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.

Drawing on Anthony Giddens's notion of the “duality of structures” and on Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, Galvan theoretically situates his analysis in the interplay of the formal and informal aspects of institutions (Chapter 1). He employs a “thick description” research strategy, skillfully combining demographic surveys, structured and open-ended interviews, and ethnographic participant observation to collect intensively detailed data on institutional changes introduced first under colonial rule and then by the postcolonial state in the land tenure and cultivation systems, and on responses to these changes, among the Serer of Siin. This is a subset of the larger but culturally and politically heterogeneous Serer ethnic group who live in an area that constituted the precolonial kingdom of Siin but now forms the administrative subzone of Njafaj in western Senegal (Chapter 2).

Galvan's careful data analysis turns on the notion of “institutional syncretism,” the continuing process of creative bricolage by which Serer peasants blend elements of imposed and existing institutions by drawing on the interpretive and behavioral framework of the latter to respond strategically to the incentive structures of the former. But institutional syncretism is not a reflexive reaction of disembodied atavistic peasants to the pressures of modernization. It is an incremental process structured by traditional ideology, culture, and associated moral values that endows institutions with legitimacy and gives meaning to resulting patterns of social, economic and political relationships. As the data analysis in Chapter 3 shows, Serer peasants are enmeshed within the traditional ideological and cultural frameworks and rely on the moral values embodied in these frameworks to interpret and accommodate the conflicting incentives of new and old institutions. But the strategic use of these moral values is the contingent outcome of conflicting historical memory and contested interpretations of tradition and culture that correlate with social structural variations in caste, age, gender, education, wealth, stated religious affiliations, and degree of religious orthodoxy. The result is the incremental adoption of new institutions and the uneven transformation of both new and old institutions.

For example, in response to the commodification of the economy, the expansion of the profitable peanut production, and the standardization of land tenure through the introduction of individual ownership and alienation rights under colonial rule, the Serer peasants adapted the traditional land tenure system based on a clear distinction between title and usufruct rights and enforcement by the lamans. The syncretic adaptation, which involved the informal practice of pawning land as collateral in exchange for a cash loan, successfully integrated the peasants into the profitable cash-crop economy without totally eradicating traditional notions and practice of land tenure, but also restricted the introduction of individualized freehold property rights (Chapter 4). The postcolonial Senegalese government introduced a comprehensive National Domain Law designed in part to correct this problem of “incomplete modernization” by transferring authority over the enforcement of the new land tenure system based on individual freehold and alienation rights from the lamans to state agencies. But by destroying the traditional local authority structures instead of co-opting them, the new institutional framework for the governance of land use failed to secure the legitimacy needed for the successful achievement of its stated goals. The result was a dual tenure system, one based on the formal institutions of the National Domain Law and the other based on the traditional informally negotiated arrangements, with corresponding decline in productivity and deterioration of land management (Chapter 5).

The Senegalese government's ensuing attempt to correct these problems through the creation of democratically elected rural councils also failed in fully achieving their stated objectives, largely because of the dual and inherently contradictory institutional position of the rural councils as elected bodies and as agents of the centralized state. The demands of administrative uniformity limited the councils' ability to respond flexibly with locally appropriate strategies to the varied concerns of the peasants who elected them. So Serer peasants, even as they strategically used and adapted the official language of rights and equality and the administrative procedures of the rural councils (pp. 184–90), also vilified the rural councils as alien institutions with no legitimacy in local culture (pp. 190–206).

Galvan's theoretical contribution lies in highlighting the interaction of structure and agency as the principal theoretical mechanism animating institutional syncretism. He correctly emphasizes the centrality of agency in reconstituting institutions but avoids the disembodied reflexivity of thin rational-choice explanations, as well as the structural determinism of institutional explanations. By stressing the contextual embeddedness of institutions, he draws attention to the strategic constraints on rational choice and, hence, to the contingencies that typically attend institutional choice and institutional outcomes.

Unfortunately, this contribution remains incomplete. The empirical materials in The State Must Be Our Master of Fire powerfully confirm the importance of informal institutions in securing high levels of self-enforcement, reducing transaction costs, and commanding popular legitimacy, three variables that are considered in comparative scholarship to be crucial determinants of institutional performance. But this importance, which is recognized only at the end of the book (p. 213), is never systematically theorized. Specification of the mechanisms by which high self-enforcement, reduced transaction costs, and sustained popular legitimacy help to solidify the cultural foundations that give institutions their strategic vitality and thus promote culturally sustainable development would have greatly enhanced the broader comparative utility of the book. For despite the unwarranted claim of the “sui generis qualities” of local culture and informal institutions (p. 228), the issues of institutional embeddedness and the interaction of culture and institutions in shaping political, social, and economic outcomes so creatively examined in the book have universal relevance.