. She herself might not have expressed her situation in these terms

138 • Competing Power

before as it was part of ‘putting up’ with things to make her marriage work. However, after she left for the neighbouring country and earned in a valued foreign currency, her views changed of what she could and could not say. She felt empowered, she noted, as she also became a breadwinner in a monetary currency that made a difference. She was able to give money to the household. On this basis, economic reasons for migration became interconnected with empowerment in her social settings. This act of giving money, she felt, led to attitudes dramatically changing towards her in the household. No-one was able to say anything to her that she could deem ‘out of order’. However, the settling of family disputes and/or explicit bids for status against local residents are only two interrelated aspects of a complex migration setting of family and other relationships (see Halstead 2011). In several instances, migrants who returned too quickly and act as if they prefer to be ‘at home’ are seen by their local neighbours as not really having ‘returned migrant status’. This was the case with one grandmother who had ‘just left’ the country: one person acknowledged that she had made a significant difference to help her relative financially, but she had returned too quickly and needed to work on being seen as separate as she could not effectively ‘act out’ status among them. Variously, older persons with green cards or US citizenship status would more actively be in two countries to cater for the deep familial bonds and so are often seen to privilege the local, which mediates their automatic migrant status. This migrant grandmother did not wish to travel back and forth, but to remain locally for as long as she could. Her emphasis on ‘remaining’ home brings out the mediatory spaces in which local devaluation can be overly presenced to affect external empowerment. The story of this resident, whose common-law husband failed to obtain joint sponsorship with her to migrate to the US, is well known, an oral village secret that must remain unspoken here and outside of textual accounts. This resident had journeyed to the US, spent six months there and eventually returned to the village to be with her partner. This partner is now deceased. Her accounts of working, even though she was a grandmother, and her joy at being back home helped to consolidate understandings of hard times in the migrant destination. At the same time, other aspects of her migrant journey and return brought out success and allowed her to appear as empowered. This was particularly in relation to being able to provide all the expenses and main gifts for the wedding of a close relative. Although she had worked and done all the required things in order to secure her residence in New York, she was glad to be home and to be

Re-presencing the Local • 139

back with family members. While dressed particularly well as part of her successful migrant journey to the US, she quickly embraced familiar ways of being on her return – lying in her hammock, for example – and was very glad to be back home. Her appearance, attitude and deep privileging of the need to remain with the family who were physically left behind tied her to a devalued local. In this regard, her ability to be a bearer of automatic migrant status was open to renegotiation.

Needy Local Conversely, migrants are faced with the constant pressure of dealing with poor conditions and violence as separate from them and something they have left behind. Some migrants can feel pressured by ‘needy persons’ in the local. In the case of the returned migrant Angela (Chapter 2), such needy persons are constantly present in the form of casual acquaintances. Angela feels that she can never give enough. This is not simply about her encounters with those impoverished persons she wished to help; it was also her own response to the inequitable conditions she had left behind when she departed the country in the 1980s. This understanding of socio-political problems was always part of her present, as memoried structural violence. From Angela’s perspective as a returned migrant, the change to the local is what she and persons like her can bring to it – their forms of social justice. As noted in Chapter 2, this was achieved by waving her passport to challenge perceived corrupt police, by expecting colonialstyle service from private sector employees such as bank officers and waiters and by constantly giving money. She noted that the persons who obtained her ‘extra money’ were often employees or casual persons who provided services, such as a gardener, a maid and even waiters at the hotel where she would take guests for lunch. The latter expected ‘very large tips’. Angela noted that she was not ungenerous; it was to be expected with the high poverty levels. Every day, for instance, her maid carried home food boxes for her children. Angela constantly ‘played’ to these expectations (see Goffman 1959). At a lunch at a top restaurant/hotel, for example, she would order without looking at the menu. At one lunch outing, she asked her maid to join us. She said that anything could be ordered, insisted on paying and, further, brushed off offers to split the bill. In her conversations with the waiter, she reminded him of her last visit and her expectations of good service at her table. The maid, herself, did not want to order anything and made a show of sharing ‘dippers’ (appetisers). When the maid saw

140 • Competing Power

that there was too much food on the table, she agreed with Angela that she needed to take it home in a food box: it was clear that this practice of taking home items was usual and approved, that this need ‘always existed’.8 Her two children at home were invariably presenced in these everyday performative spaces (Goffman 1959). Although the maid was ‘putting up’ with these expectations, she also benefitted as there was always the possibility of obtaining things from her employer beyond her salary or food boxes. She tacitly accepted Angela’s statements about her life of poverty. At times, Angela felt she was unable to ever give enough. Her ‘outside status’ as a big one, which meant that she did not have to ‘think twice’ about spending because her currency value was so much higher than the local one, supported a local needy setting of persons who had to be given things; this power of money and status as a returned migrant was presenced against the disempowered local (cf. Truitt and Senders 2008). It opened Angela to being extorted and she was aware that at any given time, people around her could seek to exploit her; she noted that she was tired of dealing with people who always seemed to want things from her. She included the stranger policeman she had quarrelled with (Chapter 2) in this category. Her power was linked to the appearance of local victims who could also become ‘aggressors’ through the invisible strength of their perceived poverty claims and/ or their attempts to show themselves as empowered by displaying resources and abilities of likely benefit to the returned migrant. In this way, Angela and others like her encountered the power of the local person, not known as big, but competing in various ways in that space of bigness without the same visibility. Angela found such an ‘aggressor’ immediately in a casual visitor to her home who was working along with a real estate agent. Just over a year after her return, Angela was endeavouring to sell her house, which she described as a mansion. It was located in a secured area manned by guards. In discussions with the real estate agent in my presence in her home, Angela noted that the house came with the neighbourhood as an area for high-level professionals; all the houses were new, including hers. An assistant to the agent, Davo, tried to show Angela that he was in a category of wealthy professionals through his language. However, Angela immediately concluded that despite his overtures he was not really going to be someone she would welcome as a friend or likely suitor for a granddaughter (which she felt to be his aim judging by his conversations and behaviour towards her). She had placed pictures of her grandchildren in her living room and would readily tell visitors about them. In particular, her granddaughter, ‘a beautiful girl’, was still

Re-presencing the Local • 141

unmarried; this attracted Davo’s attention. Angela told me that he was a nice young man, but he would not succeed in what she saw as his quest to become her grandson-in-law. He did not have the ‘right credentials’ and was far too ‘needy’, she opined. However, she was pleasant and never told him of her views. As a returned migrant who also has funds (a local expression), it is difficult for Angela to appear outside of status at the expense of particular locals; her understandings of her position also make it easy for her to challenge the perceived corrupt police (as discussed in Chapter 2). She is thus interventionist, inextricably the bearer of social justice in a memoried landscape that remains unforgiven as imprinted in bad politics and suffering. Her intervention complicates the static rendering of the local where, in acting to help, Angela necessarily invokes the ‘problem local’. However, as indicated, particular difficulties emerge from the lack of value attached to persons and/or places.

Away from and of the Local The complexity of a local site that is also part of external social imaginaries is further evoked, where people are generally interacting with overseas relatives in varied ways or are themselves planning to leave or engaging in some way with the external. In these further accounts from the case study of Lata and her husband, Raj, discussed in Chapter 3, ideas of an extended social imaginary marked by plans for actual migration and separation from loved ones show some of the minute interactions and changes. As noted, the couple’s eldest son and eldest daughter came off the sponsorship papers when they came of age. Both subsequently married locally. The two children who remained behind as well as other extended family members still residing in the country meant that Lata and Raj would have strong reasons to maintain connections and to revisit, on their departure. When Lata, Raj and their youngest daughter did eventually leave the country, Lata would return to stay in the family home, meet with other relatives and pack suitcases with local items to take back with her to her new home in the US. As a returned migrant, although certain aspects of her behaviour changed that showed she was aware of her status as a big one (see also Chapter 7), her focus on helping her son and other relatives and bringing gifts became indicative of her mode of mediating this status. However, within the village, as US residents, she and her husband and youngest daughter were seen as successful migrants. They had obtained jobs and were settled in the

142 • Competing Power

US. On this basis, they had automatic status as migrants. Unlike the example above of the village resident-migrant who had to painstakingly go through stages to show her status, Lata and her husband, through their relative prosperity prior to their departure as well as their ‘settled status’, were able to visibly emerge as big ones. Lata, as a relatively new migrant and as a visitor to her homeland, did not return with a view that she could challenge ‘corrupt officials’ as Angela had done. Rather, she was immersed in continuing her involvement in her children’s lives and that of other relatives to ensure things were going well. Her ideas of social justice were about the changes she could bring to ensure her family’s well-being, which were peripheral to any changes to the local socio-political setting. She sought to contribute to this well-being as much as possible. However, her gift-laden suitcases and migrant status added to the divide by which some experienced the status of the migrant as negative and having further impact on a devalued local.

Complicating the Needy: Experts from the Local This oscillation between the static local and the powerful elsewhere is presenced in the following local story, about people who sit and wait to ‘go away’, with no apparent prospects of doing so. This also attached itself to another story of the wandering overseas bridegroom in the Guyanese setting. The material on overseas grooms adds to accounts on cross-­border/ migration marriages, which consider that women from developing countries marry men from rich countries and migrate to these countries. Research by Nicole Constable (2005) challenges easy assumptions and stereotypes about brides looking to ‘marry up’ (hypergamy). Constable (2005: 3) notes: ‘collectively, we question many of the bald assumptions about the passivity or desperation about foreign brides; disrupt simplistic notions; and offer close ethnographic scrutiny and deep analyses of the local and global processes that make such marriages imaginable and realizable’. Danièle Bélanger and Giang Linh Tran (2009: 3), discussing the phenomenon of global hypergamy in Asia, noted: ‘Global and regional inequalities are inherent to these marriages. For many women and their families, an international marriage can offer social, economic, and geographic mobility through international migration’ [references omitted]. In their research, they also consider how these women have agency in the contributions they make to the sending communities. In Guyana, although some young women are interested in these matches and happy for their family to arrange their wedding, some

Re-presencing the Local • 143

have other plans, as the examples below indicate. Overseas women also return to the country to marry local persons: in some instances, they have known these persons previously or the marriage has been arranged through relatives or close contacts. The example of Angela and Davo above also indicates understandings that men will seek overseas partners as part of global hypergamy. However, while these easy assumptions can be generated in particular settings of ‘need’, they are complicated by various factors, including understandings about shared belonging as part of the familiar spaces that some seek in looking for a marriage partner ‘back home’. One woman migrant noted that in considering a partner from ‘back home’, she was exercising choice: as a ‘mobile’ person it was what she wished to do. In these constructions of overseas marriages, men escape some of the easy labels by being seen as more mobile. Indeed, in some instances, when overseas partners were arranged, men travelled to the overseas destination to marry. In one instance, one man obtained a visitor’s visa so he could be present in the US for his wedding to a US citizen, at an early stage when it was already becoming difficult to obtain nonimmigrant visas. His ability to journey to his intended bride’s destination for the wedding showed that he could go-and-come and, thus, did not need to marry an overseas partner for economic advancement. However, in the changing local setting in which these Guyanese present themselves more strongly as being competent in relation to a global network, women are also making use of ideas of go-and-come to show themselves outside of the devalued local. Some examples are provided below after discussion of another popular construction of overseas grooms as attached to a cultural stereotype of the ideal local bride,9 imagined in relation to Indian ideals. This resonates, for instance, with Nicole Constable’s work. Constable points to the practice of many men seeking traditional Asian wives. She notes: ‘While women may look for modern husbands, many men turn to Asia for traditional wives. White middle-class US men look for Asian women whom they imagine to be more “old-fashioned” and ­committed to family values than US women . . .’ (2005: 8). In the Guyanese villages, several women were ready to laugh at the idea that they were ‘needy locals’. One group of women who were neighbours spoke of two sisters who prepared to leave by behaving as if they were already abroad. They noted that these women wore clothing as if they lived in a cold climate (Guyana is near the equator), spoke with foreign accents and declared they were marrying men from overseas. According to the story, they lived like this for several years. Eventually, when no outside bridegroom showed up, they left the

144 • Competing Power

village and went into hiding. Their home, which they had so carefully prepared, fell into disrepair. This story appeared hugely exaggerated. When I asked where these sisters had lived, I was told it was another village and that the incident had happened some time ago. The women who told me about these sisters wanted to emphasise that they themselves were different from the kind of women who waited around for such suitors and did not inhabit such a space. They did not expect overseas grooms to come calling. They also volunteered with some mockery that they did not live in ‘Koker’,10 a village that became part of the myth attached to grooms seeking ‘good girls.’ In the Guyanese setting, an ideal of the Indian bride11 was generated in relation to the village of Koker, where the women were seen to be sought after by potential overseas grooms, in search of Indian brides. The understandings of Koker women were fascinating to some of my participants, who were both highly sceptical of this imagined ideal of chaste women and mocked themselves for not being similarly part of migration ideals. At various times, women in this research have told me that some migrants in search of local brides were interested only in ‘Koker girls’, those who as a result of living in Koker automatically fitted the construct of ‘purity’. Mythologised in the accounts of wandering bridegrooms to be, the Koker bride was specifically local. This imagined woman was expected to remain bounded in this local identity to be a desirable bride for a migrant. She was clearly an object of considerable interest to other local women who ruled themselves out of being sought by overseas grooms. These latter women pointed to this belief in Koker girls to indicate the stupidity of migrants who delude themselves in seeking pure, demure women. I visited Koker to see what inspired these understandings of ‘the bride’. My host, Bella, was a ‘Koker girl’ who had left the village a while ago and lived in the city. She took me to visit her mother and a number of other relatives. She had left to escape an abusive father and noted that her mother was a battered wife.12 Bella and I attended two ‘Indian wedding houses’. We met one of her cousins whose daughter was getting married to an overseas groom. A large number of overseas relatives were also expected at this wedding. At the second wedding I attended in this village, a significant number of the guests were also from overseas, as further confirmation that it was now the norm at ‘Indian wedding houses’ as well as at weddings across ethnic groups for migrants to materialise. The significance of migrants’ presence in Koker was that it allowed for a particular and concentrated network of extended family members. A number of families were in

Re-presencing the Local • 145

sponsorship queues to migrate. This network, together with various arranged marriages,13 served to highlight a Koker girl as marriageable and with overseas prospects, which may have lent itself to the idea of the pure Koker bride. My host, Bella, distanced herself from this construct. As we left a ‘wedding house’ and waded along a rain-soaked muddy pathway one night to visit an overseas relative who had turned up for this wedding in the village, Bella explained her priorities. She had just finished a degree programme and she would remain in the city to look for a job and to carry out networking. She would take holidays outside of the country but did not intend to leave immediately. Her plan was to obtain land for a farm resort, which she would develop for overseas visitors who wanted to be in Guyana and wanted to have a good time. She had many friends overseas; she was in constant email contact with them. They frequently sent her gifts; sometimes these were things she did not need and which she would, in turn, give to someone else. Bella declared that her relative from overseas wants to help her, but she has moved away from ‘all that’. In fact, the relative greeted her by asking her when she planned to get married. Bella evaded the question as she hugged him. She did not want anything from her overseas relatives and was not looking for a hand-out. Back in the city, she became someone who knew the right people locally. She talked casually about meeting with a key public servant to discuss a job. The official subsequently called her on her mobile to make an appointment to interview her, while she was walking with me in the city on another occasion. Bella obtained this job. Later, she arranged a small celebration at a local nightspot. Bella was keen to display her dance moves. She intermittently greeted people, mainly men she knew from the university and their friends. They greeted each other as old friends being reunited, if fleetingly so, and exchanged mobile numbers. She urged them to be sure to call her at some stage. She did not appear to have much interest in their calls, but enacted through this routine her presence in a network that privileged her agency. This networking redefined her local setting as one in which she was empowered and could find ways to help herself. Her casual approach to networking and to migration opportunities also privileged her ability to be more visible than the networks and to impose her own limits as someone who did not need an overseas partner (cf. Strathern 1996). Others also similarly enact their skills as people who do not need to be helped and who see themselves as world citizens. The idea of people on the move who could participate in something noted as ‘world citizenship’ is a considerable presence in the local setting and relates to the way

146 • Competing Power

in which notions of the West are re-theorised as a social imaginary, as indicated thus far (see, for instance, Trouillot 2003). Another young woman who similarly understood herself as competent and mobile was Tina. She and her friends were among many young people across ethnic groups who ‘multi-skilled’ in the local job market, that is, had more than one job. Tina worked as a legal clerk and a cashier in a shop. She finished her first job at 3 p.m., but usually left early with her boss’s agreement so she could also start her cashier job at 3 p.m. In the summer of 2007, she made friends with a Canadian resident visiting the country. Sunil was believed to have visited explicitly in search of a local bride. He was a migrant looking for a ‘good girl’ and preferred someone from Guyana, she noted. Sunil was a Guyanese-born naturalised Canadian. As a potential bridegroom from a wealthy country, he conformed to a stereotype of seeking a migration marriage and being able to offer security in return. It would not have been possible for him to detach himself from such an image given his single status and residence in Canada. However, his quest did not simply rely on the particular material benefits he would be able to offer his wife. In presenting himself as a desirable bridegroom, this suitor would have also expected to ‘trade’ on arranged marriages, which were occurring as indicated14 in relation to migration interactions.15 He would be able to follow up on his ideas of maintaining homeland links. Tina ‘monitored’ this migrant’s progress. She gave me various descriptions of Sunil and his quest. Tina was interested in networking. She described Sunil as her friend, although she had not yet met him. She had heard of him through another friend and had subsequently spoken to him on the phone. Sunil had passed through the city briefly and then gone on to a village in another county. Tina had kept in touch with him by phone and was expecting him to return to the city before his departure, at which time she and a selected group of friends would meet him for dinner. Meanwhile, she continued to text him for updates on his search and his activities. Sunil was meeting other friends in the villages and elsewhere and she wanted to be kept ‘in the know’. Tina told me that she was not interested in this Canadian migrant/ bridegroom-in-waiting for herself, as she considered him too old for her. She does intend to marry an outside bridegroom  – that is, one who is resident overseas  – but she plans to do so on her own terms and stated that she expects to meet this yet unknown person in another country, someone with whom she might fall in love. She felt that such migrants were looking for a particular kind of girl  – a chaste bride. She noted that they had a lot of ‘styles’ (were too selective) and looked

Re-presencing the Local • 147

down upon others who did not fit this rather imagined (in her view) category. Tina noted that she was deliberately avoiding a relationship. This was not because of cultural issues, but more tied to emotional reasons. She did not want to get attached to someone she would then have to leave behind when she eventually left the country. Tina planned to journey first to a neighbouring Caribbean island and then to North America and, there, eventually to marry. In this manner she planned to displace herself from the particular local setting of desirable and undesirable brides and to emphasise her networking and other skills in encounters with migrants. Tina brings out the paradox of women seeking modern husbands and men seeking traditional brides (see Constable 2005: 8) in a different way, and her plans also place her outside of the practice of global hypergamy (as noted, women who marry up/gain mobility in geographically desired locations). Thus, in asserting her own agency, Tina is challenging the idea of marriage to a foreigner as a means of gaining mobility and, thus, implicitly challenging any presumed negative positionality in an imagined geographical hierarchy. Rather, she sees herself as a capable and skilled networker who can pick and choose partners in a ‘global setting’. Young women like Tina were not waiting to ‘marry up’. They sought to present themselves as equals in meeting possible suitors from ‘elsewhere’ and had their own ideas and ‘vision’ for what they wanted.

Skilled Networkers: ‘Non-cultural Spaces’ Tina spoke of her tremendous networks; all her friends had friends overseas. She and several friends had formed a core migration-plans group. Together, they were accessing information on the internet about a nearby country, making contacts in that country and elsewhere and preparing to individually migrate in stages. Discussing the group’s plans, Tina noted that one or two of her friends would endeavour to obtain jobs and that others would visit to seek work. In the meantime, members of the group were variously learning new skills that would be useful and would serve to guarantee them jobs in this proposed host destination. At the same time, they operated as multi-skilled in the local Guyanese setting by having more than one job, socialising in groups in the evenings and entering into networks that extended to visitors and residents in other countries. To demonstrate the significance of Tina’s networking in relation to both the construction of local experts and bride-seeking migrants, I

148 • Competing Power

briefly consider here the cultural context of her behaviour to show that she ‘writes in’ an identity outside of a particular prescribed space, as cosmopolitan. This knowledge-making encompasses and shifts understandings of being culturally positioned as an overtly negative distinctive identity (see Halstead 2012, 2017; see also Abu-Lughod 1991; Rapport 2012). As Indian, this young woman’s behaviour signalled several cultural and social transformations. At seventeen, she had a remarkable amount of freedom. This freedom was distinct from the ways in which this had to be negotiated by young women as was evident in the earlier periods of my research (see Halstead 2001). Amidst tremendous social changes in relation to migration flows and other issues, a gendered ideal of Indian women upholding culture marks a number of interactions, particularly at Indian ritualistic ceremonies (see Halstead 2009; Sidnell 2003). With ongoing changes in the village and elsewhere, young women like Tina have more freedom. A contributory factor is the widespread outward migration of household members and the displacement of some elders to host destinations through migration chains. Most of Tina’s relatives are overseas, for instance. While Tina and other young women who emphasise their networking skills might pay attention to issues of respect in certain settings such as in the home or at religious events (see Halstead 2009), they guide their behaviour with men through ideas of their own competence. Young men they might meet at nightspots, for instance, do not demonstrate concern about their presence. In this regard, these are acknowledged ‘non-cultural spaces’;16 the young women are visible through a particular context which privileges their ability to appear outside of particular cultural constraints. Tina, in displaying herself as an expert in networking, does not feel it necessary to consider issues of respect as the context does not arise. This is dissimilar to the way in which she might opt to do so in another setting, for instance by acknowledging elders at a religious function in an appropriate manner. Although Tina ruled out the migrant visitor, Sunil, as a potential husband, he was an object of some fascination to her. In the mode of a multi-skilled, competent woman, she arranges with various female friends to meet with this visitor who, as noted, was seeking a local bride. She is not worried about what he might think about her: she implicitly expects him to deal with her on the basis of her competence and networking skills. She has already transcended the imagined local site of traditional women by this manner of association with the migrant and inscribed her geographical location as a ‘global’ site of action and mobility. Tina laughingly noted that she did not fit the profile of the

Re-presencing the Local • 149

chaste bride he was seeking. It was not one she cared to follow in any event. Through her phone calls to him and her socialising activity, she was interested in presenting herself as a ‘modern young woman’ who knows people across ethnic groups and who networks well, rather than someone who can ‘perform’ the role of a chaste bride. Tina understood that there might be those who might make real this idea of a chaste bride to the satisfaction of the Canadian visitor. She also understood that despite his migrant status, he was not necessarily going to have immediate success in finding a willing bride and that his success could well depend on the influence of other family members of the selected bride-to-be. While some migrants are known to instantly ‘fall in love’ with a local beauty, many of these marriages are arranged by family members in Guyana and overseas, as noted. The involvement of family members, together with understandings of women ‘gone wild’ in overseas destinations, helped to support the idea of a quiet, chaste bride ever present in the local. Others act on ideas of loss of status for the local in order to displace these ideas. These local Guyanese show migrants as needy of the local they have left behind or demonstrate themselves as multi-skilled in or beyond the local. For instance, Guyanese will note how migrants seek local items such as dried and fresh fish, pepper sauce and achar (a mango relish). The local being sought by migrants suggests spaces for local residents to become and show themselves as experts.

Conclusion This chapter has further explored the changing power relations where locally resident Guyanese encounter and contest loss of status to bring out their own status and abilities. In the process, understandings of their local settings as devalued or bounded are also being challenged. The chapter thus considered a co-residing and interconnected field of power relations where these local residents variously shifted ideas of their lack of status. The new boundaries as ways of curtailing a seemingly limitless site that is always external  – a global network  – are grounded, with the external being both part of the local and drawn on to extract and limit loss of status in differing forms of agency. The landscape, as one of movement and power, contends with all kinds of persons who might be visible as attached to the devalued local and also empowered. These minute interactions as bids for power and status continue to rely significantly on notions of external empowerment even as there are efforts to separate a local imagined outside

150 • Competing Power

of these global linkages. The ensuing power relations allow for new claims where people seek rights in the local setting and where there are expectations of justice within a local to counter structural violence. The next chapter considers how these contestations shift at particular micro and macro levels to consider change and demands for change in relation to violence and abuse. It considers that while citizens more involved in global networking and outward migration tended to ignore the state and bad politics, some began to extend bids for power and status in interactions with officials and others as a bid for rights in and of the local. The bids for rights by individuals, visible as specifically local, insufficiently attend to the need to negotiate or affirm particular ownership of power in the public settings. The next chapter considers that a misreading of power brings out how ‘small ones’ over-rely on particular constructions of social justice and rights in relation to external empowerment.

Notes  1. See Kwon (2008), for instance, on oppositional consciousness and activism, which also relates to empowerment in overtly devalued local settings.  2. See http://www.workpermit.com/canada/individual/skilled.htm (accessed 20 May 2008).  3. This perception does not really hold and I have attended such outdoor celebrations in New York during the summer.  4. See, for example, ‘Another Jamaican Woman Claims Abuse by Barbados Airport Immigration Police’, MNI Alive, 19 November 2013, http://www. mnialive.com/articles/another-jamaican-woman-claims-abuse-by-barbad​ os-airport-immigration-police (accessed 12 November 2014).  5. ‘Shanique Myrie Paid by Barbados Government’, Jamaica Observer, 24 June 2014, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/NEWS/SHANIQUE-MYRIE-PAIDBY-BARBADOS-GOVERNMENT_16996057 (accessed 31 July 2014).  6. This daughter was unable to sponsor Rosie at the time.  7. Although her children would come of age and thus no longer be eligible on this particular application, she would still have options at a later stage to sponsor them directly.  8. See Deborah Durham’s work on agency through begging in Botswana (1995).  9. The parody in the movie Bride and Prejudice suggests this to be a more widespread phenomenon. 10. As noted, names of persons and villages are changed in this book to provide anonymity, unless otherwise stated. 11. While this book explores material on Guyanese in general, certain cultural issues vis-à-vis East Indians are also explored to bring out these nuanced interactions.

