Dennis Galvan

Political Turnover and Social Change in Senegal

On 19 March 2000, Senegal reclaimed its cherished status as Africa’s most “advanced” democracy. On that day, Abdoulaye Wade, Senegal’s dominant political opposition figure for the last quarter-century and a five-time presidential candidate, defeated 19-year incumbent Abdou Diouf of the Socialist Party in the second round of the presidential election. The Socialists had been in power under various names since the country’s independence in 1960, first under famed poet and independence leader Léopold Sédar Senghor, and, following Senghor’s voluntary resignation in 1980, under Diouf, his handpicked successor. Despite a long tradition of electoral self-rule, Africa’s most vibrant free press, and open party competition, Senegal’s democratic credentials had been called into question for at least a decade by the apparent impossibility of removing the Socialist Party from office. By graciously accepting defeat, Diouf, like his counterparts in Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT), broke the political monopoly of a deeply entrenched and dominant ruling party. At long last, sopi—the word for change in the Wolof language and the rallying cry of Wade’s opposition movement—had arrived. Given the regional context, Wade’s victory was all the more significant: Senegal became one of the few African countries to remove a head of government at the ballot box. Moreover, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal’s colonial sister state and postcolonial reference society, had just suffered its first military coup in December 1999. Dennis Galvan is associate professor in the department of political science and the international studies program at the University of Oregon. He has published on land tenure change, village-level politics, democratization, and cultural identity in Francophone Africa. His book The State Must Be the Master of Fire: Syncretism and Sustainable Development in Senegal will be published by the University of California Press in 2002.

The social reproduction of community-based development: syncretism and sustainability in a Senegalese farmers' association

This article traces the rise and decline of a grassroots community organisation in rural Senegal. It has three aims. First, it problematises the sometimes idealistic nature of the rhetoric and literature on community-based development. Second, it suggests three factors that contribute to the effectiveness of rural self-help organisations : educated and technocratically skilled leadership, unintentionally benevolent state neglect, and a willingness to syncretically recycle elements of ‘ traditional ’ social order and culture in the service of contemporary development tasks. Finally, the demise of the community-based organisation examined here suggests a need to shift focus away from the institutionalisation of communitybased or civil society organisations per se, and to consider instead the routinisation of the participatory, empowering, and deliberative socio-political conditions that make possible the regular emergence of new grassroots organisations across time within a given community. Recent events (since 2005) in the village in question support this shift, as a new generation of community leaders has begun to craft a new community organisation, explicitly built from the detritus of the older organisation described in this article.

Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change

Introduction: Beyond Dualist Social Science: The Mangle of Order and Change PART I. RELATIONALITY Chapter 1. Processes of Creative Syncretism: Experiential Origins of Institutional Order and Change -Gerald Berk and Dennis C. Galvan Chapter 2. Ecological Explanation -Chris Ansell Chapter 3. Governance Architectures for Learning and Self-Recomposition in Chinese Industrial Upgrading -Gary Herrigel, Volker Wittke, and Ulrich Voskamp Chapter 4. Reconfiguring Industry Structure: Obama and the Rescue of the Auto Companies -Steven Amberg PART II. ASSEMBLAGE Chapter 5. Animating Institutional Skeletons: The Contributions of Subaltern Resistance to the Reinforcement of Land Boards in Botswana -Ato Kwamena Onoma Chapter 6. Creating Political Strategy, Controlling Political Work: Edward Bernays and the Emergence of the Political Consultant -Adam Sheingate Chapter 7. Accidental Hegemony: How the System of National Accounts Became a Global Institution -Yoshiko M. Herrera Chapter 8. The Fluidity of Labor Politics in Postcommunist Transitions: Rethinking the Narrative of Russian Labor Quiescence -Rudra Sil PART III. TIME Chapter 9. From Birmingham to Baghdad: The Micropolitics of Partisan Identification -Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes Chapter 10. The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial Injustice in the United States -Kevin Bruyneel Chapter 11. Interest in the Absence of Articulation: Small Business and Islamist Parties in Algeria -Deborah Harrold Conclusion: An Invitation to Political Creativity Notes List of Contributors Index Acknowledgments

The Dilemma of Institutional Adaptation and the Role of Syncretism

Forty years ago, Reinhard Bendix (1967) attacked the “invidious distinction between modernity and tradition” upon which then-prevailing approaches to political and economic development were predicated. Around the same time, a number of other scholars began to identify processes through which quintessentially “traditional” social formations

Syncretism and Local-Level Democracy in Rural Senegal

Institutional syncretism—a creative process of taking apart component elements of institutions from more than one origin for the purpose of putting together new, recombinant institutional structures—helps account for the relatively rare instances when democratic governance becomes consolidated, legitimate, and effective in postcolonial societies. This chapter follows efforts to syncretically modify local-level democratic institutions in one region of rural Senegal over the last three decades. The analysis proceeds in three steps or layers.

Conscription, Collaboration, and Self-Cutting in Rural Senegal During and After World War II

During and after World War II, rural Senegalese conscripts experienced coercion, collaboration, and moments of unauthorised control as they were recruited to, survived, and took creative advantage of European military service. Massive mobilisation of Senegalese recruits not only helped to liberate France, it also afforded new opportunities for willful action in the spaces between collusion and evasion, collaboration and resistance.

Everyday Cultural Politics, Syncretism, and Cultural Policy

Cultural policy, designed and engineered by elites and states, should be understood in relation to an underlying cultural politics, processes of ongoing contestation implicating many actors, at all levels, in transformations of meaning, symbols, habits, values, and identity. As noted elsewhere in this volume, the politics of culture (let alone something as formal as cultural policy) has long been shackled to an essentialist, static, primordialist notion of culture itself, as a hard-wired cognitive and semiotic script, which undergirds human action and taken-for-granted routine. This is true in “old school” anthropology (Geertz, 1973), more “cutting edge” thinking on action and reflexivity (Bourdieu, 1977), the classics of political culture (Almond and Verba, 1963), mainstream institutionalism (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991), and the latest reincarnations of modernization theory in studies of global convergence (Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).