Dogon Dama Funeral Rite

The dama is a major funerary ceremony of the Dogon people of the Bandiagara escarpment region of Mali, held periodically, often years after a death and typically for multiple deceased individuals at once, to bring the formal mourning period to a close and to guide the spirits of the dead out of the world of the living and into the ancestral realm. The ceremony centers on elaborate masked dance performances, involving dozens of distinct traditional mask types carved and maintained by initiated members of the Awa masking society, each representing particular beings, ancestors, or social roles within Dogon cosmology, performed publicly over several days with drumming, chanting, and choreography passed down through structured initiation. Extensively documented by French anthropologists including Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen from the 1930s onward as part of some of the most detailed ethnographic studies ever conducted on a single African society's cosmology and ritual system, the dama remains a significant living tradition among Dogon communities and, along with Dogon masks more broadly, has become widely known internationally as one of the most studied and photographed ritual complexes in African ethnography.