La littératie pulaar : nationalisme culturel, mouvement social ou instrument du développement ?

• Main Author: Marie-Ève Humery
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Les éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme 2013-05-01
• Series: Cahiers de la Recherche sur l'Education et les Savoirs
• Subjects: Development; Fula language (Pulaar); Fulani people; Literacy; Women’s empowerment
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cres/2348

Can international literacy projects be harmful to socially integrated and sustainable literacy, including mother tongue literacy? What we call here mouvement Pulaar offers a fruitful case study to discuss this issue. This article analyzes the relationship between Haalpulaar’en people (northern Senegal) and development agents. First language literacy had in fact been promoted as part of an international program for local development. The mouvement Pulaar is based on people’s desire to read and write in Fula, as a way to preserve their cultural identity that might be threatened by the expansion of other languages, but also as a way to produce changes in social relations based on gender, age or social status. Discussing the motivations and the social changes and dynamics produced by Pulaar literacy projects as they are perceived by villagers, this fieldwork-based paper will identify the lines of a complex, ambivalent and sometimes fluctuating framework between these opposing forces: an obvious Pulaar literacy desire on one hand and on the other hand the issue of controlling the socio-scriptural space.