Marcel Griaule came to ethnography from aviation and the Ecole Pratique, and made his name on the Dakar-Djibouti expedition of 1931 to 1933, the great collecting traverse of Africa that stocked the Musee de l'Homme. From 1931 onward his own ground was the Bandiagara escarpment in Mali, where the Dogon villages became the site of one of the longest sustained field engagements in the discipline's history. His early work there was methodical and documentary, masks, granaries, games, funerals, recorded expedition by expedition with photography, mapping and teams of specialists, a style of campaign ethnography he theorized and taught from the first Sorbonne chair of ethnology, created for him in 1942.
The pivot of his career, and of the Dogon's fame, came in 1946. By his account, the elders of the escarpment resolved to open the deeper teaching to him, and the blind hunter Ogotemmeli received him for thirty three days of conversation. The record of those days, Dieu d'eau, published in 1948, unfolded a cosmology of astonishing richness: the egg of the world, the pale fox and the twin Nummo spirits, creation woven like cloth and mirrored in the plan of granary, house and field, a system in which every gesture of Dogon daily life carried metaphysical weight. The book, written for a general readership, made a Malian farmer's cosmology part of world literature, and set the course for everything Griaule wrote until his death in 1956.