Download - Final Project (Cultural Anthropology)

Cultural Anthropology Final Project December 18, 2014

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Mythology and religion among the Dogons in Mali Text & photos: Anette Lillevang Kristiansen - We need to take a long way around the village Yaye, it’s around three to four kilometer more, but we must avoid getting a fish! My Italian friend Andrea and I were both looking at him, confused and smiling a tiny little bit. What was this young guy talking about? He was not joking, but deadly serious as he stood there with his primitive head gear and the worm flip flaps. But avoid a fish – that was the most ridiculous any of us had ever heard! In the morning we had woken up on the rooftop of a mud hut in the village of Tireli after a night with a spectacular view to the most magnificent sky, I have almost ever seen in my entire life. It was day five on our hike in Dogon country in the Westafrican country of Mali, a place that in its beauty surpass the most I had seen in this part of the African continent. We had been hiking next to the Bandiagara escarpment, which is a cliff around 225 kilometers long in Central Mali a couple of hundreds kilometers south of the legendary city of Timbuktu.

The only thing I knew about Mali, before I went there was that two French anthropolo-gist had made fieldwork there in the 1930ties. Not any for-eign scholar had ever in that time studied the people of the area – called the Dogons. I more or less came to Westafrica by coincidence, of curiosity I guess. A friend of mine, had traveled the area several times for 30 years, and I was envious and droved by an enormous urge to expe-rience this magnificent place. I knew that the tribe had some very special spiritual rituals and I later on realized that human offerings have been a

common part of the their religious practice and actually still are being practiced in some places. - The person, who is entering the village, where a local fisherman is fishing in the little lake will be handed a fish. The ceremony is going on for two weeks and is held once every year. Nobody knows exactly when the time is, but it’s always during the period of December and January. The one who received the fish will die. And it was January now! Zakari was looking at us seriously.

The member’s of the Dogon tribe is living along the Bandiagara Escarpment, which is a 225-kilometer long cliff in central Mali. They are famous for their very sophisticated culture, religion and cosmology.


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WHAT!! I stirred at him, shocked. But how and why? A fish! No doubt that we for se-curity reasons had to make a long way around this village, but I doubted, that the story could be really true. My western sense of reality was put on a real challenge here and today I know that I was judging very much, but who wouldn’t? But this young guy was born there – in a little village on the plateau called Ningari – and it’s never wise to ignore the natives and their knowledge of the local area. I have known that for year’s and he insisted that we should not go into this specific village. - Well, two years ago a man came into the village of Yaye. He had not heard the warning about the fish. His sister was in the hospital in Sangha and he wanted to visit her. He unsuspectingly received the fish and two weeks later he was killed in a motorcycle accident, explained Zakari and waited for our reaction. In the neighbor cities of Amani and Ireli they have during the years lost around 70 people, who re-ceived a fish and mysterious died few weeks later. The rules are the following according to the Do-gon-tradition: If nobody passed through the village in these two Dogon-weeks of this fishing-ceremony, it will automatically be the oldest man in the village, who dies. You can turn around af-ter entering the village hundred meters before the lake, if you are lucky enough to discover the fish-ing in time, but as soon as you have received a fish, there is no way out – you are going to die soon-er or later, whether you want it or not.1 Nobody knows exactly if it’s deadly to tourists, who by mistake are entering Yaye, but the fact is that the family in the village has a very strong fetish and nobody dares to go against the old tradi-tions. According to our young Dogon-guide, the problem is the lake. - The government could decide to fill up the lake, then the problem would be solved, and visitors to the village should not fear to go there anymore, but nobody knows how the ancestral spirits will react, and that’s why the government hesitates, Zakari tells us. Needless to say, we avoided getting a fish; we walked through the dry desert around three to four kilometers around the village of Yaye and arrived safely to the next village on the route, Ireli.

1 ”Mystik og menneskeofringer – på eventyr i hjertet af Vestafrika” ( in Danish, translated: “Mystics and human Sacrifices – adven-tures in the heart of Westafrica” (my own article, that was published in the magazine Globen of The Danish Travelers Guild, 2009.)