Re-presencing the Local • 151

12. These references to domestic violence are not isolated and there are now various funding bodies and NGOs focusing on the issue (see Chapter 8). 13. Migration-assistance marriages might see cousins, for instance, being ‘married’ to each other; this was not, however, a general practice outside of the context of aiding migration and reports suggest that these are ‘migration arrangements’ rather than real marriages. 14. While some arranged marriages persist, it is more common for people to choose their own marriage partners. Thus, migration arrangements differ from what were varied practices of arranged marriages among East Indians. 15. Mikkel Rytter (2012) documents a reverse practice involving Pakistanis in Denmark, who are turning away from arranged marriages between transnational families in favour of love marriages as part of the changes both at state level and within families. Rytter writes about this practice as ‘symbolic mobility’, where the young are mapping their future in relation to belonging within Denmark. 16. See Halstead (2012) for a collective response to changes in women’s behaviour in New York as related kinds of interactions.

m6 Co-occupying Public Power Challenges, Abuse and Structural Violence

Introduction Get out of here. You not got shame. Look at you. Think you could be someone my daughter can look at? What she going to want with someone like you? All you police the same. I know how to deal with you. —Seema

These comments come from Seema, a woman in her forties, who is travelling in a passenger minibus in Georgetown. Her daughter is with her and, as usual, the minibus is packed with passengers. These passengers include a policeman in uniform. Seema is glaring at this policeman. He is known to her. He is trying to avoid her eye as he blatantly ‘interferes’ (a local term for unwanted overtures) with her daughter. Within minutes, Seema confronts the policeman, telling him off for his behaviour and making other cutting remarks about the corrupt police. A few other passengers try to caution her. She should be afraid, one passenger notes, be less open with her remarks. Another suggests that she should leave it to her husband to deal with if someone is making advances to her daughter; given that her husband was not on the bus with her, she should ignore the matter. This is in the context of a recent history in which people had been fearful of publicly challenging authority figures who were corrupt and abusive, as noted, and, in some instances, men would deal quietly with ‘police problems’. Seema is not interested in these words of caution. It is her intention to embarrass this policeman. Seema launches into an offensive against him, telling him that far from being a potentially desirable suitor for her daughter, who in any event was married, he was a disgrace and needed to be shamed in public. She is ready to shame him, she

Co-occupying Public Power • 153

declares, noting she would not sit passively and watch him make these advances. She then proceeds to narrate his misdeeds  – a useless man and a bad cop who misuses his office, she claims – to the audience on the minibus. The policeman ignores her, despite being in uniform. In another era, and even in these times, he could have arrested her for disorderly behaviour, as in a separate example discussed further below. He could have given her grief in some way as someone with power to harass her. Some of the passengers listening to Seema did not think she was totally ‘safe’ from such retaliation. Yet Seema did not care. She was able to continue her remarks to her own satisfaction, until the policeman eventually arrived at his destination and disembarked. Seema was ready to take her ‘chances’ with him, to confront him publicly. Seema very deliberately spoke out against him. None of the passengers responded in any way to the blatant statement that the policeman was corrupt. While Seema appeared brave and safe in this public ‘buse’ (the local term) of the policeman, this positioning as other passengers confirmed was by no means stable in the sense that some still had doubts about any open challenge to the use of oppressive power against them. This was despite the many changes. However, the example of Seema is not isolated; people will take literally the idea that they have new rights in a rapidly changing local, where they are able to go-and-come and be involved in other migration activities. Their complaints and attempts to assert these rights occupy a changing public space of reimagined rights and power being conceived to be present for ‘ordinary’ people. The accounts in this chapter bring out certain public misreadings of power in these individual bids in public spaces. These bids add to another space alongside ‘distance from the state’, where public complaining emerges as and through multiple public spheres. In the process, it also destabilises a host of embedded power relations. Some locals misread this setting in terms of power relations; they endeavour to bid for rights outside of other factors that favour complicity and other status negotiations. The idea of external empowerment suggested that the political setting had to change if it were to incorporate the benefits in relation to global networking and outward migration. Further, if it were to have meaning and credibility for emergent big ones gaining status through their overseas connections and wealth, then the state had to appear to be protecting rights. However, these understandings insufficiently accounted for the public separation by the government of corrupt officials from the state and the difficulty in stopping this abuse. These issues both arose in terms of the difficulty of extending micro dynamics of power and agency into public settings and efforts to ignore the complicity in corruption practices.

154 • Competing Power

While bids for power became more explicit in public settings as people began to act on understandings of change and challenges to the state, expressions of status remained entangled with an idea of a depleted local. This allowed for particular limits in terms of who could make effective bids for power. As noted in some of the case studies, a revalued local setting blurred distinctions between big and small persons, where different forms of power were variously appropriated. Some of the examples in this chapter demonstrate ways in which people endeavoured to attest their rights and to challenge their victimisation in relation to the state. This was done on the basis that it was possible for them to publicly display some level of power and gain redress in these encounters. As different actors in a socio-political setting continued to agitate for rights, in some instances with support from external agencies, a space for public complaining rapidly developed. This chapter considers how this space led to public bids for rights in ways that also allowed for misreading of power dynamics. The chapter considers examples of complicit arrangements with police officials. It also considers the General Registry at the GPO, again, to further demonstrate bureaucratic hassles in relation to complicity and public complaining.

Difficult to Bribe; Easy to Complain Seema’s description of the policeman on the bus as a corrupt official was not a surprise. This revelation of corruption and illegality was not new, as noted earlier in this book. Almost everyone on the bus could have contributed a story on complicit illegal partnerships between officials and ordinary persons. Seema’s public denouncement of the policeman on the bus attracts mixed concerns, all of which Seema ignores in her desire to separate the official from an everyday setting of complicit illegality and to reposition him as a criminal. Seema tells the other minibus passengers that she must speak out as a mother. She had also experienced corruption as a victim of the said official. Importantly, however, she feels that she did not have to be afraid because these officials and others like them now had to watch their backs – they were also being investigated as part of the changes taking place. She was aware that there were activists and government critics constantly making a fuss in the media about corruption. However, Seema appeared both isolated and brave in her tirade against the police official. Her public attack followed her perception of his declining power. She notes: ‘It is harder now . . . you

Co-occupying Public Power • 155

can’t bribe a policeman easily. They watching each other. Lots of them get charged and [appear] in court’. If it were easy to bribe them, they would have more power, she felt, to do things to people and stop them from speaking out. Seema’s public scolding of this policeman, which has led to a narration of corrupt practices of the police, was also in a rather familiar context in which she could also treat him as a ‘community member’ who had to be sanctioned rather than an official representing a p ­ owerful, distant state. Seema is telling me this story with some relish in her village home in 2011; the incident occurred earlier in the year. Seema was not always the type of ‘human rights defender’ to encompass people who widely act to gain rights and justice – that she appeared to be when she lambasted the policeman. Seema lives with her family in one of the villages and has been contributing to this research since the mid 1990s as a key participant. She and her husband live in a spacious home and have two daughters. The daughter who was on the bus with her has settled in the same village with her husband and her home is just five minutes’ walk away from her parents. Her second daughter lives several villages away, but visits often. Before their marriages, Seema had hopes that they would both migrate. On this basis, she networked with relatives and friends. Indeed, she had for many years been highly concerned with migration prospects for her daughters and had concentrated her efforts on exploring such prospects. In the village, where many were relatives, she would also know the details about who had left the country, who was waiting ‘forever’ in a sponsorship queue and who was about to ‘get through’ (obtain their non-immigrant visa for the US). As indicated earlier in this book, this was not unique and in small village settings as well as in larger and less communal/familial places like markets, people tend to have discussions on migration issues. However, Seema’s challenge to the policeman is a little more than this public complaining; she is outing corruption by a familiar. The policeman is both an official and someone who thinks he is a suitable suitor for her daughter, to the point where he is flirting with her on the bus. Further, he is a friend of her neighbour, in the sense of being a powerful police friend. It became a strategy for people to acquire ‘friends’ among the police, as noted earlier. Note, again, also the introduction of a bribe-reporting website1 that was launched by the Guyana Home Affairs Ministry in 2013, hailed as a success in 2014, but later deemed useless in 2015. The police came first on the list of those reporting bribes, with the General Registry (discussed further below) coming second. Then Home Affairs Minister, Clement Rohee, in 2014, reported that the site was successful; he noted that ‘the website has listed the

156 • Competing Power

Guyana Police Force, Traffic Department as the Government agency which accepts the most bribes’.2 As part of his report on the site, Rohee urged bribe-takers in the police force to desist and for senior ranks to be more active in curtailing such practices by subordinates. However, by September 2015, Police Commissioner Seelall Persaud had called the website useless due to its anonymous nature, as noted in Chapter 2. No bribe-taker or person reporting the bribe was mentioned and the website has now been deactivated. Then Police Commissioner Persaud noted corruption to be a ‘cultural thing’ in pointing to the complicit arrangements that included people as part of the issue, thus signalling a place for blame on the individual. This invocation of ‘cultural’ does not encompass select groups whose cultural practices can locate them in the debates of culture as rights and culture against rights’ issues in relation to universal human rights. Discussing the three-part approaches to culture in this regard, Jane Cowan et al. note the ‘development of conversations between local worlds of meanings and global ones’ (2001: 8). They point to the use of culture as ‘strategic essentialism’ and add: ‘Activists from or working on behalf of communities making claims are often well aware that they are essentializing something which is, in fact, more fluid and contradictory, but they do so in order that their claims be heard’ (2001:10). The commissioner’s definition of corruption as a ‘cultural thing’ points to knowledge of the practice and people’s expectations and involvement in complicity. However, the idea of ‘cultural’ does not explicitly include those police officials who are part of the practice. Persaud acknowledges their role by noting that bribery was endemic in the police force. The separation presents citizens on one side – that of culture  – and the state, as represented by officials challenging the practice, as separate from this side. This collective of citizens as distinct from disparate individuals, groups and practices is envisaged to form a cultural practice of corruption. This invocation of culture brings out the settings of power and abuse in which corruption and complicity become unexplainable outside of culture despite the wide remit and the role of the state’s officers. While universal rights vs culture joins a larger global conversation that has at different times included critiques of approaches of modernisation theory and two civilisation theories, a new local counter-approach is emerging in the actions of Seema and others like her. This leads to the issue becoming about power and efforts to shift and deal with oppressive power. Complicit acts operate as one medium of power and, latterly, public complaining as another. The ‘cultural setting’ expands to include ‘complainers’ and a new visibility of small ones in public settings to bid for power outside of complicity.

Co-occupying Public Power • 157

This idea of a space for redress and power occurs through universal rights talk against corruption. Persons like Seema living in villages, where global networking and migration indicate their own efforts for self-empowerment and status, draw in the conceivable redress positioned in macro settings. On this basis, they are not ready to accept a separation that locates them on the opposite side of universal rights. The bid for rights relies on empowerment as well as misunderstandings of macro dynamics of power, where this space is envisaged to include change to structural violence. Further, as citizens, people are a collective citizenry imagined with the state rather than against it. The extended accounts and other examples below demonstrate further how new ideas of power in public sites are differently experienced.

Pressure At the time of the incident in 2011, Seema felt that pressure was mounting on these policemen. She opined that with increasing scrutiny of bribery practices, this policeman was going to have a harder time obtaining money for favours. She was also determined to show him up as the wrong type of friend. Her anger brought her to a space where she was uncaring of the repercussions, but she also believed that the policeman would not be able to act against this public shaming. Her audience on the minibus, however, felt that Seema could be subject to retribution from the police official, that she in fact did not share public space with political activists, investigators and similar individuals. Seema had already experienced victimisation at the hands of this particular policeman. She claimed he had filed a court matter against her at the request of a neighbour, who had established a poultry farm at his residence next to her; the smell was unbearable and when she complained the neighbour brought in this police friend, she noted, to trump up a charge. A misdemeanour was filed against her daughter and later dismissed in court. It is unlikely that Seema would have spoken out publicly in this manner against a policeman a few years earlier, even though she had been ‘boiling’ (simmering with anger) for a while about various wrongs and injustices as part of her experiences of structural violence. She was also isolated in this public statement. Her act of speaking out and the cautionary approach of the other passengers indicate how certain changes are understood and experienced where ‘less powerful people’ might still have to weigh the costs of challenging the status quo even as some become openly confrontational, believing this to be a new

158 • Competing Power

right, as further examples in this chapter bring out. The minibus setting shifted the helplessness Seema felt in the courtroom where, according to her, this police official had misused power to ‘duck’ a case jacket (docket) on a complaint she had made against her neighbour. This had occurred, she said, because the neighbour was ‘friends’ with this prosecutor. Seema had also tried to make use of officials in the matter rather than connections (as available through complicit relations). She and others had resuscitated a police group, and through this she had gained access to a top Home Affairs Ministry official. Group members were unhappy about the playing of loud music as well. Seema, in particular, felt that another neighbour had little consideration in the constant playing of loud music which affected her. Although Seema and other members of the group complained about the loud music, this did not deter such practices in the village. Seema noted subsequently that despite new publicity and outcry about police wrong-doing and torture, people such as her neighbours were still able to utilise police friends as part of their active networks of high connections with big ones. It was a long, drawn-out process and often impossible in her village to remedy a situation by making a police complaint. It was the same for residents of other villages nearby. She was particularly incensed with the neighbour in the court matter. Friends had advised her to let the matter drop after she had contacted the official above. Nothing had changed, and she was still having to deal with the troublesome neighbour. Subsequently, her comment that it was now difficult to bribe police officials also suggested that the possible option of getting the neighbour sorted out in another way was closed off. Despite the new difficulties, this particular neighbour still had his network whereby he was able to subvert official processes that might be sought to deal with his apparent breach of the law. Seema became part of a village neighbourhood police group as a space for villagers to obtain rights. However, she lost interest in this police group; one of the main persons involved in the group had obtained a visitor’s visa to the US, and her increasingly successful migration-led activities meant she became absent in pursuing the local cause, which soon lost momentum. Seema was also planning to apply for a visitor’s visa to the US. She expected that she would be successful because she had heard that the embassy was issuing visas ‘to everyone’. It seemed that outward migration remained the space to obtain empowerment for her. Thus, gaining the rights in public through her act of shaming the policeman did not help to change structural conditions, where many were involved in the complicit arrangements.

Co-occupying Public Power • 159

However, it highlighted how changes were being interpreted in relation to bids for rights and power. It also indicated a new space for some to publicly complain, though there was always the possibility that this could end badly. This possibility closed off a more collective space for public confrontation, with others opting for bystander roles (i.e. collective distancing) instead of joining or supporting the complaint. The local setting expanded sideways to include the new displays of power involving different kinds of big ones and small ones who constantly endeavoured to upset understandings that they were without power. Complicit arrangements remained, in general, a mode of expressing agency, subverting difficult bureaucratic processes. Such arrangements also remained a mode of abusive power by those officials and others seemingly always ready to add to structural violence while also prepared to show how they could help to change structural violence. The example below involves another local person who endeavoured to exercise rights in public and ended up in trouble. It brings out these nuances of rights in terms of ‘private persons’ and public spheres.

Rights, No Rights and Violence An immediate example of a local who felt that she could name and shame her abusers and gain rights against them emerges in the public case of a woman who was allegedly dragged by her hair by two policemen and subsequently lost her unborn child. The example shows how people expected to obtain rights by speaking out and then had to put up with abuse. This village housewife was at home one morning looking after her young children when two policemen knocked on her door in search of a bird they claimed had been stolen. The housewife, Rajwantee Ramlall,3 challenged the policemen’s authority to enter her home and remove the bird. She told them the bird belonged to her husband, who was not at home. She insisted that the men leave and return later. She refused to hand over the bird. An altercation followed. She cussed them and told them to get out of her house. She alleged that one of the men grabbed her by her hair, wrapped it into a coil around his arm and used it to pull her out of the house, into the yard, down the long unpaved road that connected these houses with the main road and then to the police station. She began to bleed at some point and claimed that she was also beaten at the police station. She was pregnant and subsequently lost her unborn child. She was released following negotiations by a lawyer of some repute; in this sense, he was a big one.

160 • Competing Power

The housewife made the incident more public when she narrated her story on television in 2006 and subsequently in our conversations (on camera) and generally during interviews with various officials whose help she sought. However, she later withdrew the case against the policemen. She gave conflicting reasons for doing so, but claimed there had been a strong threat of violence against her potential witnesses. She said that potential witnesses told her that men had gone from door to door in her street and threatened to burn the houses of anyone who came forward. In the end, she could not continue to seek rights on the matter. The policemen were later transferred to another police station. Some people question the practice to transfer police on complaints of wrongdoing. Police can be expected to continue to abuse power and carry out friends’ requests, amidst a setting marked by reform talks and ‘public shifts’ to the everyday acts of bribery. In this regard, bribery becomes less open, while police abuse is seen to be still prevalent. As discussed in the next chapter, different understandings of empowerment and lack of empowerment emerge in complicit practices and/or following publicly touted reform of practices and systems. This type of abusive behaviour by some police and others has met with increasing challenges by activists in a perceived new climate of accountability. However, the power relations embedded in these practices bring out the difficulty of successful challenges, particularly when lone individuals attempt to shift public abuse and corruption by recourse to the law rather than to their connections and/or visibility as big ones or newly visible big ones. Public statements about police accountability and reform measures funded by massive external grants insufficiently consider everyday hardships as part of structural violence, which have fostered corrupt relationships between citizens and officials. What is not considered is that there are spaces of empowerment in such complicit practices, which have to be forced into systems of reform. Further, many opportunities for such abuse remain and are particularly evident on the ground, in dealing with minor traffic violations for instance.

Lodging Practices and Challenges Opportunities for complicit partnerships arise, in particular, in lodging practices, as noted in Chapter 2. Police officers can stop drivers and direct them to lodge themselves and their vehicle at specified police stations. Until recently, this practice was seen as inviolate: people who

Co-occupying Public Power • 161

did not lodge their vehicles when ‘invited’ to do so disobeyed at their own risk. An earlier excuse given for this practice was that there were no books in which to write traffic tickets. The apparent absence of these books pointed both to the ‘effectual’ presencing of the state through the corrupt officers and complicit production of illegality at the time. Those who did not wish to lodge themselves and their vehicles at police stations on the instructions of traffic cops could either silently or openly be invited to ‘pass money’. In this way, people learnt to negotiate the system and obtain friends among officials. This was also a form of harassment, as noted, whereby drivers ‘understanding the code’ would offer money instead of lodging their vehicles at police stations to avoid a further ‘situation’. A particular challenge to complicit practices is found in instances where people refuse to pay money or challenge the police, as the earlier example of the migrant Angela shows. On one basis, some see it as a service (not dissimilar to tipping) when they make unofficial payments to ‘ease’ their way, whether in an office setting or on the road. On another basis, a few seek to challenge such practices. As indicated, this challenge is interconnected with changes and their own sense of empowerment as one that will, ostensibly, put them beyond retaliation. This idea of empowerment when disconnected from the visibility of a big one and/or separate from external empowerment can prove problematic and allow for a misreading of power.

Minibuses Policemen hailing minibuses, in particular, and then ‘conversing’ with the driver became embedded in these landscapes. Minibus drivers particularly, but not exclusively, are known to frequently contravene the law. Minibuses, seen as precarious contraptions by some through understandings of their speeding and overcrowding, are easy targets. This ‘performance’ on the road does not suggest that all such acts are corrupt; there are dedicated policemen who perform their duties outside of these practices. The police have a counter-narrative of providing a good service as against that of practising corruption, although, as noted above, Police Commissioner Seelall Persaud has acknowledged the problem. The police force in 2018 remained mired in allegations of corruption and scandal, with various levels of scrutiny and reform measures constantly being implemented. In an example of a radical ‘reform’, the Home Affairs Ministry in 2012 took out whole-page advertisements in a national newspaper to advise drivers of various

162 • Competing Power

offences that merited a ticket. The notices advised that drivers did not have to lodge themselves and their vehicles to a police station for these offences.4 The notices served to recognise the practice of arresting people and their vehicles for many minor traffic offences despite the status of these offences being ticketable. Although these notices advised people of their rights  – that they did not have to accept the order to report to the police station with their vehicles – this still had to be implemented in practice. Some city dwellers and villagers who commented on the new development at the time noted that it still spelt trouble, as they could still be stopped and harassed by the police despite this public campaign. They variously indicated their scepticism that the notices meant anything. Most noted that despite the notices, very little was going to change. The incident above and other various accounts brought out that the practice continued. While the notices were being circulated in the national newspapers, drivers spoke of being stopped by police teams at key road sites in the city and being asked to report to the police station. A police spokesperson noted in 2015 that the directive was very clear: the traffic chief had made it clear that people were not required to ‘lodge at the station’ and the practice should not continue. While vociferous public spheres had emerged to ‘interrupt’ these forms of public abuse, change had to be negotiated constantly ‘on the ground’. As many would note, acts by police remain widespread. The emphasis on enforcing the law, in turn, can disrupt public forums on abuse and victimhood at the hands of the police by ‘showing’ that such abuse is being curbed and there is no need for further outcry and action. In this setting, some minibus drivers are unwilling to offer the bribe; some are unable to effectively bribe a policeman, while others try to enforce ideas of ‘new rights’. Some minibuses would be selected in an apparently random fashion (in situations where the driver had failed to keep the police sweet) to come in for lodging status at the police station. The new emphasis on rights can operate for and against both police and the citizens they serve. Some misread or bid for rights without fully considering the fluid setting in which rights can still be presented, if differently so, against the ‘ordinary citizen’. This is illustrated by the following example of a bus passenger who felt she could challenge what she saw as a corrupt act in progress, but the policeman involved felt he was doing no wrong since he was enforcing the law instead of taking a bribe.

Co-occupying Public Power • 163

No Offer of Money; None Sought It is 2012. A policeman stops a minibus travelling towards the city. It is packed with passengers, too many in his opinion. On this occasion, there is no offer of money; the policeman does not appear to seek an offer. He appears more concerned with exercising power against the minibus driver as a lawful display. He tells the driver to offload his passengers and to go and ‘lodge’ his bus at the Brickdam police station. This is despite the whole-page advertisements in a Sunday newspaper by the Ministry of Home Affairs, mentioned above, advising the public of the type of offences that were ticketable, including that of buses travelling with overload. The policeman5 is convinced that he is doing his duty and upholding the law. Inside the bus, the passengers are fidgeting: they are keen to arrive at their destination. Generally, they see the action of the policeman as disruptive. It was hard to obtain a seat at that busy hour. The transportation situation is chaotic at best. Why would the policeman not leave them alone? He must be after another top-up (bribe), even though there is no visible or covert request for money on this occasion. It is an easy assumption. As the examples in this book have shown so far, the people have significant trust issues with the police.6 On this occasion, in 2012, the passengers are generally silent despite new spaces for complaining that gained new ground in the post-1992 period, as noted. They are accustomed to this type of ‘stop and order to lodge exercise’ as one that is always likely to occur on their daily journeys. Sometimes it is settled by money ‘passing hands’ between driver and ‘officer’; sometimes entire ‘busloads’ of passengers would be ‘thrown off’ by the driver and conductor as they took orders for their new route to seek ‘lodging’ for their vehicle at the police station. Some would silently fume as ‘forced witnesses’ to such encounters on the road. Minibuses escaping such treatment were often those said to be owned by certain police or their relatives. However, on this occasion, a woman passenger began to berate the policeman: he was interfering (making himself a nuisance and interrupting people’s lives) with the minibus, its driver and passengers. Passenger B, as she is described here, felt that the situation amounted to harassment. Passenger B raises her voice against the policeman. She could have complained in the media or elsewhere as part of the increasingly vocal spaces for complaints. However, this woman is not interested in complaining as someone who may or may not get rights. She is more interested in publicly confronting what she sees as abuse and

164 • Competing Power

demonstrating her rights, newly visible in the public: it is time for the nonsense to stop. She expects the policeman to be suitably reprimanded and to withdraw from this apparent corrupt act in progress. Passenger B believes that she can assert her rights; it was a new climate of democracy. However, Passenger B misinterprets the extent to which she can intercept the ‘act in progress’. The policeman turns to another law: he claims she is abusive. He allows the other passengers to leave the minibus and then redirects the driver to take the vehicle to the station with the outspoken passenger still on board. He tells her she is under arrest for her abusive behaviour. She and the driver are later released. Passenger B challenged the police on the basis that as an ‘ordinary citizen’ she now had rights. Through her raised voice, she was bypassing prevailing understandings of power and corruption as an attempt to insert a new kind of big one  – that of the ordinary citizen minus complicity in corruption and power abuse. The policeman in his newly displayed zeal to properly and effectively uphold the law, as distinct from looking the other way and taking a bribe, did not consider the embedded harassment in such encounters or the structural problem of arresting people for such offences. Thus, he was intent on carrying on a practice (direction to lodge at police station) embedded in corruption, where people would give money to avoid being told to go to the station and where the practice itself of arresting drivers for such minor ticketable offences aided bribery. Passenger B believed that she could speak out against the policeman. The response by the policeman, however, indicated ongoing contradictions in the challenges to abuse of power locally. The arrest of Passenger B brought out the difficulty of lone individuals challenging the police publicly and without support from other big ones, support that might be facilitated through a quiet phone call, that is, not publicly proclaimed. On this occasion, the policeman was inattentive to his department’s directive that drivers and their vehicles should not be taken to police stations for involuntary arrest. The challenge by Passenger B brings out a growing space in which people show their tiredness of police and other officials hassling them. The difficulty of separating complicity from abuse remains. However, these issues cannot be separated from bids for power in minute on-theground negotiations between officials and people in the everyday; that some of these people increasingly find ways to challenge power and its abuse highlights the lone individual complainant. In this setting, the returned or visiting migrant can appear as particularly big and can display or hide power in dealing with officials as ways of empowerment in the local.

Co-occupying Public Power • 165

Police, Big Ones and Victims Migrants, such as Angela and the businessman, Robert, discussed earlier, are part of this changing landscape of power relations. As in the example of Robert, some migrants return to do business and make use of their connections. Such migrants also have real power through their influence over local big ones, including influential officials. Thus, migrants ‘appear’ in various encounters to add to the types of big ones (powerful persons). This comes out in Robert’s encounter with the police, mentioned in Chapter 2. When the traffic policeman stopped him for speeding, he sat quietly for a few minutes while his legal consultant who was present in the car tried to intervene on his behalf. The consultant was told by the policeman that he should be allowed to do his job, that is, he could now do his job because there was a new focus on police accountability and it therefore did not matter that he was talking to big ones (a migrant and his legal consultant). They too would have to be treated like others. However, the policeman misunderstood the power shift as being real in terms of being able to dislodge big ones through over-reliance on the law. After the policeman said he would not look the other way and intended to follow the law, the migrant quietly made a call and then handed the phone to the policeman. The person on the other end of the line spoke to the policeman, who then decided to drop the matter. In this instance, the migrant had power that was reinforced by local big ones. This allowed for influence with a well-placed official who could successfully intervene on his behalf with the policeman. This contrasts with the different attitude shown by Angela, who believes that she has external power by virtue of her migrant status and British passport. In this regard, she can challenge public abuse by state officials without needing local connections, as discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 8 discusses related interventions by the British and US ambassadors that indicate efforts at a different level to intercede in local politics and governance through externally based power. As noted, the returned migrant Angela was visible as a particular big one through her overseas status, which was declared in her encounter with the policeman. Angela expressed her status as a big one differently as she was able to present a challenge outside of ‘state practices’ of how things were made to work. Passenger B was not visible as a person of competing power as Angela had been, while travelling in a taxi; she was not visible through overseas status or other forms of bigness. She was a local woman travelling in a minibus. Her efforts

166 • Competing Power

to be a human rights defender in this public setting were ineffective. But there was also no public support from the other passengers, who came off the minibus to seek alternative transportation. Her raised voice at the policeman merited her arrest, unlike the actions of Angela who was ignored. Thus, this example of the bus passenger indicates an over-reliance on ‘public rights’ without support from visible big ones to challenge corruption. A particular local remains visible through these negotiated spaces of powerful and powerless persons and brings out relations of governance and understandings of what makes things work. These interactions suggest embedded alternative systems that are structurally difficult to shift in practice despite new complaint forums and a focus on change. An emerging emphasis on individuals as the problem in varying ways reveals a local that has to be corrected and suggests the spaces for action beyond the local.

Not a ‘Big One’, Just Right? This is expressed in some instances through new public spheres and generally through changes in relation to migration and global networking. Pete, a furniture-maker by trade and latterly a taxi driver, had plans to journey to Barbados as a skilled mason. He also had an uncle who was a big one, involved in trading and often engaging in inter-border activities. As part of his job, Pete’s uncle had good complicit relations with police and other officials. Pete had an encounter with a traffic policewoman, which accelerated into a confrontation in which armed policeman later stopped him on the road. Pete noted he was treated like a dangerous criminal and arrested. He felt he could mount a challenge by speaking of his rights. He was quickly disabused of this position. He claimed he was asked to give G$6,000 (US$30), and that he would not be charged with dangerous driving and locked up if he paid this sum. Another relative had to make the payment on his behalf. Pete said he had been forced to ‘humble’ himself (local term), although he knew that he had not been in the wrong. He later tried to complain but was told that it was his uncle who had to come forward with any official complaint. Pete noted that his uncle did not want to do so as ‘his [the uncle’s] brother was a big one, involved in trading and needed to keep the police sweet’. As a big one, the relative was included among those who had hierarchical status in complicit partnerships through wealth and/or connections or position. The relative’s involvement in trading was related to illegal activities across the borders of the state.

