Martin Henry
WHAT EDWARD Seaga has done in his inaugural lecture as Distinguished Fellow of the UWI School of Graduate Studies and Research is nothing less than the elaboration of a grand theory of Jamaican cultural identity. Under the innocuous title of 'The Folk Roots of Jamaican Cultural Identity,' he integrates a web of connections among child-rearing practices, cultural history and current patterns of behaviour.
Generating theories is what academicians do. And Mr. Seaga is now one of them. His theory now requires hard critical analysis for its empirical soundness and utility as an explanation and as a predictor of our observed and lived cultural reality, and not just fawning adulation.
But Mr. Seaga has spent most of his life as a man of action in the political arena, an arena in which his cultural theory is of the greatest significance. For culture has to be a major factor in the out-turns of political programmes of action. The huge question tantalisingly left unanswered last Thursday evening at Mona was the implications for political and social action of the views expressed. Mr. Seaga's views on "cultural identity" are far less sentimentally positive than some others which have been dominating the thinking and defining the field. And some of the cultural traits he identifies and their roots must be enormous obstacles to what he himself understands as 'development' and has articulated in numerous budget speeches.
I have significant problems with the general direction of cultural studies in Jamaica. The excessive tilt of both academic scholarship and popular views on culture in one particular direction, driven by heroic sentiment, belies the rich integrated mix which defines Jamaican 'cultural identity', if there is any such homogenous and identifiable thing. "Nothing, save the omnipresence of Jehovah, is more all embracing than the definition of 'culture': the totality of beliefs, behaviour and values which shapes and is shaped by humanity," Mr. Seaga tells us at the start.
Neither in the oral presentation nor in his subsequent Sunday Gleaner column has Mr. Seaga let on to the fact that he was proposing a major integrative theory. But the organisation of the text in print makes clear that he is conscious of the fact. He sets a cause-effect relationship where agents of causation are discussed and then their results set off in bold-type face as a conclusion.
So having discussed the cultural and economic weaknesses in early childhood nutrition, he concludes: "The consequential impact in terms of inadequate development begins from this primary stage, setting the base for educational under-achievement and behaviour problems in childhood years and beyond. A trait of cultural identity begins to take form."
After reviewing patterns of infant training, he infers that: "This lack of regimentation contributes to another personality trait, satisfaction on demand, which begins to emerge in the early mould of cultural identity."
Mr. Seaga links both submissiveness and aggression to methods of harsh discipline. The struggle for space and scarce resources is linked to several cultural identity traits like impulsiveness and indiscipline "indifference to regimes of conduct". But the individualism in the culture is "the resource base and the crucible by which in many forms and many ways, self-expression is shaped into successful art, spiritual liberation, athletic elegance, ingenious trade practices and cunning devices of all types." Individualism is balanced by a spirit of sharing.
The lecture touched upon the overwhelming demand for respect and its link to violence, the sense of justice and the cry for it, and on faith as fundamental elements of the Jamaican psyche and culture. It surveyed family structure and function and the impact of Brer Anancy on cultural patterns.
Mr. Seaga asserts that "those who live in traditional Jamaica have never had the assertiveness of a free people able to re-define their identity." But identity is not an engineering feat; it evolves and is transformed by all kinds of historical and social forces which people are seldom conscious of and which they can't precisely control.
Nor can people simply choose from the mix of many traits that identify folk Jamaica culturally the one which mirrors them or attaches them to the roots of traditional folk society and so find their true cultural identity, as Mr. Seaga leaves us to do. So much of that identity is an imposition from the earliest infancy and from history as the lecture starts out by acknowledging.
Mr. Seaga has not even attempted to explain why when virtually every 'cause', like poverty and harsh discipline, has been worse in the past so many negative 'effects', like violent aggression, were better.
Politicians have largely ridden on the back of the culture like Brer Anancy on Brer Tiger's back, leaving its negative features identified by the longest serving parliamentarian unchallenged, indeed often celebrated. A programme of action for socio-cultural transformation, drawing on the Seaga theory, awaits their proper attention.
Martin Henry is a communication
specialist.