The Dogons are laid back people, who like to tell stories to each other – and their story telling tradition is almost as rich as their colorful world of myth. The scholars today don’t know much about ancient Mali, because all the story telling was oral, so no records have been found.


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Ancient traditions and thoughts My motivation for making this project about the Dogons is that since I did the trip in Mali in 2009, I have read a lot about this special tribe. After my arrival to Denmark, I wrote an article about the hike and the mysterious experience with the fish-story (footnote 1.) During the hike and the visit in the small villages along the escarpment, I realized that the Dogons are some of the most superstitious people I have ever met. It made me studying a lot more about the tribe and attempts to understand where their very special mythology and rituals are coming from. The thing is that they have not changed their rituals, their way of thinking and way to see the world and its creation a lot. Even though they have been confronted with tourists and western influence they have kept many of their original beliefs about the creation myth, their ceremonies, sacred festi-vals and cosmology. The Dogon tribe has some of the most spectacular beliefs in Africa, they still celebrate the old an-cestral spirits and even today the religion and spirituality has a great influence on the daily life. Many places in Africa they are worshipping spirits and believes black and white magic for instance in Benin and Togo, where witch doctors are using voodoo and you go to a medicine market with dried animals to get cured for your illnesses.

As a traveler among the Do-gons you really feel that you are being placed in a time warp beyond all kinds of real-ity and for a westerner rea-sonable thinking. Everything is being turned upside down and you come to the point where you question yourself, if there are more mysteries in this world that you will ever understand. For this project I want to in-vestigate how the mythology and superstition influence the Dogons today and I want to compare what the two French anthropologists Marcel Gri-aule and Germaine Dieterlen through their fieldwork expe-rienced in that time with my own experiences.

Everywhere along the cliff you can see the special architecture of the Dogons; these houses are mainly for the storage of millet and other agricultural products and others are religious buildings for the Hogan’s – the Dogon Shaman or priest.


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Through text and photos I will try to enlighten the thoughts behind the Dogon mythology, their rituals and way of think-ing in their daily life. The pro-ject is going to be based on observations and simple field-work during the five-day and 225-kilometer long hike with Zakari and the people I met on the hike. The hike was a part of my 2,5 month trip in Westafrica (Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso) in January-March 2009. Needless to say, when it’s five years ago I am not able to re-member the conversations in details, so my assignment is based on my article and what I can remember from my chatting’s with Zakari. During the hike I also did several interviews with him for the article, but the theoretical framework on this project is based on research by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, because all academic sources always leads to them when talking about the Dogons – as far as I know, they are the only ones, who have been making fieldwork and a deeper research among the tribe. The religious practice Mali in general is one of the places in Westafrica where oral story telling traditions has been used a lot and talking about the history of religion in ancient Mali very little has been recorded. Especially the Sahel area where the Dogon-people is located has a very little evidence2, so I believe that’s one of the reasons why Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen did fieldwork there for years, was be-cause not a lot of scholars knew about the tribes religion, myth and festivals. First of all the Dogons believes reincarnation and when a person dies the members of the tribe cele-brate with a special ceremony that bring the dead’s soul to a place where the ancestors is living. The name of the ceremony is called Yinoun-Yanna and it’s carried out by all members of the traditional Dogon-religion. Officially they are all Christians or Muslims, and in the whole area it’s possible to find churches and mosques, but the aspect of animism (the belief of spirits) is a very important as-pect, no matter which official religion, they are practicing.

2 “Ancient Ghana and Mali”, by Nehemia Levitzion, Methuen & Co Ltd., 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4, 1973, SBN: 416 75820 (page 74)

Some of the more colorful houses in the villages are shrines for the Binu cult – which is associated with spiritual communication. The Dogon religion also has a rich belief system with fetish, which is being worshipped through gifts and sacri-fices of blood from chickens, goats or dogs.


