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…
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