Co-occupying Public Power • 167

Following Pete’s complaint to the station about the policewoman, she was transferred to another station. However, he noted that after some time she resumed duties at the station. He claimed that she subsequently became an owner of a taxi, which she assigned to someone to drive. He said she had been able to raise anything between one and two million Guyana dollars (US$5,000–10,000) to obtain this taxi and noted it was ‘easy’ to know how she had obtained this sum despite her very meagre salary. Pete claimed that certain police officers were uninterested in the pittance they earned and that ‘top-ups’ was another word for ‘extras’; they would obtain these top-ups for ‘any little thing’. After his bad encounter with the police, Pete temporarily stopped taxi work and shortly afterwards managed to obtain work in Barbados. This was short-term work and he would soon return home, only to have another bad encounter with the police. In this second incident, he was once again told to lodge himself and his vehicle at the station. This was prior to the 2012 published notices advising citizens that they did not have to go the station, as discussed above. On the occasion of the second difficult encounter with the police, Pete had gone into a driveway to carry out a U-turn. A policeman stopped him for making an illegal turn and asked him to lodge himself and his car at the police station. He followed Pete in his car to ensure that he drove to the station. The policeman then saw another vehicle and driver in need of similar close attention; the driver was ‘driving carelessly’ and the policeman decided to stop him. He waved Pete on to proceed to the station. Pete drove to the directed police station and waited. He observed that the second driver and car never materialised. When the policeman came to ‘book’ him, Pete asked him why he had not ordered this other driver and car to lodge at the station too. He was told to mind his own business and claimed that the policeman demanded two towels (G$2,000 or $US10 at the time). Pete noted that these policemen would not accept one towel and that when they say ‘gimme a towel’, they usually expect two towels in order to ‘dismiss’ matters. They would rely on people’s willingness to pay to avoid the nuisance of taking themselves and their vehicles to police stations and going to the trouble of retaining a lawyer. Pete was quite worked up about the local setting and his positioned presence as a likely victim for police who were corrupt; once again, he was unable to avoid having monies paid unofficially. Pete thought he would obtain rights. This is tied to an emerging consciousness which leads people to believe that they could make public challenges against those officials who were abusive. Thus, at times, the anger of some people would spill into these encounters to publicly challenge the violations and abuse. The problem of complicit partnerships – where

168 • Competing Power

people ‘work’ with certain corrupt and abusive officials  – however, remained, overshadowing efforts by ‘ordinary citizens’ to speak out. Pete did not have the same status as Angela and Robert, who were returned migrants; although he had been a temporary migrant worker, he had not achieved any visibility as a big one, which is often attached to the status of migrants, as noted. Further, Pete did not have obvious wealth or connections or documents to proclaim a status that would render him above the attentions of corrupt police. Pete, himself, did not seek this kind of status, believing that he had rights as a citizen that were non-negotiable. Things, as he saw, had changed, and people, especially police officers, should not be harassing him on the road for no good reason. He wanted to have rights without emphasis on having been a temporary migrant. This, in itself, did not have the same status unless it was explicitly sought, as temporary migrants were seen to be re-incorporated into the local setting and needed to emphasise their global networking achievements and/or other forms of bigness to compete in these power sites. Pete, however, felt he had rights to speak out as a citizen. He recognised the space of big ones as those who competed with corrupt spaces; further, corrupt petty officers were visible as those who were explicitly and powerfully corrupt.

Police Lodging: Upholding the Law? From 2015, other changes were being implemented to monitor relations between police and citizens. These included directives on police roadblocks to stop criminals posing as police and setting up fake police roadblocks to commit robbery, an occurrence that gained some notoriety when returning migrants were robbed at an apparent police roadblock in 2014. Several other similar occurrences have increased fears of police abuse and violence, overshadowing the complicit presence of police who are being seen as criminals. Then Guyana Police Commissioner Seelall Persaud, in March 2015, noted that police roadblocks should be held close to police stations and ranks should be clearly uniformed in marked police vehicles in an acknowledgement of this problem.7 He advised citizens to call the emergency line if they noticed any suspicious activity. On 25 March 2015, the Police Traffic Chief, Ian Amsterdam, spoke of ‘cop bandits’.8 This added to then Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee’s descriptor of cops as ‘travelling magistrates’, as noted in Chapter 2. Amsterdam noted the possibility of these bandits being retired military or those who had gone AWOL (absent without leave), and said he would endeavour

Co-occupying Public Power • 169

to ascertain the number of missing police kits by checking on those who were on leave or interdicted from duty. Some feel that there were always ‘cop bandits’ among the police, and that although this phrase publicly separates criminals masquerading as police, it also rendered the relation of complicity as one that is forced on citizens. This ignores the practice of police befriending (mentioned above and in Chapter 2) and highlights conditions of structural violence under which power emerges through complicit relations and corruption. These arrangements are aided by the slowness of bureaucratic systems, particularly from the 1980s onwards. From 1992, public complaining co-resides with complicit acts, although as indicated in the examples here, this may not achieve workable results or may not be meant to deliver such results. Public complaining offers new spaces for agency against the prevailing conditions and also encompasses the shift in people’s understandings of their own empowerment. However, people run into difficulties when insufficient attention is given to different levels of power and to an ongoing emphasis on corruption, as indicated. The efforts of various persons to complain and take action in isolated settings, and in larger public ones in some instances, meet with mixed reactions and signal the continuing spaces of violence against individuals amidst the bids for rights.

Strangers as Insiders: Public Complaining, Private Arrangements Particular public offices are being positioned as spaces for redress in which to complain about problems. These actions have different levels of success and relate to new ideas of empowerment. The Registry is an example of a new space that facilitates public complaining and public challenges. Its mission statement notes its aims to ‘to supply members of the public upon request, extracts of the entries recorded with the minimum of delay.9 The presence of dedicated public servants who do their duty and endeavour to be helpful is overshadowed by experiences of the system as a problem and one that is seemingly against citizens. Some continue to expect that they will have to make unofficial payments for service. Efforts to obtain birth certificates and other similar documents at the Registry, as indicated in Chapter 2, usually attract unofficial payments. This practice has continued in the post-1992 setting. While some people turn up at the Registry expecting that the system will work, it is generally known that an unofficial payment has to be made

170 • Competing Power

for swift service, not dissimilar to what is known about practices that facilitate working relationships with some police, as discussed in this book. Thus, the Registry is another major institution for such practices in which people are made to feel that ‘passing money’ on the side is a necessary exchange for documents. As noted earlier (see Chapter 2), these understandings are embedded in structural conditions to do with how records were kept and inadequate registrations of births in particular. Some people never had their births registered, so when they attempted to obtain the crucial birth certificate in order to get a passport to leave the country, none was to be found. Records were identified as being destroyed by rodents and insects according to the Ministry of Home Affairs 1995 report, as noted in Chapter 2. In some instances, persons who had lost birth certificates also found themselves being told that there were no records or that they had never been registered, they would have to proceed through a legal process of swearing affidavits to attest their birth and identity. The lack of records baffled some in the post-1992 setting, as they had expected that things would dramatically change and that they would be able to have their documents processed quickly. The first visible change was the advice that came from the guards at the entrance to the General Registry that anyone who wished to enter could not do so if they were dressed too casually (wearing dresses or blouses without sleeves, or shorts, for instance). Dress rules applied (see Chapter 7). Some guards who stand at the entrance are sympathetic; they often listen to people making requests or discussing the problems they are having in obtaining a particular document. The guards endeavour to be helpful. Another significant change at the Registry was the provision of a faster service to collect requests and documents. Seats were also installed; people sat on benches in a small room awaiting service from one of the receptionists and were seen through a queued system. On several instances when I accompanied someone requesting a document, I observed orderly behaviour; people spoke quietly. However, those who had difficulties talked about these issues with persons they were meeting for the first time. In and out of domestic settings, random conversations and ‘stranger-talk’ about problems in dealing with officials and state systems, as noted in Chapter 2, constituted particular shared spaces. The ways in which people would speak to random strangers about problems, as discussed further below, became a shared insidership to deal with various forms of structural violence, which gained new ground in public spaces for complaining.

Co-occupying Public Power • 171

On one occasion, a man who visited the Registry with a young child was visibly agitated. Earlier, someone had misbehaved at the entrance to the room and the guard at the far entrance had quickly appeared and moved the person out of the section. On this occasion, the man in the small waiting room, telling his story to all present, proclaimed that he wanted to be heard. He said that he was mother and father to his son, and that he had to look after him. This, he said, meant that he had to leave the country and leave his son behind. He hoped they would give him his birth certificate quickly so he could apply for a passport. He said he hoped he would not be asked for a bribe as he did not intend to pay one. Another woman noted quietly that there was always a two-week delay in obtaining her documents, and she knew that for G$3,000 (US$15), she would be able to have this delay bypassed. With the payment, she would have the documents within a few days, as the clerks (those receiving the money) would work exclusively on her case. Despite the emphasis on ‘hassle-free’ and corruption-free service, a ‘particular friend’ is often present to help with better service and to ‘cut down’ on waiting time in some of these government offices. This ‘friend’ in 2011 had to be paid a sum of G$3,000 (US$15); more recently, from 2013, the sum can be G$5,000 and in some cases as much as G$6,000 (see also Chapter 7). As many were often ready to pay in order to avoid delays, it seemed that these complicit arrangements could have been bypassed with an official expedited service and appropriate staffing payment increase. However, this might simplify a situation, in general, where payments mediate the expectations of difficulties and hardships embedded in the local, not dissimilar to Akhil Gupta’s (1995) account of the local knowledge practices in which people had to know how to make unofficial payments to get service. The other issue was that where records did not exist (or had deteriorated or been destroyed), any expedited official service would, in effect, only confirm the non-existence of records and would, in effect, confirm the widespread view that other types of ­payments were needed. As in the example below, some felt that the system was being deliberately unhelpful and that much more would have to be done to restore confidence. People were queuing in order to obtain documents to leave the country, and the difficulties they experienced in getting the documents indicated the problems they wished to evade. The idea of unhelpfulness could also be extended to the ways in which officials and clerks also expressed their own disagreements with the system and other structural conditions of their everyday existence as ‘weapons’ that could be utilised to show their dissatisfaction (see Scott 1990).

172 • Competing Power

In this regard, although in some instances they were in a position of power by being able to process the required documents or in some way alleviate a problem faced by a citizen, generally they also suffered from these conditions. Unhelpfulness was an expression against these conditions rather than simply opening a space for the bribe. These public-private transcripts of resistance indicated that where people appeared to implement oppressive systems, they were also individuals suffering from the system at different ends. Complicity in abuse and corruption involves this dual mode of people living under conditions of structural violence and acting to evade those conditions. They acted to obtain power and empowerment connected with efforts to leave the country and related interactions. It is a ‘new cultural thing’, which includes the secular state and the non-cultural as part of how the local is experienced through ongoing changes. These changes are marked by understandings of ‘global’ and ‘migration-embedded’ conversations. Like the man above, another woman was randomly telling her story to strangers outside the Registry building. There seemed to be no set criteria for hailing these strangers, except that she seemed to think people who did not obviously look as if they were desperate to obtain birth certificates (where they might have successfully circumvented the system, for instance) would be able to help. Her story was familiar. She had been travelling from her village home frequently to the GPO (Registry) to obtain a birth certificate. After being ‘pushed around’ for a prolonged period, she had finally been told that the birth certificate she sought had never existed. The records were not there. Could people help? On learning more about my research, she said there were many others in her position. Eventually, she noted that she had been told to consult a lawyer to start the necessary steps to ‘produce’ the record of birth legally, and it seemed she would have to do that. It was strange, she said: there seemed to be no point ‘passing money’ to an official to get the documents. She had tried. It was futile on this occasion. Despite her acknowledgement of needing to find a lawyer, she seemed to find it necessary to stand at the entrance leading to the corridor where the office was located and find people to tell her story to, as a way of finding relief for what she saw as a great wrong (cf. Wilce 1995). Such experiences continue despite the efforts to ‘modernise’ and institute ‘courteous practices’ in public services, in the sense of people being able to get things done with the minimum hassle. In 2014, when the Home Affairs Ministry sent out an order instructing immigration officers not to process passport applications without an accompanying

Co-occupying Public Power • 173

birth certificate that was no more than six months old, a tremendous uproar followed. This order was subsequently overturned through a legal challenge by the lawyer Saphier Hussein, who also heads a political party. Although individuals complained about the issue, effective action was only achieved through the courts, suggesting the limits to individual action without adequate support. In this regard, public complaining needs to be visible through particular forms of acknowledged power, as discussed further below, from which the law is a separate and ultimate space of redress, to be undertaken only when other arrangements had failed. This is in the sense that, alongside and outside of public complaining, people will utilise connections and rely on complicit arrangements rather than the law.

Co-occupying Power In James Scott’s (1990) negotiated spaces of power for the ‘weak’, people utilise off-stage spaces to demonstrate the hidden transcripts of power relations. However, public complaining brings out different understandings of power in which some seek to co-occupy ‘public power’, bypassing the recourse of hidden transcripts. What is not presenced in these bids for rights is that officials had a complicit presence with individuals; individuals have also ‘sanctioned’ corruption and abuse of power as ways of dealing with structurally embedded violence. People’s complicity at different levels also meant they were included within the notion of rogue aspects of the state, as noted. The efforts of citizens to complain and bypass these spaces of corruption seek a paradigm shift in this relationship to consider complaining rather than complicity as the public-private mode of relationships between officials and citizens. It also brings out new forms of engagement with the local socio-political setting. The efforts insufficiently account for how individuals are perceived as part of the problem by the state and the continuing partnerships between people and officials as ‘contributing’ systems of governance (cf. Jaffe 2013). Various individuals, specifically visible as local, who cannot be seen as big (powerful), as discussed, over-rely on the idea of rights as a given. Their varied experiences signal an extended space for violence against individuals and where officials can still evade responsibility for their actions. It brings out that power and the forms of its display in public cannot be so easily reconstituted into public rights for all. In some instances, these officials continued to realise the local setting as devalued and inseparable from the ‘problem state’ and where

174 • Competing Power

people’s rights remained something that they could confer or take away. By extension, those visible as particularly local individuals, that is, without support from a big one, found it difficult to publicly appear as powerful in opposition to corrupt state officials, despite the post-1992 emergence of independent media and changes in relation to migration and global networking. People who ‘open their mouths’ (speak out) in public places rely on an idea of rights amidst new spaces of emerging activism. However, individuals who take action to obtain rights in ‘everyday encounters’ run the risk of being isolated in a way that shows the role of complicity as having ongoing relevance in power relations and where individuals are repositioned as the problem.

Conclusion The case studies and accounts in this chapter have brought out the different bids for power in a local context of big ones and small ones that remains relevant to how power is made visible or displaced. The chapter considered shifting power relations on the ground, where some endeavour to speak out against corruption and abuse by state officials. It considered these bids for rights against continuing reliance on complicit partnerships and the different visibility of big ones, where migrant power can contest and/or intercede in understandings of powerful persons against the state’s officials. These competing sites of power continue to signal the presence of externally led forms of empowerment, where lone local voices have difficulty in bids for rights when seen as explicitly local. This is where they are attached to a devalued local without the benefit of or support from powerful friends and/ or big ones. The interactions signal the individual with responsibility to help manage complicity; the state invokes the individual as the problem even as individuals seek to complain against bad cops and similar others. The next chapter considers particular bids for power in the collective space envisaged between state and citizen. It shows a shift by the state in the reimagining of encounters with bureaucracy and public spaces as already embedded in all the benefits associated with more developed systems in relation to extra-territorial ‘interventions’ and by localising the idea of the world citizen. In this collective setting, citizens are expected to behave and conform on the basis of a world citizenship status. In this regard, the idea of external empowerment is localised; some will put up with certain hassles if these are seen as connected to systems in their host destinations. Knowledge

Co-occupying Public Power • 175

of behaviour and how things work ‘elsewhere’ aids this approach. Various reform measures re-engage the idea of a depleted local and the citizen-on-the-move. The emphasis on reform, outing corruption and adhering to systems seeks to produce an orderly citizen body where the individual has to take responsibility in complying with laws. This occurs as a new space of power relations in which corruption can remain a mode of power despite the emphasis on the law. In turn, the individual surfaces more publicly as the problem, to be morally blamed and collectively joined in the cultural issue of corruption. The next chapter further develops these themes in which individuals are identified as not doing enough and as having moral responsibility to help the law work and make governance effective. These interactions are marked by continuing acknowledgement of externally led understandings of empowerment.

Notes 1. The website, no longer active, was found at http://www.ipaidabribe.gy. 2. ‘“I Paid a Bribe” Website Successful in Detecting Corruption in Several Gov’t Agencies’, iNews Guyana, 29 September 2014, http://www.inewsguyana. com/i-paid-a-bribe-website-successful-in-detecting-corruption-in-severalgovt-agencies/ (accessed 10 January 2015). 3. She asked that I mention her name so her story could be widely heard. 4. ‘Home Affairs Identifies Traffic Ticket Offences’, Stabroek News, 9 April 2012, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2012/news/stories/04/09/home-affairs-identifies-traffic-ticket-offences/ (accessed 10 April 2012). Ticketable offences listed were: Driving an uncertified motor vehicle; Driving a motor vehicle without a driver’s licence; Failing to produce a driver’s licence; Refusing to declare present address; Breaching of conditions of provisional licence; Speeding (exceeding speed limit); Permitting more than one trailer to be drawn; Failing to stop when required by police in uniform; Leaving motor vehicle in a dangerous position; Driving motorcycle without safety helmet; Driver carrying pillion-rider without safety helmet; Failing to exhibit certificate of fitness; Failing to exhibit licence for motor vehicle; Unlighted motor vehicle (front); Unlighted motor vehicle (rear); Unlighted motorcycle/bicycle (front); Unlighted motorcycle/bicycle (rear); Unlighted animaldrawn vehicle (front); Unlighted animal-drawn vehicle (rear); Failing to carry lamp on handcart during hours of darkness; No parking brake; No reflecting mirror; No warning appliance on motor vehicle; No silencer; No efficient automatic windscreen wiper; No efficient speedometer (hire car, motor lorry, motor bus); Unnecessary sounding of horn; No trailer to be drawn by bus/hire car; Carrying more persons than the permitted number; More persons on the front seat than the number fixed to be carried thereon; Conductor (overload); Conduct of driver and conductor (breach); Stopping

176 • Competing Power

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

within 30 feet of any corner; No efficient brakes on bicycle and tricycle; No warning appliance on bicycle and tricycle. People speak of a policeman or officer rather than a traffic policeman. See also a regional 2015 Latin American Public Opinion (LAPOP) report, which documents trust issues with police among certain groups in the Caribbean and Latin American region (Cohen et al. 2015). ‘Don’t Stop If You Don’t See a Marked Police Vehicle at Roadblock  – Top Cop’, Kaieteur News, 22 March 2015, http://www.kaieteurnewsonline. com/2015/03/22/dont-stop-if-you-dont-see-a-marked-police-vehicle-atroadblock-top-cop/ (accessed 26 March 2015). Michael Outridge, ‘Roadblocks Will Be Near Police Station’, Guyana Chronicle, 26 March 2015, p. 19 (accessed 26 March 2015). ‘Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report’ 1995, p.18. See http://parliament.gov.gy/documents/documents-laid/6218-ministry_of_home_affairs_annual_report_1995.pdf (accessed 24 March 2018).

m7 Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local Individuals, Migrants’ Experiences and Strategies of Governance

Introduction I’m not going to pay them. No way they getting money out of me. This nonsense has to stop. I have rights. they will make me wait. I will wait. They won’t get anything out of me. —Katy

Katy is discussing her position on an application she is making for a birth certificate at the Registry where she is aware that she can pay. She knows that if she pays a sum she will obtain her birth certificate promptly, but she feels that they (the staff at the Registry) would have to give her this birth certificate on application and that she did not need to pay (give money for prompt service) on the side as it was the duty of the staff to process her application. Katy has lost her birth certificate. The system for obtaining a new birth certificate appears straightforward, but Katy wants to be careful, so there is no space for legitimate delay at the Registry. She seeks advice on filling out the form and then submits it to the Registry. She prepares to wait. It will, she says, come in the post: she does not have to go to the office to plead her case, which, in effect, means paying someone to help her. Her behaviour is ‘fascinating’ to some of her friends. Why prolong the misery? It is just hardship to wait in this manner. Yet all it is really, according to these friends, is being sensible (see Linger 2005). One of her friends, Host LB, consents to this sensible route, understanding that empowerment has to be extracted through particular technologies of governance, where these local settings are always potentially disempowering spaces, as shown in some of the examples in the previous chapter. Host LB will never wait and usually pays for service at certain

178 • Competing Power

levels. She has accumulated ‘friends’ in official positions by turning up and enquiring for ‘service’ whereby officials take unofficial payments; in addition, she is able to utilise ‘connections’ with people in higher offices who can order unruly officials to behave. This is explicitly to stop what she deems to be everyday forms of harassment against her or people she knows, which can range from encounters with bad service to actions by rogue policeman. Host LB’s experiences of these issues are not isolated to her immediate setting; she has become a ‘behind-the-scenes’ human rights defender on behalf of some of her acquaintances who suffer from inequities and do not readily speak out. In developing further case studies and related examples on migrants and local residents, this chapter considers that the enabling aspect of empowering people through and despite their difficult encounters with systems in migration and global networking activities is poorly presenced in bids for governance. These bids draw on a bio-political imaginary focusing on compliance and universal rights rather than on violence and a problem state. The chapter considers that while the state’s efforts to curb individuals’ lack of compliance and to render more visible their complicity in illegal practices draw on a mode of external empowerment, this co-optation of external empowerment is insufficiently presenced where understandings of structural violence and corruption remain. It considers that reform measures bring out new emphasis on structuring governance and that efforts occur in between and beyond complicit relationships. It looks at experiences of external empowerment amidst difficulties and the ways in which this idea of empowerment can be inadequately present in new local initiatives that aim to facilitate better service. These initiatives incorporate ideas of universal rights and systems. The reform efforts signal particular forms of spatialisation of the state vis-à-vis the external as modes of extracting legitimacy and eroding the discourse of an unhelpful, isolated state and one, thus, only powerful through complicit practices and violence, as discussed (see Gupta 1995). Ferguson and Gupta (2002: 984), while noting some of the more visible examples of repressive state power in discussing spatialisation, point to the roles of both ‘theoretical understandings and bureaucratic embodiment’ to make sense of state spatialisation.1 This chapter explores some of the reform measures and systems to consider how bureaucratic forms re-materialise to relate to the individual as the problem, when previously the emphasis by individuals was on the state as the problem. The changes in the migration-embedded local bring out a ‘universal language’ of rights against the individual.

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 179

Katy and the System In waiting for her birth certificate application to be processed, Katy is adamant that things have changed: she will get the certificate by following the changed system, which is meant to be the ‘proper system’. This change is intertwined with the reform measures produced in terms of universal practices and rights where, as noted, many measures are being instituted to ‘clean up’ the system with support from overseas donors. These reform measures emerge as part of the system in practice, however, where some officials can still be paid for swift service, as noted. Katy says she knows that this practice of service is still flourishing and that there is always ‘someone’ who wants money. This is generally understood and officially acknowledged on the bribe-reporting website that was launched by the Guyana Home Affairs Ministry in 2013 and subsequently discontinued, as noted earlier. Katy, in her efforts against these practices, sucks her teeth (a long sound of dissent known as ‘suck-teeth’) and notes that they were not going to get money out of her; the system ‘on show’ (where these underthe-counter negotiations are not on display) is there to provide her with the certificate. Things have changed, she says again, which means officials have to stop treating people badly (cf. Parry 2000: 28–29). Her application process will take a few weeks. She expresses determination to wait it out. Katy is applying for the certificate in order to apply for a new passport, which will take a similar length of time. She then plans to apply for a non-immigrant visa to visit relatives in the US. All of this will take at least a couple of months to complete, in her estimation. It is not the norm for such faith and patience to be demonstrated by people who endeavour to ‘work with’ the official system: in effect, it is the lack of trust that resurfaces as trust in complicit arrangements. However, Katy is more concerned/angry about the idea of paying people than about reducing her waiting time. She is aware that various others, including Host LB mentioned above, would simply go ahead and pay to obtain the service needed. Katy exercises her own bio-power, and the change that she perceives in her favour means that she must accept a loss. Her attitude brings out a new space of anger as one that she would not have expressed in this manner before all the talk of reform and ongoing changes. It is not dissimilar to some of the examples in the previous chapter, such as that of Passenger B. However, Katy does not feel that she is engaged in confrontation with anyone. She is, in effect, confronting embedded practices if in a different manner from Passenger B and Seema, as

180 • Competing Power

discussed in Chapter 6. The examples of people who choose not to pay and to wait on the system show that reformed spaces in the local are rebounded onto the problem state as a difficult space with which to work. The space for corruption as a complicit one can re-emerge as an ongoing mode of dealing with problems. Through a prolonged waiting time, Katy suffers for her determination to rely on this new system. What is missing is a real effort to empower people like Katy when they rely on the view that the system will work for them or expect that they will obtain rights as automatic entitlements. In this regard, they envisage a system that over-relies on a new construction of bureaucracy. This type of bureaucracy is being forced to be enabling as distinct from the various forms of structural violence discussed in this book, and to be enabling without complicity. Separated from the complicit partnerships, however, such bureaucracy fails to be enabling for Katy and others like her and returns to structural violence. Imagined in this idea of what is workable is a smooth transition to a type of system conceived outside of the ‘problem local’, one offering rights and one that is unproblematic. It corresponds with the bid to establish the bribe-reporting website discussed earlier. Basically, Katy has had enough and, not dissimilar to Seema berating the policeman (in Chapter 6), she is prepared to ‘deal with the system’ and face the consequences. There is a readiness by some officials to see individuals as those necessarily contributing to good governance through good moral behaviour (see Chapter 8), and in this sense, Katy is an individual to be welcomed. This good moral behaviour includes adhering to newly introduced dress codes when visiting government offices, as discussed further below. However, it requires a new type of forbearance to have such tolerance and willing compliance when it is expected that compliance must be coerced; it is an idea of evading such coerciveness that also pushes complicit arrangements. Katy does not have the immediate sum at hand to pay someone ‘under the counter’, although it is possible that she can have it ready if she decides to pay; it is an issue of ­reprioritising things. She says, however, that she will not do that. Host LB, on the other hand, sees ongoing power negotiations with big ones, whether or not a bribe is required, as necessary to everyday relations. It is this perception of negotiating power with big ones (in this instance, state officials) that is missing in the description of corruption as cultural, where the ‘cultural’ understandings inform a local conversation of power that is globally envisaged while being experienced in minute everyday settings. This description changes structurally violent systems into enabling spaces as a conversion of bureaucracy, one that is not catered for ‘legitimately’.

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 181

The ‘working system’ operates selectively and through other types of ‘favour mode’, or through the hassle involved in arranging meetings with officials and reasoning the space for rights, which are different experiences of power relations. While talk of corruption being cultural and police being bandits, as noted by top police officers in the previous chapter, permeates efforts to institute reform (see also Harrison 2007; Parry 2000: 29, for instance), how the system works on the ground is inseparable from minute negotiations. These negotiations remain part of power relations. Host LB’s approach matches expectations of what is achievable in universal spaces of rights minus the spaces for corruption and complicit partnerships in which she works within this ideal. By understanding the practice of performing her lack of power or lesser power in these acknowledgements and contestations, she gains agency. This is by acknowledging and seeking to overturn the experience of structural violence. In these arrangements, she emerges as someone seeking a favour, someone who has to be helped; on this basis, she also reaffirms the power of the big one and becomes a kind of ‘big one’ herself through her connections and tasks of helping others. At the same time, these negotiations outside the public arena provide responses but do not necessarily end the general problem. For instance, on one occasion Host LB was able to get the police to stop bothering a relative who was regularly being stopped and searched when passing a police station. However, this did not stop the police bothering others who were not similarly connected. There was also always the possibility that a disgruntled police officer – one of the subordinates who needed to be reined in – could do harm later to the said relative. Thus, knowing who has the power and how to access it becomes more important than speaking out publicly. For Katy, above, this was explicitly about her newly learned right to obtain a service through a process that was presented as reformed. However, the system retained a process of ‘passing money’ for good service. Host LB, in attending to the in-between spaces of reforms, showed her awareness that despite and as part of reform, open confrontation was not the way forward. The reformed system still relied on connections. Her readiness to engage with these opening and reopening spaces, where big ones could quietly curb the excesses of subordinates when such excesses were brought to their attention, indicates how power was being managed in relation to reform. While blame continued to be placed on individuals as those ready to bribe and ready to take bribes, systems of reform focus too narrowly on the universal space that locates the individual as the problem. It seeks

182 • Competing Power

consent from people, which is not readily given through people’s consciousness of the structural violence against them. In situations where people can mix these settings with forms of empowerment obtained through external linkages, systems are not experienced in the same way.

