Dogon Sculpture and Material Religion

Following the theme of the conference that I attended at Durham, I have been thinking about how far the various ideas around material religion can be applied to the Dogon sculptures and masks. Dogon material has always been recognised as being religious, but the exact nature of the religious element and the relationship between the religious and the objects themselves has tended to change over time.

 

One of the things that I am doing in the development of the book on the Uses of the Dogon is trying to track the development of ideas about the Dogon, their life and culture, their art, and, yes, their religion. Of course to talk of ‘their religion’ raises many questions that I ought to be addressing in another one of the strands of this blog. That is not where I want to go in this posting. Suffice it to say, for now, that by ‘religion’ at this point I am meaning interactions with the non-empirical, the other.

Historically the interpretation of masks, and to some extent of statues as well, has been dominated by Marcel Griaule’s classic work on myth. From his earliest work on the masks, through his conversations with Ogotommêli, to the work that Griaule and Dieterlen put into Le Renard Pâle, the complex myths that form the pinnacle of knowledge among the Dogon were assumed to be the basis for understanding every other aspect of Dogon life. It is not my place in this posting to question the myths themselves, or Griaule’s construction of the myth, but it is simply to note that both he, and those who followed him, assumed that an understanding of the myth would make sense of all aspects of the Dogon culture and life, including their material culture. All masks, therefore, all symbols and drawings on the fronts of houses, all sculpture and granary doors, all aspects of Dogon art, was understood in terms of the myths. Everything was a Nomo, a twin figure, an ark, or whatever it might be.

Over time, however, it was recognised that the myths did not relate easily to the principle forms of the sculpture, especially, for example, the maternity figures, the equestrian figures, or figures holding various day to day objects. A new understanding began to see the sculptures more in relation to ancestor figures rather than related directly to the myths. This was reinforced by what was known about the use that was made of sculptures in various shrines (and actually very little was known about the use of the sculptures as Griaule and his colleagues focussed so heavily on the masks and the dances that they tended to overlook other aspects of ritual and material culture). The figures were seen as representations, or repositories of the ancestors, a means or mode of communication between the living and previous generations. They were a source of power, or perhaps more accurately a conduit for the power of the other.

The latest thinking around material religion, however, as expressed in a number of different papers at the conference, aims to break down the distinction between the material and the spiritual, to see the object not as a container for the other, or for power in whatever form, but to see the relationship with the other being a relationship between subjective persons, to see the object as having agency in its own right. Are the sculptures representations of the ancestors? Are they conduits for the power of the ancestors? No, in this view they cannot be that. They are players within the religious field, subjective others in their own right, part of a complex relationship between human persons and non-human persons. Much current thinking around animism is focussed on this kind of interaction and the subjectivity, or the agency, of the non-human other.

I am not sure that I actually have the ethnographic knowledge to be able to provide a real rethinking of the role of sculptures as non-human others within the Dogon religious world. I can speculate, of course, and what fascinates me more than anything else in this context is the way older statues can be used and re-used. The work on the biography of the object (a different kind of subjectivity and relationship with the material) plays out in wonderful ways among the Dogon where objects, made many centuries ago, can be used within shrines, taken to the cliffs and ‘buried’ with the dead, rediscovered, reignited with power, and reused in ritual, perhaps many times over, before finally being collected by travellers and dealers and bought to the West for sale, collection and display.

To simply treat these objects as illustrations of the myth, however wonderful and complex that myth is, or as bit parts in ancestor cults, conduits of power, or even as aesthetic masterpieces within the museum, is ultimately to undervalue them as non-human others, objects with life and with power, part of a long historic relationship with many different human others and part of a contemporary relationship with the collector and observer. It is this that, somehow, I think we ought to rediscover…

Dogon Art at the Liverpool World Museum

This is the first of three postings under the theme of Uses of the Dogon. As I have explained below (Post 1), that is the title I have given to the book I am currently writing on the way in which the Dogon people have been represented in different kinds of discourse (anthropological, art historical and tourist) in the West. What I want to use this strand of the blog for, therefore, is to comment on things that I am reading and visits that I am making that have a loss relationship to the book, but may not actually be included within the text itself.

The week before last I visited Liverpool World Museum with my partner to look at the Africa gallery and to see the Dogon items that are held by the Museum. Last week I attended a conference at Durham, organised by the Sociology of Religion section of the British Sociological Association, on the theme of Material Religion. These three postings, by way of catching up with myself, will pick up themes that come from these two experiences.

So, back to Liverpool, I must begin by offering my thanks to Zachary Kingdon, the curator of the Africa Collection at Liverpool for giving his time to show us around the gallery and taking us out to the store to see the other Dogon items. Liverpool has a small collection of Dogon pieces, all acquired during the 1960s when the then curator used money given to the museum to rebuild its collection after damage during the war, to buy a number of objects on the open market to, in many ways, ‘complete the collection’. The Dogon items, however, did not ‘complete the collection’ and, I assume the same was true of many of the other items bought at this time. This was because the ‘collection’ as it had developed in Liverpool really never should have contained Dogon items in the first place. It was a collection largely put together by a Liverpool merchant, Arnold Ridyard, who travelled the coast of West Africa from Sierra Leone to Angola accepting donations from, and making purchases from, local Africans in the different countries visited. It is only by some abstract notion of ‘African Art’ that Dogon pieces would have been seen to add to, or ‘complete’ such a collection. It is an understanding of what Zachary has called the ‘canon’ of African Art. That the Dogon are seen as an essential part of such a canon is, of course, interesting and relevant to the book, but of little direct relevance to Liverpool.

Zachary has done some very interesting work on the African donors to the original collection and the current gallery within the museum makes a significant point of placing the African individuals back into the story of the collection and its position within Liverpool. Even the Congo material, which was largely purchased by Ridyard, emphasises the role that local African research assistants played in going from village to village asking about the use and relevance of the Nkisi nail figures. This placing of the African individuals, both men and women, at the centre of the story, and recognising their links to Liverpool, where some came to study, or sent their children to study, provides a very different kind of narrative that gets beyond the ‘art/artefact’ debate. It gives a coherence to the gallery and an interest that is historical as well as cultural.

Unfortunately, however, in the middle of the gallery sits a display of items from Benin. These probably could not have been ignored, they are of excellent quality and very impressive items in themselves, a few bronzes and a series of ivory tusks. One of these, on the wall apart from the others, was collected before the British expeditionary force arrived and could well have been a gift to an earlier merchant. The majority, however, came from the violent activities of the British and represent plunder rather than gifts or the result of trade. I did not feel that this distinction was really brought out clearly enough in the display.

At the end of the gallery, on the other hand, some of the items bought in the 1960s are set aside, including a wonderful seated Dogon figure. These are set aside as evidence of a different kind of ‘collecting’ from the bulk of the exhibition and while this makes a useful point, and while most of the items are one-off, because of the way they were purchased, and so could not form part of a wider display of a particular people or region, I did feel the distinction was somewhat false. That, however, is a personal opinion and I still have to say that this was one of the most imaginative and informative exhibitions of African cultural artefacts that I have seen in recent years and would be highly recommended.