Griaule’s Legacy: Rethinking la parole claire in Dogon Studies

Cahiers d’Études africaines, XLV (1), 177, 2005, pp. 95-129.Few Africanists, indeed few an thropologists, remain as controversial as Marcel Griaule. Hailed as a hero o f French Africanist ethnography, with a prodigious output and prestigious school, and assailed as an anti-hero whose sympathy for Africa masked deeper forms of colonial violence, Griaule embodies the best and the worst of our disciplinary history. Lecturing in his aviator’s uniform, badgering his informants, seizing the Parisian limelight, using aerial photography, embarking on missions, collecting formuseums, and eventually becoming a Dogon elder, Griaule remained a curious combination of nineteenth century adventurer and 20th century colonial commandant, at once an agent of the French government and a liberal advocate of African cultural sophistication. Through the extended critique of Lettens (1971), the signal essays of Jamin (1982b) and Clifford (1988), and Hountondji’s attack against ethnophi losophy (1983), Griaule became a favorite target, personifying the violence and duplicity of colonial ethnography and its mystification of cultural traditions. With his substantive research on Dogon deep knowledge questioned on empirical grounds (van Beek 1991a), his interpretive focus on secrecy and hidden meaning—what he called la parole claire —has become iconic of the colonial imagination at large (Mudimbe 1988).