Dr. Laurence Douny
Profil
Forschungsthemen1
Techniken aus westafrikanischer Wildseide: Die Bewahrung des Wissenserbes von Marka-Dafing
Quelle ↗Förderer: Sonstige internationale Geldgeber Zeitraum: 02/2020 - 07/2022 Projektleitung: Dr. Laurence Douny
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Publikationen25
Top 25 nach Zitationen — Quelle: OpenAlex (BAAI/bge-m3 embedded für Matching).
Editorial
2009Journal of Material Culture · 40 Zitationen · DOI
The editors of this special issue on ‘“Making” and “Doing” the Material World’ examine some aspects of the anthropology of techniques, a relatively understudied branch of anthropology, which considers the embodied and cognitive engagement of human beings in their lived material world. They suggest that the use of new theories of embodiment, cognition and performance allows for a consideration of the role of the senses, perception, emotions and materiality in the formation of knowledgeable, gendered subjects. They argue that the Francophone and Anglophone traditions in the anthropology of techniques are complementary, despite their divisions (between and within them).
Journal of Material Culture · 39 Zitationen · DOI
This article explores some of the multiple forms and uses of Dogon domestic waste, considering daily shared experiences of the matter. It examines the implicit meanings objectified in the materiality of, and the daily praxis associated with, rubbish that the Dogon select and allocate to particular places in and out of their `home container'. These are framed within a recycled cosmology that encompasses a plurality of entangled world-views that inform us about the life cycles of people, environment and society.
Journal of Material Culture · 10 Zitationen · DOI
This article explores some aspects of Hausa wild silk embroidered gowns known as riga, interpreting these famous and prestigious attires in the light of techniques and transformative processes. The author thus highlights implicit forms of knowledge underlying material practices about, first, the wearing and layering of highly decorated gowns and, second, the process of creating silk-embroidered motifs (on the outside gown) and inked patterns (on the inside gown) that stand as the objectification and expression of charismatic power through self-display. The author proposes that Hausa wild silk-embroidered gowns constitute a material identity of power in that they materialize individual as well as group social status, prestige, fame and wealth. The empirical materials derive from ongoing fieldwork in northern Nigeria on the production and use of wild silk, a particular substance/material to which mystic properties are attributed and which plays an important role in the empowerment of riga.
TEXTILE · 5 Zitationen · DOI
This article examines wild silk woven wrappers of the Dogon of Mali. These luxury cloths called tombe toun that are worn and valued by Dogon women for their sheen embody prestige for ceremonies as well as they act as a material identity and a form of meta-language. In this article, I discuss the indigenous concept of sheen as expressed through the production and usages of wild silk wrappers. I show that from a Dogon point of view, sheen mainly refers to a living force called daoula inherent to wild silk. daoula as a kind of “aura” of the textile embraces the medicinal and magic properties of wild silk but also its durability, strength and material brilliance. These are drawn out of the cocoons and threads by use of technical transformative processes and through wearing the wrapper, which acts as a marker of social visibility and of which daoula empowers the wearer. I suggest that the cultural significance attached to Dogon wild silk material and textiles that symbolize Dogon social values such as personal worth, wealth, and social status, rests on the particular materiality of sheen and therefore the efficacy of this animal secreted material.
Anthropology and Medicine · 5 Zitationen · DOI
This paper deals with the role of earth shrines in generating and maintaining social order and cohesion in a Dogon village on the Bandiagara escarpment (Mali, West Africa), in a context of scarcity. Earth shrines are erected at significant points in the landscape and in remote times symbolised the foundation of the territory. They form part of the ritual control of space by reinforcing, through sacrificial practice, a symbolic boundary that encloses and protects the village space. Through their yearly reactivation, this practice firstly enables the Dogon to strengthen their relationship with their god, their ancestors and the spirits that own the place and, secondly, it aims to renew social relationships and maintain the cohesion and continuity of the society whilst simultaneously conveying a sense of well-being. This paper examines the materiality, efficacy and activation principles of Dogon earth shrines that operate through the intervention of complementary living substances: millet and blood. These earth shrines function on an ontological principle of containment by which people protect themselves, act and dwell in the world. That is to say, they endow active principles and play a part in forming a local cosmology in a harsh and changing world.
