Mali
A staged creation, an amphibious ancestor, and an argument about what the fieldwork found.
Dogon cosmology as it reached print is a staged creation. In the account Marcel Griaule published from his conversations with the elder Ogotemmêli, the world is brought into order through successive acts rather than a single one, and its ordering principle is the word: speech given to matter, weaving and granary and field arranged as diagrams of the same structure. The Nommo, amphibious ancestral beings, descend and establish the patterns that hold the world in shape.
The end implied by this scheme is not a cataclysm but a completion. A creation laid out in stages by design is a creation whose design can be finished, and the Dogon material locates the end in the exhaustion of an order rather than in its violent destruction. That places it beside the staged and numbered world-ages of other traditions while keeping a distinct emphasis on the spoken word as the thing that holds the cosmos together.
Mali also carries the corpus's sharpest methodological warning. In 1991 Walter van Beek published fieldwork among the Dogon which failed to find the elaborate cosmology, and particularly the astronomical claims of Le Renard pâle, among the people he worked with; he argued that much of it emerged from the interaction between Griaule and a small number of informants. The dispute is unresolved and is part of the record, not a footnote to it. The narrative is set out in The Nommo and the Word: the Dogon End and the system in Dogon Cosmogony and the Word, while the Yoruba material offers a West African cyclical scheme documented through a different route. What Mali supplies is a reminder that a tradition's recorded shape can be an artefact of how it was recorded.
See also
- The Nommo and the Word: the Dogon EndThe end as recollection: the Dogon cosmos is a word spoken by the creator, scatt
- Dogon Cosmogony and the WordA cosmos created in stages from the word of Amma, seeded by the amphibious Nommo
- The Ifá Corpus and the Ages of the WorldA divinable end: the Yoruba world ages are patterns in the Ifá corpus, and the d
Further reading
- Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas · Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1965 (French original Dieu d'eau, 1948) The primary account, framed as thirty-three days of instruction from the elder Ogotemmêli.
- Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le Renard pâle · Institut d'Ethnologie, Paris, 1965 The extended cosmological system, including the disputed astronomical material.
- Walter van Beek, 'Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule' · Current Anthropology 32, 1991 Fieldwork that could not reproduce Griaule's cosmology among the Dogon he consulted.