Dust rises. The speed and intricacy of movement increases competitively as the musicians urge on the dancers. Then, in well under an hour, it’s over. The performers linger to pose for pictures and vanish as silently as they came.

Canned ethnography? For a Western art critic who tries to resist value-laden paradigms, like high versus low, traditional versus modern, and genuine versus fake, but who is still steeped in binary thinking, it was hard, on a recent visit, not to take the event as an artifact, a slice of globalist consumer art — at least at first. But Africa, once you start asking questions, tends to change how you see.

The dance, it turns out, is a radically condensed version of a funeral masquerade, a communal ritual intended to urge the reluctant dead into the afterlife, where they can assume useful roles as ancestors. A full-scale performance, honoring important elders, can go on for days. The one I saw under a hot winter sun was the CliffsNotes edition. But it was also an example of history in motion, cultural survival in progress.

The Dogon, a farming people said to have come to the region centuries ago to avoid conversion to Islam, have long since been claimed by that religion and by Christianity alike, and by the most seductive of faiths, secular materialism. And as the force of incursions has increased, age-old means of self-support have diminished. Climate shifts and the departure of young men to cities have made agriculture a constant and losing struggle.

In these circumstances tourism has been a godsend. The packaged dances have brought in cash and have given young men a reason to stay home. By packaging and selling their culture, the Dogon have been keeping it viable.