The Dogon Culture

Cultural ecology has to do with how people adapt to the social and physical environment they are surrounded by. Every culture has their own way of adapting which enables the world to have a large variety of cultures that can be found throughout the world. The Dogon peoples were able to identify a great sense of culture, religion and more by implementing artifacts, mentifacts, sociofacts. All of these terms come together to create cultures. To explain what all of them mean, I will begin with artifacts. Artifacts are usually physical objects such as clothes, automobiles, tools and more. Throughout the video I was able to identify quite a few artifacts used by the Dogon people. One artifact that really stood out for me was their wooden masks.
it’s incredible to see how a simple mask can have so many meanings behind it. Next we have mentifacts which are non-material components, unlike artifacts. When discussing mentifacts, we usually discuss beliefs, language, ideas, tradition and more. Mentifacts are important to one’s culture because they hold incredible significance. A couple of examples used in the video representing mentifacts are: wisdom is the best energy source, fox tells the future. These two examples show just how special the Dogon culture really is. They’re beliefs are very important to them which is a strong component of their togetherness. Lastly we have sociofacts, they are basically the code of conduct and rules that people should follow when being in that culture. Examples of sociofacts that I found in the video include: Each wife has a house, men usually do the weaving, patriarchy. It’s interesting to see how apparent patriarchal societies are due to their long and rich past. Also, even though it is a patriarchal society, we still see the presence of women. Women basically own houses and are in charge of taking care of