Dogon in a wider world

Dogon Studies: Past, Present and Future
Wouter van Beek
ASC and Utrecht University

The Dogon have been the object of intense and long-standing academic interest. Few cultures in the world have caught the limelight of scholarly and public attention as have this group on the Bandiagara cliff side. From Frobenius and Desplagnes to the present day, the Dogon have featured in travel literature, tourist visits, film, exhibitions in museums and academic discourse as the epitome of a – if not the – West African culture that has managed to preserve its integrity and vitality. How did this happen? What processes have put the Dogon in this position? What trajectory in history has made the Dogn into the “ultimate exotic African”? The next question is what this means for present-day Dogon studies. What are the priorities for research and documentation at this juncture and – in particular – what is the role of the Dogon themselves in their own ethnography and development studies? What aspects of Dogon society are under-represented, what Dogon groups are under-researched, and what research priorities should be made for the near future? This seminar explores the assumption that the Dogon have been studied too much in isolation and that their ethnography has to be more thoroughly embedded in the total empirical knowledge on West Africa and in the geo-political processes affecting the region. This also implies that the Dogon have developed a range of relations with the wider world that remain under-explored. In fact, the whole idea of an isolated Dogon area – one of the main parameters of Dogon studies so far – might be more a construct of academia-cum-tourism: is it more profitable to study such a “special group” as an integral part of the wider world, not only in the present, but also in historical times? Not only, we think, have the Dogon definitely become part of the “wider world”, their culture and history have been part of a “wider world” throughout their history.

Migration for White Men’s Work: An Empirical Reply to Marxist Theory
Isaie Dougnon
University of Bamako

This paper offers a critical (re)reading of ‘The Working Day’, Chapter X of Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume One: The Process of Production of Capital), based on the articulate accounts of many Dogon migrants on the glorification of colonial work. In his theory, Marx concentrates on the structure of work to describe the exploitation of the worker and predicts secular hatred between capitalists and workers. Narratives of numerous African migrants about work in colonial times demonstrate that what was most important was not the structure of the work but the system itself. Why, for example, did French Sudanese workers abandon their French masters to go and work for the British in the Gambia or the Gold Coast? Between 1920 and 1960 Dogon migrants ranked work according to the amount of effort and technical and social organization required to fulfil the task. The following questions indicate the issues discussed in this paper. To what extent did the ancestors’ structure of work influence the differentiation and classification of white men’s work? Did the classification of local activities at a village level have repercussions for the colonial work? To what extent does the new conceptualization of work challenge Marx’s ‘Working Day’ theory?