UCL Discovery (University College London) · 5 Zitationen
Dans la trajectoire des choses. Comparaison des approches francophones et anglophones contemporaines en anthropologie des techniques. Dans cette introduction, les auteurs exposent les approches francophones et anglophones de l’étude des techniques et suggèrent que ces deux traditions ont traité d’enjeux comparables. Ils les resituent dans l’histoire des Sciences humaines et analysent leur place dans le champ anthropologique. Ils retracent les débats et les échanges qui les ont enrichies, particulièrement dans leur dialogue avec d’autres disciplines connexes comme l’archéologie, la sociologie, l’Histoire de l’Art et la muséologie. En conclusion, les auteurs suggèrent que l’un des éléments qui différencie ces traditions réside dans la manière dont est pensée et traitée la question du déterminisme.
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences · 4 Zitationen · DOI
This special issue, “Making Animal Materials in Time,” delves into the history of animal materials used in craft and scientific endeavors since the eighteenth century. We regard animal materials as dynamic elements with particular properties granted context-specific and culturally fluid meanings by those who work with them—often to the point of dissolving their original animal materiality. Focusing on this multi-dynamic at the intersection of history of science and the anthropology of techniques permits a reformulation of the concept of affordance, as material affordances, to create the theoretical capacity for a discussion of the diverse processes of rendering animal bodies into new substances, materials, and things. Six case studies illustrate how human historical actors distinguished animal materials as they observed, envisioned, extracted, processed, and changed animal bodies and tissues into new elements. Collectively, these papers present a strategy for examining connections between the spatial and temporal qualities of animal materials situated in human-scale material practices. The animal materials featured in this special issue serve as boundary objects across practical settings, contexts, regions, and cultural world settings that instrumentally link the history of science to anthropologies of craft knowledges.
Construction Robotics · 3 Zitationen · DOI
Abstract Wearable augmented reality-supported technology allows for tracking and informing the interrelation of craftspeople with the architectural structure they are working on. Especially when dealing with partially ordered rather than fully ordered material systems, this feedback is relevant since toolpaths cannot be established a priori but rather evolve during the architectural construction process itself. On the one hand, partially ordered material systems have the potential of adapting to conditions both internal and external to the structure. On the other hand, they can be considered as structures that are constantly evolving: instead of demolishing a building, it could be continuously repaired. While a large range of investigations involve robots equipped with sensory feedback to address this topic, only few studies have attempted to equip humans with a minimal amount of technology so as to harness human sensory intelligence, merely enhancing it with technology. This article introduces the current state of the field of augmented reality and partially ordered systems in architectural construction with a focus on filament-laying processes. Then, it presents a newly developed framework for augmented construction with designed filaments for partially ordered fabrics in architecture, encompassing both the wearable hardware and the custom-developed software. The principles of systems in human-made filament-based architecture are introduced and set in relation to similar role model systems in animal-made architecture. Then, three experiments of increasing complexity investigate the human-to-machine, the machine-to-human and the machine-to-human-to-machine communication. A final integrative demonstrator serves to investigate the framework for augmented reality in construction on a full architectural scale. As an outlook, areas of further research—such as the integration of artificial intelligence into the feedback loop—are discussed.
Technology s Stories · 3 Zitationen · DOI
2 Zitationen · DOI
2 Zitationen · DOI
2 Zitationen · DOI
In her close ethnography of a Dogon village of Mali, Laurence Douny shows how a microcosmology develops from people's embodied daily and ritual practice in a landscape of scarcity. Viewed through the lens of containment practice, she describes how they cope with the shortage of material items central to their lives—water, earth, and millet. Douny’s study is an important addition to ecological anthropology, to the study of West African cultures, to the understanding of material culture, and to anthropological theory.
