The Dogon People
The Dogon are a West African ethnic group who live in the central plateau area of Mali, south of the Niger bend, near the city of Bandiagara, and in Burkina Faso. The population ranges between 400,000 and 800,000 people. They speak Dogon languages, which are considered an isolated branch of the Niger-Congo language family, meaning they are not connected to any other languages.
The Dogon People are famous for their religious practices, mask dances, wooden sculpting, and architecture. The Dogon’s social organization, material culture, and beliefs have changed dramatically over the last century, in part because Dogon territory is one of Mali’s most popular tourist destinations.
History Of The Dogon People
The Bandiagara Escarpment is a 500-meter (1,640.42-foot) tall sandstone cliff that stretches for approximately 150 kilometers (90 miles) into the heart of the Dogon region.The Bandiagara Mountains may be found to the northwest of the cliff, while the sandy Séno-Gondo Plains can be found to the southeast. Bandiagara is home to Dogon settlements because, a thousand years ago, the Dogon people refused to convert to Islam as a whole.
The Dogon felt threatened by these historical forces, therefore, they settled in strategically defensive areas along the escarpment’s walls. Water availability is another consideration in their site selection process. In the sandstone rock, a rivulet runs at the base of the cliff during the rainy season, and the Niger River is not far away.
The Dogon people have a number of recorded oral histories that detail their ancestry. One relates to the fact that they originated in the Mande region, which is southwest of the Bandiagara escarpment and quite close to Bamako.
It is said that the original Dogon hamlet was located in the southwest corner of the escarpment, in a place called Kani-Na. Studies of the Dogon region’s archeological and ethnoarcheological past have revealed many interesting facts about the area’s settlement and environmental histories, as well as its people’s social behaviors and technology over the course of several thousand years.
In the 15th century, the Dogon moved to the Sanga area by following the escarpment to the north.Some oral tales say the Dogon came from the east, while others say they originated in the west, beyond the Niger River. Most likely, the Dogon of today are made up of people from different ethnic groups who moved away from the spread of Islam.
Islamic law classified them and many other ethnicities of the region (Mossi, Gurma, Bobo, Busa, and Yoruba) as being within the non-canonical dar al-harb and, thus, fair game for slave raids organized by merchants, though it is often difficult to distinguish between pre-Muslim practices and later practices.
Slavery became more important in West Africa as urbanization boosted demand for labor. Historically, invaders have targeted indigenous males for death and taken women and children as slaves.
Art Of The Dogon People
Sculpture is the primary medium of Dogon art. The major themes of Dogon art are faith, independence, and the goals of society (Laude, 19). Dogon sculptures are not meant for public display, and instead are typically maintained in private homes, temples, or with the Hogon (Laude, 20). The symbolic significance of the pieces and the method by which they are created make concealment crucial.
Women grinding pearl millet, women carrying vessels on their heads, donkeys carrying cups, musicians, dogs, quadruped-shaped troughs or benches, bending figures from the waist, mirror images, aproned figures, and standing figures are all common motifs in Dogon sculpture.
Dogon art clearly demonstrates cultural influences and connections. Before the Dogon arrived, several cultures called the Bandiagara cliffs home. Dogon art owes much to Tellem art, particularly in its rectilinear patterns.
Culture And Religion Of The Dogon People
In October 1946, Ogotemmêli, a blind Dogon elder, taught the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule about the most important symbols of the Dogon religion.Prior to his meeting with Ogotemmêli, Griaule had already spent fifteen years among the Dogon people.
During the period of twenty years, Ogotemmêli learned the holy stories from his father and grandpa, and he passed that knowledge on to Griaule. Due to the fact that the Dogon people were still practicing their religion orally at the time of its recording, this document is extremely valuable from a historical standpoint. They were among the last in West Africa to hand over power to the French.
In the 1930s and 1940s, French anthropologists Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen worked with the Dogon people. They said that the Dogon had “their own systems of astronomy and calendrical measurements, methods of calculation, and extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology, as well as a systematic pharmacopoeia.”The religion had common ground with other traditional African faiths in its emphasis on nature in many forms.
Nummo and Nommo, who were twins, were very important to the spiritual life of the religion.Ogotemmêli described the Nummo, whom he called the Serpent, as amphibians who were variously likened to snakes, lizards, chameleons, and even sloths (because of their slow movement and shapeless neck).
The Nummo were also said to be able to walk on land, and when they did so, they stood erect on their tails. The Nummos, like the chameleon, had mostly green skin that would shift to other hues at will. At various eras, it was believed to display every color of the rainbow.
The Nummo were also known as “Water Ghosts” in other accounts. Marcel Griaule called the Nummo “Dieu d’eau” (gods of water), but Ogotemmêli recognized them as hermaphrodites since they were located on the Dogon women’s side of the sanctuary.
