Haunting Griaule: Experiences from the Restudy of the Dogon

Abstract

It really was a chance occasion, just before Christmas 2003. On my way to the Dogon area I had greeted my friends in Sangha, and was speaking with a Dutch friend, when a French tourist lady suddenly barged into the hall of the hotel and asked me: “There should be a cavern with a mural depicting Sirius and the position of all the planets. I saw it in a book. Where is it?”. My friend smiled wrily, amused by the irony of situation: by chance the lady had fallen upon the one who had spent decennia to disprove this kind of “information”. “In what book?” I asked, and named a few. It was none of these, and she could not tell me. Cautiously (maybe she had planned her whole trip around this Sirius “experience”) I explained to her that though there was a lot to see, this particular mural did not exist. She left immediately, probably convinced she stumbled on a real ignoramus.In retrospect I never meant to criticize Marcel Griaule, it just happened as a consequence of other choices, which eventually led me to Dogon country. After completing my PhD thesis on the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroun and northeastern Nigeria, I started scouting for a second area of field research. For two reasons, I wanted a comparable setting: to allow myself to feel at home easily because I seemed to have less time, and to use in general the approach of controlled comparison. In my first field research I had made a more or less classic ethnography of a group of comparable size (150,000) in a similar environment, living in the Mandara Mountains south of Lake Chad and straddling the border between northern Cameroun and North Eastern Nigeria.

Art and the individual in African masquerades Introduction

“…And because I wanted to hear what people had to tell me about their experiences, rather than fit them within some predetermined frame, I tried to disencumber myself when interviewing from the ideas and information I had read prior to beginning my fieldwork. More specifically, I sought to distinguish between using earlier studies to formulate questions to open the field of inquiry, and using them to guide people into expected answers, thereby closing the field (see also van Beek 1991; 2004; Brett-Smith 1994: 17; Amselle 1998: 35; Strother 2001). The authors of the articles here draw on a range of methods to open their analysis of masquerade.…”