Amerindian development in Guyana: legal documents as background to discourse practice

Abstract

This article is based on fieldwork in Guyana on the legitimation of Amerindian voices within official development for a. It focuses on the material and textual context to development discourse and the relationship between legal documents and situated discourse practice within this. Documents produced by Makushi communities and the government are analysed in terms of: (i) the participant roles they construct and the representations they implicitly construe; and (ii) the meaning of such stereotyping as a move within a wider and more dynamic discourse. The possibility of exploiting discursive tensions between official texts, situated development practice and the attitudes of key participants is then considered.