Last Friday afternoon I attended the launch of Rudy Insanally’s The Guyanese culture: Fusion or Diffusion? at Moray House, and given that the author majored in English and literature, I was expecting to be presented with a treatise on Guyanese music, art, theatre, literature, etc. However, Insanally took the broader view of culture, viewing it as being the norms, values and beliefs of a people. And as Dr. Paloma Mohamed, who did the book review for the event, observed, on the whole the volume analyses some of our more pressing political issues.
Being the quintessential diplomat who spent decades in Guyana’s diplomatic service, Rudy possesses an in-depth and nuanced understanding of both his internal and external environments, and now in retirement, he seeks to apply this awareness in a constructive disquisition about our myriad political problems set in the framework of our developing political culture, which he defines as ‘the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and govern behaviour in the political system.’