The sun, which was considered a feminine emblem in their faith, was their primary symbol Nummo “Dieu d’eau” (gods of water), but Ogotemmêli recognized them as hermaphrodites since they were located on the Dogon women’s side of the sanctuary. The sun, which was considered a feminine emblem in their faith, was their primary symbol.
The Dogon word for sun, “nay,” came from the same linguistic origin as the words for “mother” (na) and “cow” (n). As a group, they were represented by the traditionally feminine color red.
There was chaos in the beginning of time because of the issue of “twin births” vs “single births,” also known as androgyny versus single-sexed beings. For the Dogon, this idea became a central tenet of their religion. Ogotemmêli observed, “The jackal was isolated from birth, and that’s why he accomplished so much.”
Dogon men celebrated the Sigui festival, which was linked to the afterlife beyond Earth, and the sexless male jackal. It was said to have been held once every sixty years and honored the white dwarf star Sirius B, prompting many to wonder where such information came from. White was the color traditionally associated with men.
Although the male nobles of the Society of the Masks (“awa”) were instructed in the ceremonial language of “Sigi so” or “language of the Sigui,” it was considered a substandard language and included only approximately a fourth of the vocabulary of “Dogo so,” the Dogon word language. At funerals and the “end of sorrow” rites, the “Sigi so” was used to recount the origins of the cosmos, human existence, and the arrival of death on Earth (“dama”).
Once the soulless male Jackal was created, it became necessary to make all humans sterile. The goal was to ensure that no further Jackals or similarly evil beings would ever be able to take root on our planet.” The Nummo predicted that the initial rule of twin births was doomed to extinction, leading to mistakes on par with the jackal’s single-birth occurrence. The first son of God acted as he did because of his isolation.
“The rite of circumcision in the Dogon faith symbolizes the eradication of the second sex and soul from human beings. “Each individual should only have one soul type, and that soul type should be either masculine or female. The old remedies of circumcision and excision are being revived.”
Symbolic of the harmony between humanity and the divine, the birth of human twins was reason for celebration in Griaule’s day Dogon society. Griaule claims that there is a pan-African cult centered upon the birth of multiples. Present-day Islam is practiced by a sizeable population of Dogon. Christians make up another subset of the population.
The patrilineal system is the backbone of the Dogon social order. The male senior of each Dogon village (which may be thought of as an extended family) is responsible for making decisions on behalf of the whole community. This chief is the eldest surviving son of the family’s local patriarch.
Marriage
Even though most marriages in the Dogon society are monogamous, nonsororal polygynous marriages are possible.It is unusual for a guy to have more than two wives, even in polygynous marriages. Each wife in a polygynous marriage has her own home inside the marital complex.
Traditionally, the first wife (known as ya biru) is given more respect and privileges within the household than subsequent spouses. Once the first child is born, the wife officially becomes part of her husband’s family. The parents of the prospective husband do the actual work of choosing a wife. Those who practice endogamy in their marriages only marry within their own clan. As a corollary, intercaste marriage is illegal.
Ladies have been known to leave their spouses before the first child is born. Divorce after having children is a severe and unusual event that usually involves the entire community. Polygamous marriages have double the divorce rate of monogamous ones. A divorce typically results in the wife keeping only the youngest child and leaving the rest with their father. The term “guinna” is used to describe huge families with up to a hundred members.
Several Dogon traditions reflect the people’s deep-seated desire for peace. At one of their most significant ceremonies, for instance, the ladies honor the men, the men express their gratitude to the women, the young show their respect for the elderly, and the elderly acknowledge the achievements of the young. Another example of a cultural custom that the Dogon engage in whenever two people meet is elaborate welcomes.Every day, people in the Dogon community perform this ritual.
During greeting rituals, a long-time member of the group will often ask a new person a series of questions about themselves and their families. The correct response is “sewa,” which indicates that everything is OK. The Dogon, who has made contact with the locals, will next ask the inhabitant how the rest of the family is doing. Neighboring groups have called the Dogon “sewa people” because the term sewa is so ubiquitous in a Dogon community.
Hogon
The Hogon is the village’s political and spiritual head. He is chosen from the eldest males in the village’s most powerful family.
During the first six months after his election, he is not permitted to shave or wash. Everything he wears is white, and he is off-limits to all save the closest of acquaintances. A young woman who has never had her period takes care of him, doing things like cleaning the house and making him meals. At the end of the day, she goes home to rest.
He dons a scarlet fez upon initiation. He wears a pearl armband as a badge of office. One of his wives steps in for the virgin and goes back to her own house for the night. This means that the Hogon is confined to his home by himself. Lébé, the holy snake of the Dogon, is said to visit each man at night to wash him and impart wisdom.