Empowerment, External and Local Systems Migrants and intending migrants deal ‘receptively’ with onerous processes to obtain US migrant status, for instance, and with resettlement issues in their new country. While migrants and migrants-in-waiting experience difficulties with bureaucratic systems and various other measures, these difficulties are subsumed or overshadowed by the larger emphasis on status attached to the migrant and to ideas of external empowerment. Such difficulties are ‘re-translated’ as enabling spaces through particular journeys out of structural violence; the migrants are evading homeland conditions and obtaining opportunities in their host country. The following example demonstrates how an empowering space opens up despite and as part of a bureaucratic time-consuming process.

Not a Hassle It has been an unimaginably long time that Reenu and her family have been in a sponsorship queue to migrate to the US. However, their wait is now over. I have been invited to their home through my acquaintance with their relative, Host A, discussed in Chapter 5. I have known Host A since the mid 1990s. This is 2008, and Host A, friend and interlocutor, has maintained a steady flow of information on migration activities and violence in these villages and elsewhere, often without spelling out any connections between violence and migration, but where both have been significant to her experiences of the everyday. On this occasion, she has brought me to visit her brother, Harri, and sister-in-law, Reenu, who live several villages away from her own residence. Shortly after this visit, these relatives would hold a house party to mark their departure to take up permanent residence in the US. Only Reenu is at home. We all sit in the ‘bottom house’, as an extended kitchen space. Host A sits in a hammock and Reenu waves me to join her on an outdoor bench next to the hammock. She is awaiting the return of her sons and husband, who are in the city, sorting out various

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 183

final arrangements for their impending departure. She notes that her sons have had to return to a city photographic studio to re-pose for photographs needed to process final documents they have to have ready for their arrival as impending immigrants in the US. While Reenu awaits the return of these family members, she showers us with the hospitality that marks these village settings: plates of chow mein2 are provided to us. Food is invariably available in these village settings and must be given to and accepted by the visitor (see Mauss 1967). The repayment of this gift is an exchange of conversations and agency through the presence and acknowledgement of the researcher in their home. Reenu reinforces the hospitality ethos by filling my plate with food, despite my protestations that I had eaten shortly before setting out for her home. When Reenu’s sons return, they tell us with ease and even with some laughter about the task of having to return to the city to get the photos right. They provide a detailed description of the tedious waiting process and their re-posing for the required photos. It is an attitude that expresses relief at the near end of a very long waiting period in the sponsorship queue. It also signals how they are preparing to face life in their new country and to deal with any difficulties that might arise. This attitude has some similarities to the ways in which villagers experienced the introduction of a tax identification number (TIN), as noted further below. The example of the TIN brings out the ways in which this conformity also becomes empowerment, explicitly so, when it can be located as part of global networking activities.

Empowerment and Loss Generally, locals who are intending migrants and/or networking with their overseas relatives know that things can be difficult and there are many heart-rending stories of separation, loss and other difficulties in these migration bids and journeys, as indicated earlier in this book. In migrant destinations, those ‘without papers’ (undocumented migrants), as noted in Chapter 1 in the example of Fazad, explicitly encounter new forms of structural violence.3 However, these problems are not readily visible in a particular publicness where migrants are seen to bear automatic status in the local Guyanese setting. Fazad’s wife, Fatima (Chapters 1 and 4), was able to draw on this sense of empowerment successfully on her return to her village home in Guyana, despite having overstayed in the US. She had remained overseas for a sufficient period and conducted herself on her return in a manner that claimed this status.

184 • Competing Power

It is in the minute family and domestic settings where people know each other with a level of intimacy, and where the extensive migration and global networking interactions from the 1970s/1980s provide for shared understandings of conditions, that such difficulties are made known. As discussed in Chapter 4, local residents who suffer from the automatic status of the migrant are increasingly contesting their loss of status in the encounter. However, there is also knowledge and understanding of the difficulties as part of a shared setting in which both locals and migrants inhabit a transnational that also offers spaces for empowerment. Thus, jobs and accommodations are sought and can be found in advance by relatives of imminent migrants, as in the case of Reenu, above, for instance. Many women in these village settings are housewives, or unemployed or retired. Some live in extended households, where it is customary for them to have a role exclusively in the domestic arena rather than to go out to work. This changes dramatically in the migrant destination, where women migrants from these villages and elsewhere seek and are expected to seek employment.4 This access to and/or desire for employment is often one of the immediate changes in the migrant setting. Although there are exceptions, with some women not actively seeking employment, many are prepared to work. In some instances, if the migrant, temporary migrant worker or undocumented migrant is unaccompanied by family members, seeking employment is the only option. In conversation with me, Host A and Reenu reflect on how life is going to be for the new immigrants when they arrive in the US. Reenu notes that they have already sorted out accommodation in an extended family home in Long Island, New York. She expresses appreciation of the arrangements. She knew this accommodation would be some distance away from Richmond Hill, Queens, a main Guyanese migrant settlement, as noted, where some of her relatives resided. Transportation to the Queens locality would not be an issue, however, as other family members had cars and one of her sons would also eventually be applying for a US driver’s licence. Reenu had a willing attitude: any initial hardships that were to be encountered would be sorted out. Initially, they would have the support of extended family members in the migrant destination, but they expected that they would soon manage on their own as they planned to obtain jobs very quickly. Host A helps to direct the conversation, as a ready local ‘interpreter’ of context and based on her own embedded knowledge of how change was occurring, with family members being both present and, in some

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 185

sense, ‘already away’ (Geertz 1972). As noted in Chapter 4, Host A is aware that the migrant destination is not a place where everything will automatically be rosy. Host A goes past the status attached to the automatic migrant to show understandings of these difficulties, marked by her interactions not just with extended family members who are migrants, but also with residents in her villages and elsewhere who add to these stories. The dualistic experience of hard times and empowerment as a consensual mode is one that is being drawn on in the reconfiguring of local settings in which local residents are expected to comply, to ignore or tell of spaces of corruption in order to fit into a mode of governance. This mode also connects with or is legitimised through external systems and rights. However, this emphasis co-resides with people’s sense of being enabled beyond the reach of the state when becoming migrants and/or conducting global networking. Missing in the local setting is the lack of consent and expectation of empowerment through compliance. This points to the difficulty of shifting the experience and/or memories of structural violence in a particular devalued local.

Empowerment and Local Knowledge These nuances are not to be confused with lack of knowledge about what migrants encounter or can encounter in the migrant destination, as already noted. As indicated earlier, some of these accounts emerge at celebratory events or at funerals in New York, where relatives speak of the hardships experienced by older family members. One youth spoke of his father who had just died, to say that he wanted his story documented and that as a migrant his father had had to suffer many trials. Another family held a religious ceremony to ‘celebrate’ the hardships of the oldest person, who was a great-grandmother, and invited extended family members. This allowed for a gathering of over sixty relatives in this building in Queens, New York that was used for religious activities. The grandmother sat in the place usually reserved for deities. The many extended relatives offered accounts in praise of her sufferings, noting that without her efforts they would not have succeeded in their own migration journeys. However, alongside the extensive family networks that aid permanent migration and resettlement are changes in family relationships. As discussed in Chapter 5, resident Guyanese can encounter these changes negatively; as some of the examples have shown, they are treated poorly by overseas relatives. The changes also relate to how the migrant has become a particular kind of person

186 • Competing Power

with access to certain opportunities and as part of ­different structural ­conditions, for instance. Poor treatment is not restricted to the Guyanese resident. Relatives will also complain in the migrant destination about those who have become ‘too big’ and are uncaring of family duties and obligations. Some women, in particular, will note the freedom to make choices as employed persons and to become breadwinners. Physical space, particularly the home, becomes more private and closed to the very public forms of hospitality evident in the Guyanese settings; there is often little time for such gatherings. Thus, in Queens, New York, for instance, migrants would often meet each other at social events outside their homes, such as in temples and mosques or ‘wedding halls’, along with the occasional yard barbecue. A strong example of such change arises in wedding ceremonies in Queens, New York. The ‘traditional’ Indian wedding house with weeklong activities and rituals leading up to a Sunday wedding is reshaped through different priorities marked by time management in New York. One Guyanese migrant, Resu, noted with some equanimity and even pride: ‘my daughter’s wedding is on a Saturday . . . yes, it is different from back home, but the pandit [Hindu priest] is a busy man . . . we have to fit with his dates’. He noted that they would have a reception (a ‘non-ethnic’ aspect of the ceremony, which is also held in Guyana) at a time of their choice, but that this was still constrained by work priorities and had to be fitted in with main family members’ work commitments. There were also two separate guest lists – an extensive one for the Indian ceremony and a restricted one for the reception held in a hall. The reception hall would often be rented as a complete package, which would be based on the number of guests. Resu, for instance, noted that he would be paying US$275 for each person attending and so, literally, could not afford to have anyone turn up who was not on the guest list. This would be closely monitored in a way that was unheard of in Guyana: persons representing the hall management would do a head count at the door. This approach was not deemed irregular and Guyanese have become accustomed in the migrant setting to cater for strictly monitored wedding lists at such receptions. Despite the cost and his various demurrals, Resu’s number of guests for the reception in the expensive hall was extensive, including casual acquaintances who were ‘big ones’, people with good connections or obvious wealth who had done well in New York and could not be left off the guest list. The example of wedding receptions indicates both openness as a category of visibly belonging beyond particular cultural, ethnic or nationalistic constraints and the construction and reconstruction of status;

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 187

these are spaces for people to display migrant status. It also signals the production of particular types of persons who are empowered in the migrant destination. This production relies on inter-cultural visibility of migrants. In some instances, migrants who first settled in Richmond Hill and outlying areas in Queens (a main Guyanese migrant settlement, as noted) extend this idea of inter-cultural visibility by moving out of the area. Long Island is a preferred destination. However, they will ‘turn up’ in the Richmond Hill locality to reconnect with other migrants. Some also have homeland-bound businesses in the area, such as food places and shops, which capture interest through stated linkages of selling homeland products. A businessman who lives in the locality notes that he lives in Long Island but does business in the area because it is strategic: people had memories of his business label and wanted his ‘Guyanese food’. Thus, some of these ‘mobile migrants’ often return as observers and/ or particular kinds of participants to the distinctive setting of Richmond Hill, marked as those who can stand apart even though they appear to belong. This emerges through people who conduct businesses and live elsewhere and those who visit Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill to purchase food and other items exported from Guyana (see Halstead 2012). Nancy Foner’s accounts show Jamaicans in New York who similarly occupied ethnic and non-ethnic spaces as an example of related forms of empowerment through inter-cultural or non-cultural visibility. Foner (1998: 178) notes that the Jamaicans saw themselves as both distinct from Afro-Americans and as being able to have better relations with whites than the Afro-Americans were able to have.5 This visibility of status as a larger construction in the migrant destination extracts the person from a particular ‘migrant-cultural’ context to re-emerge as competent and successful. This overshadows difficulties, pain, loss, separation and changes to family relationships, for instance. The visibility of the status-enhanced migrant also bears a collective of persons who can be accessed in terms of perceptions of wealth and achievements where duty and familial bonds, as well as larger reasons for leaving the homeland, might be present but are not the over-riding narrative. This emerges as the composition of the migrant, externally empowered and able to give back: gifts and the expectations of gifting occur in various contexts, from sponsorship help and family ­remittances to political contributions and humanitarian assistance. These nuances of loss, struggle and change are not readily present in Guyanese settings where ‘public spaces’ for encounters between migrant and state are being reimagined in terms of the empowered world citizen, able to understand ‘rupture’ between faulty systems and

188 • Competing Power

‘enhanced’ developed approaches. This mode of delivering citizenship and state efficiency jumps from the ‘bad local’ and notions of the isolated state to the presentation of reform. This is facilitated through the presencing of external empowerment/world citizens and through increasing interventionist roles of external agencies. The turn to the idea of individuals as faulty means also that such individuals have to be extracted in particular encounters with the state and shown to be the problem. The presencing and re-presencing of the external, in terms of different perceptions of rights and empowerment at state and onthe-ground levels, further relates to Ferguson and Gupta’s (2002) point about re-examining scale and space to understand changing forms of state spatialisation. They note further: ‘the conflicts engendered by neoliberal globalization have brought the disjuncture between spatial and scalar orders into the open, revealing the profoundly transnational character of both the “state” and the “local” and drawing attention to crucial mechanisms of governmentality that take place outside of, and alongside, the nation-state’ (2002: 995). The case studies also demonstrate how imminent migrants began to fashion themselves in terms of particular requirements, demonstrating certain nuances of loss and disempowerment that are also part of these experiences, but which can be overshadowed in the larger understandings of migrant status and empowerment. The example of certain experiences with the TIN (tax identification number) is indicative of these nuances. Some local residents have treated the introduction of the TIN as a source of empowerment through interactions with overseas relatives and remittances of goods from overseas. A TIN is a familiar requirement in the US,6 for instance. However, it materialises in countries such as Guyana as part of reform measures.7 The TIN is often described as ‘tint’ in everyday conversations.

The ‘Tint’ In 2010, some villagers were involved in ensuring they had their ‘tint’. The term was quickly circulating in discussions. One villager explained: ‘I don’t need tint, my neighbours need it to receive barrels [of goods] from outside; my relatives have it [tint] outside, so not something strange’. It had been introduced following a series of reform measures. However, for the villagers involved in migration activities and interactions with overseas relatives in the US it became part of an experience to be shared, as something that relatives and friends had had to deal with in their migrant destinations. Further, without the TIN, they could

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 189

not fill out customs forms to obtain goods arriving from overseas. The local Guyanese discussed here experienced it as part of an extended setting in which they were involved and, thus, they variously noted it as something that was onerous but necessary. While they sought to understand the tint and the processes of obtaining it, at the same time they wanted to ensure they ‘got it right’, as the form and requirements were all new. In itself, the form was not a difficult one, but it appeared as both transnational and part of an unfamiliar local, which had to be renavigated. The villagers in this example were concerned with the form without expressing any deep sense of frustration over it. The form and process manifested as an experience to be shared with overseas relatives. Generally, however, this shared space and enabling aspect are not readily present where the local is seen as explicitly local in relation to bureaucracies that point to a problem state rather than to a space of empowerment, as indicated. Thus, as discussed in Chapter 6, local residents faced with poor bureaucratic systems to obtain birth certificates and passports experience these settings in terms of deep unhappiness, as expressed in some of the complaints. Even though they are often seeking these documents in order to travel out of the country (the overwhelming demand for birth certificates is directly related to passport applications, as noted), they do not see these spaces in the same way, for instance, that they would view the US embassy. In earlier years, applicants faced long queues and difficult processes in their applications for visas, but the embassy was conceived as never of the local.

Bad Experiences and Enabling Bureaucratic Systems The state agencies that cause people to suffer become bad experiences of the state. Spaces for expressions of deep dissatisfaction have in recent years moved to more open complaining, as noted in the previous chapter. These attitudes and experiences are dissimilar to attitudes by intending migrants, for instance, when dealing with bureaucratic requirements as part of the US sponsorship process. Such a process is prolonged and can be experienced as hardship, as accounts show; however, such applicants know that they will eventually have success and move on to better things. Thus, they expect that systematic c­ ompliance will in the end be enabling. Would-be migrants and others will talk about the convoluted and drawn-out processes of obtaining immigrant visas (see additional

190 • Competing Power

notes on the case study of Lata, further below, for instance, as well as Chapters 3 and 4). Notifications that applicants need to re-file consent documents8 can be sent out from the main processing centre in the US even as the applicant is about to obtain the sponsorship. If the applicant resends the document affirming consent to be sponsored, the time is extended for the application to be processed. Some applicants can be led into resending such documents without simultaneously questioning the system. A call on one occasion by a US sponsor to the US centre processing non-immigrant applications, after a consent form had been sent out twice (on the last occasion colliding with another response saying that the application had reached interview stage), obtained the reply that had they just called with their reference number this would have continued the sponsorship without the need to resend a consent form. Any glitches or lack of documentation would have been corrected by the phone call notifying them that the application was still active. The readiness to conform means that challenges are not necessarily the first recourse, unless grounded in actual support and knowledge that the system supports such challenges. This can be, for instance, through the activities of immigration lawyers, prevalent in the migrant destinations, who are willing to offer assistance ‘to challenge’. This can be contrasted with different receptions of problems when faced with bureaucratic systems in the Guyanese settings generally, as noted.

Enskilled Presence The wait to obtain US sponsorship can be extremely tedious. Dependent children can go out of status after coming of age during the wait period, as was the case with Lata, whose father, a US citizen and their sponsor, had died while the sponsorship application was in process (see Chapter 3). On various occasions, while the applications for permanent US residence were in process for this family, I met with Lata, a housewife, and other family members in their home. Lata and her husband, Raj, were occupied with different aspects of preparation, dealing with queries from and submission/resubmission of documents to the US embassy. Lata would handle this with some determination, noting phone calls she would make to her relatives in the US to follow up on the process. She was also often ready to assist her relatives overseas and deal with queries regularly on her family’s sponsorship application, utilising a range of skills and abilities that went beyond the general idea of a housewife as having a secondary role. Her ‘enskilled presence’ had visibility within the spaces of the home. When Lata returned to Guyana,

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 191

her person and body became visible in a new status that moved her out of a quiet ‘background’ role of fixing and managing things. In this embodied manner, she became the person who returned with gifts, and who was busy coordinating the return of goods that would travel back with her to her migrant home in the US. Her bodily appearance changed in terms of being brisk in her movements and speech: she embodied the agency and status of those who had successfully departed and could return with gifts (cf. Okely 2007). Lata had little time to sit and chat as she would customarily do in the earlier years of our encounters. Now, instead of sitting and chatting about ‘problems’ in the country, from which she could be distant because she was always ‘leaving soon’ and talking about her plans for the future, she had joined those who had left. On this basis, she could only return through a sense of urgency expressed, for instance, by the manner of her movements in the spacious outdoor bottom house of her Guyanese family home, packing suitcases and arranging goods. This was different from her leisurely space when previously dwelling as a migrant-in-waiting in this home, when she would sit in her living room to similarly arrange anything that needed her attention and where she then had so much more time to greet and talk to the researcher regularly visiting her home. Some of her extended family members who were often present on occasions of celebration – the weddings of her daughter and later her son, or a religious ceremony, for example – were now present to join in a ‘departure ritual’, which acknowledged separation, ‘loss’ of a family member, difficult times in the migrant destination and Lata and her family’s migrant status. This status was further evident in her ability to move between the countries with gifts and in her new bodily ­mannerisms and appearance.

Complaining, the System and ‘Orderly’ Bodies In public settings, in particular government offices, there is some understanding of people being ‘able’ to present themselves in spaces envisaged through ideas of ‘enabling bureaucracy’ (where problems will be resolved and people will work with the system) as orderly and courteous. This is also envisaged in terms of bodily appearance where they have to adhere to a dress code to enter these government buildings. This emphasis on appearance brings the citizen into a joined effort to make the system work. In the passport office, another building in which people will gather in lengthy queues to wait for passports and which is subject to intense

192 • Competing Power

scrutiny for reform measures, people have to turn up in ‘suitable attire’. People will complain of the heat and the overly long waiting period. Amidst the expectations that reform is working, there are still those who will pay for service. Both the Registry and the passport office accommodate relatively quiet if discontented clusters of persons waiting for their documents. While benches and courteous service marked certain reforms in the post-1992 period, there remain some bad experiences of queuing and excessive waiting periods. While reform measures have endeavoured to curb problems with waiting times in certain public offices, some practices re-emerge or become located in different spaces. The reform space also brings out potential difficulties. In those situations in which officials insist on following systems through the filling out of forms and adhering to procedures in a systematic way that is also impersonal – no shared space against the ‘isolated state’  – the experience is often a protracted one. One applicant, Al, noted that officials will deliberately make the process overly long in order to encourage payment. Al told of an official who sat and looked at him while processing his document, moved away from his desk several times and took a long time to issue his document. This was at the end of the process, where all the applicant had to do was collect his document. There was no need for what Al saw as a charade. The official was unduly ‘performing’ through his movements and demeanour, and without using words, how the process of collection was arduous and out of his control. In his bodily actions, spaces for complicity could be read as habituated. The applicant felt that the behaviour of the official and his mannerisms amounted to a new way of indicating an expectation of gratitude (making an unofficial payment to the official) on his part – that while the system was endeavouring to close off spaces for under-the-counter payments, some were trying to find ways to continue to indicate their expectation of these payments within the newly ordered spaces that were meant to provide good service. Below are further details on efforts to produce conformity through the public appearance of the individual.

Making Conformity: Rules and Experiences The issue of enforcing rules on dress code is a ready example of this production and emphasis on the individual. The way in which people have to appear in buildings where the business of the state is conducted and where they might encounter public officials has become heavily monitored and subjected to a mandatory dress code. This is

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 193

not enshrined in law or custom. The everyday mode of wear is not prescribed by ethnic, cultural or related factors: while ethnic groups do have distinctive wear tied to understandings of ‘their traditions’, their use of such wear is for specific occasions, markedly selective, in relation to a ritualistic activity meant to produce them through a particular known identity (see Jayawardena 1963, 1980). In recent times, some Muslim women wear the hijab, pushing the everyday to include this garb as their mode of attire; however, this is not a general mode of wear. Thus, overall, the post-colonial descendants of people from disparate origins and countries appear through what may be described as ­culturally non-distinctive clothing. The issue of a mandatory dress code for people present in state buildings emerges as one of respectful and orderly bodies able to be covered adequately. The dress code is a missive against scanty and over-casual dressing ostensibly more fit for beaches and parties than for government offices and the ‘proper citizens’ who are conducting business in these offices. Imagined in this dress code is the idea of individual bodies improperly clothed and unable to perform a civic duty of citizenship. Embedded in it is awareness of people’s discontent and unhappiness with the state. In this regard, the rule about dress was meant to facilitate an atmosphere in which people were civil and courteous. In indicating a problem of disaffected hordes, ready to speak out against officials, it shifted the idea of poor service and poor bureaucratic protocols to the idea of the individual as a problem. It suggested a role for civility and orderly citizens in changing the ills of the system with its embedded structural violence. The focus on the individual has become a continuing motif in efforts to bring about social change in relation to effective citizenship and inclusive governance. The dress code as an emphasis on order is not a singular occurrence isolated to Guyana, and is context-dependent in terms of differing emphases and meanings. In European cities and, separately, in South Asian villages, as examples, the appearance of people, as individuals, has collective meanings in public spaces related to perceptions about identity and belonging. Concerns arise, particularly, in the new security era and general debates about multiculturalism in Europe. In France, significant nationalistic positioning of secularised public appearance has attracted the banning of large religious symbols on the person.9 In an effort to produce particular kinds of bodies in public places, France imposed bans on religious displays in certain public sites.10 The law was passed in 2004 despite massive protests. Banned displays included Muslim headscarves, Christian crucifixes and Jewish yarmulkes. Subsequently, in 2011, full face veils and burqas (head-to-toe

194 • Competing Power

coverings worn by some Muslim women) were also banned. These requirements were seen as efforts towards inclusive citizenship which had meaning in a larger setting and where people were being ordered into a nationalistic space that was to be coerced out of the particular, as a culturally overt space in France. Thus, ethnic and religious associations could not be allowed to have a dominant visibility in the practice of citizenship and ongoing imagining of the nation-state (see Anderson 1983; Eriksen 1993). Supporters of France’s position have pointed to the problems of multiculturalism and the need to ‘assimilate’ a growing Islamic population, while critics have argued that it has the opposite effect of hindering integration (see Wiles 2007, for instance). Anjum Alvi (2013: 180), discussing varied meanings of veiled appearances, pointed to the context of respect and protection in Pakistani Punjab, where women in the marketplace emerge outside of usual spaces of respect and ‘are therefore compelled to wear a chador, a shawl bigger than a palla, or a burqa . . .’. Alvi notes how these attitudes of concealment are about assertiveness and management of gendered relations in terms of different types of spaces, from the domestic to the larger public setting. Globally, appearances in public have come into new and alarming possibilities when interpreted in security-conscious contexts that move out of debates about gendered ideas of belonging to those of identifying anti-social persons ready to do harm. This was epitomised in the arrest of a male UK resident on the basis of what constituted ‘suspicious behaviour’ while on the London Underground. He was visible through a laptop, a jacket ‘deemed to be too large for the season’ and a large haversack, which would signify for certain security and police forces that he had intentions on public order and thus posed a public threat. He was arrested and locked up and later released on bail. He had to go through a solicitor to resolve the situation, and has engaged a host of media to tell his story.11 Guyanese migrants will discuss the importance of appearance when travelling. One male professional notes that he would always wear a suit when moving from one country to the next and even when returning to Guyana on short visits. It made a difference – people would note the suit and treat him accordingly as a ‘big one’, someone not to be trifled with in his estimation and experiences. In the Caribbean-Guyanese settlement of Queens, several male migrants noted that whenever they had to travel via airports from one US state to another, they would ensure they were always attired in a suit, or at least a jacket. These modes of dressing kept unwarranted (it was always unwarranted in relation to them, they noted) suspicion away from them, given their

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 195

non-white ethnic appearance, particularly after 9/11. It also meant they were not treated poorly as their formal attire helped to mediate likely stereotypes. This readiness by some to dress appropriately may be contrasted with the complaints by those local Guyanese who are turned away from government buildings because of their perceived scanty clothing or other inappropriate forms of dress as assessed by the guards at the entrances to these buildings. Some have even engaged these guards in a ‘busing session’ (see Edwards 1979), where they would argue or quarrel from a safe distance against the inconvenience of being refused entry for reasons of officially dictated inappropriate modes of attire. The issue of being asked to dress ‘properly’ overshadowed what was more important for them: obtaining proper service from officials. Items that are excluded from scrutiny include jeans, often described as ‘American jeans’. Jeans gained popularity among Guyanese women amidst some conflictual experiences and interpretations of their presence in ‘traditional’ settings where, in some instances, they were seen as clothing for ‘loose women’ in the 1970s–1980s. It took some time for jeans to be adopted as everyday wear by women in these specific contexts of doubt about their modesty. Jeans are now popular across ethno-cultural groups to the extent that they dominate a particular night of activity during week-long Hindu wedding ceremonies  – the Saturday night, which has become known among some as ‘jeans night’. Some of the women, often of a younger age, will turn up attired in jeans to continue the celebrations and dancing. In recent times, women of different ethnicity from the city as well as village locations discussed the wearing of jeans as a protective garment in public spaces and at night events; they might attend an event such as a music entertainment show and/or would be travelling home late at night on ‘public transportation’, including in taxis. The general view was that jeans could be seen as protective wear because they were tightly fitted and not easy to take off. The wearing of jeans by women has achieved some invisibility as ‘problem clothing’ in government buildings; women will be scrutinised for short shirts or sleeveless ­clothing, but not for jeans. People will from time to time be caught out in sleeveless clothing or appearing in a way that the guard, briefed to scrutinise appearance, deems inappropriate. For some, it is not of uppermost concern that they are approaching a government building and, on this basis, they are not likely to remember that appearance is an issue. This also signals the different views and treatment of the external site and understanding of the spaces that are potentially empowering. Note that there are no similar

196 • Competing Power

contexts of likely consternation about dress when applicants visit the US embassy in Georgetown, in particular, to apply for immigrant and non-immigrant visas; applicants would automatically dress well in a way it is imagined they would not do when visiting local government offices. This is not necessarily so. While the strictures about dress codes that have been introduced suggest numerous discontented people in ‘uncivil attire’, it must be emphasised that this is not really the case. The dress code emerges, in such instances, as an inconvenience to add to other nuisances experienced in dealings with official settings. It appears as another bureaucratic hassle. In Guyana, while professionals, particularly lawyers, would wear suits or jackets, various others such as accountants, businessmen and office employees are more casually attired. Citizens going about their day-to-day business who are not required to be formally attired can be dressed in any fashion, inclusive of sleeveless clothing and shorts. The heat (often 90°) is a major factor in people’s choice of apparel. Most people, however, are usually well dressed. There are few men who go about in shorts or sleeveless clothing on weekdays; women are often seen in jeans, as indicated, and might be attired in sleeveless clothing, often deemed to be fashionable. The imagining of people in disrespectful clothing goes beyond the immediate attire to take on board the possibilities of uncivil persons marked immediately by their choice of attire when attending government buildings and speaking to officials. The issue of dress has long been a socio-political concern, if at different levels, in independent Guyana. Suits and ties, for instance, came under intense scrutiny as a marker of a person still enthralled by the colonial power in the immediate independence period. Of more immediate interest in this immediate independence setting was a focus on officials to be attired in shirt-jacs (open-necked short-sleeved shirts which are not tucked in, with noticeable pockets in the manner of jackets), rather than suits; under Burnham’s rule, men were socialised into wearing the shirt-jac. This was a particular style of shirt favoured by socialist-oriented persons and seen to be a definitive marker of belonging against colonial modes of dressing. The tie was another such item to be disavowed, as noted, and it disappeared completely from general attire in the immediate post-colonial years. In the earlier independence years, the appearance of citizens was not a primary item on the agenda; under a subsequent militarised dictatorship, few were expected to be public complainers or aggressors of any sort. In this earlier era, in keeping with a forced political system, citizens were imagined as well behaved and subdued, with the sense not to adversely attract the attention of the authorities in general. Those, as

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 197

‘ordinary citizens’, who breached these conventions faced retribution, as indicated in Chapter 1. In one instance, in the 1980s, a group of youths attired in martial arts clothing and practising along the seawall in Georgetown were taken to the police headquarters (where the black clothes police were located – see Chapter 2) and badly beaten for practising martial arts openly. One of the youths, narrating this story years later, noted that they did not fight back as they felt they could not resist. On another occasion, four university students who were studying late at night were taken to the seawall along East Coast Demerara (beach on the Atlantic Ocean) for a public flogging with a webbed belt. They were then forced to paint pro-government slogans on the seawall for an hour for the PNC government. About thirty people were present. No police action was taken on the matter. Given understandings that people would not resist in the sense of starting a civil protest, public policy was not directed towards dress codes to monitor the appearances of people. The problem was not perceived to exist in a manner serious enough to occupy the attention of officials. The suit returned to ‘fashion’ in the late twentieth century after it had suffered a decline during the anti-imperialism rhetoric that marked the independence era under Forbes Burnham. The tie slowly come back into vogue in the 1980s in some offices of private companies; it was also reintroduced by one private school at this time. Guards can scrutinise the incorrectly dressed individual as someone likely to erupt into a quarrel, yet, as noted, these are isolated occurrences. People would usually keep conversations of dissatisfaction at some distance from the point of encounters with officials. An explicit mandate seeks order through ‘newly’ required actions of persons and appearances of their bodies in public places and through new strategies of governance. The new space of governance is imagined, for instance, in terms of civility and courtesy, where persons attending government offices have to adhere to a dress code or be refused admittance. Efforts to enforce laws and institute reform of systems are signalled as understandable in a universal sense, that is, the kinds of systems that citizens have been encountering in travelling to more developed countries. However, reform practices to make the system and law work can remain part of bad experiences of the state; these ‘corrected systems’ may not work well outside of particular negotiated spaces of power. Exceptions can be found where people themselves relate to such systems as extended interactions with overseas relatives and part of global networking rather than with the mandates of the state. As examples show, reform in practice also relies on connections and ‘befriending’ vis-à-vis complicity to shift or intercede in particular

198 • Competing Power

imbalances of power relations as those negatively experienced by people. While the emphasis on reform and order endeavours to force illegality and corruption underground, variously, corrupt practices continue as modes of engagement between state officials and citizens and bring out, further, that power continues to be joined with ideas of a difficult relationship with the state in these larger settings. These strategies are inseparable from rendering the individual culpable, as further discussed in the next chapter. As the accounts show, blame shifts to the individual as the problem when there is insufficient acknowledgement of their role in governance and when corruption remains a problem. Ideas of empowerment have to consider and/or shift power relations embedded in complicit practices as habits of realising the state.