Acta Horticulturae · 1 Zitationen · DOI
For centuries, across West Africa, plants have been used extensively not only in traditional medicine but also for dyeing cloth.Examples are the use of the bark of Terminalia laxiflora, the root of Cochlospermum tinctorium and the pods of Acacia nilotica, which together form the vegetable basis of a complex natural colorant produced by the hunters of the Marka-Dafing community in the Mouhoun region of north-western Burkina Faso.This colorant, known as vouwo and used by the hunters to dye a hunting and ceremonial shirt called a donso dileke (hunter shirt), is prepared by adding the plant elements to soil and iron ore in water.This mixture of ingredients then undergoes a long process of fermentation, whereby an essential role is played by certain bacteria present in the mud.This paper examines the use of extracts of the pods of A. nilotica to counteract certain counterproductive bacteria that under non-optimal conditions may proliferate in the dyeing jar, forming thick biofilms and inhibiting the dyeing process.Besides showing some previously studied antibacterial activity, extracts of A. nilotica pods have also been found to interfere efficiently with the biofilm formation of these bacteria.By suppressing the disruptive bacteria, A. nilotica seems to support the proliferation and desired activity of the bacteria that contribute to the coloring of the textile (mainly anaerobic producers of iron sulphide).While extensive research has been carried out on the phytochemistry of traditional medicinal plants, in this ongoing study, the authors investigate the role of A. nilotica in traditional fermentative cloth dyeing by looking into aspects of the microbiome that develops during the dyeing of the hunter shirt.The interdisciplinary approach of this study to the complex roles of natural dyes combines extensive anthropological field research with microbiological methods.
Techniques & culture · 1 Zitationen · DOI
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.
Apparence(s) · 1 Zitationen · DOI
Dans cet article, l'auteure explore la construction sociale de l'apparence chez les femmes marka-dafing de l'ouest du Burkina Faso en partant de la production d’un textile traditionnel appelé tuntun dont la composante principale est la soie sauvage, une matière rare et précieuse. En analysant les procédés techniques utilisés par ces femmes pour transformer les cocons d'abord en fils puis, avec l'aide de tisserands, en pagnes et foulards, l'auteure s’interroge sur la nature et les significations attribuées à cette matière aux caractéristiques mystiques produite par des chenilles non-domestiquées. Des affinités matérielles entre les femmes, la soie et les esprits émergent au cours du processus complexe de transformation de la matière qui permet de révéler sa brillance. La soie, par l’intermédiaire du corps qui porte le pagne, matérialise ces relations et sa brillance permet de connecter le monde visible à celui de l’invisible. Dotée d’agentivité matérielle, la brillance contribue également à légitimer les messages qui sont tissés dans le textile.
University of Toronto Press eBooks · 1 Zitationen · DOI
1 Zitationen · DOI
This chapter explores aspects of the Dogon Tengu and Tommon collective, individual and shared material identities. It suggests that Dogon cultural identities materialise in their wild silk indigo cloths of prestige called tombe toun throughout the making process and social usages of this flamboyant woven fabric. The chapter examines of the material practices involved in production and in the use of wild silk as a wrapping material. It discusses Dogon wrapping techniques in relation to wild silk indigo textiles. The Dogon and Marka-Dafing people live in neighbouring territories and on both sides of the Malian and Burkinabe political border. The chapter suggests the interethnic collaborative production of the cloth and through its use in various social contexts to dress and cover the body. Hence, tombe toun wrappers serve both as the material and visual means by which social status and values are expressed and as the way those social relationships by sealed and legitimised.
Techniques & culture · 1 Zitationen · DOI
Dans la trajectoire des choses. Comparaison des approches francophones et anglophones contemporaines en anthropologie des techniques. Dans cette introduction, les auteurs exposent les approches francophones et anglophones de l’étude des techniques et suggèrent que ces deux traditions ont traité d’enjeux comparables. Ils les resituent dans l’histoire des Sciences humaines et analysent leur place dans le champ anthropologique. Ils retracent les débats et les échanges qui les ont enrichies, particulièrement dans leur dialogue avec d’autres disciplines connexes comme l’archéologie, la sociologie, l’Histoire de l’Art et la muséologie. En conclusion, les auteurs suggèrent que l’un des éléments qui différencie ces traditions réside dans la manière dont est pensée et traitée la question du déterminisme.
