Fetish

The Dogon are a people living in the Bandiagara, Douentza and Bankass regions in the south-central part of the Republic of Mali. The place where they live is commonly known as Dogon country. Their number is estimated at 500-600 thousand and the art of this people has fascinated collectors and researchers for almost a hundred years. In the study of the history of Dogon art numerous comparative studies are carried out with the art of neighbouring peoples. Some common features have been found between the art of the Dogon and the Tellem - mysterious people who inhabited the Bandiagara Escarpment long before the arrival of the Dogon. Some similarities have also been found between certain types of Dogon masks and those of the Mossi people from Burkina Faso. Another source of inspiration for the Dogon art may have been terracotta items from the area of the Inner Niger Delta. Terracotta figurines excavated since the 1940s from a site just 250 km from the Bandiagara Massif have shown many similarities to some of the Dogon sculptures. Comparisons were made between styles, facial features, body types depicted, gestures, clothing and attributes. The terracotta figures are quite well dated, many of them examined by thermoluminescence, others found in archaeological contexts, dated by the 14C carbon method. We know that they were made between the 11th and 17th centuries. Some scholars believe that the stylistic similarities between the Dogon wooden figures and the terracotta s from the Inner Niger Delta are not coincidental and may point to a common source of inspiration, which is most often considered to be the Soninke or Malinke peoples who moved from the Mande region to the Inner Niger Delta areas in the 13th century.

Ewa Prądzyńska