18037526 mary douglas dogon culture profane and arcane

[i6] DOGON CULTURE-PROFANE AND ARCANE MARY DOUGLAS SOME years ago Madame Dieterlen astonished the anthropology students in London University with the wealth of detail about Dogon culture which was at her command. They were not less impressed when she explained that the first twenty years of field research among the Dogon had been the most arduous and that sub- work was more and more rewarding. Now the already considerable ethno- graphy of the Dogon is enriched by two ajor documentations, Le Renardpdle by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, and Ethnologie et langage by Genevieve Calame-Griaule.' Madame Dieterlen describes how willingly the Dogon associated themselves with the research: answering questions by successive ethnological expeditions since I93 they had come to see that unless they themselves took a much more active role the programme would never be realized. In 1947 the main priests of a particular region took the initiative to co-operate more fully by allocating a highly competent instructor to the late Marcel Griaule. After daily lessons and daily confidential reports to the priestly council, the book Dieu d'eau was recorded. The gesture was all the more generous since the Dogon in making it knew that they thus exposed themselves to years and years more of deep research into their culture. These books bear the mark both of Dogon enthusiasm and initiative, first in the impressive depth of detail in which their culture is recorded and second in that it is still presented as seen by the Dogon themselves. The pale fox is the enigmatic principle of disorder in Dogon cosmology. He is anti-society, anti-law, the disobedient son of the creator who committed incest with his mother, the Earth, and was three times punished, first by being turned into an animal, second by being circumcised, and third by being deprived of human speech. But he remained a source of knowledge and of power, used by humans in divination. Le Renardpdle s a transcription of the full myth sequence of Dogon esoteric knowledge. Volume one deals with the creation of the world. The second volume will deal with the history of the first sixty-six years of human life on earth. Dogon initiates receive this knowledge at the last stage of instruction. The book contains spon- taneously offered Dogon illustrations of the symbols used in their sacred drawings and a Dogon exegesis of the myth and of accompanying rites. It is offered as a source book for comparative religion on the themes of sacrifice, totemism, African astronomy, and many other matters. The authors do not intervene in the role of critics, or even as interpreters. They are mere editors of work in which the Dogon themselves express their own thought. This means to some extent that the future researcher is expected to do his own field-work in the two volumes o produce and test his own hypotheses. One drawback of this method is that two volumes are short for present- ing all the data about the religious doctrines of a culture. Some selection has evidently 1 Le Renardpdle, par Marcel Griaule et Germaine logic et langage: a parole chez es Dogon, par Genevieve Dieterlen, Paris; Institut d'Ethnologie, 1965; Ethno- Calame-Griaule, Paris: Gallimard, I966.

18037526 mary douglas dogon culture profane and arcane

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