La conservation du mil par la potasse. Vers une épistémologie dogon des matériaux

Abstract

In a climatically challenging environment, over time, the Dogon in Mali (West Africa) have developed technical strategies to cope with the scarcity of food resources and conserve millet, their subsistence crop. Millet stalk ash and potash, produced by leaching and heating ashes, are commonly used for conserving millet in granaries as well as cooked foods. In light of the anthropology of techniques, and by using operational sequences as a core methodology for field data collection and analysis, this paper explores the traditional conservation techniques used by Dogon men and women in the village of Kani Komolé, located in the Tengu kan linguistic area. This approach focuses on the material aspect of this technical system of conservation: preservation and transformation are considered as a set of material practices involving generative materials such as millet potash, which is produced out of millet ashes obtained from the combustion of millet straws and shaft. Potash is considered both as a property of ashes and as the material that results from their transformation. Through an examination of processes used for the transformation of millet – including the use of fire – this collection of operational sequences highlights implicit forms of meaning such as belief systems about materials, the ritualization of tasks and symbolic aspects of the conservation techniques, which all form part of the Dogon definition and practice of conservation. In this perspective, this paper documents the Dogon’s conservation system, based on the social aspects of millet consumption and on the cereal’s temporality. In addition, this system stems from a Dogon epistemology of materials, based on the Dogon’s understanding of the material efficacy of millet potash – that is, this substance’s inherent power as a set of active properties with relation to healing, enhancing, neutralizing spells and preserving. In this perspective, by considering millet’s material relations within the broader daily social environment of the Dogon, this paper examines both what happens when Dogon men and women prepare food for the purpose of conservation, make it ‘preservable’, and the effect of potash on foodstuffs and on the people who consume them.