Conclusion This chapter has explored how the idea of state reform at various levels also shifts the problem of poor bureaucratic systems and complicity to that of the problem of non-conforming individuals. It explored an overemphasis on reform tied to knowledge of how things work elsewhere, and new understandings that people will follow the new systems through their ideas of empowerment in relation to external sites. It considered that these public sites and efforts for reform led to another misreading of power and change. This misreading also more publicly focused on individuals as the problem rather than the state. It showed a co-residing setting of expectations of workable reform and practices of ongoing complicity. The interactions brought out the changing forms of rebounding the local through complicity, contrasting bids for rights and presencing of externally led empowerment. The next chapter explores how these settings arise amidst ideas of external empowerment, where the state, in the form of various officials, also competes to be a public sphere and certain individuals explicitly become the problem. The focus serves to re-presence the individual as faulty and insert a new discourse of morality into state governance. This is also where unrelated global debates about culture as rights in relation to universal rights seep into certain understandings of violence as a collective cultural problem. As discussed in the next chapter, this seeks to shift perceptions of the devalued local in new ways through the focus on the individual rather than on structural violence and the ‘isolated state’ as the problem.

Materialising a Strange-Familiar Local • 199

Notes  1. They note the need to consider ‘commonsense assumptions about the verticality of states as well as many received ideas of “community,” “grassroots” and the “local,” laden as they are with nostalgia and the aura of authenticity’ in reconsidering the issues (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 990).  2. A local Guyanese dish across ethnic groups; the home-cooked variety is a staple. However, it has great popularity in Chinese restaurants where it is differently cooked with fewer vegetables and is seen to be Chinese food.  3. See Susan Coutin’s (1995) account of the distinction between those who are bearers of rights and illegal citizens in her discussion of the sanctuary movement in the US (see also Coutin 1993).  4. See Halstead (2012) for an account of one woman migrant who was unhappy about this expectation in her own household and subsequently left her husband and became involved with someone who was able to support her financially.  5. This may be further considered in terms of how young people from different groups find a common space of belonging through their interactions with American brands and by de-emphasising ethnicity, as discussed in Halstead (2002).  6. It is known in the US as an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number).  7. ‘Guyana: Taxpayer ID Will Assist in Detecting Evasion, Money Laundering  – Sattaur,’ June 2006. See http://ifg.cc/aktuelles/nachrichten/ regionen/554-gy-guyana/20836-guyana-taxpayer-id-will-assist-in-detect​ ing-evasion-money-laundering-sattaur (accessed 10 July 2010).  8. This is a form the applicant has to sign to consent to the sponsor’s application.  9. See Westerfield (2006) for discussion on related bans in Turkey and elsewhere. 10. ‘Article L. 141-51 of the French Education Code provides: “In state primary and secondary schools, the wearing of signs or dress by which pupils overtly manifest a religious affiliation is prohibited.” (Legislation passed on March 15, 2004)’ (as noted in Wiles 2007: 699). 11. See, for example, David Mery, ‘Suspicious Behaviour on the Tube’, The Guardian, 22 September 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/ sep/22/terrorism.july7.

m8 In and Out of the Local Blame-Sharing, Faulty Persons and the State

Introduction I know what is right. We all responsible. I see the news. Don’t like how things are changing. The ‘community’ is not the same, anymore – people have freedom. They think about ‘American rights’1 (new reliance on rights in court). But it is up to the people. We have a duty to stop abuse and deal with it. —Shenaz

Shenaz is a former teacher who describes herself variously as an expert. She offers health counselling as a ‘counsellor’ on call. She follows local news with deep interest so she can discuss the issues with overseas relatives and others. When a mutilated body found on 2 October 2010 was disclosed to be that of a high school student, sixteen-year-old Neesa Lalita Gopaul, Shenaz decided to support a position that the teachers were at fault for failing to act to prevent the tragedy. The matter involved domestic abuse of the young girl. She blamed the teachers on the basis of failing in their moral responsibility to act. This notion of moral responsibility for an act of extreme violence – the apparently decapitated body was found in a floating suitcase  – was not simply the view of ‘ordinary people’ like Shenaz. Government ministers, the then president and others got involved to offer their views. Some saw the problem to be that of a shared process of blame. Neesa’s mother, Bibi Gopaul, and Bibi Gopaul’s lover, Jarvis Small,2 were charged with murdering the teenager. They were convicted in 2015. However, the climate of moral outrage and accountability isolated teachers and certain other public servants as part of the problem and sought to render them as ‘culpable individuals’ who had to share

In and Out of the Local • 201

blame with the state. In a process of unveiling faulty persons in and out of public office, the problem of violence and injustice became the failure of persons to demonstrate care and responsibility as part of an extended public, which included the state. This chapter explores the theme of how faulty individuals are presented as a problem in a narrative of complicit blame-sharing and responsibility that remains entangled with the new spaces of external empowerment and the cosharing of power. The spaces for people to step up to share blame and responsibility shift the state and/or government of the day from being explicitly blamed for all problems. The state is also seen to align with external partners to correct the problem as a mode of effective governance, alongside ‘contentious’ relationships. Public interventionist approaches by external bodies and a growing body of observers, inclusive of diplomatic officials, observers, writers of country reports and NGOs, seek to engage the state and civil society to follow a particular universalistic mode imagined as being outside of the norm of rights and justice in the country. The public sites that co-opt ideas of external power and empowerment are being co-occupied by external partners; along with ‘ordinary people’, they appear variously, and at times forcibly, as partners of the state. While the state can, in the form of various official outcries, contest that some of the problems exist at the level professed, it can also become aligned with ‘external approaches’ to frame the problem and to right wrongs. In this setting, morality becomes an index for solutions when violence is seen to be caused by faulty individuals. A new focus on morality extends these spaces to bring out the individual as culpable. Citizens’ understandings of the language of external empowerment are being differently co-opted; violence and problems have to be embedded in actions of people rather than of officials. In this regard, citizens have to take on ‘moral responsibility’ to make the law work given the histories and contemporary settings and as part of their duty as ‘world citizens’, where the language of universal rights becomes hyper-relevant. This chapter explores these sites of public blame-sharing and the idea of moral responsibility to bring out new endeavours for governance that re-bound citizens’ understandings of external empowerment in particular ways in relation to the state and to new bids for governance. These interactions remain entangled with different displays of power, and local-global understandings of expertness and violence at the local level.

202 • Competing Power

Shared Blame and Culpable Individuals As details emerged of the horrific abuse Neesa Gopaul had suffered prior to her death, it became necessary to find other ‘culprits’ who could be blamed for what had happened. This was despite the charges for murder against the two people mentioned above. Neesa Gopaul’s body was discovered in a suitcase in a resort creek. Two dumbbells were tied to the suitcase with a red rope but had been insufficient to keep it under the water. Police also found Neesa Gopaul’s passport and her bank card in the suitcase. The shape of the body suggested that Gopaul had been decapitated; later, a post mortem revealed that the head was still attached, but had been battered and rendered unrecognisable. Her body was discovered six days after her mother had reported her missing in 2010. Almost immediately after the discovery of the body, police charged the mother, Bibi Gopaul, and Jarvis Small with the murder. Small is the owner of a gym. Police investigators thought it was significant that two dumbbells had been found attached to the suitcase. Following reports that she was subjected to domestic abuse, social services had removed Neesa Gopaul from her mother’s home and put her in the care of her grandparents. It emerged that shortly after this event, Neesa returned to her mother’s home; the grandparents said they could not maintain her and that the sum of G$8,000 (US$40) they were being given weekly to do so was inadequate. However, two social workers were fired for neglect and several teachers blamed, as discussed further below. The views of various officials and ‘ordinary persons’ on the Neesa Gopaul matter and blame-sharing bring out the ways in which accountability is as much a moral project as a legal one. In these bids, communities and individuals have roles and presences in moral accountability as an idea of shared governance. This, in turn, displaces the problems attached to an isolated state as distant from people and as enmeshed in activities of certain corrupt officials. The case of Neesa Gopaul placed pressure on both officials and ordinary persons to know and act against abuse in new ways, which also assumes dramatic change to structural conditions. However, the language of rights is one about making people publicly accountable in ways that identify and indict a particular local as the problem, as noted. This local alters the idea of a devalued site marked by political violence. In this new imagining, the state becomes visibly part of the process, working with communities not through the law but through a notion of shared moral accountability. In this process, culpable

In and Out of the Local • 203

individuals are identified to share blame, prominently. The language of rights is one about making people accountable and getting them to recognise violence rather than suggesting solutions for embedded problems that might lead to/allow for violence.

Public Blaming At a press conference in 2010, then President Bharrat Jagdeo noted that those who had failed by omission in the Neesa Gopaul matter would be penalised. He was quoted on the 2010 President’s Office website as saying: ‘somehow we failed this child and too often people in the public sector who provide services are worried that they may get penalised for acts of commission, so they would be very reluctant to take actions’.3 The Ministry of Home Affairs blamed the police for failing to do enough. The Ministry of Human Services and Social Services launched an investigation into the Childcare and Protection Agency. News was circulated that the Deputy Director and another officer were dismissed and a third officer was placed on extended probation. However, the Deputy Director said she had never been involved with the case and had, in effect, resigned from her position. The main political opposition party, the PNC/R, staged a protest in front of the building housing the Ministry of Human Services, blaming the ministry for its failure to protect children and noting that the two fired child workers were being used as scapegoats. The then Minister of Education, Shaik Baksh, launched an investigation. Gopaul had attended Queen’s College, a top secondary school in the city of Georgetown. Teachers at the school were blamed for what had happened to Gopaul. Their failure to help a student at risk from domestic violence was seen as crucial in the events leading up to her death. The head teacher was demoted in the investigation carried out by the Ministry of Education, and three teachers were sanctioned.4 Both of these acts were subsequently rescinded: the head teacher moved successfully to the high court to get the demotion reversed; the sanctioned teachers gained the assistance of the Teacher’s Union, which forced the Ministry to withdraw the sanctions. Together, the various investigations had found that all of these officials had constituted a system that failed Neesa Gopaul, who, according to reports, had been at risk and suffered much abuse prior to her death. It was ‘necessary’ for the teachers who had known about the abuse to be publicly blamed. Even though they did not remain bystanders, they were initially sanctioned as an official action by a state body. The frenzy

204 • Competing Power

of action and blame allocation was meant to correct the system and ensure that the case of Neesa Gopaul would never be repeated. Priya Manickchand, then Minister of Human Affairs, noted: I wish to point out that the Agency is not responsible for Neesa’s death. The responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of those who did this fiendish act. Nevertheless, we share responsibility for not providing her with enough protection, we share this responsibility with the police service and the education system and we share this responsibility with the family members of Neesa and the community where Neesa lived.5

Two senior teachers at the college told me they had always been expected to alert the Ministry of Education about any child they deemed to be at risk. However, they noted limitations that were also socially embedded in taking on authority beyond their role and/or getting anyone to listen. A few months later, in a separate incident, a teacher at a different school suddenly announced in the media that he believed one of his students was under threat of abuse and wanted the Ministry to know. In imparting this knowledge, he called in a national newspaper and featured his concerns publicly. Teachers are now a group that is gaining increasing visibility in relation to blame about failing in their duty or, in some cases, failing in their role as moral guardians and those who can maintain standards. Teachers are also being named as those who are committing crimes with much frequency in recent times. Teachers are seen both as officials of the state and as representatives of the community; their new visibility as accountable officials draws simultaneously on these two settings, which are seen to occupy different spaces of legitimacy and to encompass morality as part of the law. One of these settings is also part of the local, which is othered in the emphasis on universal rights, meant to represent shared global understandings of ethics and care. In a reconstituted public domain, accusations become extraordinary and violent in the demand for new types of moral persons. These types are seen to be lacking in a new public cosmopolitan setting marked by attentiveness to universal rights. The expressions suggest a local that has to be revealed as insufficiently cosmopolitan vis-à-vis a broader site of citizenship and ethics of responsibility. The uncovering of violence in the name of rights repositions the state as a singular caring body, but more crucially, the focus on the domestic and attributes of family and community identify people as the problem. This public emphasis on upholding the law co-resides with or draws on a morality that has also ‘sanctioned’ illegal practices, as previously discussed (Heyman and Smart 1999: 10).

In and Out of the Local • 205

Shenaz and Blame Shenaz, as a teacher, reflected on ‘long time’ days where teachers were in a position to guide ‘the child’ and act in loco parentis. She felt that help could come from teachers, not in their position as officials of the state, but as moral members of the community through an ethic of care. Shenaz was keenly following the preliminary inquiry into the murder charges against Bibi Gopaul and Jarvis Small held in January 2011. She was convinced that the blame should be shared beyond this legal recourse. She was conscious of the need for this intervention because of the migration changes, whereby so many had left the country, and felt that it remained the teacher’s role to guide the student. Shenaz noted: The teachers should be blamed. They have a moral responsibility; it is not a legal one. But they should have taken action to help. I heard that they made ten reports to social services. Don’t know what to believe. Teachers become parents when children are in school. They are fully responsible. That is how it always was. Now it is changing. As a teacher, I would have taken the blame if action not taken. If they [the teachers] knew something was wrong, they should have taken action, made sure.

This view of the teachers being able to act also comes across in sanctions: the teachers were expected to act outside the law and by doing so to fulfil a moral duty. Shenaz ‘accepts’ some of this blame as someone who has also been a teacher; she understands how teachers could be blamed. Shenaz felt that the young girl could have been helped to escape the violence she had endured prior to her death and that, as a teacher, it would have been her duty to ensure this help was given. This former teacher who is now self-employed and advises people on health and lifestyle issues, as noted, thus feels that there is a space for teachers to intervene beyond that of the law. She noted that if the police or social services did not act quickly enough, the teachers should have continued to pursue the matter on the basis of their moral obligation. She also suggests that the teachers could have taken action despite the slow response of officials and without necessarily taking heed of the law. Shenaz feels that the teachers’ inability to act has been impeded by the greater focus on the law ‘nowadays’, which takes away the role from communities. She notes that it is often impossible for teachers to take action in the setting ‘out there’, as one with too many changes in regard to authority. Some of these changes, she points out, are around migration; many people have left the country and communities have

206 • Competing Power

changed. She points, too, to the earlier political violence; some officials were abusive and people could not depend on getting help from the law. Now, she added, people return to the country with ‘American ideas’ of laws and rights and make things more complicated. Shenaz notes that the ‘rapid changes’ and departure of people have left uncertain situations regarding how people, young and old, behave. She feels that the actions to share accountability with communities and teachers reflect moves to deal with these changes. This local setting is ‘shadowed’ by migration changes and it was up to people to step up and make the law work so that young girls like Neesa Gopaul would not suffer such brutal fates. In her view, despite the problems, it was all the more necessary for teachers to return to the role of taking action where the system fails. Thus, the teachers should not have stopped at the point of reporting. In these views, Shenaz does not dwell on the past political problems, violence and corruption by oppressive officials. She gets caught up in the public debates in which the state and officials are gaining different visibility in bids to right wrongs, accept and share blame. Some, including the then Home Affairs Minister, Clement Rohee, also attributed blame to the police in Neesa Gopaul’s case, although the focus on the teachers overshadowed this blame. As noted earlier, renegotiations of the law are/have been part of everyday settings in which policemen are known facilitators of illegality; ordinary people have engaged with this everyday illegality. Some residents in nearby villages endeavoured to explain why the police did not appear to do enough to prevent the tragedy, noting both the acts of those policemen who were seen as violent and processes of complicit relationships where police can become ‘powerful friends’, as discussed earlier. Note also the account of the woman who had been dragged by her hair by two policemen, as discussed in Chapter 6, and had been subsequently forced to drop her case through fear of reprisals. Many victims of domestic violence report cases and then withdraw them in order to maintain relationships and/ or out of fear, as noted further below in an account by Savi, regularly beaten by her husband and unable to gain police support, according to her accounts. In various cases, police officers are deemed to have a ‘community interest’ by using their power to protect friends, being overzealous or inactive in pursuing matters both on the basis of bribe-taking and taking sides in community issues. However, in the new setting of rights, police officers are increasingly being held to account, as discussed earlier in this book. In 2011, Acting Chief Magistrate Priya Beharry told the police at a main police station that they were abusing their power by

In and Out of the Local • 207

detaining a cleaner in their lock-up for nine days without charges on an allegation that he had stolen twenty-five loaves of bread from the police station.6 Other changes in 2017 and 2018 indicate additional efforts to deal with police infractions. Seema, the woman who had publicly challenged a policeman on a bus (see Chapter 6), followed the Neesa Gopaul case closely and drew on her own experiences to blame the police: ‘Everyone knows everyone; the police are part of the community. The stepfather [Jarvis Small] is a big one’. He was seen as powerful enough to have police friends who would turn the other way, it was believed. Jarvis as a big one was seen to occupy this space before he was jointly charged with murder. Another villager noted: ‘they [the police] did not want to go down and trouble [arrest] him . . .’, further confirming his power as a big one with powerful police friends. The increasing efforts to hold policemen to account become part of a public narrative of new blame of the police as a collective. In the recognition of bad cops and ‘travelling magistrates’, as discussed earlier, police also become part of the problem; in this blame on the collective, individual policemen are also being identified for sanction as renegotiations of power and in relation to ethics and care vis-à-vis universal rights, as discussed here. However, ‘everyone knows’ the police will abuse their position, and given this scenario, it becomes insufficient to name obvious officials such as policemen as main perpetrators. The blame has to be shared and accountable persons produced for public display. This focus is on the person inside the community rather than on the community itself. This person-centred focus references both the histories of structural violence and the state’s biographical rewriting where a ‘complete state entity’ deals with the moral as part of the law. The contradictions and paradox draw on a notion of external legitimacy extracted from external interference and embedded in the recognition of universal laws. The recognition forces social knowledge of morality as part of the law.

Trial and Publics More than four years after Neesa Gopaul was murdered, Bibi Gopaul and Jarvis Small were tried and convicted of the murder.7 The 2015 trial was well attended, and the verdict led to a frenzy outside the courtroom as various persons came to observe and, in some cases, to shift their role as observers to voice loud opinions outside the court. By the time the trial had concluded, Bibi Gopaul had attracted considerable

208 • Competing Power

attention in a prosecution-led condemnation of the role of a woman who in murdering her child had committed a heinous act that merited both legal and moral condemnation. Bibi Gopaul was said to have gone to the police station that served her village to report physical abuse against her and to report sexual abuse of her daughter. She had then returned with her daughter, Neesa Gopaul, to withdraw the latter report. The prosecution, however, noted that she had withdrawn both reports. This was seen to question the validity of the reports. In this instance, Bibi Gopaul was irretrievably demonised, through the murder of her daughter, among other factors. She could not be seen to be afraid of her lover as a reason for withdrawing police reports; this also overshadowed known practices of domestic victims making reports to police and then withdrawing these reports. Such withdrawals may be deemed symptomatic of abuse of the victims. However, in Bibi Gopaul’s case, going to the police station to report the matter and then withdrawing her reports supported the view that she was the abuser.8 On this basis, it was considered that the police could not ‘act’ because their hands were tied by this withdrawal.9 In the public outcry and court case that followed, this lack of police action and Jarvis’s position as a big one could not compete with Bibi Gopaul’s role as a callous woman and mother. She was considered to have been the only person with access to her daughter’s passport and bank card and so the only person able to place them in the suitcase with the body. It was not clear given the mutilated state of the body why identification documents would have been placed or left in the suitcase. The significance of this in making the case against Bibi Gopaul was that it located her at the scene, conclusively. Achieving some distance by virtue of not being the biological father, Jarvis Small was less visible in public condemnation; he could not be so closely attached to ‘community values’ and to the roles of father or mother. The prosecution narrated evidence that showed Bibi Gopaul had joined with her lover, Jarvis Small, and had motive to murder her daughter. It was claimed that her daughter had found out that her father had not died naturally and that Bibi Gopaul and Jarvis Small were implicated in his death. A key witness in the case was Simone De Nobrega, who met Bibi Gopaul in the lock-up and befriended her there and then turned witness against her. According to De Nobrega, Bibi Gopaul discussed the death of her husband in terms of whether an exhumed body could be successfully tested for poison after one year. Another motive Bibi Gopaul was said to have had for the murder was that of finding her

In and Out of the Local • 209

daughter in the arms of Jarvis Small. Women wiped their eyes in court at the prosecution’s closing argument. Bibi Gopaul attracted widespread condemnation both as a mother and a woman for what had happened to her daughter. The judge, in sentencing Bibi Gopaul, paid attention to her role to pass a harsher sentence. He noted that although Bibi Gopaul had reported assaults to the police, she was seen after those reports in the company of a man (Jarvis Small) whom she said she feared. The judge noted that, as wife and mother, Bibi Gopaul deserved the longer sentence. This met with some approbation among onlookers and those who subsequently discussed the case. Several long-term participants said they supported this view. Some observers outside cheered at the judge’s sentencing. Bibi Gopaul was sentenced to 106 years in prison and Jarvis Small to ninety-six years. Justice Narendra Singh, in handing down the sentences, added to a base of sixty years for each, ten years each for premeditation, ten years each for brutality, ten years each for child murder, and six years each as a result of the matter being about domestic violence. He also sentenced Bibi Gopaul to an additional ten years for murdering her child.10 The woman as the mother should have had more feelings towards her daughter: she had failed in this duty and epitomised a blameable individual who let her own child down. Finally, she could be seen as the individual with the most fault in the matter. Absent from this public view was the underlying context in which communities have been impacted through the departure of elders and through earlier issues of socio-economic decline. Envisaged in this mode of blame-sharing was a singular moral community vested with local knowledge of conditions and practices. This was presented as supporting counter-legitimacy to the kind of rights enshrined in the law. In the public outcries against domestic violence and other related wrongs, some people have to appear as faulty; the problem of disorder has to be publicised. The publicness of domestic violence brings it out as a ‘people problem’ rather than a problem of the state. Efforts to deal with this dualism of rights and abuse create new personas of accountable persons as those who can be blamed and new public spaces for victims to emerge. This was spectacularly evident in the case of Neesa Gopaul, with expectations of high performance by officials and ordinary persons to know and act against abuse in new ways, which also assumes dramatic change to structural conditions. What also emerged was the horrific role of domestic violence as a problem within communities where individuals could then be isolated for blame.

210 • Competing Power

Domestic Violence The space to promote universal rights reflects negatively on the institution of the family and its ability to protect individuals against the actions of other individuals who might be close relatives. As in the case of Neesa Gopaul, various causes emerge to identify culprits who have committed abuse against family members, recently in unprecedented ways. This is increasingly the case with sexual violence and domestic abuse. In the language of universal rights used by NGOs and others, the institution of the family comes under scrutiny as a shift to the positioning of the ‘isolated’ state as the problem. The ethos of shared responsibility co-resides with a new publicness of violence in domestic settings. In this new publicness of domestic violence as a problem, women and children are being encouraged to come forward and press charges against family members who have committed abuse. The data include both very trivial and extraordinary accounts of domestic violence, inclusive of murder, as in the case of Neesa Gopaul, above. Some of the latter incidents have been linked to drug abuse and mental illness. More recently, with the upsurge of crime and tremendous changes inclusive of an aggressive focus on outing domestic violence, there is greater awareness and talk of societal problems as the issue. Domestic violence and criminal banditry are seen to arise out of illegal excesses and by some commentators as a breakdown of the ‘complete state’. However, in coming to know the new public setting, in which particular persons are being unveiled as the problem, blame and accountability co-reside or have to deal with embedded understandings of morality that may be in opposition to the law and its anchoring in universal values. This returns to migration-embedded changes and power enactments at different levels as bids to shift violence. In these changing settings, language of rights as empowering emerges alongside new emphasis on the law and blame for individuals.

