Drawing tradition: Dogon children's art in the age of tourism

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Enid Schildkrout

Jeux dogons is surely one of the most detailed ethnographic accounts of childhood in Africa written in the early twentieth century. Perhaps because children proved to be accessible informants, readily sharing information, at least on the surface, with outsiders, Griaule and others on the Mission Dakar-Djibouti devoted considerable attention to recording information given to them by young informants. The resulting 290-page monograph contains accounts of children's activities in twenty-four villages along the Bandiagara escarpment. The monograph is rich with descriptions, drawings, and photographs of toys, games, children's songs and stories, musical instruments, wall paintings in circumcision camps, sand drawings, architectural models made by children, and masks. It includes accounts of how Western material culture, including airplanes and cars, guns, cameras, and eye-glasses, were, in 1938, being eagerly incorporated into the repertoire of Dogon play.

Griaule began his account, not surprisingly, by linking children's games with cosmology. "Once, when the sky was very near the earth, the Dogon women detached the stars from the sky and gave them to the children. When the children were tired of playing with the stars, the mothers put the stars back in the sky" (1938a:1, my translation). The stars, once remote from children, are grasped by women, become part of the children's world, and then are returned to, or reconciled with, the cosmos. The mothers are in charge of the cosmos and share it with children, who may therefore hold the key to the origins of the cosmos. As we know from Walter E.A. van Beek and others, much of Dogon ritual, especially masking, is aimed at countervailing this feminist and child-centered perspective. The stars--the secrets of the universe--inevitably get taken over by the men.

Like many of his contemporaries, and deriving ideas from writers like Edward B. Tyler (1832 1917) and Sir James G. Frazer (1854-1941), Griaule speculated that children's games represented survivals of earlier adult rituals. The abstract of the English translation of Jeux dogons sums up his argument: "Griaule notes that in many of the listed games and amusements there are certain religious and magical elements present, basically parodies of adult rituals, which may eventually represent the only survival of those adult Dogon ceremonies now falling into disuse" (HRAF doc. 13).

Griaule speculated that children's games, masks, and drawings on the cliff walls of circumcision camps moved between the religious sphere and the everyday world, with children as the intermediaries. Children and their material culture occupied the liminal space, what Griaule called "entrebaillement"--the gap, or half-open space--between ritual and play (1938a:5). This point was not lost on the Dogon themselves. When Griaule noted that in talking to Europeans, sculptors would say that the figures they were carving were dolls and toys, they were, Griaule claimed, telling lies, hiding the true meaning of the ancestral figures. The sculptor was recontextualizing it by hiding behind the foil of childhood. Griaule, suspicious of the carver's claim that he deliberately made figures for children, suggested instead that dolls were discarded ancestor statues; the fact that toys in 1938 had simpler forms than the ancestral altar figures then in use demonstrated stylistic change in ritual carving over time. In fact, what was most likely going on was that the artists equated children and whites, insofar as both were alienated from Dogon ritual practice, and they therefore simply recategorized the objects according to the user, moving them from the realm of the sacred into the realm of the everyday.