Caga {part II}

The Dogon do not name the village well or the broken pump (now the rusted, village equivalent to the garden gnome). However, the spring has a name, a formal name: Caga. It is one of the first words I learned when I came to live here and the first place I visited. It serves as the primary water source for at least two of the six quartiers of the village – approximately 200 people. It is the laundromat and public bath, a place where stories are told and where gossip is exchanged among the women. Children swim and play their carved flutes into the echo of the grotto. It is the foundation of the community. In fact, it may be the sole reason why the village exists.

“The past lies embedded in the features of the earth,” writes Keith Basso, an Anthropologist who lived and studied the Western Apache in southeast Arizona. “[It] shapes the way they think…Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of self, including one’s own community and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person”. This examination of place – of home really – can be applied to people across the globe. Yes, even suburban middle class Americans like myself. Of course, the further we remove ourselves from communities – such as not knowing our neighbors, isolating ourselves in the comforts of the digital age – and the more we live above or beyond our ecosystems that surround us, the less this applies. I still believe that deep meaning of place is there in all of us. It’s there under the surface. It’s what we long for. For the Dogon, place and identity (both individual and communal) are closely linked, inseparable, and the collective memory of the Spring helps to shape this community.

Perhaps this is a contributing factor to why the pump sits forgotten, why women and children wind down the steep rocky trails that have taken lives from families, why, even now at the tail end of the dry season when only a few inches of water pool below the spring, people choose to come here rather than pull water from the well to the west of the village. These other places have no memory. They have no work or story involved in their existence.

Communities need to grow and build upon the foundation that has already been laid down. “Your not going to invent a new [village], instead you’re doing a strange archaeology, trying to enhance the old, hidden design”, states Jaime Lerner, the city planner of the Brazilian city of Curitiba, one of the most successful examples of sustainable urban planning in recent years. “You can’t go wrong if the [village] is growing along the trail of memory… [it] is the identity of the [village]”.