Two Portraits: Griaule's Dogon and the Restudy

No account of Dogon religion can avoid the problem of its sources. The tradition became world-famous through the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule and his colleague Germaine Dieterlen, whose books, above all Dieu d'eau (1948), described an extraordinarily elaborate secret cosmology of numbered pairs, cosmic eggs and symbolic correspondences. That portrait shaped the Dogon's international image and even, controversially, a claim that they held ancient knowledge of the invisible companion star Sirius B. It has since been seriously contested: the anthropologist Walter van Beek, after long fieldwork, reported (1991) that he could not find the deep esoteric system Griaule described, and argued that much of it arose from the interview relationship itself. The responsible position is to present the detailed Griaule cosmology, and especially the Sirius claim, as contested ethnography rather than established fact, while recognising the Dogon's own continuing veneration of Amma and their public ritual life as securely attested.