Dogon Figure, Mali

The sculptural tradition of the Dogon people is among the oldest and most iconic in the canons of African art. This ancient and time-worn sculpture of an ancestor is of a classic iconography, a standing figure with upraised arms; this position is seen through the interrelated traditions of the successive cultures that inhabited Dogon country in what is now central Mali, from Djennenke to the so-called Tellem (Pre-Dogon) culture, to the Dogon. The effects of time and exposure on the natural wood medium have worked together with the artist’s design to create a mysterious and powerful image evoking the cosmic power and creative imagination of this ancient culture.

The Dogon people reside in a rocky and arid region of the Western Sahel on the Bandiagara Escarpment, a majestic run of sandstone cliffs that slices across present-day central Mali between the Niger River and the Burkina Faso border. Rising over 1500 feet in sections, the Bandiagara is one of the most dramatic land formations of sub-Saharan Africa and provided a natural protective barrier against foreign incursions as well as natural shelters for many works of art that the culture produced. Defying both gravity and a harsh climate, the Dogon thrived in this unforgiving environment and constructed entire villages in the steep cliff face along the escarpment.

Partly due to their inaccessible location, the Dogon and their traditional lifestyle remained largely undisturbed by Westerners until well into the twentieth century. In 1931, on the Mission Dakar-Djibouti sponsored by the musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, French anthropologist Marcel Griaule led a small group of ethnographic researchers into Dogon country and undertook an exhaustive study of its history, culture, and religion. Griaule’s field data on Dogon mythology and oral tradition and his observations about the Dogon way of life would form the core of the scholarly literature on the Dogon. While Griaule published exhaustive accounts about the art historical context and ceremonial function of masks in Dogon society, his documentation of statuary revealed frustratingly little information, a gap in scholarship that many scholars, including Michel Leiris, Kate Ezra, and Hélène Leloup, have attempted to address in later decades.

Replete with ritualistic symbols and mythological references, Dogon statuary is inextricably linked to the cosmogony of its creators and cannot be understood separate from its social, historical, and cultural context. On this type of sculpture in particular, scholars have proposed persuasive interpretations of its iconography, though, in the absence of written history, precise meanings remain conjectural. A distinctive and frequently-rendered subject of the Dogon corpus is a single standing figure with raised arms, a posture usually interpreted as a gesture of prayer - an effort to link earth and heavens - and in particular, an appeal for rain in the arid environment of Dogon country. Leloup writes: "The statues with raised arms form part of a group of statuettes of different styles found all along the cliffs: Djennenke, classical Tellem, Niongom, Komakan, to which we can add the ones mentioned by Leiris, the 'raised arm' statuettes in the caves of Yougo [...]. These figures played a role in rainmaking rites performed by all the different inhabitants of the cliffs: a cultural adaptation by osmosis responding to the chronic lack of rain along the dry cliffs" (Leloup, Dogon, Paris, 2009, p. 127). This iconography is an archetype found in some of the earliest and most celebrated works of Sahelian art in public and private collections around the world.

The Dogon kept their sacred sculptures in caves in the cliff face, thereby preserving them for hundreds of years. Radiocarbon dating of wood sculptures from this region shows that a small number of the very earliest examples that survive in fact pre-date the arrival of the Dogon. The present figure likely dates to the eighteenth century or earlier, and stands as an exemplar of a long cultural tradition that originated in pre-Dogon societies through to the diverse substyles of the Dogon, who arrived on the Bandiagara around the fifteenth century.