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

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Enid Schildkrout

In the literature on children's art, one often hears that young children draw what they know and older ones draw what they see (see Willats 2003; Fineburg 1998). (12) Are these boys who are constructing Dogon culture through their very selective representations leaving out the signs of modernity because they think such images won't please the tourists, or are they leaving them out because they do not want to acknowledge modernity--including tourism, Islam, and technology--as part of their lives? Clearly they believe the masks and the other elements of the ritual landscape are important, but is this preference also guided by the reactions of the teachers, anthropologists, and tourists who admire and buy their drawings? Among other things, the drawings show that to the young artists, these worlds--that of the masks, the architecture, the ritual sacrifices depicted in the drawings, on the one hand, and that of the camera-carrying visitors on the other--are conceptually separate. (13)

It is worth bearing in mind how different the Dogon example is from the children's art one sees so often elsewhere in Africa: the wire cars, airplanes, motorcycles--images of technology, not tradition. That the Dogon boys are doing something else entirely refers us back to the question Griaule raised in the 1930s: To what extent is the artwork of children preserving a reality that might otherwise immutably change? While the Dogon drawings will not, in themselves, stop changes from occurring--either in the direction of conservatism for tourists, or innovation for Dogon themselves--the children, through their art, are negotiating the relationship between these domains. What effect this might have on the culture itself is beyond the scope of this paper, but as the children become adults, these images are likely to remain part of their experience, their identity, and the way they interpret Dogon culture.

[This article was accepted for publication to January 2004.]

Notes

(1.) My contact with the Dogon is based on four short trips over a ten-year period (1992-2002), two of which involved visits to Tireli. On all these occasions, I worked as a lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History's Discovery Tour program, paying as close attention as I could to the interaction between tourists and local people, especially children. My thanks go to Polly Richards and Susan Vogel for reading drafts of this paper, and to Simon Ottenberg, Alisa LaGamma, and David Binkley for comments on a version presented at the 2003 African Studies Association meeting. A larger version of this paper, comparing children's art in Senegal, Mali, and Nigeria, was presented in 2002 at the Rutgers University Center for Children and Childhood Studies Regional Seminar Series.

(2.) Jean Rouch, sadly, was killed in a car accident in Niger on February 20, 2004.

(3.) Curtis Keim and I developed this theme in our study of early-twentieth-century Mangbetu art (Schildkrout & Keim 1990); it is discussed in regard to tourism among the Dogon by Walter E. A. van Beek (2003).