Savi’s Abuser In the following account, Savi, an itinerant domestic cleaner who has been made aware of her rights vis-à-vis domestic violence, nevertheless ‘walks around’ with bruises on her body inflicted by her husband. These bruises are hidden physically. Savi told me that she had been abused for many years. She said: ‘My husband is an abuser’. I asked her

In and Out of the Local • 211

if she had always used the term ‘abuser’ for her husband and why she didn’t go to the police to report what he had done. She noted: ‘I started calling him an abuser a lil while now. Before I used to say he does beat me, but I read in the papers about abusers – look me shoulder. He just hit me, it black and blue’. At this stage, she pulled up her sleeve to show me the bruises. Savi knew about the campaigns against domestic violence and that women could obtain rights in certain places. She was temporarily under-employed and seeking more work as a cleaner. She noted, however, that she wanted part-time work because she needed to be at home when her husband returned from work. She would tell selected persons about what her husband was doing and expected that they might help her because of all the fuss about domestic violence. She said she had complained about her husband at her local police station on many occasions, but she did not really want to go to the police again. Also, the police knew her husband well. She paused significantly when she said this. She then noted that the story was complicated because they (she and her husband) lived in her husband’s parents’ house. The parents were overseas and her husband was ‘waiting’ to leave. As someone in a sponsorship queue to leave the country, the husband could not afford to be in trouble with the police as this might affect the required police clearance needed for an immigrant visa to the US. However, she noted another concern about being forced out of the in-laws’ house after her husband departed, adding that she had children and did not want to break up her family. In the larger setting, as part of various state and NGO initiatives, people are now increasingly being named, shamed and criminalised for hitting a loved one and/or carrying out other forms of abuse. The outcry and publicity create a particular kind of public person representing a new violent space. The public outcry against domestic violence and related abuse is aided by recent legislation, activities of external agencies and a focus on universal rights. This focus affects petty violations and domestic infractions in the country in terms of how such acts have been routinised. The problem of domestic violence becomes one of the key problems to be positioned outside of the problems people have with the state and the poor conditions many have experienced. The larger setting of political banditry and structural violence, discussed earlier in this book, can be side-stepped in this space of blame, which can be vested in ‘communities’ as those comprising citizens and moral individuals. Added to this setting are extra-territorial initiatives to bring out other community problems and, through public scrutiny and related

212 • Competing Power

attentiveness, to find solutions. The area of domestic violence is seen as a ready space for such attentiveness. The issue of child labour, identified as a problem by external reports and externally funded agencies, however, struggles for similar visibility. This, in turn, demonstrates contradictory spaces for partnership in the emergent settings in which the state draws on external ideas of rights in bids for governance in the face of increasing outward migration. Making this type of violence public beyond particular local knowledge occurs in relation to a new emphasis on universal rights. The emphasis on universal rights constructs outraged bodies who insist on the law and human rights. This insistence is by the state against people who are seen as law-breakers, and by activists and political parties and a vociferous media against the state. External agencies are also seen as interventionist in filing reports. The US State Department, in particular, compiles annual country reports. These reports over a period of years have highlighted domestic violence as a problem.11 These reports attract critical responses as occurred, for example, with the US TIP report in 2011 discussed further below. In a global human rights landscape, as has been well discussed in the literature, universal rights and their assertion are often in opposition to local culture and its practices (see Cowan et al. 2001). As Sally Engle Merry (2005: 6) noted, the local becomes the other in the discourse of human rights, where ‘those who resist human rights often claim to be defending culture’. However, there is no straightforward division between universal rights and culture rights in the Guyanese setting, as indicated earlier (see Cowan et al. 2001; see also Merry 2006, for instance). Rather, understandings of rights are drawn from a setting in which people have had to break the law in order to gain rights. This has included some officials as well as ordinary people, as noted in the earlier discussion on different types of illegality. It is thus the knowledge of rights and what these are understood to be that has to be addressed in relation to people’s structural experiences of violence and loss of rights. The current efforts of state bodies and officials ‘to put things right’ by drawing on or being prompted by external agencies and notions of universal rights are encumbered by the perceptions of an oppositional relationship between people and state rather than by culture rights. It is also encumbered by local knowledge practices. Various public reactions against wrong-doings by individuals rely on a morality that is being presented as a continuum between individual and state. These notions of morality allow for the individual to be seen as the problem to connect with complicit corruption practices. The process of sharing responsibility between people and state

In and Out of the Local • 213

is not readily evident, although, as shown previously, some will blame people for corruption. Those identified as oppressors, faulty persons or wrong-doers endeavour with difficulty to provide a counter-narrative: they become identifiable others outside of a shared community newly visible as participating in universal rights.

Co-occupying Public Spheres Nearly two years after Neesa Gopaul’s murder, on 1 July 2012, then President of Guyana, Donald Ramotar, was marching with a group of men on the streets of Georgetown. This was a solidarity march. The president was there as an ‘ordinary man’ with other men who were marching against domestic violence. Collectively, the men endeavoured to show that they cared about these issues and opposed domestic violence despite reports of increasing levels of this type of violence. By leading the march, President Ramotar also presenced the caring role of the state and its position against these types of wrongs. The president marched against domestic violence, as among and of the people to speak with a common voice and to become part of a public sphere seeking to right wrongs. Jürgen Habermas’s ([1962] 1989) traditional public sphere as well as many contemporary public spheres obtain alternative meanings in this co-optation of voice by the state whereby certain approaches open up responsibility to and blame against people. This shares space with the state and/or acts to separate the state from being explicitly presenced. Thus, significantly, the state through the then president and various other officials competed to be a voice in a public sphere that included external actors; the interactions signalled a new kind of governance with unexpected partners. A ‘major external partner’ was also visible in lending support against such violence. A week before the solidarity march mentioned above, the wife of the then American Ambassador to Guyana, Saskia Hardt, had appeared in support of a press conference that was promoting a fashion show with a focus on the problem of domestic violence.12 Hardt was one of several influential persons present. As the ambassador’s wife, her presence was a considerable endorsement of the fashion show’s cause of highlighting the issue of domestic violence and speaking out against it. This cause was earlier given urgency through the release on 5 July of a 2011 US country report.13 The report noted the widespread incidence of domestic violence in Guyana and also the efforts of two local NGOs to offer support for victims. The report noted new efforts

214 • Competing Power

by the police to provide counselling for victims. The report would note the allegations of rape against the then Guyana Police Commissioner and other separate allegations of sexual misconduct against female prisoners by two police officers in one instance and in another by one police officer.14 This report was quickly circulated in the media, with much focus on the issue of domestic violence; the publicity linked with a view that victims are outside the norm in settling matters themselves or taking payments instead of prosecuting their oppressors. As the Neesa Gopaul case documented, domestic violence has startling visibility, grounded in facts. Similarly, some are left feeling that they are under attack by overzealous campaigners who view an everyday setting as one supportive of hidden types of domestic violence. This focus on domestic violence coresides with other public efforts to identify corrupt practices through the naming of officials who are failing in their duty and, thus, are positioned by various voices in the public sphere as faulty. Thus, the publicness on domestic violence and related crimes is not only about identifying the issue. Also presenced in this setting are various actors, from state officials to external ‘observers’, who separately speak for universal rights. Particular persons emerge who are marked as wrong-doers. Separately, they contribute to new types of public spheres in which the state adopts the language of universal rights as part of a new visibility in a cosmopolitan space. The arena for these struggles includes marches, protests and disclaimers along with the crucial presence of external partners. These new understandings of rights vis-à-vis empowerment are promoted in public spheres complicated by the presence of state officials with differing visibility in giving and taking away rights and, in some instances, losing the initiative in these rights issues.

Blame and Public Caring Disparate activities that endeavour to guide an ethos of care and ­morality  – seen to be lacking in the selective understanding of the local  – produce many possibilities for sharing blame and denying culpability. The imposition of this dichotomy has little room for the changes that have occurred in relation to massive outward migration and the ways in which many citizens engage with an external site as a source of empowerment, as noted earlier. At the same time, this worry about abuse and care assumes that citizens will understand the language of universal rights, where faulty individuals are to be disclosed as a problem of the local. As noted, this local can also include the state.

In and Out of the Local • 215

In a recent instance, the state received ‘unexpected blame’ for a problem that was not believed to exist within the country. A political row15 erupted over a US report about child labour in Guyana as linked to Guyana being placed on the US 2010 Tier 2 watch list (T2WL).16 The US TIP report noted that Guyana was being placed for the ‘fourth consecutive year’ on T2WL.17 Guyana was upgraded to Tier 1 in 2017.18 The report claimed that Guyana now had the worst forms of child labour, including trafficking and child prostitution. The US TIP report drew on project findings by the agency Educare Guyana to note: During the reporting period the U.S. Department of Labor reported results of a project that withdrew 984 children from exploitive child labor in logging and saw-milling, fishing, hazardous farming, factory work, mining, and freight handling from 2005 to 2009.19

Educare Guyana, compiled the report20 on a three and half year project that had significant funding by the US Department of Labour. The project was seen to have declared the existence of child labour in Guyana. Educare was taken aback at the unfavourable local reactions. Educare Director, Ed Denner, told me that the agency had methodically compiled the report and it was not just about identifying the problem of child labour. The agency had an advocacy role and a high focus on education. He appreciated that officials were upset, given that in the Guyanese setting some of these forms of child labour were not recognised as child labour – for instance, parents taking a child out of school to help them with their small business. The forms of child labour the agency then identified were: ‘vending in the market; being permanently out of school to work; fetching and carrying things; working in family buses used for public transportation; doing a bit of agriculture or doing unpaid chores in the home’. The then government minister Manzoor Nadir, who challenged the report issued by the US State Department, also indicated his interest in changing the law so children could work from the age of thirteen instead of from the age of fifteen. Children were allowed to do some kind of part-time light work in family businesses. The proposed change would serve to separate such light work from what could be deemed abusive conditions and those situations in which he argued there was confusion between the two categories. While the government would be dismissive of the report, the issue brought out concerns with identifying problems caused by individuals that can be righted by the state.

216 • Competing Power

Re-othering the Local The idea that individuals are at fault for social problems is at odds with people’s understandings and experiences of structural violence. The devalued local was never seen to be about individuals as the problem; it was more about the socio-economic and political construction of the local, as discussed in earlier case studies. Thus, as noted in Chapter 3, in particular, when terrible acts of banditry occurred and allegations of extra-judicial killings surfaced, people saw these acts as separate from their everyday lives and as spaces to express distance from these types of violence. In general, these forms of distancing amidst extensive engagement with the external reaffirmed the problem with the state and their understandings that it was unhelpful in their lives. Further, it required their complicity in order to make ailing bureaucracy workable. In these settings and the extended sites of local-global interactions, people became creative to enable such ailing bureaucratic systems and to empower themselves beyond this devalued space. Thus, the repositioning of individuals as faulty was a reversal. This repositioning also reimagined the local in new identities of faulty people, which were difficult for them to recognise. This was also separate from a cosmopolitan space that advocated universal rights as a shared ‘global community’, that is, as extended spaces inhabited by ‘world citizens’, mobile people who were not constrained by particular localised problems. Thus, various people at the ‘wrong end’ of these rights issues argue that their own rights are being taken away or that the particular universal right is being constructed outside of a necessary morality that delivers shared rights in practice.

Reversal of Rights In 2010, a city businessman became the object of what he and his wife saw as a witch-hunt when they were accused of abuse against their Amerindian maid, inclusive of human trafficking. The man, who has since closed his business, could not understand the sudden publicity that accused him of human rights abuse. He admitted that he had pulled a muscle at one stage and had asked the maid to manipulate the muscle. He said he had paid her an additional sum for doing this because it was not part of her job description. This assistance from the maid had occurred in the absence of his wife. He noted that his young

In and Out of the Local • 217

son had been present at the time to support his claim that there had been no inappropriate behaviour on his part. The maid, who was employed for three months, was removed from the home of the couple following allegations that she was being forcibly held. However, subsequent investigations showed that she had been sent on errands a number of times with large sums of money, and so the accusations about her forced detention were shown to be untrue. The publicity that followed fed on what was seen as the arrogant attitude of the couple in defending themselves with claims that they had taken good care of the alleged victim, allowing her to watch TV programmes and giving her an air-conditioned room as sleeping accommodation. The couple also could not understand that they had done wrong by requesting that the maid take an HIV test as part of their employment requirements and restricting her access to a telephone. They felt that because she was Amerindian, she had all the rights as a focus on her ethnic group; on the other hand, they were not visible as having rights. The couple felt this was a new agenda of public rights, and thus they were in turn being stigmatised. In the end, the couple publicly apologised for their attitude; the maid withdrew the complaint against them, and charges accusing them of breaching labour laws were dropped. They agreed that the maid could keep a sum of about US$70 which had been paid to her in advance and which she had not yet earned. The couple claimed that in the whole case they had been portrayed as monsters, yet they had treated their maid better than most people. They had done what they could. Given poverty levels in the country, they maintained they were ‘good persons’ for these acts. To speak the language of rights was to ignore a lot of different types of violence and create monsters out of good people. What may be considered in this example is their absolute certainty of how well they had demonstrated care and ethics. The couple were endeavouring to gain acknowledgement for their behaviour, which, despite all the outcry, they felt to be morally correct. By 2015, human trafficking was being articulated as a real concern in Guyana. The 2015 US trafficking report report points to the problem of incoming persons in the hinterland areas, the difficulty of obtaining children’s testimonies against traffickers and the trafficking of persons to neighbouring regions. Earlier annual reports also reflected difficulties in prosecuting and convicting human traffickers. Violence of a different kind also attracted external reports and intervention: this related to the death squad discussed in Chapter 3.

218 • Competing Power

Activism, Reports and Interventionist Actors Various external bodies as well as local organisations also made their views known to the government of the day on the death squad issue that arose in 2004. George Bacchus, who alleged the existence of a death squad, had provided details of ‘organised murder’ and implicated certain officials in January 2004. Despite his rush for protection to the US embassy, Bacchus would not survive, as noted in Chapters 2 and 3. Amidst a media furore, many calls by opposition parties and activists were made for an investigation. The matter attracted much public attention in these particular public spheres. A Presidential Commission of Inquiry was held in 2004 to examine allegations concerning the then Minister of Home Affairs, Ronald Gajraj.21 The Inquiry was established to investigate ‘the allegations that the Minister of Home Affairs, had been involved in promoting, directing or otherwise engaging in activities which involved the extra-judicial killing of persons’.22 Gajraj went on leave to facilitate the inquiry;23 in April 2005, he was cleared by the inquiry, which found that there was no ‘credible evidence’.24 The inquiry established links between Gajraj and former policeman, Axel Williams, who was also implicated in the death squad. The inquiry accepted Gajraj’s explanation that he had been conducting intelligence gathering. He resumed ministerial duties. Various external bodies as well as local organisations objected to the reinstatement of Gajraj as a minister. The US,25 in objecting, noted that his reinstatement ‘undermines the rule of law . . .’ The EU noted: The European Union has taken note of the report of the Commission of Inquiry into allegations that Minister of Home Affairs Ronald Gajraj was involved in extra-judicial killings. The report, while finding no credible evidence that Mr Gajraj was so involved, criticises him for intruding ‘unlawfully’ in the issue of gun licences and for an ‘unhealthy’ association with a known murderer. The European Union wishes to inform the Government of Guyana of its disappointment and disquiet that, in spite of these criticisms, Mr Gajraj has been reinstated and has resumed responsibility for the Guyana Police Force.26

Gajraj subsequently resigned his ministerial post to become Guyana’s ambassador to India. The Presidential Inquiry was seen to be inadequate and a second one was urged. Various bodies called for an independent inquiry. In rejecting the OHCHR recommendation to hold an inquiry, the government stated:

In and Out of the Local • 219

Guyana considers that these recommendations on ‘allegations of grave human rights abuses,27 including murders and extrajudicial killings, allegedly committed by members of the armed forces and the “Phantom Squad” in the period 2002–2006’ to be one sided, misinformed and prejudicial.28

It countered that during the period in question, criminals held all its citizens ‘under siege’. The government also went on to note that it had not been complacent about allegations against disciplined members of the forces and that there had been several inquiries and court martial processes; however, it stated that it could not proceed with another inquiry into the phantom squad allegations without evidence and witnesses. One professional declared in conversation that the emergence of a phantom squad was a necessary response to maintain order and protect lives. He further noted that groups in the neighbouring country of Trinidad and Tobago had paid keen attention to these developments as some were faced with similar issues of what he saw as deliberate political violence to gain power amidst the politics of silencing an ethnic group.29 His invocation of exceptional circumstances (cf. Agamben 1999) did not implicate the state, but rather a group of people who felt they had to take action – in effect, a reminder of the disorderly presence of extended state officials who realised official spaces in everyday practices. Alongside the suggestion in these allegations of some type of official involvement are the beliefs by sections of the populace that the actions of the phantom squad which protected ‘ordinary citizens’ were necessary. In a social setting in which corruption and various forms of injustice had become normalised, some could not condemn attempts to get rid of the bandits even though it was outside the law. Understandings of ethno-political violence tied to a political history brought out an explicit space of law-breaking vis-à-vis activities of the phantom death squad. The functional publicness of a phantom death squad as providing protection from murderous ethno-crime and violence in what was perceived to be the absence of effective law split opinions about the status of the perpetrators and continue, explicitly, ideas of social justice as separate from official state processes. ‘External partners’ endeavour to provide aid or exert pressure for human rights vis-à-vis the violence. Amidst all the migration and social interactions of people in relation to the external, the local setting is changing; violence has become more explicit and the language of law and order jostles with unlawful killings and violence. In 2015, the APNU in a coalition with the AFC won the election to form the new government. The new opposition expressed doubt about

220 • Competing Power

the results. However, no explicit violence followed; leading diplomats, in particular, went on record to support the fairness of the election results. The winning political parties as a coalition were seen to win on a platform to stamp out corruption, which had support from various external bodies. The opinions of these external bodies about politics and related issues were increasingly publicised as a type of intervention in governance which in these later years has moved from ‘diplomatic cover’ to robust public statements. This mode of intervention relates to the isolation of politics and a political segment as the problem. It also shows a new role for public external intervention in the socio-political setting. Opposition politicians and NGOs, among others, are vociferous in outing new and old ills in the complicated settings of violence and rights. Similarly, as noted in the example above of President Ramotar marching against domestic violence, the public sphere in contesting local problems is also occupied by the state. Relatedly, diplomats and other external actors enter into more publicly interventionist roles to right local wrongs. In the mish-mash of these politicised settings of rights, empowerment and differential bids for power, external partners, particularly diplomatic officials, are increasingly visible in public interventionist modes. This goes beyond country reports where diplomats make strong use of local media to voice their opinions and place pressure on the government to conform to certain positions. This pressure has particularly, but not exclusively, been applied in the case of local government elections, which by 2015 had not been held for twenty years. They were held in 2016. These modes bring out particular ‘governmental omissions’ and needs for corrective action, with the state reimagined as an ideal body of rights inseparable from universal rights. In this setting, governmental actions that are deemed problematic and abusive officials become attached to the ‘community body’ of needing cures and of being insufficiently cosmopolitan in terms of rights. Various diplomats, including the then US ambassador Brendt Hardt, the Canadian High Commissioner to Guyana, Dr Nicole Giles, and the British High Commissioner to Guyana, Greg Quinn, are on record for public calls for various action. In 2017–18, there is increasing space for calls to action by diplomats.

Conclusion The public presencing of ‘external partners’ remains on a platform that envisages internal stability and premises the existence of

In and Out of the Local • 221

advanced technologies, facilities and ideal political offices as adequate to support infrastructure enabling universal rights. This cosmopolitan setting draws on the ongoing changes that are also occurring as part of widespread migration. The suggestion that change is possible at a faster pace if only individuals  – whether government officials or ‘ordinary people’  – would acknowledge their wrongs and share blame, incorporated the imagined external ideal of rights and moral accountability. People as ‘world citizens’ can also understand this setting and meet new expectations of a local. As political problems shift into a social space in which migration changes are made to co-reside with larger mandates, this local is ‘reordered’ both through local activism and through external partners’ interventions. The vociferous public spheres that emerge bring out in conflictual ways the problems of violence, corruption and complicity. These show the different actors who seek and display power and bid to offer empowerment; in this reimagined social setting, people are made to bear responsibility for shared governance even as they act to show their capacities outside of local restrictions. These competing sites of power intersect with differing visibility of the person as culpable, by being known as a socio-political actor and as someone who travels.

Notes  1. Shenaz’s concept of American rights relates to rights which she felt interfered with authority of parents and elders. It signalled larger views about youths and women calling the police in domestic disputes in Guyanese migrant settings in New York (see Halstead 2012; see also Lazarus-Black 2001).  2. Small was described in village settings as Neesa’s stepfather and in court settings and the media as Bibi’s lover.  3. As publicised on the then President’s Office website http://opnew.op.gov. gy/ (accessed 9 February 2011  – the online page is no longer available). The president’s speech was reported in the media. See ‘President Says . . . Neesa’s Death Affects Soul of the Nation’, Guyana Chronicle, 23 October 2010. http://guyanachronicle.com/2010/10/23/president-says-neesas-deathaffects-soul-of-the-nation (accessed 23 October 2010).  4. Names of the head teacher and teachers have been omitted here.  5. She was reporting on the findings of an internal investigation of the Childcare and Protection Agency in Neesa Gopaul’s matter. The report noted there had been failures and omissions on the part of several agency staff. ‘Minister Priya Manickchand Reports on Findings of Neesa’s Case’, Guyana Chronicle, 29 October 2010. See http://guyanachronicle.com/2010/10/29/

222 • Competing Power

 6.

 7.  8.

 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

minister-priya-manickchand-reports-on-findings-of-neesas-case (accessed 1 November 2010). ‘Labourer Charged with Theft of Bread from Police Mess Hall’, Stabroek News, 23 February 2011, http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/arch​ ives/02/23/labourer-charged-with-theft-of-bread-from-police-mess-hall/ (accessed 24 February 2015). ‘202 Years for Neesa Gopaul’s Killers’, Kaieteur News, 6 March 2015, http:// www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2015/03/06/202-years-for-neesa-gopaulskillers/ (accessed 6 March, 2015). See, for instance, ‘Neesa Gopaul Murder Trial . . . Only a Heartless Mother Could Watch Somebody Else Kill Her Child – Prosecutor’, Kaieteur News, 5 March 2015, http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2015/03/05/neesa-gop​ aul-murder-trial-only-a-heartless-mother-could-watch-somebody-elsekill-her-child-prosecutor/ (accessed 5 March 2015). See, however, Lazarus-Black (2001) for different accounts on domestic violence through the courts in Trinidad. ‘202 Years for Neesa Gopaul’s Killers’, Kaieteur News, 6 March 2015, http:// www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2015/03/06/202-years-for-neesa-gopaulskillers/; ‘Dubbed as “Cold-Blooded” Killers in Neesa Gopaul’s Trial . . .’, The Daily Observer, 6 March 2015, http://antiguaobserver.com/dubbed-as-coldblooded-killers-in-neesa-gopauls-trial-mother-lover-found-guilty-mothersentenced-to-106-years-lover-gets-96-years/ (accessed 10 March 2015). See for instance, US State Department country in 2005, 2006 2010, 2011. ‘Guyana,’ 2006, US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78894.htm (accessed 10 October 2010); ‘Trafficking in Persons Report 2010 Country Narratives: Countries G Through M’. https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142760.htm (accessed 20 January 2012); ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011.’ United States Department of State; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (accessed 7 July 2011). Held by fashion designer Sonia Noel. ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011.’ United States Department of State; Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (accessed 7 July 2011). The allegation against the police commissioner was well-publicised at the time and tape recordings were released on social media. An attempt to charge him with regard to the allegation was disallowed in the high court. He later resigned and died in a car accident in September 2012. ‘Henry Green Rape Allegation . . . Top Cop’s Motion Unconstitutional – DPP’ by Latoya Giles, Kaieteur News, 21 February 2012. https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2012/02/21/dpp-says-top-cop’s-action-is-premature-andunconstitutional/ (accessed 21 February 2012). ‘Nadir Rejects Claim 984 Children Saved from Exploitive Labour’ by Oluatoyn Alleyne, Stabroek News, 25 June 2010. See https://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/news/guyana8/06/25/nadir-rejects-claim-984-chil​ dren-saved-from-exploitive-labour/ (accessed 25 June 2010). ‘Labour Minister Dares U.S. to Provide Child Labour Evidence’, Guyana Chronicle,

In and Out of the Local • 223

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29 June 2010. See http://guyanachronicle.com/2010/06/29/labour-ministerdares-us-to-provide-child-labour-evidence (accessed 29 June 2010). ‘US Stands by Trafficking in Persons Report’ by Oluatoyn Alleyne, Stabroek News, 23 June 2010. https://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/news/guyana/06/23/usstands-by-trafficking-in-persons-report/ (accessed 23 June 2010). Tier 2 Watch list refers to ‘countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s [Trafficking and Violence Protection Act] minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards’ and:  a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing;  b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or  c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year’. See http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2012/192363.htm (accessed 20 December 2016). ‘Trafficking in Persons Report 2010 Country Narratives: Countries G  Through M’. https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142760.htm (accessed 20 January 2012). ‘Trafficking in Persons Report 2017’, https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/ countries/2017/271199.htm (accessed 30 April 2018). Ibid. Technical Cooperation Project Summary: Combating Exploitive Child Labor through Education in Guyana’, https://www.dol.gov/ilab/projects/ summaries/Guyana_CECL_CLOSED.pdf (accessed 12 April 2018). Following the allegations, the US and Canadian embassies revoked Gajraj’s non-immigrant visas. See ‘PPP Press Statement’, http://www.ppp-civic.org/releases/pr064.htm, 12 April 2005 (accessed 12 September 2012). The inquiry was chaired by Justice of Appeal, Mr. Ian Chang S.C., and comprised former Major General and Chief of Staff of the Guyana Defence Force, Mr. Norman McLean and former Chancellor of Judiciary, Mr. Keith Massiah. See http://www.op.gov.gy/speeches/statealbion.html (accessed 12 September 2012). ‘The U.S. Is Concerned by the Government of Guyana’s Decision to Reinstate Former Home Minister Ronald Gajraj’, 12 April 2005. https://2001-2009. state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2005/44540.htm (accessed 10 May 2017). ‘Declaration by the Presidency on Behalf of the European Union on the Reinstatement of Guyana’s Minister of Home Affairs in His Functions’, Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union, 13 April 2005, http://www.eu2005.lu/en/actualites/pesc/2005/04/13Guyana/index. html (accessed 14 October 2012). Footnotes omitted. This was part of the then Guyana government’s replies in the 2010 Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review, Guyana to the

224 • Competing Power

United Nations’ General Assembly. The Guyana Government added : ‘The movers appear to have ignored the fact that the worst crime and killing spree in its history was waged by violent criminal gangs during the period 2002–2008 leading to the murder or permanent maiming of hundreds of men, women and children. The massacre of 25 persons (including five children) in two communities in two nights in 2008, and the assassination of a Minister of government, members of his family and two guards in April 2006, execution-style by the “Fine man” gang, has been documented locally and internationally’. See https://www.upr-info.org/sites/default/ files/document/guyana/session_8_-_may_2010/a.hrc.15.9.add.1guyanaen. pdf (accessed 14 October 2012). 29. Note, however, developments that led to Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar preparing to send home cabinet ministers for misconduct. ‘20th Departure from Government’, Trinidad Express, 30  July 2014. https://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/local/th-departurefrom​-government/article_2c7eebcc-5a51-5573-bd0a-a362c6857fc3.html (accessed 3 August 2014).

m Concluding Reflections Socio-political violence, corruption, migration and related issues resonate with other events and actions elsewhere in a local-global nexus where multiple voices compete for power of different kinds. As this book demonstrates, such bids are not limited to ‘ordinary citizens’ who feel disenfranchised by their circumstances. The co-opting of the public by a president as a voice against violence appears as a singular event in a ‘small’ country within the larger global framework until we consider the eruption of ‘voice’ in the 2016 events of Brexit and the US election/ presidency of Donald Trump. Migration across borders, talk of a ‘failed state’ and new-old assertions of global power complicate the settings and the bids for small states to (re)gain legitimacy. These issues of global power at the level of states were present in different ways and the book has brought out concerns with persons and their encounters with power at differing levels within an extra-territorial local. This has invariably been about violence and bids for empowerment and agency. Various case studies have shown ongoing transformations in a local setting, rendered static through a memoried landscape of poor conditions, political problems and violence and which became the site of intense power negotiations in relation to external ideas of empowerment and ongoing migration. The accounts brought out the agency of people and the various bids to make the local and nation-state relevant amidst extensive outward migration and violence. The ethnographic material has at times been complemented with historical details, as well as material in the public domain, adding to an approach to consider the wider context. The book, thus, further contributes to research that shifts bounded understandings of smallscale studies. While dealing with particular socio-political settings in Guyana, it has offered interventions in field debates through its

