The Dogon village of Banani.

The Dogon are a group of people living in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend in the Bandiagara region. They number about 300,000. The Dogon are best known for their mythology, their mask dances, wooden sculpture and their architecture. The past century has seen significant changes in the social organization, material culture and beliefs of the Dogon, partly due to Dogon country being one of Mali's major tourist attractions. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1200x1600, 1165 KB) Please see the file description page for further information. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1200x1600, 1165 KB) Please see the file description page for further information. ... Banani Banani is a village in Mali, populated by the Dogon people. ... Bandiagara is a city in the Malian Land of the Dogons. A sandy formation of cliffs and plateaux in the region is also known as Bandiagara. ...

Geography and demography

The Bandiagara escarpment seen from the south

The principal Dogon area is dissected by the Bandiagara Escarpment, a sandstone cliff of up to 500m stretching for about 150km. To the southeast of the cliff, the sandy Séno-Gondo plains are found, and northwest of the cliff are the Bandiagara highlands. Image File history File links File links The following pages link to this file: Dogon Bandiagara Escarpment ... Image File history File links File links The following pages link to this file: Dogon Bandiagara Escarpment ... The Bandiagara escarpment seen from the south The Bandiagara Escarpment is an escarpment in the Dogon country of Mali. ...

Culture and religion

The majority of Dogon practice an animist religion, with its festivals and Sirian mythology, but a significant minority practice Islam, and some have been converted by missionaries to Christianity. Animism is the belief that personalized supernatural beings (or souls) inhabit all objects and govern their existence. ... The position of Sirius Sirius (α CMa / α Canis Majoris / Alpha Canis Majoris) is the brightest star in the nighttime sky, with a visual apparent magnitude of −1. ... Islam   listen? (Arabic: al-islām) the submission to God is a monotheistic faith, one of the Abrahamic religions, and the worlds second largest religion. ... Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament writings of his early followers. ...

The Dogon record their ancestry through a patrilineal system. Each Dogon community is headed by one male elder. This chief head is the oldest living son of the ancestor of the local branch of the family. Within this patrilineal system couples will marry monogamously, although polygyny is occasionally known. Patrilineality (a. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The term polygyny (neo-Greek: poly+gyne woman) is used in related ways in social anthropology and sociobiology. ...

They are one of many African tribal groups which practice female circumcision. Female circumcision (including excision) loosely refers to a number of procedures performed on the female genitalia and which are generally of a cultural, rather than medical nature. ...

The Dogon maintain an agricultural mode of subsistence, and cultivate millet, sorghum and rice, as well as onions and some other vegetables. They also raise sheep and chickens. Grain is stored in granaries. Nutrition information for one cup of cooked millet Millet is the collective name of a group of genera of the grass family(Gramineae/Paniceae) widely grown around the world for food or animal feed. ... Species Hybrids Sorghum, also known as jowar, (Sorghum vulgare or Sorghum bicolor) is a grass (family Poaceae) which is used for food, fodder, and the production of alcoholic beverages. ... Species References ITIS 41975 2002-09-22 Rice (genus Oryza) is a plant of the grass family which is a dietary staple of more than half of the worlds human population. ... Binomial name Allium cepa L. Onion in the general sense can be used for any plant in the Genus Allium but used without qualifiers usually means Allium cepa L., also called the garden onion. ... Vegetables in a market Vegetable is a nutritional and culinary term denoting any part of a plant that is commonly consumed by humans as food, but is not regarded as a culinary fruit, nut, herb, or spice. ... Binomial name Ovis aries Linnaeus, 1758 A sheep is any of several woolly ruminant quadrupeds, but most commonly the Domestic Sheep (Ovis aries), which probably descends from the wild moufflon of south-central and south-west Asia. ... Binomial name Gallus gallus (Linnaeus, 1758) This article is concerned with chicken as a domesticated fowl; for other uses of the term see chicken (disambiguation). ...