UCL Discovery (University College London) · 1 Zitationen
Abstract This article explores some of the multiple forms and uses of Dogon domesticwaste, considering daily shared experiences of the matter. It examines theimplicit meanings objectified in the materiality of, and the daily praxisassociated with, rubbish that the Dogon select and allocate to particularplaces in and out of their ‘home container’. These are framed within arecycled cosmology that encompasses a plurality of entangled world-viewsthat inform us about the life cycles of people, environment and society. Key Words ◆ Dogon ◆ domestic waste ◆ materiality ◆ recycled cosmologyIn memory of Mary Douglas (1921–2007).To understand garbage you have to touch it, to feel it, to sort it, to smell it.(Rathje and Murphy, 2001: 9) Rubbish! It’s all about rubbish! Waste, garbage, detritus, litter and dirthave become a significant concern within the anthropology of the last10 years. Beyond classics such as Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966),Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979) and Laporte’s olfactory
OpenGrey (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) · 1 Zitationen
Grounded in long-term fieldwork, this thesis develops an ethnography of two aspects of Dogon material culture: the Dogon landscape and the Dogon habitation, both of which are defined as containers. The examination of these two discrete metaphorical and material epistemologies, which are conceptualised as 'skin envelopes', seeks implicit forms of worldviews that are objectified in their materiality. In other words, the research focuses on the expressions of a daily generative cosmology as it is grounded in pragmatic, material and routine embodied activities that relate to the 'making' and 'doing' of these two forms of container. Framed within an Anthropology of Techniques, the study employs a combined praxeological and phenomenological approach entailing the participant observation of body-kinetic and sensory experience of containers. In addition, observations of the body movements involved in the making and storing of things in the compound expose the containers in a visual sequence called 'chaine operatoire' that also constitutes a frame of analysis, one devised through the recording of the manufacturing and use of the containers. Thus, through an empirical, descriptive, reflexive, and processual approach to Dogon containers and related worldviews, my research elaborates theoretical perspectives on a Dogon philosophy of containment that is defined within a materiality perspective. In doing so, I demonstrate that particular local ways of 'being-in-the-world' or 'being-at-home in a world container' are generated through the material qualities of the Dogon landscape, or cosmoscape, and the domestic sphere of the compound. These operate through a gathering process and boundary-making devices that create the inside/outside locales in which people dwell and which generate a sense of ontological security in a particular scarce environment.
Journal of Material Culture · DOI
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on “endangerment,” highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material knowledges practices (wild silk textiles; hide and fiber crafts; artificial island-building; felt hats; dry stonemasonry; dyes) in six geographical locations (Burkina Faso, Mongolia, Solomon Islands, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Colombia), the featured EMKP projects highlight how endangerment and resilience are not mutually exclusive. Instead, enmeshed paradoxically through social embedding, endangerment and resilience are intimately intertwined, constituent parts of each other. We propose the notion of “demonstrably sustainable technics” as an analytical category to better account for the endangerment-resilience nexus, to better understand why and how some material practices and knowledges persist despite various threats to their continuity, that of their human and non-human participants and broader socioecological contexts. Simultaneously, “demonstrably sustainable technics” allow for a nuanced understanding of the imbrication of acts of cultural and social erasure paradoxically with the very same traditions of documentation attempting to be overturned or at least confronted by these projects.
Coloration Technology · DOI
Abstract Coloration using soil‐based dyes is a fast‐growing subject of enquiry in fibres and textile surface design, with pigments and microbes involved in their production being extensively researched. Dyeing techniques using this rich natural resource have also been integral to long‐standing textile traditions worldwide. Grounded in an anthropological study of the dyeing practice of Marka‐Dafing hunters in Burkina Faso, West Africa, this paper presents an analysis of the coloration processes in vouwo , or mud dye, used for hunting and ceremonial garments. It highlights complex biochemical and microbiological reactions occurring in a dyeing experiment curated by dyers throughout an 18‐month‐long fermentation process. The authors propose an interdisciplinary approach to the study of vouwo that combines (i) detailed examination and documentation of craft practice with (ii) a materials science‐based analysis of the iron ore used and of the resulting brown colour shades and (iii) a microbiological description of the multiple roles of bacteria and their complex interactions with plants such as Acacia nilotica in the dyeing process. By underlining the material, biochemical, microbiological and medicinal properties of vouwo dye, our study of dyeing with soil as a natural colourant calls attention to a potential role of traditional craft knowledge in dialogue with modern science for the future production of more sustainable and health‐promoting dyes.
Azania Archaeological Research in Africa · DOI
SPIRE - Sciences Po Institutional REpository
International audience
Berghahn Books · DOI
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