How true is it in terms of ethnography?

Meet the Dogon! A people numbering about 250,000 mostly living in Bandiagara, Mali, West Africa (Red blotches on map)

Let's get this straight about the Dogon: They are not "stone age" in any way. In Africa and Asia there are numerous tribes which could be so described, subsisting by foraging in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with minimal material support.

Dogon are by comparison a sedentary agricultural people with a rich and sophisticated material culture. Arts they can count their own include:

	smelting iron,     © INAGINA 1998-9. Image by Eric Huysecom, Bernard Agustoni
working it into tools, growing a subsistence crop in poor and rocky soil, fishing,       yo dolomo crook Bandiagara Escarpment © Shawn Davis 1997 Fishing on the Niger at Segou © Shawn Davis 1997
	house building, granary building, locksmithery,       Doorway © Robert Donald Matthews 1997 Rooftops of Dologou © Shawn Davis 1997 Dologou © Shawn Davis 1997
pottery, weaving, dyeing, basketry, leatherwork,     Calabashes © Robert Donald Matthews 1997 Children's toys © Shawn Davis 1997 Napping on a blanket © Shawn Davis 1997
	painting, mask-making,     Wall Painting © Robert Donald Matthews 1997 Dogon Dance picture at this portal to the REPUBLIC OF MALI
and sculpture.       Ambire Mamadou, blacksmith © Shawn Davis 1997 Equestrian figure @ Sahel Tecnologies

It should be no surprise that they also posess systems of symbolic respresentation... and even some astronomy.     Pale Fox divining table © José Azel 1989

Real Dogon Facts about Sirius

Dogon do know Sirius.
They call it dana tolo -- the hunter's star.
Orion's Belt represents the game and the dogs.
They do not call it sigu tolo.
It is not connected with the 60-year sigu festival.
They do not know about po tolo or eme ya tolo.
The Dogon do have secrets, but not about Sirius.

(From "Dogon Restudied" by Walter EA van Beek, Current Anthropology, Vol 32, Number 2, April 1991 p. 139)

Prof van Beek's article is a comprehensive critique of the work of Marcel Griaule, who published Un Systeme Soudanais de Sirius with Germaine Dieterlen in 1950, which claimed that Sirius or "sigi tolo" was connected with the 60 year "Sigi" festival, that sigi tolo was orbited by "po tolo" and "emme ya tolo", and that this information was secret.

Marcel Griaule, who died in 1956, is still a hugely regarded anthropologist. See this exhibition of his work. His erstwhile collaborators are still highly regarded in the field. Empirical works he produced before WWII, such as Masques Dogons, still contain much valid ethnography. So why the discrepancy between Griaule and van Beek over Sirius?

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