Languages

Dogon has been frequently referred to as a single language. In reality, there are at least five distinct groups of dialects.^[1] The Dogon language family is internally highly diverse, and many varieties are not mutually intelligible.

It is generally accepted that the Dogon languages belong to the Niger-Congo language family, but there is less certainty about their place within this family. The Dogon group has been linked to the Mande subfamily but also to Gur. In a recent overview of the Niger-Congo phylum, Dogon is treated as an independent branch before Volta-Congo. ^[2] The Dogon languages are spoken by the Dogon in Mali. ... Map showing the distribution of Niger-Congo languages The Niger-Congo languages are probably the largest group of the world in terms of different languages. ... Mandé is the name of an ethnic group or nation, as well as a group of languages which are spoken in several countries in West Africa, including Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mendé, Yacouba, and Vai. ... The Gur languages belong to the Niger-Congo languages. ... In the classification of African languages, Volta-Congo is the major branch (in terms of number of languages) of the Niger-Congo phylum. ...

The Dogon languages show few remnants of a noun class system (one example is that human nouns take a distinct plural suffix), leading linguists to conclude that Dogon is likely to have diverged from Niger-Congo very early. Another indication of this is the Subject Object Verb basic word order, which Dogon shares with such early Niger-Congo branches as Ijoid and Mande. In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the general order of words in a languages sentences: Sam oranges ate. The SOV type is the most common type found in natural languages. ... The Ijoid languages are spoken by the Ijaw (Izon, Ijo) and the Defaka (Afakani) in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, totalling about 1. ... Mandé is the name of an ethnic group or nation, as well as a group of languages which are spoken in several countries in West Africa, including Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mendé, Yacouba, and Vai. ...

Mythology

Dogon mythology has been said to describe the white dwarf star Sirius B, which orbits Sirius but is not visible without the use of a powerful telescope. White dwarf Sirius-B in x-rays A white dwarf is an astronomical object which is produced when a low to medium mass star dies. ... This article is about the star. ... The position of Sirius Sirius (α CMa / α Canis Majoris / Alpha Canis Majoris) is the brightest star in the nighttime sky, with a visual apparent magnitude of −1. ... 50 cm refracting telescope at Nice Observatory. ...

The Dogon call Sirius B Po Tolo. This star was the seed of the Milky Way galaxy and "navel" of the entire universe, according to the Dogon mythological explanation. They describe the universe as "infinite, but measurable", and filled with many yalu ulo, or spiral star systems, including the one containing the Earth's sun. The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Latin Galaxia Kuklos) is the galaxy in which the Earth is found. ... This article is about a celestial body. ... For the plant of this name, see Umbilicus rupestris. ... The deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. ... A spiral galaxy is a type of galaxy in the Hubble sequence which is characterized by the following physical properties: Spiral Galaxy M74 presents a face-on view of its spiral arms. ... Earth, also known as the Earth, Terra, and (mostly in the 19th century) Tellus, is the third planet outward from the Sun. ... The Sun is the star at the centre of our Solar system. ...

According to the Dogon perception of the universe, most of the universe is part of the "external" star system, while nearer to Earth is the "internal" star system. The stars in the "internal" system include many that they claim affect the lives of people of Earth and play a part in human history, including not only the Sirius binary system, but also Orion, Pleiades and others. Orion, a constellation often referred to as The Hunter, is a prominent constellation, perhaps the best-known in the sky. ... The Pleiades, dominated by hot blue stars surrounded by reflection nebulosity The Pleiades (pleye-a-deez or plee-a-deez, also known as M45, or the Seven Sisters) is an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. ...

The tribe neighboring the Dogon, the Bozo, have a similar mythology about Sirius in the sky and refer to it as the "Eye Star". Bozo the Clown is the name of a clown whose widespread syndication in early television made him the best-known clown character in the United States. ...

