★ Delve deeply into Dogon culture, based on three decades of field research, and re-examine the art, cosmology and rituals of the Dogon people.
★ Combining anthropology, psychiatry and historical analysis, it offers a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of Dogon society.
★ Contemporary relevance, focusing on the suffering and care of immigrants, reflecting historical changes under instability, war and social anxiety.

The Dogon Plateau in Mali is one of the most studied and paradigmatic areas in the field of anthropology. The ethnology of its populations is unique, as evidenced by the works of Marcel Griaule (1931-1956) and subsequent criticisms, at times caustic, of his formulation.
Is it still possible to speak about the Dogon today? The question is in itself legitimate, if we consider the sheer number of studies dedicated to the Dogon people’s art, cosmogony, languages, symbols, architecture and divinatory techniques. Yet it would appear to moot the idea that it is possible to say everything there is to say about a society and its institutions once and for all.
There are still things that have been left out, or simply repressed. This is the subject of The Grudge of Time, a book that reopens the “Dogon files” based on the research by Roberto Beneduce, a participant in and a witness of the decisive changes that have taken place over the last thirty years. In this endless ethnography, the memories, experiences and emotions that impregnate encounters in the field are relayed and recorded with reference to one area in particular: that of madness and the singular form of historical consciousness that ritual care preserves, and of the violence that has been the scourge of this region of Mali for years.
In this way, the Dogon emerge from the museums and monographs in which they have long been immobilised. Their bodies released at last from the spell that was petrifying them, their movements and dances are engaging history once more.
The Grudge of Time is an intermingling of ethnography, critical theory and historical analysis which restores to the debate a subject that had long become stilted and updates it to the present, to the story of the Dogon (and Malian) diaspora, considering suffering and care in a changed historic context in which precariousness, war, social and family anxieties provide the backdrop to the accounts of migrants and their adventures.

Roberto Beneduce is an anthropologist and psychiatrist. A collaborator of Marc Augé and a lecturer at the University of Turin, he lived in Africa and has been visiting professor at a number of foreign universities. He is recognised as an authority in the field of critical ethnopsychiatry and African studies and has published Trance e possessione in Africa. Corpi, mimesi, storia (Trance and Possession in Africa. Bodies, mimesis, history, 2002), and (with Bertrand Pulman and Élisabeth Roudinesco) Etnopsicanalisi. Temi e protagonisti di un dialogo incompiuto. (Ethnopsychoanalysis. Themes and protagonists of an unfinished dialogue, 2005) and Corpi e saperi indocili. Guarigione, stregoneria e potere in Camerun (Indocile Bodies and Knowledge. Healing, witchcraft and power in Cameroon, 2010).