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During the hike we visited the settlements along the cliff and in the village of Begnimato, Zakari showed us some fetish-stones and the house of the local shaman, the so-called Hogon. The Hogon is the spiritual leader of the Dogons and it’s always a male, because men are the ones with the strongest spiritual and magical power. The Hogon’s are responsible for guarding the purity of the soil and therefore officiate at many agricultural ceremonies.3

- When a Hogon dies and the wise men of the village shall find a new Hogon, it can take them up to three years to find him. There are a lot of rules concerning a spiritual leader in the Dogon-religion. Among other things people are not aloud to cry, when the Hogon is dead. If you do it anyway you will die yourself within a year. They don’t consider him dead, but gone on a journey. On the day where he is being chosen as a Hogon you on the other hand have to cry, says Zakari and smiles.

No newly chosen Hogon is under 70 years old, so they can never be spiritual leader for

many years. If the Hogon makes mistakes he will die and if he is being sick, he immediately has to make offerings to the spirits. The Boa serpent is among the ancestors of the Dogons and plays an important role concerning the Hogon. The Hogon is only purifying himself every third month – and it happens when the Boa serpent is visiting him in the nights and licks him – after that he is consid-ered clean and sacred. In the village Zakari shows us several fetish, which looks a bit like a phallus. It can be made of stone, dry mud or wood. Every day the fetish need offerings and one time a year the Dogons gives offerings to the medicine fetish, to avoid sickness. - In the past a fetish demanded human offerings to get a good rainy season. These offerings official-ly stopped long time ago, but some places they still do it. It’s never a tourist or somebody from the village, who is being sacrificed, but always a person from somewhere else. In the villages of Yenda, Tendeli and Tintan they still do it4 before the rainy season. But most plac-es they are Christian and nowadays they are only offering animals. They kill an animal and throw the blood on the fetish. Often it is chickens, dogs, goats or sheep’s. The best effect has a black 3 http://sacredsites.com/africa/mali/dogon.html 4 From the interview with Zakari, I don’t have any evidence if this is true or not or he was just trying to make himself interesting for the tourists.

The Dogons have a rich and highly developed symbolic believe system and everywhere you can find examples of this through art, architecture and handi-craft.


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animal. Its quite difficult to find a completely black animal, most of them will have a little spot of another color somewhere, Zakari explains. The creation of planet earth What Professor Marcel Griaule is doing in the book “Conversations with Ogotemmeli” from 1948 is that he is interviewing the old man Ogotemmeli, who is of Dogon-origin. Ogotemmeli answers Marcel Griaule’s questions and comments on the fieldwork observations. He first concentrates on taking to the elders of the Dogons, but Ogotemmeli was chosen especially because he was one of the best informed5. Griaule is also interviewing the most important totemic priests of the religion, some of those who were priests of the cult of the ancestors. Much of the fieldwork (that last for more than 25 years) was focusing on the spirituality, religious views and mythology of the Dogons. Griaule’s methods were interviews, participation observation and living among the Dogons for years. “God brings you! God brings you!” “Greetings! How is your health?”6 “Welcome! Welcome after weariness! Welcome from the Sun!” That’s the greeting Marcel Griaule gets from Ogotemmeli, when they meets for the first time and in the following years they have lots of conversations about the Dogon religion, their creation myth, life and death. During the book we follow 33 days, where Griaule is inter-viewing Ogotemmeli every day about his life, his culture, the daily life of the Dogons, their beliefs, the spirit cults of the culture, the sacrifices, the symbols and the art – just to mention a few things. The Do-gon universe is very rich, comprehensive and diverse.

5 “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Germaine Dieterlen), published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 (page XVI) 6 “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Germaine Dieterlen), published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 (page 12)

Offerings of animals are necessary for the Dogons to keep the world in balance and harmony and for getting a good harvest and rainy season. In the past they sacrificed human beings, and some places they still do it according to our guide.


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What they focus on in the beginning of their conversations is how the stars were created by the one and only God Amma and his complicated process of creating the sun and the moon. Amma took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him – as he had also done with the stars.7 The myth continues with the creation of the human beings the same way and if you ask the Dogons today you will get the same answer about how the world were created. In that way, my sensation when I was there was, that the basic things have not changed a lot. The Dogons still believes the same as they have done for centuries – not much has changed concerning the basic of their religious practice and ideas about heaven, earth and humanity.