226 • Competing Power

ethnography on villages, as well as the city, detailing ‘ordinary’ people’s lives as enmeshed in structural violence and corruption, where they act to gain empowerment beyond the reach of the state. In demonstrating the salience of ethnographic contributions vis-à-vis contemporary debates on the state and various modes of power, the accounts have overturned easy assumptions of poverty and the failed state thesis, in which people are seen to flee from an impoverished local and where the state appears ineffectual and is seen to be the problem. These perceptions were addressed variously and latterly in bids for new forms of governance. The accounts included criminals as ethno bandits, in different bids for power and the distancing practices by people who saw the criminal activities of such self-styled bandits as a political issue, separate from an everyday life concerned more with evading structural violence and engaging with migration and global networking activities than with such brutal violence (except where they or their relatives were directly affected). Such deadly violence developed into new impositions on people enmeshed in structural violence. In some instances, the activities of the criminals led to further migration, particularly at the height of the attacks on certain Indian villages from 2002 onwards. The book has included accounts on information in the public domain on this ethno banditry and related criminal activities to further contextualise local experiences and explore socio-political settings. The accounts draw on field data, information available through the media, documents generated by the US courts in some instances and other varied publications on the criminals discussed here and others who were part of the violent socio-political settings. Some of this information would appear on ‘official sites’ which would then be deactivated, indicating a fluid setting and management of data. These particular accounts are limited to the context of this book and are by no means comprehensive. Further comparisons emerge in the violence of the 1970s–80s and where people from across ethnic groups began to leave the country. This also returns to experiences of daily conditions as structural violence and the quest for social justice in efforts to migrate and globally network. The book considered status and empowerment in relation to different bids for power as interactions which rendered understandings of a static devalued local and its re-negotiated forms as entangled in migration and networking activities. Both people and state demonstrated agency by drawing on external ideas of empowerment, to re-ground the local in particular ways despite ongoing migration and talk of a failed state. Different bids

Concluding Reflections • 227

occurred for ‘shared governance’ through public co-optation of victimhood and public spheres, and through the presence of external ‘­partners’ in migration-embedded settings. The book has considered that a view of migration attaches to those who see themselves as ‘citizens of the world’ as spaces both for empowerment and belonging in wider social imaginaries. In the years since my fieldwork began in Guyanese sites in the mid 1990s, there has been much change, both in Guyana and in the larger global settings. Citizens as global and from the local emerge in these accounts, which together attest to particularised understandings of belonging as a process of scaling up and scaling down, where borders and persons have to be outwardly mobile to be reclaimed. Outward migration as the ongoing option is constantly presenced. In the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Guyanese continued (particularly from 2014) to speak of the ease of obtaining immigrant visas to the US, with some noting that they were pleased to visit relatives or do temporary work and return home to Guyana within six months (thus not overstaying the holiday time they were given on entry). In 2017, in the Donald Trump era, there was new talk of ­difficulties – of not obtaining a non-immigrant visa and of being stamped in for only three weeks (instead of six months) to holiday on arrival in the US. Some see these issues as perplexing given the discovery of vast quantities of oil in Guyana  – with the new expectations of wealth and ‘world status’ this evokes  – and the perceptions of the more recently understood ­desirability of Guyanese in these destinations. At the centre of many contemporary debates are ownership claims against and disavowals of the person to be known through particular frames of identities. The production of ‘persons out of bodies’ intersects and is hailed through technologies of power intimately connected to the blurred boundaries between victims and agents (see Appadurai 1998). The book has considered how people ‘write-in’ identities beyond ready boundaries, which, while contextually hailed through ethnopolitical divisions, are envisaged through the openness of the global – an ­ongoing cosmopolitanism that is also about bids for empowerment. In considering a body of ethnographic data across many years alongside historical and contemporary material in the public domain, the book has engaged with particular moments and concerns to offer insights into changes embedded within migration and different struggles. It has placed emphasis on the voices of participants. It has endeavoured to show how they appear and do not appear within systems of governance, while bringing out experiences of ‘deep victimage’ as relevant. This differing approach also eschews any romanticising of

228 • Competing Power

conditions of structural violence and banditry as experiences to be also highlighted, even as people endeavour to deal with and overturn daily ‘tribulations’. On this basis, and latterly, new spaces for complaint alongside misapprehension of how challenges can be made in public settings allow for some of the frustration (which can mark suffering and incite anger, for instance) to be expressed to render the spaces and experiences which people seek to evade and/or overturn. In these ‘complaint spaces’ and related avenues, people are visible as ‘partners’ with the state as a new kind of matiness (shared kinship in conditions of hardship). Strategies of governance hail the individual differently, as co-occupants of public spheres and/or those who have to help to make the system work. The problem of corruption was shown to co-reside or to emerge through an envisaged lack of order and a lack of orderly bodies. In this partnership, state systems are differently isolated as comprising faulty persons. The opening of public spaces for complaint and dissent appear as mandated joined-up (if not joined together) voices against the problem and varying forms of the problem local. A form of depersonalising to correct systems and, thus, faulty people also draws in concerns about some officials. The police in particular are subjected to increasing scrutiny. In 2018, a policeman was fined by the court for slapping a woman passenger on a minibus. He had been flirting with her and touched her skirt. This may be contrasted with Seema’s experience when she publicly spoke out against the policeman who was flirting with her daughter (Chapter 6). Yet at that time, others felt she should not speak out. Change, while uneven, is overtly evident in a focus on regularising order. In the mandating of a power shift from corruption and illegality to ordered systems and bodies, a more ‘traditional’ top-heavy space of authority and regulation is being envisaged into being. The emphasis on conformity allows for new difficulties in the local setting, where increasingly a sense of being hassled emerges, if in differing ways from the early years of system breakdowns and ‘disenchanted’ official service. The increasing turn to bureaucratic systems of compliance, such as legislated requirements that make opening a bank account a painfully drawn-out process, and other related official compliance measures demonstrates and/or adds to a new regime of making persons publicly accountable. The emphasis on rigid enforcement of such forms to reinforce rational-legal authority is in many ways seen as onerous. People express deeply felt despair at having to face such new bureaucratic obstacles. These are seen to stand out as new kinds of bureaucratic reclaiming; the talk against such practices in

Concluding Reflections • 229

the everyday suggests the overturning or closing of spaces for creativity and agency. For some, a new worry is the impact on the circulation of money, which has been seen to be affected in recent times. There have been complaints that people are being asked, ‘What do you plan to do with your money?’ on withdrawal from banks. Such scrutiny follows new financial legislation (for anti-money-laundering measures). It joins with the other experiences of how persons are produced as bodies to be differently ordered through perceived over-regulation – in the sense of inadequately catering for people’s well-being and dignity as social justice – and related mechanisms. While efforts to develop and redevelop systems of governance and services continue apace, and there is anticipation of benefits to accrue from the billions of barrels oil that are now known to be in Guyana waters, a dialectic remains in which persons are visible through migration-embedded settings and a problem local, being marked by structural violence of new kinds along with increasing crime, including incidents of brutal banditry. The developments are suggestive of shifts that rely on advanced infrastructures and systems as part of the reimagined local and where, variously, these are in process. The state in a refashioning sees world citizens who will necessarily be able to deal with external types of bureaucracy while systems are being (re)developed. This dialectic is further contextualised through the ongoing diasporic relations between locals and overseas relatives, ongoing global networking and continuing efforts to achieve some form of go-and-come. The local remains a site of competing forms of power at micro and macro levels: the public production of moral persons imagines and seeks to deliver corruptionfree systems, which insufficiently considers embedded and emergent types of structural violence. In turn, corruption moves into a new kind of underground and/or is differently defined. It finds new forms as continuing if different expressions of agency and power. This book, while spanning a significant time period and with accounts across many years with select participants, demonstrates an ethnographic present that must necessarily remain open to new developments while moving to a close. This work has offered a partial account as one that might be reframed into other ontological partial narratives from the other likely perspectives (see Strathern 1991). Studying the contemporary, as Faubion (2016) discuss, considers moments in the process of happening, with possibilities of particular meanings in emergence. An ethnographic approach considers these processes through deep immersion. This immersive mode engages the specific

230 • Competing Power

as a knowledge approach that privileges lived experience as inclusive of larger context and contemporary historical material. This book has drawn in and followed participants and events through deliberate fragmentation as knowledge-making from the views of those being studied. It considers that in the coming together of many stories, participants and researcher are engaged in experiencing ‘partial wholes’ of these happenings. This incompleteness also speaks to those who are mobile in and out of borders as ongoing spaces of belonging in relation to others and spaces elsewhere that are also the places of home and the local.

m Glossary backtracker – body smuggler backtracking person – someone who uses illegal routes beer garden – bar big ones – powerful persons boiling – simmering with rage bottom house – space under the house bottom house counsellor – someone who gives advice from her home bucta – male underwear busing session/buse – abusive session case jacket – court docket chamar – low caste chatri – high caste, local spelling dry goods – groceries eyepass – to belittle family calling – business claimed to define the family go-and-come – non-desperate, touristic travel house on pillars – style of buildings constructed on pillars with space for hammocks under the buildings humble – to perform lack of status faced with authority interfering – breaching respect to flirt keep sweet – ensure good relations through a ‘gift’ of money or other items Koker bride – pure bride in local village Kshatriya – as in chatri lime/night limes – local expression for group socialising with contextspecific meanings lodge – expression used to commandeer vehicles to be kept at a police station

232 • Glossary

obeah – sorcery/black magic outside – a social imaginary and a physical location outside the country provisions – cassava, eddoes, plantains mati – people in solidarity, sharing conditions of hardship ’merica – America migrants-in-waiting – those in a legal sponsorship queue to migrate to the US not-waiting migrant  – those adopting the consciousness of being a migrant/travelling out without relevant status paddy – unshelled rice shirt-jac – a style of shirt made popular under an earlier government small ones – persons meant to be without power suck-teeth – a long sound made between the teeth and lips to indicate dissent top-up – local term for bribe towel – police term for bribe village secrets – matters known in a village, meant to be kept hidden; underground form of gossip without papers – undocumented person in the US

m Bibliography Anonymised Participants Participants

IntroCh.1 Ch.2 Ch.3 Ch.4 Ch.5 Ch.6 Ch.7 Ch.8 Concluduction sion

Fatima & Fazad

√

√

Tikkaram

√

Jacko

√

Lall

√

Reny

√

Ruth

√

Pearl

√

Rajin

√

Sharief

√

John √

Lata & Raj

√

Dinesh

√

√

√ √

√ √

√

√

Ritu

√ √

Kamo

√ √

Cee

√

Bets Jean & Ramesh

√

√

Angela

Feroze & Ameena

√

√ √

√

Peter & Hanif

√

Boyo & Farah

√

Alice

√

√ √

234 • Bibliography

Tessa Anand

√ √

√

Laila

√

Fazal Host A

√ √

√

Rosie

√

Davo

√

Bella

√

Tina

√

Sunil

√

Host H

√

√

Seema

√

√

√

Passenger B

√

√

√

Robert

√

Pete Katy

√

√

√ √

√

√

Host LB

√

Reenu

√

Harri

√

Resu

√

Al

√

Shenaz

√

Savi

√

Published Sources Abrams, Paul. [1977] 1988. ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58–89. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. ‘Writing against Culture’, in R. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 137–62. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. State of Exception. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agrawal, Reena, and Andrew W. Horowitz. 1999. ‘Are International Remittances Altruism or Insurance? Evidence from Guyana Using Multiple-Migrant Households’. Retrieved 1 August 2010 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.500.8146&rep=rep1 &type=pdf. Alvi, Anjum. 2013. ‘Concealment and Revealment: The Muslim Veil in Context’, Current Anthropology 54(2): 177–99.

Bibliography • 235

Amit, Vered. (ed.). 2002. Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments. Routledge: London. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). 1990. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions in Globalization. London: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. ‘Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization’, Development and Change 29: 905–25. Aretxaga, Begoña. 2003. ‘Maddening States’, Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 393–410. Avebury, Lord, and the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group. 1981. ‘Guyana’s 1980 Elections: The Politics of Fraud’, Caribbean Review 10: 8-11,14. Bandak, Andreas, and Lars Højer (eds). 2015. ‘The Power of Example: Anthropological Explorations in Persuasion, Evocation, and Imitation’, Special Issue, JRAI 21(S1). Bartilow, Horace. 1997. The Debt Dilemma: IMF Negotiations in Jamaica, Grenada, and Guyana. London: Macmillan Education. Baumann, Gerd. 1995. ‘Managing a Polyethnic Milieu: Kinship and Interaction in a London Suburb’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(4): 725–41. Baumann, Gerd. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourse of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bélanger, Danièle, and Giang L. Tran. 2009. ‘Contributions of Women MarriageMigrants to Their Families of Origin in Rural Vietnam’, 2009 IUSSP Conference. Marrakech. Bender, Barbara. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in. B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–18. Birbalsingh, Frank. 1997. From Pillar to Post: The Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. Toronto: Tsar. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carrier, James (ed.). 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caton, Steve C., and Bernardo Zacka. 2010. ‘Abu Ghraib, the Security Apparatus, and the Performativity of Power’, American Ethnologist 37(2): 203–11. Chalfin, Brenda. 2006. ‘Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty: Enlarging the Anthropology of the State’, Current Anthropology 47(2): 243–76. Cohen, Mollie, et al. 2015. ‘Those with Darker Skin Report Slower Police Response’. Latin American Public Opinion Project. Retrieved 12 December 2017 from http://www.americasbarometer.org. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff (eds). 2006. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

236 • Bibliography

Constable, Nicole. 2005. ‘Introduction: Cross Border Marriages, Gendered Mobility and Global Hypergamy’, in N. Constable (ed.), Cross Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–16. Coutin, Susan B. 1993. The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the US Sanctuary Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Coutin, Susan B. 1995. ‘Smugglers or Samaritans in Tucson, Arizona: Producing and Contesting Legal Truth’, American Ethnologist 22(3): 549–71. Coutin, Susan B. 2001. ‘The Oppressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen: Subjectivity in Competing Accounts of Political Violence’, Law & Social Inquiry 26: 63–94. Dabydeen, David, and Brinsley Samaroo (eds). 1996. Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean. London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Danns, George K. 1982. Domination and Power in Guyana: A Study of the Police in a Third World Context. London: Transaction Books. Danns, George K. 1986. ‘The Role of the Military in the National Security of Guyana’, in A.H. Young and D.E. Phillips (eds), Militarization in the NonHispanic Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 19–20. Das, Veena. 2004. ‘The Signature of the State’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Oxford: James Curry; Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 225–52. Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. 2004. ‘State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’, in Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Oxford: James Curry; Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 3–34. Dawson, Andrew, and Mark Johnson. 2001 ‘Migration, Exile, Landscapes of Imagination’, in B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 319–32. de Sardan, J.P. Olivier. 1999. ‘A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?’ Journal of Modern African Studies 37(1): 25–52. Drummond, Lee. 1980. ‘A Cultural Continuum: A Theory of Intersystems’, Man 15(2): 352–74. Durham, Deborah. 1995. ‘Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency: The Spirit of Asking in Botswana’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1(1): 111–28. Edwards, W.B. 1979. ‘Speech Acts in Guyana: Communicating Ritual and Personal Insults’, Journal of Black Studies 10(1): 20–39. Eriksen, Thomas. 1990. ‘Liming in Trinidad: The Art of Doing Nothing’, Folk 32: 23–43. Eriksen, Thomas. 1993. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Farmer, Paul. 1996. ‘On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below’, Daedalus 125(1): 261–83. Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Farmer, Paul. 2004. ‘An Anthropology of Structural Violence’, Current Anthropology 45: 305–17.

Bibliography • 237

Farmer, Paul. 2005. ‘The Banality of Agency: Bridging Personal Narrative and Political Economy’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 125–35. Faubion, James D. (ed.). 2016. ‘On the Anthropology of the Contemporary: Addressing Concepts, Designs, and Practices’, Forum, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 371–402. Feldman, Allen. 1999. ‘The Event and Its Shadow: Figure and Ground in Violence’, Transforming Anthropology 8: 3–11. Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’, American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Foner, Nancy. 1998. ‘West Indian Identity in the Diaspora: Comparative and Historical Perspectives’, Latin American Perspectives 25(3): 173–88. Foucault, Michel. 1984a. ‘Truth and Power’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 51–75. Foucault, Michel. 1984b. ‘Discipline and Sciences of the Individual’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 169–256. Fraser, Nancy. 1998. ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Age’, in C. Willett (ed.), Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 19–49. Galtung, Johan. 1969. ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–91. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 412–53. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gledhill, J. 1999. ‘Official Masks and Shadow Powers: Towards an Anthropology of the Dark Side of the State’, Urban Anthropology 28(3–4): 199–251. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Graeber, David. 2012. ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor’, The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 105–28. Griffiths, Melanie. 2013. ‘Living with Uncertainty: Indefinite Immigration Detention’. Journal of Legal Anthropology 1(3): 263–286. Griffith, Ivelaw. 1991. ‘The Military and the Politics of Change in Guyana’, Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 33(2): 141–73. Griffith, Ivelaw. 1997. ‘Political Change, Democracy, and Human Rights in Guyana’, Third World Quarterly 18(2): 267–86. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402. Gupta, Akhil. 2005. ‘Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictional Accounts of the Indian State’, Ethnography 6(1): 5–34. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6–23.

238 • Bibliography

Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Oxford: Polity Press. Halstead, Narmala. 2001. ‘Ethnographic Encounters: Positionings within and outside the Insider Frame’, Social Anthropology 9: 307–21. Halstead, Narmala. 2002. ‘Branding Perfection: Foreign as Self; Self as “ForeignForeign”’, Journal of Material Culture 7(3): 273–93. Halstead, Narmala. 2006. ‘Others in and of the Field: Anthropology and Knowledgeable Persons’, in Geert De Neve and Maya Unnithan-Kumar (eds), Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 47–66. Halstead, Narmala. 2008a: ‘Victims and Agents Unmade: Routinising the Extraordinary’, Social Anthropology 16: 19–33. Halstead, Narmala. 2008b. ‘Experiencing the Ethnographic Present: Knowing through “Crisis”’, in Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely (eds), Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–20. Halstead, Narmala. 2009. ‘A Landscape of Respect Relations: Television, Status, Houses’, Home Cultures 6(1): 19–41. Halstead, Narmala. 2011. ‘Gift Practices in the East Indian Diaspora: Status, Equality and Loss through Inclusion’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 16(2): 278–95. Halstead, Narmala. 2012. ‘East Indians as Familiars and Partial Others in New York’, History and Anthropology 21(1): 149–69. Halstead, Narmala. 2014. ‘Local Knowledge and Invisible Presences’, American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, 2014. Washington, DC. Halstead, Narmala. 2017. ‘Relational Persons of the Home’, in R. Pilkey et al. (eds), Sexuality at Home: Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Approaches. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 202–215. Halstead, Narmala, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely (eds). 2008. Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harrison, Elizabeth. 2004. ‘The “Cancer of Corruption”’, in I. Pardo (ed.), Between Morality and Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 135–54. Harrison, Elizabeth. 2007. ‘Corruption’, Development in Practice 17(4/5): 672–78. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1995. A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge. Hastrup, Kirsten, and Olwig Karen Fog (eds). 1997. Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object. London: Routledge. Heyman, Josiah McC., and Alan Smart. 1999. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford: Berg. Hintzen, P., and Ralph Premdas. 1982. ‘Guyana: Coercion and Control in Political Change’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 24(3): 337–54. Hirsch, Eric. 1995. ‘Introduction. Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Space and Place. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–30.

Bibliography • 239

Hirsch, Eric. 2001. ‘When Was Modernity in Melanesia?’ Social Anthropology 9(2): 131–46. Hirsch, Eric. 2003. ‘A Landscape of Powers in Highland Papua, c. 1899–1918’, History and Anthropology 14(1): 3–22. Hirsch, Eric. 2008. ‘Knowing, Not Knowing, Knowing Anew’, in N. Halstead et al. (eds), Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 21–37. Hirsch, E., and C. Stewart. 2005. ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’, History and Anthropology 16(3): 261–74. Hope, Kempe R. 1985. ‘Electoral Politics and Political Development in PostIndependence Guyana’, Electoral Studies 4(1): 57–68. Humphrey, Steven. 2006. ‘Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception’, The European Journal of International Law 17(3): 677–87. Jaffe, Rivke. 2013. ‘The Hybrid State: Crime and Citizenship in Urban Jamaica’, American Ethnologist 40: 734–48. Jansen, Stef. 2009. ‘After the Red Passport: Towards an Anthropology of the Everyday Geopolitics of Entrapment in the EU’s “Immediate Outside”’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(4): 815–32. Jayaram, N. 2006. ‘The Metamorphosis of Caste among Trinidad Hindus’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 40: 143–173. Jayawardena, Chandra. 1963. Conflict and Solidarity on a Guianese Plantation. London: The Athlone Press. Jayawardena, Chandra. 1980. ‘Culture and Ethnicity in Guyana and Fiji’, Man 15: 430–50. Kerrigan, Dylan. 2015. ‘Transnational Anti-Black Racism and State Violence in Trinidad’, Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved 20 September 2016 from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/692-transnational-anti-black-racismand-state-violence-in-trinidad. Khosravi, Shahram. 2007. ‘The “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-ethnography of Borders’, Social Anthropology 15(3): 321–34. Klein, Naomi. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Kubick, Jan. 2009. ‘Ethnography of Politics: Foundations. Applications. Prospects’, in E. Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 25–52. Kwon, Soo A. 2008. ‘Moving from Complaints to Action: Oppositional Consciousness and Collective Action in a Political Community’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39(1): 59–76. Lakhan, Sridat, V. Chris Lakhan and J. Singh. 1990. ‘The Use of Canadian Aid to Sustain Guyana’s Administrative Dictatorship’, Caribbean Studies 23(3/4): 69–84. Lazarus-Black, Mindie. 2001. ‘Law and the Pragmatics of Inclusion: Governing Domestic Violence in Trinidad and Tobago’, American Ethnologist 28: 388–416. Leach, Edmund. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of the Kachin Social Structure. Oxford: Berg. Linger, Daniel T. 2005. Anthropology through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

240 • Bibliography

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism’, American Anthropologist 104(3): 766–75. Mars, Perry. 2001. ‘Ethnic Politics, Mediation, and Conflict Resolution: The Guyana Experience’, Journal of Peace Research 38(3): 353–72. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Merrill, Tim (ed.). 1992. Guyana: A Country Study. Washington, DC: GPO for Library of Congress. Merrill, Tim (ed.). 1993. Guyana and Belize Country Studies/Federal Research Division. Area Handbook Series. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Merry, Sally Engle 2005. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’, American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51. Miller, Daniel. 1993. ‘Spot the Trini’, Ethnos 58: 317–34. Miller, Daniel. 1994. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad. Oxford: Berg. Milne, R.S. 1981. Politics in Ethnically Bipolar States: Guyana Malaysia, Fiji. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Mintz, Sydney W. 1996. ‘Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as Oikoumene’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(2): 289–311. Mitchell, Clyde. 2006. ‘Case and Situation Analysis’, in T.M.S. Evens and D. Handleman (eds), The Manchester School: Practice and Ethnographic Praxis in Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 23–44. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American Political Science Review 85(1): 77–96. Morrison SJ, Fr Andrew. 1998. Justice: The Struggle for Democracy in Guyana 1952–1992. Georgetown: Red Thread Women’s Press. Nader, Laura. 1969. ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 284–311. Naipaul, V.S. 1991. ‘A Handful of Dust: Return to Guiana’, The New York Review of Books, 11 April, 15–20. Okely, Judith. 2007. ‘Fieldwork Embodied’, Sociological Review 55(1): 65–79. Okely, Judith. 2008. ‘Knowing without Notes’, in N. Halstead et al. (eds), Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 55–74. Olwig, Karen Fog. 2007. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Orozco, Manuel. 2003. ‘Remitting Back Home and Supporting the Homeland: The Guyanese Community in the US’, Inter-American Dialogue Working Paper, USAID GEO Project.

Bibliography • 241

Parry, Jonathan. 2000. ‘The “Crisis of Corruption” and the “Idea of India”: A Worm’s Eye View’, in Italo Pardo (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 27–56. Pierce, Steven. 2006. ‘Looking like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48(4): 887–914. Premdas, Ralph. 1982. ‘Guyana: Changes in Ideology and Foreign Policy’, World Affairs 145(2): 177–202. Premdas, Ralph. 1994. ‘Internationalisation of Ethnic Conflict in the Caribbean: The Case of Guyana’, Caribbean Quarterly 40(3/4): 125–38. Premdas, Ralph. 1996. ‘Race and Ethnic Relations in Burhamite Guyana’, in D.  Dabydeen and B. Samaroo (eds), Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean. London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Prentice, Rebecca. 2009. ‘“Thiefing a Chance”: Moral Meanings of Theft in a Trinidadian Garment Factory’, in Katherine E. Browne and B. Lynne Milgram (eds), Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, pp. 123–41. Rabinow, Paul, et al. 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rapport, Nigel. 2012. Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson (eds). 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. E. Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodney, Walter. 1979. People’s Power. Georgetown, Guyana: WPA. Rodney, Walter. 1990. Walter Rodney Speaks. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Roopnaraine, Terry. 2001. ‘Constrained Trade and Creative Exchange on the Barima River, Guyana’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7: 51–66. Rose, Euclid A. 2002. Democracy and Socialism in the Modern Caribbean: Superpower Intervention in Guyana, Jamaica and Grenada, 1970–1985. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rytter, Mikkel. 2012. ‘Between Preferences: Marriage and Mobility among Danish Pakistani Youth’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 572–90. Salter, Mark B. 2008. ‘When the Exception Becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies 12(4): 365–80. Sanjek, Roger (ed.). 2015. Mutuality: Anthropology’s Changing Terms of Engagement. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schatz, Edward (ed.). 2009. Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. London: University of California Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Philippe Bourgois (eds). 2004. Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

242 • Bibliography

Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. [1965] 2002. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sedlenieks, Klavs. 2004. ‘Rotten Talk: Corruption as a Part of Discourse in Contemporary Latvia’, in I. Pardo (ed.), Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 194–254. Seecharan, Clem. 1999. Bechu: Bound Coolie Radical in British Guiana 1894–1901. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Shah, Alpha. 2010. In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharma, Aradhana, and Akhil Gupta (eds). 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Sidnell, Jack. 2003. ‘An Ethnographic Consideration of Rule-Following’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 429–45. Singh, Jai Narine. 1996. Guyana: Democracy Betrayed: A Political History, 1948– 1993. Kingston: Kingston Publishers Ltd. Smith, Raymond T. 1962. British Guiana. New York: Oxford University Press. Stocking, George. 1993. Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. ‘Cutting the Network’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–35. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 2006. ‘A Community of Critics? Thoughts on New Knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 191–209. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1989. ‘Ethnic Conflict in the World Today’, American Ethnologist 16: 335–49. Tesla, Nikola. 1915. The Wonder World to Be Created by Electricity. Twenty-First Century Books. Retrieved 29 May 2018 from http://www.tfcbooks.com/ tesla/1915-09-09.htm. Ticktin, Miriam. 2006. ‘Where Ethics and Politics Meet’. American Anthropologist 33(1): 33–49. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tilley, Christopher. 2009. Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies and Identities. Explorations of Landscape Phenomenology 3. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. ‘The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind’, Current Anthropology 42: 125–38. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Truitt, Allison, and Stefan Senders (eds). 2008. Money: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Bibliography • 243

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2009. Human Development Report. Retrieved 11 October 2009 from http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/ hdr_theme/country-notes/GUY.pdf. Vertovec, Steven. 1992. Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Change. London: Macmillan. Vertovec, Steven. 1994. ‘“Official” and “Popular” Hinduism in the Caribbean: Historical and Contemporary Trends in Surinam, Trinidad and Guyana’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 28(1): 123–47. Wallace, Anthony F.C. [1961] 1970. Culture and Personality. New York: Random House. Wardle, Huon. 2010. ‘Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?’ Social Anthropology 18(4): 381–88. Weber, Max. 1958. ‘The Three Types of Legitimate Rule’, trans. Hans Gerth, Berkeley Publications in Society and Institutions 4(1): 1–11. Westerfield, Jennifer M. 2006. ‘Behind the Veil: An American Legal Perspective on the European Headscarf Debate’, The American Journal of Comparative Law 54(3): 637–78. Wilce, James Jr. 1995. ‘“I Can’t Tell You All My Troubles”: Conflict, Resistance, and Metacommunication in Bangladeshi Illness Interactions’, American Ethnologist 22: 927–52. Wiles, Ellen. 2007. ‘Headscarves, Human Rights, and Harmonious Multicultural Society: Implications of the French Ban for Interpretations of Equality’, Law & Society Review 41(3): 699–735. Wilk, Richard R. 1999. ‘“Real Belizean Food”: Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean’, American Anthropologist 101: 244–55. Williams, Brackette. 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle. London: Duke University Press. Wilson, Richard (ed.) 2005. Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1972. ‘American Anthropologists and American Society’, in D.  Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Random House, pp. 251–63. Wolf, Eric R. 1990. ‘Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions’, American Anthropologist 92: 586–596. World in Action. 1968. ‘The Trail of the Vanishing Voters’, British documentary series. Granada Television Films. Retrieved 29 May 2018 from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=X4edAtrKfaE. World Bank. 2003. Guyana: Development Policy Review. The Challenges of Governance and Growth. Caribbean Country Management Unit Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit Latin America and the Caribbean Region. Retrieved 10 June 2006 from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/866551468771558165/pdf/25640.pdf. World Bank. 2016. Migration and Remittances. Factbook 2016. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: World Bank. Worrell, DeLisle, et al. 2000. ‘The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy in the Caribbean’, Research Network Working Papers; R-401. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank.

