Marcel Griaule (Aisy-on-Armançon, Yonne, 1898 - Paris, 1956) is a ethnologist French.

After having spent several months in Abyssinie (1928 - 1929) it organized the crossing of Africa of west in east: the Mission Dakar-Djibouti of 1931-1933 with Michel Leiris, Andre Schaeffner, and other ethnologists, inaugurating the ethnology of ground on this occasion. During this forwarding, he studied the Dogon S on which he made the large majority of his research.

Very attached to the culture dogon, it took part in the development of the area by supporting in particular the construction of a stopping of irrigation for the culture of the Oignon, of pepper in the area of Sangha (Sanga).

One of its essential contributions (relating to the Ethnography) is to have shown that cosmogony dogon (oral) is at least as important as Western cosmogonies. It however will be very criticized to have underestimated the Western influence in astronomical knowledge of Dogon. It was one of the rare ethnographers to be profited from African traditional funeral.

From 1943 with its death, he is professor with the Sorbonne (first pulpit of ethnology). He is also Conseiller French Union. Since 1940, he was General secretary of the Société of the Africanists.

He worked, inter alia, with Germaine Dieterlen and his daughter Genevieve Calame-Griaule.

Works

• Flambeurs of men (1936)
• Masques let us dogons (1938). edition 1994, reprinted in 2004. Scientific publications of the national Natural history museum of Natural history. 890 p. + XXXII. ISBN: 2-85653-569-0.
• Jeux let us dogons (1938)
• Sao legendary (Gallimard 1943)
• God of water (discussions with Ogotemmeli, work which reveals the structures of the crowned thought dogon) (1948)
• pale Renard, ethnology of Dogons , Institut of Ethnology, 1965/1991 (in collaboration with Germaine Dieterlen).

Secondary literature

• Walter E.A. van Beek: " Dogon Restudied: In Field Evaluation off the Work off Marcel Griaule." Current Anthropology , 32 (1991): 139-167.
• Isabelle Fiemeyer, Marcel Griaule, citizen dogon , Actes Sud 2004