Circumcision
According to Dogon belief, all human beings, male and female alike, are born with both sexes already present. The foreskin is feminine, while the clitoris is masculine. (Historically, Dogon belief said that man has two souls; circumcision served to rid him of one. This is why sex-specific rites of passage like circumcision are so important.
In the United States, males are circumcised in three-year increments, starting at age 9 and continuing until age 12, for example. They’ve officially graduated from the ranks of the uninitiated. The circumcision is done by the blacksmith.
Following that, they isolated themselves from the rest of the tribe for a few days in a hut to let the wound heal. At the end of the ceremony, the newly circumcised guys exchange gifts. They use a rattle-like instrument constructed from a wooden rod and calabashes to create their music.
Men who have recently been circumcised are expected to go around naked for a month so that the rest of the tribe might marvel at their maturity and physical transformation. Even in the dead of winter, this tradition continues as it has for decades.
After the rite of passage of circumcision, a boy is considered an adult and leaves his father’s home. He and the other males in his age group form a “due” and stay there till they get married and start a family.
One type of female genital mutilation done by this and other African ethnic groups is type I circumcision, in which the clitoris is cut off.
The circumcision cave in Songho is decorated with black and white rock drawings of animals and flora. A cave not far away is used for storing musical equipment.
Dogon Mask Societies
The masked dancing society known as the Awa performs ritual and socially significant dances. It has a secret language and a stringent set of rules governing behavior (sigi so). Apart for some members of certain castes, all initiated Dogon males take part in Awa. Women are not allowed to participate in sigi so and are not allowed to study the language.
The elaborate masks used by the Awa during ceremonies are a defining feature of their culture. The Awa are known for their performance skills during two main events: the sigi ritual and the dama burial ceremony.
Sigi is a ceremony performed by everyone in a society to remember and respect its founding parents. The’sigi’ includes every member of the Dogon people and is thought to have begun as a way to unify and preserve peace among Dogon communities.
It all kicks out at the most northerly section of Dogon territory, and the villages take turns hosting the celebrations and ceremonies that follow. The fresh masks are carved at this time and presented to the ancestors. Every 60 years, a new’sigi’ is begun, and each town celebrates for about a year before passing the honor on to the next.
There are two sections to a Dogon funeral ceremony. The first is right after a person dies, while the second might take place years afterwards. Second traditional funeral ceremonies, known as “damas,” are becoming extremely rare because of their high cost.
Damas are still performed today, although they are mainly done as entertainment for visitors interested in the Dogon way of life rather than for their original purpose. The Dogon make money off of this spectacle by charging visitors to view whatever masks they like and for the event itself.
During the traditional dama, participants don masks and engage in a series of ritual dances and ceremonies meant to guide the spirits of the dead to their graves. Dogon damas involve a wide variety of objects, such as masks worn by fastening them in the wearer’s teeth and statuettes.
It’s possible that the masks used during the dama ceremony are decorated differently in each of the Dogon villages. The rituals associated with dama may be carried out in a variety of ways depending on the community. Dama is the one-day event that takes place just after a person dies and is known as the Halic.
Shawn R. Davis claims that the yingim and danyim may be seen in this rite. The masks used in the yincomoli ceremony are announced with the smashing of a gourd over the deceased’s wooden bowl, hoe, and bundukamba (burial blanket), while the entrance to the deceased’s dwelling in the family complex is decked with ceremonial components.
Masks such as the Yana Gulay, Satimbe, Sirige, and Kanaga are worn by participants in the yincomoli rite. The Yana Gulay mask is crafted from cotton fabric and cowell shells to represent a Fulani lady.
The women ancestors, symbolized by the Satimbe mask, are credited with discovering the masks’ true function: to usher the souls of the departed into the afterlife. Only men who were still alive when the Sigui ritual (described further below) was performed wear the tall Sirige mask during their burial (Davis, 68). At one point, the Kanaga maskers would sit and dance next to a bundkamba, which symbolizes a loved one who has passed away.
There are several days dedicated to both the yingim and danyim ceremonies. Those who have passed away since the previous Dama are remembered during these celebrations every year. To aid in driving the ghost, known as the nyama, away from the deceased’s corpse and the village, the yingim involves the sacrifice of cows or other valuable animals and enormous pretend battles.
Thereafter, a few months later, the danyim takes place. Each community celebrates the danyim in their own unique way, although typically it lasts from three to six days and consists of daily morning and evening dances performed by masqueraders.
Masqueraders perform elaborate dances on the roofs of homes belonging to the deceased, as well as in the streets of the hamlet and the surrounding fields. According to legend, the dead will continue to be responsible for any misfortune until the masqueraders have finished their dances and all rituals have been done.
Dogon Astronomical Beliefs
Many writers, starting with the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, have said that the traditional religion of the Dogon includes information about things in the sky that can’t be seen with the naked eye.
