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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Individualism, community, and cooperatives in the development thinking of the Union Soudanaise-RDA, 1946-1960
Author:Van Beusekom, Monica M.ISNI
Year:2008
Periodical:African Studies Review
Volume:51
Issue:2
Pages:1-25
Language:English
Geographic term:Mali
Subjects:rural development
ideologies
Union Soudanaise Rassemblement Démocratique Africain
colonial period
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/article/252442/pdf
Abstract:During the late colonial era (1946-1960), nationalists and colonial officials in French Soudan (Mali) engaged in extensive discussions with each other and among themselves about rural development. They shared a language of development centred on the concepts of tradition, modernity, community, and individualism. This article focuses on the development thinking of the leaders of French Soudan's principal nationalist party, the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US/RDA). Both US/RDA leaders and French ethnographers and officials considered the relationship between individual and collective interests as central to their analysis of rural development. Their shared development language permitted collaboration but also masked important differences in nationalist and colonial analyses of social change and the direction of rural development. Particular areas of contention were social evolutionary models of change, the likelihood of rising individualism, and the potential of communitarian development. The patterns of interaction in this debate reveal that intellectual exchanges between and among officials and nationalists were multidirectional and characterized not by borrowing but by exchange, adaptation, and reformulation. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]
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