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

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Enid Schildkrout

The performances for tourists suppress innovation and emphasize a mythologized version of "tradition" based in part upon Griaule's texts and photographs, in part upon what the tour guides make up, and in part on what the Dogon perceive to be the audience's expectations. Thus while masking itself is evolving and changing in some contexts, the tourist presentations are freezing tradition into a mythologized rendition of Dogon culture. It is this version of the masking that is most accessible to children, and this is what they seem to be representing in their art.

In writing about children (Dogon and others), it is important not to assume that they are simply passive learners--that culture is defined by adults and that children simply grow into it. If, as some writers suggest, the Dogon as adults are able to absorb tourism and at the same time preserve their identity and their rituals, conceptually separating the latter from theatrical performances, this does not mean that the current generation of children will develop the same understandings. If the "real" dama is only performed, in some places, every twelve years, as Van Beek says, this would be a one-time event in the life of a child. Yet these days, during some seasons, there are frequent presentations for tour groups visiting from Europe, the U.S., and Japan (Van Beek 2003; Lane 1988), not to mention performances for local people for secular occasions. Through these events children gain their understanding of masks, and construct images of Dogon culture and their place in it. And masks, formerly something that they only learned about through ritual, as they approached adulthood, are now part of the culture of childhood (Figs. 13, 14). The new media that children use to represent their understanding--the school exercise book, the pencil, and the colored marker--enable even the younger ones to study the details and discuss the meanings of various elements of the masks.

[FIGURES 13-14 OMITTED]

Outsiders have been impressed with the realistic detail in these drawings. This detail is evidence, I think, not just of the centrality of masking and traditional architecture in Dogon culture, but also of the fact that these aspects of culture are accessible to children in new ways. Dogon children's art today is not simply a learning experience but rather a signal that the boundary has shifted between what children are allowed to know, as children, and what is only accessible to them after initiation. It is worth noting again that only boys are doing these drawings, even though girls also see the masks dance for tourists. It may be that while the boundaries of age are being crossed, those of gender are being reinforced.

Today, as the dances and masks are performed for outsiders, and as the children's drawings are themselves becoming a kind of marketable currency, we are seeing more than a continuation of the preoccupation with masks that Griaule described in 1938. Children are constructing an image of the Dogon world in these drawings, in detail and with precision. They are depicting what is important to them, but at the same time they are leaving out things that are also part of their world. There are no tourists and no cameras in their drawings, nor do we see the masks made of all kinds of imported materials that have been noted by Richards (2000). Griaule described children making cars and airplanes in 1938, but today these things, even though commonplace, are not represented.