Even though they are Chris-tians and Muslims and prac-tice these religions, the ani-mism is still a strong and im-portant part of their culture. Their picture of the universe is the same as it has been from the beginning. This typi-cal way of thinking as an an-imistic believer is completely intact – that you need to be “friends” with the God and the ancestral spirits are very clear here. You need to satis-fied the spirits every day dur-ing offerings, never go to the point where the spirits are getting angry with you, be-cause then the disasters will get you. It’s a kind of thinking that is seen very clear also in the

religion on Bali. They worships the traditional Hindu gods, but the religion is a mix of pure Hindu-ism and animism, where they believes that the good spirits are living in the high mountains and the evil spirits are housed in the deep sea. This comparative is maybe a bit out of contexts in this pro-ject, but it’s exactly the same principals. The Dogon religion is very rich when it comes to symbolic and rituals and “Culture, the shared un-derstanding of the group, is largely learned and expressed though symbolic communication”8. The symbols in the Dogon-religion and way of thinking is something this special tribe share and nobody else can fully understand their symbolic world. It’s a system of symbolism they have developed during many generations and something that the children there learn from when they are very small. Among a culture many symbols in languages, social action and artifacts are it’s key symbols, those

7 “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Germaine Dieterlen), published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 (page 12) 8 ”Thinking like an Anthropologist – Chapter 8, What does it mean? The Interpretive Question, page 283.

The rich and colorful world of mythology is often seen in their handicraft. They color their cloth with natural colors and especially the color blue is very often seen. Another attraction for the tourists is the Dogon masks. They are not so colorful, but have their own very special expression.


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that express the important truth9. For the Dogons their symbolism are very important to them and it’s a very basic part of their religion. Their rituals are mainly based on the worshipping of the di-vine and in general rituals can be defined as a formal behavior, composed of symbolic arts, utter-ances and objects that express beliefs in the important truth10 The Dogon cults In the book “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” they also discuss the different kinds of cults for instance the Cult of the Binu, which is a totemic practice and it has complex associations with the Dogon’s sacred places used for ancestor worship, spirit communication and agricultural sacrifices.11 “Binu worship venerates the souls of eight ancestors and of certain men of note, who fol-lowed in the wake of the eight in later times, and secure their favour on behalf of the liv-ing”12 “In order to reveal him-self, a Binu would appear to one of his descendants in hu-man or animal form and give him one of the covenant-stones (dogué) found in the tomb of Lebé13 (Lebé is the Earth God and has its own cult) – so lots of myth are connected to the Dogon-religion, but how does this way of thinking effects the daily life of the Dogons? They are doing the needed offerings, the daily ones, the yearly ones and tries to avoid the taboos, like going into the villages when they risk getting a fish etc. I don’t think they are think-ing a lot about these things in their daily life, it’s an integrated part of their life and have been it for centuries and that’s just the way it is. Nobody is questioning these things and nobody is questioning the decision-making of the Hogon or the other wise men. 9 ”Thinking like an Anthropologist – Chapter 8, What does it mean? The Interpretive Question, page 291. 10 ”Thinking like an Anthropologist – Chapter 8, What does it mean? The Interpretive Question, page 291. 11 http://sacredsites.com/africa/mali/dogon.html 12 “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Ger-maine Dieterlen), published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 (page 123) 13 “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Ger-maine Dieterlen), published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 (page 123)

The Courthouse is the place where all decision-making takes place and only the wise and high status men like the Hogon’s (the shamans) of the village are aloud to go there.