This theory has made its way into the New Age and ancient astronaut canons as proof that aliens visited Mali in antiquity. Other authors have questioned Griaule’s account. They say that Europeans who visited the Dogon people in the early 20th century are a much more reliable source of such information.
Throughout the years 1931, 1935, 1937, and 1938, as well as annually from 1946 to 1956, Griaule spent anything from a few days to two months among the Dogon. Griaule and Dieterlen based a great deal of their writing on their chats with the Dogon wiseman Ogotemmêli, which took place over the course of 33 consecutive days in the latter half of 1946.
According to what they heard, the Dogon people consider Sirius (sigi tolo, “star of the Sigui”) to be accompanied by two more stars: p tolo (the Digitaria star) and mm ya tolo (the female Sorghum star). In the Dogon system, Sirius was one of the centers around which a much smaller star, the companion star Digitaria, orbited.
When Digitaria draws closer to Sirius, the brightness of Sirius increases, but as it recedes, the star seems to twinkle, giving the impression that there are several stars in the sky. In orbit, a whole cycle can take up to half a century. In addition, the Dogon people were said to have an apparent familiarity of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings.
In a prologue to their research of the Sudanese star system, Griaule and Dieterlen said, “The challenge of knowing how, with no tools at their disposal, men might know the motions and certain features of almost invisible stars has not been settled, nor even asked.”
According to Griaule and Dieterlen’s account, the Dogon people appear to know that Sirius is part of a binary star system, whose second star, Sirius B, a white dwarf, is completely invisible to the human eye (just as Digitaria has the smallest grain known to the Dogon), Robert K. G. Temple wrote a book titled The Sirius Mystery in 1976, arguing that the Dogon’s system reveals precise knowledge of cosmological facts known only to FriedrichAfter that, Temple contended that the Dogon’s knowledge of the constellations suggests an alien transmission if it can be traced back to ancient Egyptian texts and folklore. Neither Griaule nor Dieterlen ever suggested such a fantastical origin for the Dogon’s wisdom.
In more recent times, however, Griaule and Dieterlein’s findings have been questioned. In a 1991 article in Current Anthropology, anthropologist Walter van Beek concluded after his research among the Dogon people that, “Though they do speak about sigu tolo [which is what Griaule claimed the Dogon called Sirius] they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that, through a different position, appears as sigu tolo. Nonetheless, everyone agrees that Griaule was the one who first told them about the star.
Geneviève Calame-Griaule, Griaule’s daughter, replied in a later issue that Van Beek didn’t “take the right steps to learn” and that van Beek’s Dogon sources may have thought he was sent by the political and administrative authorities to test the Dogon’s Muslim orthodoxy.University of California, Berkeley, professor Andrew Apter offers an impartial evaluation.
Ian Ridpath, a skeptic who wrote in 1978, said, “There are many ways the Dogon could have learned about the West before Griaule and Dieterlen came to visit.”During a five-week mission conducted by Henri-Alexandre Deslandres to research the solar eclipse of April 16, 1893, Noah Brosch speculates in his book Sirius Matters that the Dogon people may have made contact with astronomers living in Dogon territory.
Robert Todd Carroll adds that it is more likely that interested tribal members learned about the Sirius star system via contemporaneous, terrestrial sources. In referencing these theories, James Oberg emphasizes how hypothetical they are by asking, “The clearly sophisticated astronomical knowledge must have come from someplace, but is it an ancient legacy or a recent graft?”
Notwithstanding Temple’s inability to disprove its supposed antiquity, the proof for the information’s recent acquisition remains purely circumstantial. James Clifford adds that Griaule distrusted Christians, Muslims, and anybody with too much contact with Europeans, and actively sought out informants who were best suited to speak of traditional lore.
Oberg identifies other misconceptions held by the Dogon people, such as the number of moons Jupiter has, Saturn’s position as the furthest planet from the sun, and the fact that it is the only planet with rings. His interest in other seemingly implausible statements (such as the existence of a red dwarf star around Sirius, which was not postulated until the 1950s) prompted him to consider Temple’s earlier challenge, with Temple claiming that he “gave another line of argument.” ”
To examine the Dogon data’s prediction mechanisms, we must do it without bias. If a Sirius-C is located and confirmed to be a red dwarf, for instance, I will accept the Dogon data as definitive.
Another star in the Sirius system, mm Ya, was supposedly known to the Dogon People. It was “bigger than Sirius B but lighter and lower in magnitude,” according to the stories. The existence of a brown dwarf star (a Sirius-C) in a six-year orbit around Sirius was first suggested by gravitational studies in 1995.
Although the likelihood of a triple star system for Sirius is “now low,” it cannot be ruled out entirely, according to more recent research that used sophisticated infrared photography to reach that conclusion. This area, which is within 5 AU of Sirius A, has not been explored.
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