Living in a Landscape of Scarcity: Materiality and Cosmology in West Africa

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.