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The Dogons are farmers and traders and are dependent on a good rainy season for their crops, so the importance of offerings to Amma and the spirits for a good harvest is also of huge significance. But their daily life is about surviving, getting food and water, selling or exchanging their goods on the local market and worshipping the spirits for good friendship, luck and a good health. In the village Ireli we went to see the Hogan’s house and the “courthouse” which is a low building with a roof of straw. It’s here the wise men discuss problems and it’s the center of the decision making of the community. The houses are very low, because it’s not the plan that a man shall be able to stand upright in there, only sitting. One cannot rise in anger in this sacred house, he have to go out if he is angry or disagree and need to stand up. No aggressive reaction indoor. The Dogon way of bury the dead are also still the same. The Dogons are carrying the body through the village. It will usually be buried the day after the death. They rap the body in white cloth. A priest or another person of high status will be rapped in a precious piece of cloth. The body is being lifted up to one of the sacred caves in the cliff and put in the burial chamber. The door is sealed with mud and a few days after they will celebrate the burial with a ceremony and a party. Zakari told us that several hundred people are buried in the caves. The Dogons believes that another tribe was living along the cliff before them. This group of people was called the Tellem-people, and nobody knows where they originally came from. The Dogons

believes that the Tellems had special magic power, so they were able to fly up to the caves, that was their homes. They carved these caves or niches several hundred meters over the ground in the vertical face of the cliff. Scholars to-day mean that there have been more threes in that time, so it was possible for the Tellems to make rope of plant fibers and pieces of bark and then climb down from above to their homes. It is these manmade caves the Dogons are using for burial chambers. The Tellem-people and the Dogons are not the only ones in the world who has been

burring their deaths in very difficult accessible caves. Another example of this is the People of the Clouds in Chacapoyas in northeastern Peru. In the place called La Pataca the have used exactly the same principle when they buried the dead. The Chacapoyan’s has also been placed the bodies in cave tombs on the vertical rock face14.

14 Film: ”Lost Kingdoms of South America – People of the Clouds” – BBC Scotland, 2013.

The Dogons are very skillful when it comes to handicraft and art and they sell their products to the tourists to get an income. They are basically farmers and grow millet and other agriculture products to sell on the local markets.


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Tourists as a threat As I said, I don’t think the Dogon-way of thinking has changed a lot from the time when Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen was doing their fieldwork among the tribe during 25 years begin-ning from 1930’s. Lots of the things mentioned in the book “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” sounds familiar to me comparing to what Zakari told me – meaning the basic things about practicing religion, believing the spirits and keep the different traditions talking about for instance female circumcision, gender roles, taboos and things like that. But one thing has changed - the tourists had arrived and that can mean both positive things and negative. The tribe have, because of the meeting with other cultures, values and ways of thinking, got a sense of the feeling of having money and what it can lead to talking about material things and an urge for education and insight in the rest of the world. Everybody wants to be like the westerners and I don’t think that is a positive development. The majority of the Dogons are still poor; they lack lots of basic things, but still the tourism has brought a bit more wealth to their villages. They can still struggle from starvation, because the har-vest and crops can goes wrong. What is very important for them is the harvest of millet, which is the main ingredient in their nourishment and a couple of years before I visit Mali there had been a very serious draught where the inhabitants of the Dogon country have had very severe starvation problems and they were forced to get support from international humanitar-ian organizations. Because the tourists have come to their area, they have started to make more handi-crafts for selling, and in their work you will often be able to see segments of their religion and mythology. In many ways and many situations you will be able to see it and sense it in their architecture, in the at-mosphere of the villages and in their daily household.

It’s happy and harmonious people you meet, when coming into the small vil-lages along the escarpment, but the Dogons are very spiritual people with a high sense for religious and symbolic understanding. Nobody knows how Do-gon priests in the past have got the knowledge about the little star in the Sirius constellation – that will probably remain a mystery forever.


