In a remote area of Mali, West Africa, the people called Dogon survive today as they have for thousands of years: in mud-brick houses below the Bandiagara cliffs. In the sandy plains, they grow the millet and sorghum they need to live. This arresting photographic portrait allows us privileged access to their traditional way of life, remarkably maintained today even after extensive contact with Western civilization.
Stephenie Hollyman’s intimate pictures show a tightly knit, cooperative society engaging in daily activities and sacred rituals: planting and harvesting crops, creating crafts, and performing varied religious ceremonies, most notably the masked dances with which the Dogon celebrate the honored burial of their dead. Walter van Beek’s engaging narrative displays the authority and observant eye of an anthropologist who has long lived among the people he writes about. This astonishing volume will find a rapt audience among readers of Abrams’ acclaimed African Ceremonies and other popular books on vanishing African tribal customs.
Stephenie Hollyman has worked as a journalist in many parts of the world taking photographs of people, from tribal elders in Alaska to Indians in the Andes of Peru. Her pictures have recorded the effect of apartheid on children's lives in southern Africa, and of homelessness in America. Her photographs have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Audubon, and Time magazine.
Walter E.A. van Beek is associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. He has done fieldwork in Africa for 30 years, studying the Kapsiki/Higi people of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria and, since 1979, the Dogon of Mali. He has written many articles and two books on Africa.
