The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal

Extract

The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. By Dennis C. Galvan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 331p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Oral history among the Serer ethnic group in western Senegal suggests that a heroic itinerant ancestor founded the community in a parcel of land he cleared by setting fire to the brush and the forest. This original fire is the source of the authority over claims to control and use the land that became institutionalized in the inheritable office now widely known by the title of laman (the “master of fire”). With the commodification of the economy under colonial rule, the introduction of a new land tenure system, and the creation of elected rural councils for local management of land tenure by the postcolonial government, the state has replaced the lamans as the master of fire. This history provides the fascinating title and the substantive focus of Dennis Galvan's interesting book that addresses theoretically important and empirically relevant issues concerning the relative impact of structure and agency on the choice of new institutions, the resulting impact of embedded institutions on social and economic development, and, more broadly, the relationship among institutions, culture, and development.