The Dacar-Yibutí Mission under Marcel Griaule´s guidance has inaugurated French ethnography in a modern, spectacular fashion, connecting it to the latest intellectual, artistic, and even sports fashion. It has provoked the issuing of a great number of texts of distinct caliber: from one hand, the work of Leiris on the dogon language as well as on a possession cult from Ethiopia; on the other hand, the great griaulist saga which constructs a gigantic cosmological system based on overinterpretations of a handful number of informants' declarations. Perhaps the main point of this last trend is the premise that his task is to reveal a secret. This article inquiries on this "secret".
dogon; French ethnography; Griaule; secret