Senufo Traditional Religion

Senufo traditional religion, practiced across northern Cote d'Ivoire, southeastern Mali and northern Burkina Faso, is organized around the Poro, an initiatory institution that instructs Senufo men through graded stages, and its counterpart the Sandogo, which gives Senufo women their own ritual and divinatory role. Poro instruction takes place at a sacred grove and involves carved masks and figures tied to each grade, shown only within the society at the level a grade permits, and this article does not describe what is seen inside a grove or how a mask is used there.

What is public, and the subject of real scholarly and museum world debate, is the afterlife of Senufo ritual objects once they leave Senufo hands. Carved Poro masks and figures entered Western museum and private collections over the twentieth century, often without the consent of the societies that owned them, and Susan Gagliardi's fieldwork based study of the Senufo poro is among the scholarly work documenting both the institution's structure and the ethical questions its objects raise once displayed outside their own context. Authority over a mask or a grove object rests with the Poro society that owns it, not with whoever holds an example removed from Senufo hands, and Senufo communities continue to practice Poro and Sandogo today, a living institution rather than a source of museum pieces.