Dogon

The Dogon it's a West African tribe in Mali living mainly along a 90 mile escarpment of canyon, cliffs, and plateau called the Cliffs of Bandiagara. The Dogon number approximately 300,000 and are well known for their ornate ritual masks, costumes, and dance.
Dogon’s mythology is remarkably rich and centers around the idea of language. It is the “word” that manifests itself in every aspect of creation: “The constituent materials and morphology of speech are seen to correspond to those of cereals, of man, of woven cloth, of the whole cosmos. The same intricate harmony of images is drawn down and across from one level of experience to the next. Reading it is like gazing through a microscope at a flourishing form of life...” (anthropologist Mary Douglas). According to this eschatology the word is the manifestation of cosmic energy stewarded by the nommo, divine beings who are both part and participant of continual creation. For the Dogon, the word is not just speech, but also action and ritual. Speech, action, and ritual all reflect the primary interrelatedness the individual has with cosmos and vice versa. The grain of millet, the foetus in the womb, and the earth under heaven are all the same thing, differentiated only by a slight oscillation of the primordial word. Such an ontological understanding has enduring consequences. For the Dogon, to say something is to make and/or do it.
The Dogon mask and accompanying ritual are representations/manifestations of the word. Wearing a mask and performing the rite associated with the mask re-establishes sacred time and space (Eliade), pronounces the creative word (Douglas), initiates the mask-wearer as a co-creator of the cosmos (Grillo), which provokes a cosmic harmony ideally at every level of nature (Griaule).