Marco Aime, Journal Dogon Boringhieri Bollati, Torino, Marco Aime
This book is so small (of pages) as a valued (content). Apparently this is an essay on the relationship between the culture of the Dogon people (the population of the African state of Mali), anthropologists and tourists, but the reflections on these topics could rightfully extend more generally to the path of discipline of anthropology and Ethnological the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The book, very humbly (and this is valuable) is not treated as general objectives of reflection, but certain is that the story of the Dogon is undoubtedly significant and perhaps emblematic.
The Dogon have been made known in Europe by French Marcel Griaule, who lived among them in the thirties and forties. On them he wrote dozens of articles, essays and several books, among which the most famous is the God of water. In that book, the Dogon as Griaule describes a population of shepherds-warriors-philosophers, who have built a complex cosmology, symbolism and ritual that are present in every act of daily life of every member of this population.
The French are passionate about this book, and since the years between the wars among the intellectual classes began to go out of fashion a trip through the Dogon, not just one of the African safari where you go to see the animals and nature, but a journey of culture, the discovery of a population considered refined and has a deep culture.
Marco Aime exposes the "myth of the Dogon", built by Griaule. First, a Dogon population has never existed: there have been several groups that speak different dialects, living in the same cliff, and only Griaule defined them as a single population. Griaule's Dogon described as a population that practices ancient rituals symbolic, always the same since time immemorial. In fact, the Dogon have never been isolated from other populations that live in the region, and have they had with commercial and cultural exchanges, which have caused changes in the culture, rituals, beliefs and symbols.
the tour operator has done certainly convenient representation of the Dogon by Griaule made, because it certainly satisfies the thirst for exoticism of a party of tourists, the so-called "cultural tourism." Even the Dogon did it and it suits the representation of them that made the French anthropologist: "The Dogon, for their part, seem to have realized that tourists look for them only in this aspect and, of course, make it as much as possible evidence. Tourists, meanwhile, is pleased to find exactly what was promised by tour operator ".
"The eye of the stranger sees only what he already knows," says an African proverb, which seems to fit the story of the Dogon and how they have been seen by tourists and anthropologists. Aime cites numerous examples of how anthropologists Griaule and his followers that the tour guides and tour operators, have built the identity Dogon identity as immutable, fixed forever. Some examples of the construction of the Dogon are pretty funny: Aime cites, for example, a book of anthropologists and Michel Nadine Wanono Renaudeau, full of illustrations. Some of these portray women Dogon intent to dry onions, "the gesture is immutable" says the caption, "evoking an atmosphere of timelessness that surrounds this people. It was purified, made "authentic" tribal removed in time and fixed forever in a dimension ahistorical. Yet, before the arrival of the French, there were no onions. It was precisely the settlers to develop the cultivation. This and many other examples are cited from Aime to show how the Dogon have engaged in over the centuries with other peoples, as their customs and traditions, far from being immutable, have changed. Even the same masks and statues rituals have changed over time. Aime said that "the same Marcel Griaule notes that in 1935, the seventy-eight traditional masks, it added a under his eyes. During a ritual dance appeared a character from the undulating movements, holding a notebook and a pen, pretending to ask questions to the public and to transcribe the answers, followed by a performer: the mask was the ethnographer " .
Griaule had never thought that his presence could influence an event, this was due "to his vision of culture conceived as a performance, a spectacle," as well as other anthropologists and his team shared the same vision. In short, both the anthropologist and the tourist, you want to see what becomes what you want to see. As noted by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas, when studying the Dogon were British anthropologist, "perhaps we had texts filled with diagrams of kinship, lineages and so on, in the best tradition of British functionalism of the period. Curiously, those Dogon, so pay attention to tradition and aesthetics, are more like the French. "
