The mask dances: the setting

This is a story about masks. But the masks themselves do not form the centre of this tale, but the question of dancing ‘rights’: who may dance with them and who may not. And for the Dogon of Mali this fight is not about just any masks, but theirs! Dogon masks may be well known in the world of museum exhibitions and art dealers; for the Dogon themselves masks form the main fascination in their culture.

The general setting is the village of Tireli, nestled at the foot of the Bandiagara cliff, a village where tourists come regularly during the cool season in order to see mask dances. Tireli is on the tourist trail because of its renown as a mask dancing village ever since the 1980s when the tourist market was opened up (as part of the structural adjustment implementations in Mali). Before that time only the central village of Sangha, a cluster of villages at the end of one of the few roads into Dogon country, hosted all visitors. Dogon country and culture had already been on the tourist agenda for decades, as the publications of the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen had made Dogon culture famous in the period 1938-1956. Their esoteric descriptions fired the imagination of many Northerners, and provided the background stories for the first waves of visitors.