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The mystery about Sirius They still believe one hundred percent that you will die after a short time, if you have entered a vil-lage and you have received a fish. These thoughts are such an integrated part of their way of think-ing that nobody would ever be able to changes it. At least it will take many generations, but with such a strong story telling tradition the legend will survive for many generations. It’s a way of thinking that is basically driven by fear, like when people don’t like when they see a black cat run-ning over the street and that something terrible will happened if you passes under a ladder. First of all they are living next to or on a spectacular cliff in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the desert, with fully view to the Milkeyway. It makes them in general very spiritual and you will meet a group of people who on the surface are very harmonious and mentally well balanced, that’s the impression you get just after a few moments together with them. There is no doubt that the Dogons are on a very high level talking about spirituality – and this label that we as westerners like to put on them – primitive – is not really true. They are actually quite sophisticated in their knowledge and spirituality and back in the late 1940’s they greatly surprised Griaule and Dieterlen by telling them the secret Dogon myths about the star Sirius (8.6 light years from the earth).15

Dogon priests told the two anthropologists that the star constellation Sirius had a companion star that was in-visible to the human eye. This star was small and incredibly heavy, and that it rotated on its axis. The remarkable is that the companion star of Sirius, called Sirius B, was first photographed in 1970 and it was not seen through telescope until 1862, but The Dogon beliefs, on the other hand, were supposedly thou-sands of years old. The Dogon name for Sirius B is Po Tolo and consists of the word for star Tolo and Po, the name of the smallest seed known to them. They also claim that it is "the heaviest

star," and white. Not until 1926 did Western science discover that this tiny star is a white dwarf, a category of star characterized by very great density.16

15 http://sacredsites.com/africa/mali/dogon.html 16 http://sacredsites.com/africa/mali/dogon.html

Our young guide Zakari was born and raised in a Dogon village and could tell us lots of stories about the culture, it’s religion and their very mysterious way of thinking. He was also the one who saved Andrea and I from getting a fish in the village of Yaye – otherwise I would maybe not have been able to tell this story today.


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The Dogons also have four calendars, one for the Sun, Moon, Sirius, and Venus, and have long known that planets orbit the sun. In many ways these things are making the Dogons the Maya-people of Africa. The Mayas in Mexico and Central America are well known for their calendars. African serenity Generally speaking the whole life of the Dogons is soaked into a very strong fundamental belief that Amma is the God and the spirits have to be satisfied in every possible way to keep everything balanced. I know that it is very easy for westerners to have the tendency to just focus on the positive and romantize things on a trip like the one I did. I was only there for five days, everything was exotic and exiting, but I strongly felt this well known African accept of things are the way they are – a kind of African “following your karma”. There is

this trustful acceptence of the world and what happens shall happen. I don’t know if it’s just a facade, because these people are actually struggling a lot with poverty and starvation or if it’s really their nature. If I asked Zakari about things about the reli-gion and their beliefs he explained it to me like a matter of course and that’s also the impres-sion I get when I read the passages of the book by Marcel Griaule. The Dogons are satisfied, and I think the only concern I heard from Za-kari was the fact that more tourist is making their way to Mali. It was, as I mentioned before, back in 2009 I was there and since then there has been a lot of problems coming up in Mali talking about fun-damentalists and terror attacks. It was in its beginning when I was there, a couple of Ger-man tourists were kidnapped in the northern part of Mali near the city of Gao (it’s the east-ern part near the border to Niger) and since then many troubles have emerged in the desert area around Timbuktu in the central part of Mali. So I don’t know about the situation for the Do-gons today. Tribes like them do often have a very double and ambivalent attitude to tourists.

The tourists come with their western influence no matter what, some think they destroy the culture, but they bring foreign currencies into the country and when the tourists don’t come because of ter-rorism, the culture is suffering economical and they don’t sell any of their handicraft.

Sacred masks for religious dance performances plays a significant role in the Dogon religion. The most sacred of the masks are kept hidden in caves and will only be used for rare festivals like the Sigui-festival, which is only being celebrated very 60. year – next time will be in 2027.