Skepticism

Most of the information regarding Dogon mythology and knowledge of Sirius and its companions comes from Robert Temple and his 1975 book The Sirius Mystery. While interviewing the Dogon, Temple found they had some information on Sirius and its companion star, Sirius B. Sirius B is invisible without a telescope. Since the Dogon did not have telescopes and were not an advanced civilization, he concluded that the only way they could have obtained the information on Sirius B was by contact with an advanced civilization. Therefore, Temple concluded that aliens from the Sirius star system personally visited the Dogons and made them familiar with the operation of their astronomical home.

Carl Sagan, among others, agrees with Temple that the Dogon could not have known about Sirius B without contact with an advanced civilization. However, Sagan argues that the Dogon could have found out about the Sirius neighbor by contact with advanced terrestrial civilizations. Information from those other cultures does refer to dark companions about 5,000 years ago in myths, which may have reached the then less isolated Dogon. A respected astronomer and dogged critic of pseudoscience, Carl Sagan is best known for his enthusiastic efforts at popularizing science. ...

The Dogon have had a traditional interest in astronomy. By the 1920s, the Dogon had had contact with Western civilizations. It is only natural that conversations with visitors would eventually turn to astronomy. In fact, in the 1920s, there had been a great deal of press in scientific journals regarding Sirius and its neighboring star. Since Sirius A, which is visible to the naked eye, was a part of their mythology, it is reasonable that the visitors passed on information regarding its companion and its period of orbit and other information regarding the star. In ancient Greece and other early civilizations, astronomy consisted largely of astrometry, measuring positions of stars and planets in the sky. ... Sometimes referred to as the Jazz Age or primarily in North America as the Roaring Twenties. // Events and trends Technology John T. Thompson invents Thompson submachine gun, also known as Tommy gun John Logie Baird invents the first working television system (1925) Charles Lindbergh becomes the first person to fly...

By the time Temple visited the Dogon in the 1970s, they had had a great deal of contact with the western world and had time to incorporate Sirius B into their religion. To skeptics, it is unreasonable to assume that the Dogon's only source of information on the Sirius stars was extraterrestrial in origin. This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... Skepticism (Commonwealth spelling: Scepticism) can mean: Philosophical skepticism - a philosophical position in which people choose to critically examine whether the knowledge and perceptions that they have are actually true, and whether or not one can ever be said to have absolutely true knowledge; or Scientific skepticism - a scientific, or practical...

Notes and references

Notes

References

The people

• Bedaux, R. & J.D. van der Waals (eds.) (2003) Dogon: mythe en werkelijkheid in Mali [Dogon: myth and reality in Mali]. Leiden: National Museum of Ethnology.
• Morton, Robert (ed.) & Hollyman, Stephenie (photographs) & Walter E.A. van Beek (text) (2001) Dogon: Africa's people of the cliffs. New York: Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-4373-5
• Wanono, Nadine & Renaudeau, Michel (1996) Les Dogon (photographs by Michel Renaudeau; text by Nadine Wanono). Paris: Éditions du Chêne-Hachette. ISBN 2-85108-937-4

The languages

• Bertho, J. (1953) 'La place des dialectes dogon de la falaise de Bandiagara parmi les autres groupes linguistiques de la zone soudanaise,' Bulletin de l'IFAN, 15, 405–441.
• Blench, Roger (2001) 'A Survey of Dogon languages in Mali: Overview'. Retrieved June 26, 2005.
• Hochstetler, J. Lee, Durieux, J.A. & E.I.K. Durieux-Boon (2004) Sociolinguistic Survey of the Dogon Language Area. SIL International. online version
• Williamson, Kay & Blench, Roger (2000) 'Niger-Congo', in Heine, Bernd and Nurse, Derek (eds) African Languages - An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, pp. 11—42.

External links

• General information about the Dogon and Sirius from a "Metaphysical and Science Website"
• "Dogon and Sirius" from The Skeptic's Dictionary.
• The contribution of linguistics and language studies in unravelling the history of the Dogon Plateau