Index

m Index Abrams, Paul, 24n6 activists, 28, 44, 94, 154, 156–57, 160, 212 activism action: agitate for rights, 154; bids to compete, 2 types: emerging activism, 174; local activism, 221; oppositional consciousness, 150n1; political activism, 102n15 actors agents, 9, 10, 20, 41, 57, 70, 227 criminal actors, 79 interventionist, 42, 141, 218, 220 local-global experts, 16, 112 mediators, 57, 61 officials, 214 states actors, 3 Young and Restless counsellor, 112 world citizens, 145 Agamben, Giorgio, 6 African heritage, 50n30 Afro-Americans, 187 agency, overshadowed in other descriptors, 5 agency, migration-related acknowledgements and contestations, 181 activities, 5 deliberate stance of disinterest, 16

imagined geographical hierarchy, 147 non-desperate travel, forms of, 17 sending communities, to the, 142 re-ground the local, 226 subverting difficult bureaucratic, 159 systematic compliance, 189 Agrawal, Reena, 47 Alvi, Anjum, 194 America common term, 47n1 idea of, 24, 28, 107 ‘merica 114, 119 migrating to, 119, 120 obtaining America, 28 violating the laws, 100 American brand names, 119 American cartoon, 110 American jeans, 195 American soap opera, (Young and the Restless), 110–11, 113, 117 America street, 62 American rights, 200 American embassy, 80–81. See also US embassy amnesty, 80, 82, 87, 100 Amnesty International, 76n18, 100 anti-imperialism, 6, 197 Anthropology against fixity, 14

246 • Index

Anthropology (cont.) anthropological example, 15 anthropological study, 43 contemporary, 12, 15, 229 cultural production, 7 constructions of community, 76n24 corruption in cultural contexts, 17 critiques, 13–14, 17, 24 historical turn, 13 geopolitics and mobility, of 1 small-scale studies, 24n13, 255 APNU-AFC, 24–25, 35, 90, 219 arranged marriages, 104, 145, 146, 151n14 Asia, 142–3, 193 Ato, Bilal, 37. See also Darke, Barnard Fr attempted coup, 90 automatic status ability to depart, 10 devalued local, 133 open doors, 70 migrants, 3, 130, 142, 183–84 poor treatment, 31 problem-local, 134 Avebury, Lord, 39, 49n21 Bandak, Andreas, 15 Bacchus, George, (police informant), 79 Bacchus, Shafeek, murder of, 67 backtracking, 32, 105, 114, 126 backtrackers, 61, 103, 124 backtracking fee, 126n1 backtrack routes, 104 going backtrack, 113, 130 illegal route, 32, 114 overstay, 124 people who backtrack, 120 unsuccessful, 103 banditry killings, 216 new types of, 120 period of banditry, 83 political banditry, 6, 98 presenced though banditry, 74

victims of the banditry, 88 See also death squad Barbados Barbados, via, 105 main destination, 134 overseas labouring jobs, 114 Shanique Myrie, 24, 150n5 skilled, 166 temporary migrant worker, 113 tourism industry, 8 Bartilow, Horace, 48n12 Bartica massacre, 44, 51n33 Bélanger, Danièlle, 142 Benny Hinn (US evangelist), 109, 110, 118 bio-political imaginary, 22, 178 power, 7, 179 birth certificate, 18, 52, 58, 170–73, 177, 179, 189 black clothes police death squad, 75n14 feared black clothes, 34 notoriously corrupt and brutal, 66 police headquarters, 197 black religious cult, 48 black uniforms, 66 blame-sharing, 22–23, 34, 200–202, 209 body smugglers, 30, 103, 124 body, state and citizen citizen body, 175 community body, 220 enforcing body, 36 orderly bodies and persons, 13 singular caring body, 204 state body, 203 Bookers (famous colonial store), 43 bottom house shop, 111, 112. See also domestic boundaries beyond ready boundaries, 227 blurred, blurring of, 2, 20, 227 group, 38 new boundaries, 129, 149 notion of limits, 129 redrawn, 16 reinstating of, 1

Index • 247

territorial, 16 unstable, 50 Brazil, 106, 125, 127n13 Brahmin, 73 Britain, 47, 67, 70 Bureaucratic systems ailing bureaucratic systems, 10, 57 block their efforts, 10 hassles, 59, 154 poor bureaucratic systems, 74, 80 slowed bureaucratic systems, 63 unhelpful bureaucratic processes, 55 Brexit, 225 brides clothing for, 68 foreign brides, 142 migrants in search of local brides, 144 seeking traditional brides, 147 stereotypes about, 142 British colony 6, 55 British Guiana 34, 47n9 British High Commissioner to Guyana, Greg Quinn, 220 British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, 39, 41, 49n21 British passport, 70, 71, 165 British Plantation ownership, 6 Bush, George Jr., 78, 80, 83, 87 100n1, 101n4 bribe, issues and practices of bribe-taking, 63, 206 difficult to bribe, 158, endemic, 156 everyday acts of bribery, 160 increasing scrutiny, 157 minor ticketable offences, 164 most bribes, 156 offer, 53 officials seeking bribes, 60 space for the bribe, 172 withheld, 18 bribes, terms top-up, 53, 163, 167 towels, 167

bribe-reporting I Paid a Bribe, 66, 75, 175n2 website, 155, 179, 180 bribes, visas for, 56 bureaucratic embodiment, 178 Burnham government administration, 19, 35, 36, 37 independence era, 197 pre-independence, 72 Burnham regime: brutal violence, 33, 1973 election, 41, draconian and repressive, 48n11, manoeuvred into critical, 41; military, 33, 35; militarisation, 57; refused by, 43; socialist model introduced, 50; vetoed, 126n4 Burnham, Forbes connections, 166 continuing partnerships, 173 fails to be enabling, 180 first independent leader, 8 ideal, 181 illegal partnerships, 154 initially united, 34 intent only on personal power, 47n9 opportunities arise, 160 problem of complicit partnerships, 167 Rodney, 48n13 Burnham, Jesse, 34, 47n10 Burnham personal army, 35 Buxton, 81–90 Cambio, 49–50, 62, 75 Camp Ayangama, 41 Camp street jail, 34 Canada Canadian skilled programme, 130 communications with family, 94 learning about Canada, 131 migrate to, 58, 108 obtain necessary travel visas, 120 residence in, 140 salary in, 115 sister in, 108 uncle in, 117 work permit, 150n1

248 • Index

Canadian High Commissioner, Dr Nicole Giles, 220 Caribbean, former colonies in, 7 Caribbean Court of Justice, 134 Caribbean, islands, 23n1, 147, 98 Caribbean and Latin American region, 176 Caribbean-Guyanese settlement, 194 Carrier, James, 70 Carter, Jimmy, 42 Catholic Standard, 36 Carroll, Thomas (US Vice Consul) appeal judgment, 127n10 blind guilty plea, 66 fraudulent visa scheme, 56 memorandum and order, 74n3 non-immigrant visas, 121 U.S. v Carroll, 75nn12–13, 127n11 caste, 72–73 Cheddi, Jagan East Indian, 102n17 Marxist, 34 political leader, 72 China, 48n12 child labour, 212, 215, 222 city market, 93 citizenship, roles and processes active citizenship, 59 automatic citizenship, 100n1 broader site, 204 civic duty, 193 enhanced developed approaches, 193 negotiated spaces of, 52 imaginaries of, 1 inclusive citizenship, 194 state-making and, 3 through inter-ethnic tension, 45 civil society, 22, 34, 201 civilization theories, 156 CNN network, 83 complicit relations, different understandings of between and beyond, 178 forced complicity, 64 good complicit relations, 166 grey zones, 18

habits of realising the state, 22, 198 helpful negotiators, 10 unwanted product, 64 complicit partnerships brokers and ordinary persons, 63 numerous examples, 65 complaint forums citizens, efforts of, 174 complaint spaces, 228 new, 166, 163 overly-long waiting, 192 complaint, police-related harassment, 163 neighbours, 108 police friend, 157 policewoman, 167 transfer police, 160 complainants and modes of complaining against officials, 83 arrogant clients, 132 co-occupy public power, 173 individual complainant, 164 migrant destination, 186 misapprehension, 228 mixed reactions, 169 outing corruption, 155 powerless and powerful voices, 18 quiet rather public, 60 reimagined rights, 153 sense of power, 53 invisible presencing of the law, 40 Comaroff, Jean, 67 Camoroff, John L., 67 commission of inquiry incidents of deadly violence, 44 inquiry would clear, 79 unhealthy association, 218 consent compliance, 185 from people, 182 sensible route, 177 parent’s consent, 98 consent, sponsorship and documents affirming consent, 190 sponsor’s application, 199n7

Index • 249

conspiracy to import, 92, 94, 102n21, 127n10 Constable, Nicole, 142–143 cosmopolitanism, 9, 14, 227 corruption talk, 10, 17, 18, 25, 33, 35 crime spree, 86, 92 criminal deportees, 56, 74n2, 79 criminal dons, 92 criminals, police-related police criminality, 34 security enforcers, 56 cooperating witness, 66 death squad, 75n14 criminals, taken sides with 87 roadblocks, 86–86, 168, 176n7 cop bandits, 169 police being bandits, 181 Cuba, 48n12 currency devaluation, 49 Coutin, Susan B., 7 Danns, George K., 24n11, 34 Darke, Bernard Fr (British citizen and Jesuit priest), 36, 37 David Hill (US fugitive). See Rabbi Washington de Caires, David, 41–42 deadly violence, 36, 44, 88, 226 death squad ethnic-led attacks, 34 exceptions, kinds of, 80 extra-judicial, 56, 79, 92, 218 feared para-military, 66 Hinds, Mark, 67 New York Court, 94 phantom group, 79 private political war, 87 Thomas, Mark, 67 Williams, Axel, 66 Demerara Bauxite company, 49– 50n18 Denner, Ed, 215 dictatorship control of the military, 34 decline, 27 development aid, 18 dictatorship era, 89



dictatorship government, 19 government changed, 112 militarized, 34, 8, 196 post-dictatorship, 60 Presidential commission of inquiry, 218 Rodney’s death, into, 12, 37, 44 diplomats, 71, 220 diplomatic agencies, 1, 22 disempowerment and loss, contesting beyond the local, 149 cultural capital, a particular form, 131 competence in global networking, 136 limit loss 2, 11, 16, 129, 149 more than local, 132 privilege their skills, 12 reclaimed through minute interactions, 124 reform, talk of, 179 domestic spaces arena, 30 bottom house, 182, 191 settings, 83, 97, 170 184, 194 spaces under the house, 111 domestic violence, issues, campaigns abuse, 200, 202 campaigns against, 211 case studies, 23 collective focus, 114 failure to help, 203 fear of reprisals, 206 hidden types, 214 marching against, 213 not isolated, 151 public outcry, 208–9, 211 societal problems, 210 domestic victims, 206, 208 Donald Trump, 123, 225, 227 dress codes, 180, 191–93, 196–97 drug crimes, 80, 82 Dutch and African spirits, 108 easy labels, 8, 63, 143 Economist, The, 60

250 • Index

economic migrant, 84 Educare Guyana, 215 egalitarianism, 55, 72–73 elders, 127, 148, 209, 221 elections ballot boxes, 35, 39–42 ballot papers, 28, 39 fraudulent general elections, 33, 38 free elections, 112 irregularities, 41 international observers, 39 local government, 220 observers, body of, 201 overseas voters, 41 military, 38, 39 post-1992, 45 voters present, 123 embedded violence, 52, 173 emergency, 6, 48, 90 escapees, 79, 101n7 essentialised ethnic identities, 92 ethnographic encounters, 14 ethnographic listener, 29 ethnographic present, 12, 229 ethnographic research. See research ethnic cause, 6, 34, 38, 78–79, 90–91 ethnic cleansing, 80 ethno-political, violence and criminals ethno-politics, history of, 14 ethno-political bandits, 34, 38 ethno-divisive politics, 44 marginalising sections, 90 political history, 219 violence, hailed by the, 99 Europe, 193 European cities, 193 European Union, 218, 223 everyday discourses, 56, 121 everyday talk, 73, 86 exceptional circumstances, 219 expert, forms and understandings local-global, 16, 112 being experts, 129 construction of local experts, 142 counsellor on call, 200 expert in networking, 148

expert in the local, 130 expert space, 94 privilege the local authentic, 132 role, 93 understandings of expertness, 201 external agencies, 21, 34, 154, 188, 212 external debt, 35, 50 external empowerment state and people: citizen’s understandings, 23; state, 178, 198; state actors and citizens, 3; young people, advice to, 111 processes and power: benefits in relation to, 153; connections, 16; global-local spaces, 20; experiences of, 22; mediatory spaces, 138; power, co-sharing, 22, 201; power relations, 10; recurring theme, 129; social justice, 5, 47; status interactions, 131 external partners, 18, 22, 45, 55, 124, 201, 214, 219, 220 external intervention, 42, 48, 49, 220 extended family, 32, 99, 116, 133, 144, 185–85, 191 Exxon-Mobil, 11, 127n12. See also oil extra-judicial killings, 34, 75, 79, 86, 93, 216, 218 extra-territorial, 3, 55, 74, 211, 255 facilitators, 54–55, 64, 69, 71, 118, 206 familial ties, 68, 97, 134 Farmer, Paul, 4 Ferguson, James, 3, 20, 24n5, 178, 188, 199n1 Faubion, James, 229 Feldman, Allen, 4 fieldwork data, 11–12, 210, 226, 227 earlier fieldwork, 29, period 135 Guyanese sites, 227 immersive encounters, 15 locations, 15 long-term, 12, 14 processual fieldwork, 13

Index • 251

presence and acknowledgement of, 183 ten notebooks, 29 See also research Financial Times, 60 five criminals, 34, 79 Foner, Nancy, 187 France, 47n2, 193–94 Gajraj, Ronald (Minister of Home Affairs), 218 Galtung, Johan, 3, 4, 5 gangs, 36, 38, 87, 224 GDF officers, 41 Geertz, Clifford, 185 General Registry, 57, 154, 155, 170 Georgetown (capital), 12, 62, 203 gifts exchange of conversations, 183 gifting of homes, 99 gift of money, 54 return with money, 114 return the gift, 114 tv set, 117 real brand name, 119 return of goods, 191 overseas holidays, 120 gifts for the wedding, 138 gift-laden suitcases, 95, 142 gifts, contexts coerced to accept, 124 cultural contexts of, 19 free gift, 53 give to someone else, 145 keeping, 114 keep the police sweet, 64 maintenance of social relations, 59 migrants to provide, 68 mode of mediating, 141 sponsorship help, 187 occasions of insiderness, 96 globalisation, 2, 5, 11 global hypergamy, 32, 142–143, 147 global village, 2 go-and-come agency, 121 changing local, 153



diasporic relations, 229 disengagement, 128 left and returned, 87 non-immigrant visas, 104, 122, 133, 143 trader, 103 tourists, 84, 87, 123–24 touristic, 98, 125, 137 travel in and out, 120 government buildings, 59, 195–96 GPO (General Post Office), 52, 57, 59, 154, 172 Graeber, David, 58, 59 green cards, 138 Griffith, Ivelaw, 39 Gupta, Akhil, 3, 20, 24n5, 171, 178, 188, 199n1 Guyana Defence Force, 35 Guyana dollar, 43, 69, 126n3, 167 Guyana Home Affairs Ministry, 155, 179 Guyana Police Force 156 Guyana stores, 43 Habermas, Jürgen, 23n3, 213 Haiti, 4 Halstead, N., 148, 151n16, 199n4 Hardt, Brendt (US Ambassador), 220 Hardt, Saskia, 203 Harrison, Elizabeth, 24n15 Hastrup, Kirsten, 13 Højer, Lars, 15 Horowitz, Andrew, W., 47 hospitality, 29, 116, 117, 183, 186 House of Israel, 33, 37, 36–38, 42 Hoyte, Desmond, 42 external creditors, attention to, 42 socialist model, end of, 50 Presidency, 41 programme, 49n25 ungovernable, 90 human rights abuse, 50, 216 human rights defenders, 49, 155, 166, 178 human rights, pressure for, 219 human rights, law and, 212 Hussein, Saphier, 173

252 • Index

IMF (International Monetary Fund), 10, 27, 35, 48, 57 illegal migrant, 31, 61, 78 indentureship, 6, 55, 73 Indian, ethnic group, 33, 38 Indian Muslims, 29 Indian private business sector, 91 Indian religious organisations, 38 Inter-American Press Association, 37 inter-border, 61, 166 interinter-ethnic division, 42, 71–72 Irizarry, Dora L. (US Justice), 93 Jagan, Janet 90 Jagdeo, Bharrat, 203 Jaffe, Rivke, 92 jailbreak, 90, 101n7 Jamaica, 8, 24, 92, 126, 134, 150n4–5, 187 Jamaicans, 8, 187 Jansen, Steff, 71, 76n22 Jayawardena, Chandra, 72 Joseph Hamilton, (House of Israel priest), 37 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15 Khan, Halim, 122, 127 Khan, Roger Shaheed, 92–94, 102n21 kidnapped US Embassy employee. See Steve Lesniak kinship 9, 72, 117–18, 134, 228 knowledge-making, 148, 230 Kshatriya (Khatri, chatri), 73 Kubick, Jan, 12 Kwon, Soo A., 150n1 labour laws, 217 Lamaizon, James, 37 Latin America, 7, 176n6 Lesniak, Steve, 81 Lindo Creek massacre, 44 loss and disempowerment departure of people, 124 departure ritual, 191 forced returnees, 32 heart-rending stories, 135 impel particular experiences, 10

on the ground enactments, 2 outside status, 128 perceived inability, 129 permanent migration, 137 static local, 21, 129 US, in the, 31 rights, loss of, 212 Lusignan massacre, 44 Library of Congress, 41 Maha Sabha, 49n19 Manning, Blanche (US judge), 66 Mars, Perry, 48n11, 34 Massiah, Keith, 223 matiness, strategies of disturb basic ideas, 9 extended notion of matiness, 63 lack of matiness, 71–72 non-matiness, 91 partners with the state, 228 shared kin, 64 shared network, 91 McLean, Norman (army chief), 42, 223 memoried landscape, 71, 78, 141, 225 memoried structural violence, 139 Merry, Sally E., 212 minibus, drivers, 65, 161–62, 164 migrant destination, 32, 84, 86, 134, 138, 183–88, 190–91 migration journey, 83, 112, 185 migrant relatives, 15, 111, 115–16, 128 migrant status automatic, 31, 68, 138–39 abilities to sponsor, 137 enabling spaces, 182 external power, 165 gift-laden suitcases, 142 larger understandings, 188 less power, 53 needy of the local, 149 new bodily mannerisms, 191 returned migrant status, 138 migration-embedded, 10, 68, 88, 172, 178, 210, 227, 229

Index • 253

Miller, Daniel, 14, 76n25 Mitchell, Timothy, 7 modernization, 17, 156 modernity, 2 moral accountability, 202, 221 moral community, 209 moral project, 5, 202 Morrison, Andrew SJ (Catholic Standard editor), 34, 37, 38 multiculturalism, 193–94 nationalism strategies, 39 Nadir, Manzoor (Government minister), 215, 222n15 Naipaul, V.S., 27 National Security Act, 48n11 network of spies, 36 New York court, 92, 94 NGOs, 151, 201, 210, 213, 220 non-cultural, 147–48, 172, 187 oil billions of barrels, 229 Major oil discovery, 127 new desirables, 123 Trinidad & Tobago, 8 Olwig, Karen Fog, 13 oppression, 28, 63–64, 71–72 Orozco, Manuel, 115 overseas persons and interactions overseas, from: born overseas, 131; bridegrooms 134, 142; clients 132; goods 61, 116, 136, 189, overseas US-based evangelist 16; overseas-based family networks 97; connections 153; donors 179; guests 96; partners 104, 143, 145; overseas-based children 94; overseas visitors 87, 88; overseas women 143; people overseas 121; returned migrant 165 overseas, to: governmentsanctioned trips 62; holidays 120, 124; migrant labourer 125; temporary overseas worker 114; overseas credentials, 68 overseas marriages, 143

Panama Canal, 33 parallel economy alternative economy, 60 global trade, of, 61 illegality, soft line of, 60 Parry, Jonathan, 17, 59, 75n6 passport office, 58–59, 191–92 passengers, minibus, 152, 154, 228 performativity, 14 permanent migration, 120, 137, 184 Persaud, Pulmattie, 44 petty harassment, 65 petty violations, 58, 211 Pierce, Steven, 24n15 physical violence, 15, 35, 73, 96, 125 plural society, 7–8, 24n8 PNC (People National Congress, PNC-Reform), 34, 50, 90, 197, 203 police abuse, 64, 114, 160, 168 police accountability, 160, 165 police befriending friends, 64, 110, 155, 158, 174, 206–7 officials and persons, 18 practice of, 169 petty officers, 64 police officials, 64, 66, 127, 154, 156, 158 police cell, 40 police station, 40, 65, 159–64, 167–68, 206–08, 211 PPP (PPP-Civic, People Progressive Party), 19, 34, 50, 90, 223n22 Portuguese faction, 34 Portuguese Jesuit priests, 37–38 post-colonial, 9, 18, 70, 72, 193, 196 poverty assumptions of, 226 bad conditions, 16 levels of prosperity, 106 life of poverty, 140 lone woman walking, 107 obvious poverty, 111 overturning poverty, 123 poverty levels, 139, 217 poverty and inequality, 92

254 • Index

poverty (cont.) poverty, raise her out of, 16 visibility of, 129 witness poverty, 84 power struggle, 56, 72 power-broker, 56, 63, 121 powerful friends, 64, 174, 206 powerful passport, 70, 71 powerless documents, 71 powerless persons, 21, 166 Premdas, Ralph, 48n14 press members, presence of, 37 protest anti-government protestors, 36 disempowerment tactic, 40 killed, 41 protest their inclusion, 65 victimisation tactics, 90 advertised protestations, 94 massive protests, despite, 193 civil unrest, 50 civil protest, 197 failure to protect, 203 struggles include, 214 public sphere traditional, 23n3, 213 new types: media furore, 218; multiple, 45, 153; governance, 227–28; new, 91, 166; nuances of rights, 159; vociferous, 162; state, 198, 213–14, 220, 228; vociferous, 221 publicity, 8, 158, 211, 214, 216, 217 public offices, 169, 192 public rights, 166, 173, 217 Queen Victoria, statute of, 43 Ramotar, Donald, 213, 220 Rapport, Nigel, 14 Rawlins, Ronald Fineman feared criminal escapee, 35, 44 five for freedom, 79 assassination, 224n28 remittances assisting relatives: collective duty, 116; small business, setting

up 16; migrants 68; family member 108; benefits 92; global networking, 104, 134; significant source, 112; dwelling houses, 115; departure to the US, 99 key to the economy, 61 mobile travellers, 84 political contributions, 187 remittances of goods, 188 secret millionaires, 110 statistics, 47n4 under-reported, 47, 115 research approaches, 13 case history, 11 city, 12–13 documents, survey, 12 ethnography on villages, 226 ethnographic research, 11, 14, 15 new research project, 13 power, state, corruption, 17 person-centred accounts, 23 Queens, New York, 2, 15 researchers, 7 research participants, 1, 14, 15, 29, 63, 122 research, body of, 7, 10 villages, 12–13, 15, 150n10, 226 respect breaching respect, 231 context of, 148, 194 respect terms, 127 Robinson, Curtis, 44 Rodney, Walter, 12, 24, 35, 38, 48n13 Rodney, Walter, Commission of Inquiry, 37, 44, 48 Rodrigues, Edy Zohar (US officer), 122 Rohee, Clement (Minister of Home Affairs), 65, 155, 156n1, 168, 206 Roman Catholic Church, 37–38 Roopnaraine, Terry, 43 Rose, Euclid, 48n16 Ryter, Mikkel, 151n15

Index • 255

Sawh, Rajpat Rai, 44 Sawh, Satyadeo (government minister), 44 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, 47n9, 50n31 Scott, James, 173 shared suffering, 63, 71, 86 Simels, Robert, 75n15, 92, 94, 102n20 Singh, Jai Narine, 43 slavery, 6, 55, 72 Smith, Gregory (GDF soldier), 35, 48n15 Social imaginaries ability to depart and return, 10 external bodies, 8 forms of engagement, 126 local, 4–5 new social imaginaries, 60 recurring theme, 129 self-constructions, 9 wider social imaginary, 84, 86, 227 social justice, bearer of, 141 social injustice, 4 South America, 6 Soviet Bloc, 48n12 spiritual helping people spiritually, 108 obeah woman, 107 spiritualist, 104, 108, 110 spiritual offerings, 114 sponsorship documents, 77, 82, 96, 136 Stabroek News, founded by, 41 state, notions of above the state, 16, 55 beyond inter-ethnic divides, 8 contexts of professed alienation, 3 distance from the state, 153, 155 distant state, 4, 155 failed state, 5, 7, 8, 17, 18, 226 imagined community, 59 literature on globalization and, 5 moral and the legal, 20 new forms of state-making, 18 renew ideas of, 10 spatialisation of the state, 3, 178, 188

state biographical rewriting, 207 transnational approach, 3, 188 state, power of the, 52, 63, 70 state, problem, 5, 20, 22, 59, 173, 178, 180, 189 state-sponsored vigilantism, 80 status, loss of, 16, 32, 86, 129–132, 135, 149, 184 status, out of, 97, 137, 190 Strathern, Marilyn, 3, 23n4, 129 Suriname, 92, 125 superpower intervention, 242 super-vigilante, 94 supremacist cult, 36 Tambiah, Stanley, 43, taxi drivers, 86–88 taxi industry, 88 television access to television, 117n5 establishing television, idea of, 126n4 foreign television, 116 story on television, 160 television programming, 111 television talk, 117 Tesla, Nikola, 2 touristic travel, 104, 125, 137, 231 trading circular trading, 119 external trading, 104 global trading, 120 house in Trinidad, 117 inter-border activities, 166 outside goods, 111 proper trader, 105 status, 103, 115–16 streets, openly trading, 61, travel bans, 84 travelling magistrates, 65, 87, 100, 168, 206–07 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 70 undocumented, 28, 30– 32, 82–83, 104, 183–184, 232 UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), 80

256 • Index

uniform, attired in, 39 United Sad’r Islamic Anjuman, 49n19 US ambassador, Brendt Hardt, 220 US Appeal court, 80 US citizenship status, 74n2, 138 US Country reports beyond country reports, 220 domestic violence, 213 human rights abuse, 66 trafficking in persons, 222n11 unlawful killings, 75n9 writers of, 201 US dollar, 49, 75 US Embassy, 27, 27, 55, 56, 121, 122 US Federal Bureau of Investigation, 81 US sponsor, 189–90 US, visitors to the, 84, 120

Venezuela, 33, 109 vehicles, lodging, 65, 160 Washington, Rabbi, 36–37, 48. See also David Hill wedding houses, 89, 144 Westerfield, Jennifer, 199n9 Wilk, Richard, 132 Williams, Brackette, 43, 50n29, 72, 76n23 World Bank, 16n2, 24n15, 68, 90, 115 world citizenship, 145, 174 Worrell, DeLisle, 49n25 WPA (Working People Alliance), 35, 37, 44 village secrets, 106, 114, 232 visa for sale, 66 violation of, 18 U.S.C., 127