Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 20, 2015 Letters
Dear Editor,
I write to correct misinformation in Freddie Kissoon’s column (Oct 19) on the nationality of the reputable anthropologist R.T Smith. Freddie penned: “… I saw the news of the death of one of Guyana’s most learned and prolific scholars, Professor Raymond T. Smith… .” Raymond T. Smith was a white Englishman; he was not Guyanese. Yes, he was a scholar unlike Freddie. According to Smith’s website, “he was born in 1925 in England and served in the Royal Air Force before finishing his studies in social anthropology at Pembroke College in Cambridge. He graduated with a PhD in anthropology in 1954 and then worked at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. It was there that he began his field research into economic and kinship studies in the West Indies and particularly in British Guiana”.
Smith was a lecturer and researcher at the UCWI (now UWI) when he did research in West Coast Berbice for his doctorate – thesis titled The Negro family of British Guiana that later became a book. Later, together with Chandra Jayawardena, a Sri Lankan who unlike Freddie wrote several articles in accredited peer reviewed journals, Smith did extensive research on sugar and rice workers on the West Coast of Demerara. He then wrote his book British Guiana.
Smith has written extensively on ethnicity, kinship, ethnography, urban poverty, race and class, gender, social change, etc. He knew the Caribbean well. He lived in Jamaica and spent time in Guyana. He studied both Indians and Africans.
Raymond Smith understood the history and culture of Indo-Guyanese and their struggle for acceptance/respectability in the society. Also he empathised with Cheddi Jagan’s politics” to empower the poor and working class.
Smith, after moving around for a while, settled down at the University of Chicago from where he retired as Emeritus Professor in 1995. Smith also taught at McGill University, Montreal; Freddie would know McGill well. It is interesting that Freddie said he studied Smith’s work, but he never quoted the scholar in any of his articles – that is odd.
Smith did not pursue any recent research on Guyana; it is not known whether he feels Guyana was better off under colonialism. But few would disagree with Freddie that Guyana and most former colonial societies are economically and socially worse off today than under White rule.
Vishnu Bisram
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