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I remember Zakari and I talked about the festivals of the Dogons. The celebrate their religion and spirits with huge festivals and an important part of these festivals is tribe dance and performance – its by the way not permitted for any tourists, women or children to participate in these events (only a very few foreigners have seen these festivals and always only men), mainly because the Dogons are using very sacred masks for the dance – masks that are sacred because they are magical and very powerful in the spirit. The masks are extremely rare and precious and are only being used for the festivals, where they play a significant role. Normally they are being stored in the caves in the cliff. The most important and spectacular festival is the Sigui-festival, which is only being held every 60. year. The last Sigui-festival was being held in 1967 and the Dogons are very much looking forward to this event in 2027. - The Dogon elders are agreeing that a lot of things will change until that time. The development has been enormous just since the last festival, so nobody knows how the festival is going to be, says Zakari and stirrers out in the horizon, while he is putting his special Dogon head gear on, preparing him self for the rest of the days hike. Conclusion/reflections For me today looking back on the experience I had in Mali – and now with my new anthropology knowledge – I can see that it was a true paradise for a researcher. I was only there for a short time and I would have needed much more time to go deeper into the substance of this special tribe. The place and this ethnic group of people have everything that makes an anthropologist exited. It’s an exotic place, a really thoughtful religious way of living, a complicated belief system, lots of myths, and lots of things that truly belong in an Indiana Jones film. It’s no wonder for me that the two French anthropologist could spend 25 years studying the Dogons – it’s a huge job to just understand just a little part of it and my biggest challenge with this project was also to narrow the topic. I have tried my best. The Dogons also made me realize that there are many things that we as foreigners will never fully understand; it’s again the question about going native. I think you can do it till a certain point, but you can never go all the way. These people are born and raised in a completely different environ-ment, with so different values and beliefs, that as a westerner it demands a huge effort to try to un-derstand it. It’s not impossible, but it will take a long time, as the two French anthropologists did. I know it’s a cliché, but I think tribes like the Dogons has a lot to offer and teach us – people can always learn from each other, but these so-called primitive tribes has kept a sensation for the nature that most modern people have forgot. I am thinking about it every time I read about the ancient egyptians, the Mayas or the Incas of the Andes – this special skills they have and had talking about paying deeply attention to the nature and being dependent of nature. Following the seasonal flood of the Nile, the rainy season of Amazonas and events like that – the modern humanity has almost forgot that, because it’s not necessary for us to pay any attention to it and because we have technology to measure everything – these nature people has much more sensation for nature than we have.


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So what I could hope for was that more modern anthropologists would do fieldwork around the Dogons today to maintain the culture and it’s knowledge. Taking about the participant observations in my project I have tried my best to describe the envi-ronment also during the hike, but to support that I do hope that the photos comes to its right and show how the surroundings were. I have chosen not to put any transcription of the interviews into the text, I cannot remember the questions I asked Zakari, and that’s why I have concentrated on describing the main themes of my experience in Mali. I was together with Zakari and my Italian friend Andrea for all the five days, and we had lots of chit chat, meaning not very structured interviews, but still it gave me a sensation of the main points in the Dogon way of seeing things and how they are thinking. Its not really easy to compare what the two French anthropologists got out of their research and what I discovered during my five days, but my conclusion is as I see it, that the Dogons have basi-cally not changed a lot concerning their religious beliefs, their myths and picture of the universe – the biggest change is the influence from the outside world through tourists and travelers. And what the future will bring to them nobody knows – but there is no doubt that a lot will have changed dramatically when they are going to have their next Sigui-festival in 2027. There is a lot to dig into when talking about the Dogons and I hope that I have succeeded in show-ing just a tiny little bit of this magnificent culture.


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References “Conversations with Ogotemmeli – An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas” By Marcel Griaule (with introduction by Germaine Dieterlen) Published for the International African Institute by the Oxford University Press, 1965 “Ancient Ghana and Mali” By Nehemia Levitzion Methuen & Co Ltd., 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4 1973 SBN: 416 75820 “Thinking like an Anthropologist - A Practical Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” John T. Omohundro, Paperback – January 8, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0073195803 Article: Mystik og menneskeofringer – på eventyr i hjertet af Vestafrika” (translated: “Mystics and Human Sacrifices – adventures in the heart of Westafrica” (my own article, that was published in the maga-zine Globen by The Danish Travelers Guild, 2009.) Web: http://sacredsites.com/africa/mali/dogon.html Notes: Field notes based on my hike in Dogon country in January 2009.

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