Dieu d'eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmeli

Marcel Griaule was a French ethnographer whose Dieu d'eau records his mid-twentieth century conversations with the blind Dogon elder Ogotemmeli, presenting an elaborate esoteric Dogon cosmology built around the ancestral beings called the Nommo. Its documentary value is real, it is Griaule's own recorded account and it became enormously influential in shaping how Dogon religion was understood in French and English scholarship for decades afterward. Its limit is the reason for its tier two placement, later fieldwork by Walter van Beek, published as Dogon Restudied and already covered separately in this atlas, found no independent confirmation that ordinary Dogon people held this cosmological system, raising the question of how much of it reflects Ogotemmeli's own esoteric knowledge or Griaule's own construction rather than general Dogon belief, so any claim about Dogon religion drawn from Griaule alone should be checked against that critique.