TITLE: The Transfonnation of the Bassa: A Study in Culture, Identity and Social Change, 1830·1987.

The conventional study of social change had tended to perceive the values, attitudes, and cultural institutions of non-Western peoples as "obstacles " to the "rational" organization of society. Policy makers, "modernizing " states and "development " agencies have sought to create institutions which would supposedly diffuse values needed to promote rationality. Though this Modernist position has been severely criticized in the last two and a half decades by Dependency, Undndevelopment and Marxist theorists, the C1itics themselves have not departed from some of the fundamentally Eurocentric premises of ~l(xJefi1ism. Despite the recognition of the role played by the historical linkages between the Western Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America in precipitating the condition described as "underdevelopment", it is taken for granted that the desired goal of "development " is the creation of Western type "advanced " societies. The case of the Bassa indlcates the dreams and aspirations of the targets of "development", may differ fundamentally from the agendas of gO \ emments and development agencies. People in rural communities like the Bassa have thei