Enacted cultural critique: Examining everyday violence in Garo Hills

ABSTRACT

This article is a critical ethnographic illustration of community psychology praxis as enacted cultural critique. Community psychology praxis involves cultural critique so as to challenge, subvert, resist, and transform disempowering cultural constructions. Although it is important to appreciate and attend to cultural norms, there are many contexts where existing norms serve to marginalize communities. Drawing from a youth participatory action research initiative in the Garo Hills region of Northeast India, we examine the implications of community psychology praxis as enacted cultural critique in the context of endemic ethnic conflict. Enacted cultural critique in such a context entails deliberate, self-conscious efforts to interpret or make sense of the existing cultural context and create new ones. This creative activity involves collectively imagining, saying, writing, sculpting, fashioning and/or building new ways of being in and understanding our shared world. Our approach is characterized by an explicit recognition of the political nature of cultural analysis, which represents a significant departure from traditional, apolitical understanding of culture. Using the lens of community psychology praxis also allows for a more agentive view of culture–one that acknowledges that individuals and communities (re)create and (re)write culture through practices of everyday life and social and political mobilization.

KEYWORDS:

• Enacted cultural critique
• ethnic conflict
• participatory action research

Notes

The definition of youth is culturally and historically contingent. We adopt the definition of youth as demarcated in the Indian context, i.e., 15–35 years. However, most of the participants were in the age range of 20–25.

http://divyajeevan.org/.

The Office of the Deputy Commissioner is the highest administrative position at the district level. They are bureaucrats appointed through the Indian Administrative Services and are usually posted in the districts for a period of four years. In this instance the Deputy Commissioner hails from New Delhi and was assigned to the state of Meghalaya.

The word communal here connotes ethnic exclusivity. It is used to describe those who endorse antagonism along ethnic lines.