Yankadi–Makru Dance (Guinea)
From the Baga and Susu peoples of Guinea
Thinking Through Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)’s work, La Pensée Sauvage
The Yankadi–Makru suite is a two-part ceremonial dance: Yankadi (slow, sensual, contemplative) and Makru (fast, exuberant, ecstatic). This sequence, practiced primarily in youth courtship and public celebration, forms a ritual of transition—from intimacy to community, from introspection to expression, from individual desire to collective affirmation.
From Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, this dance is best interpreted as a structural myth enacted through bodily bricolage—where the transition between slow and fast rhythms mimics not just mood shifts, but deeper oppositional transformations: private/public, calm/ecstasy, feminine/masculine, and ultimately nature/culture.
Bricolage: The Dance as Structural Recomposition of Cultural Debris
In Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, mythical thought does not build abstract concepts ex nihilo, but rather assembles meaning from fragments of experience, recombining familiar cultural symbols (gestures, rhythms, motifs) into new yet structured wholes. Yankadi–Makru precisely follows this logic.
The Yankadi phase operates with softness: circular hip movements, extended pauses, sidesteps. These gestures are borrowed from domestic memory, the rhythms of water-drawing, food preparation, and lullaby. Here, movement is introspective, and the dancer’s body becomes a vessel of memory and potential.
In contrast, Makru bursts forth as a sudden inversion: stomps, spins, vigorous arm gestures—public exuberance, energetic display, and muscular tension.
These transitions are not chaotic but structured: the dancer bricolages a mythic journey—a personal, even erotic, contemplation (Yankadi) transformed into public engagement and kinetic display (Makru).
Thus, from a Lévi-Straussian angle, the dance is not random improvisation but a mythical system constructed through embodied recombination of sensory-cultural fragments.
Binary Oppositions: Structure Behind the Movement
Lévi-Strauss held that myth is organized around fundamental binary oppositions. In Yankadi–Makru, we see several binaries at play, mediated through tempo and gesture:
Binary Opposition Yankadi Makru
Stillness / Motion Yes No
Inner / Outer Yes No
Passive / Active Yes No
Water / Fire Yes No
Feminine / Masculine Yes No
Lunar / Solar Yes No
The dance does not resolve these binaries dialectically (as Western logic might) but instead juxtaposes them cyclically: one emerges from the other, affirming difference while implying continuity. This is myth as cyclical logic, not linear argument.
This is aligned with Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of myth not as a resolution of contradiction but as the formal structuring of contradiction into ritualized systems.
The Body as Mytho-Technological Interface
Lévi-Strauss sees mythical thought as deeply concerned with order, classification, and pattern recognition, though it uses signs, not concepts. Yankadi–Makru dancers use their bodies as semiotic systems:
The hips sway to communicate fertility and receptivity in Yankadi.
The feet slam and leap to announce readiness and vigor in Makru.
The arms become signals—sometimes framing the body (introspection), other times reaching outward (projection).
This use of body as a lived taxonomy—mapping emotional states onto social legibility—is what Lévi-Strauss would call the “science of the concrete”: the ability to systematize complex relationships through tangible and sensory mediums.
In this dance, an entire symbolic order is externalized through rhythmic motion, fulfilling what Lévi-Strauss calls the "perceptual reduction of chaos".
Event and Structure: Performance as Myth in Motion
The duality of Yankadi–Makru also encapsulates Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between structure and event:
Structure: The formal choreography, gender roles, symbolic gestures, drumming patterns.
Event: The specific occasion (courtship, festival), the dancer’s own improvisation, environmental factors (sunlight, audience mood).
Lévi-Strauss insists that mythical thinking assembles structure from event, like building a castle from fragments. Here, the Makru section, erupting from the structure of the Yankadi, is precisely that: the ‘event’ born of structural transformation. The dance becomes a ritual that internalizes historical contingency (who is courting whom, what village tension is in the air) and renders it timeless.
This aligns with the insight from The Savage Mind: “Myths and rites are not detached from reality, but preserve the remains of systems of observation and classification adapted to the concrete”.
Sociological Integration: Dance as Taxonomy of Relation
The social function of Yankadi–Makru is vital: it is a public stage for private codes, allowing:
Youths to explore relationships within culturally sanctioned rules,
Elders to affirm social order through drum rhythms and moral oversight,
Gender roles to be tested, enacted, and evolved in choreographic language.
In this way, the dance is a cosmogram—a kinetic map of social relations. Lévi-Strauss would interpret this as a social taxonomy disguised as entertainment. It is not entertainment alone—it is how Guinean communities think themselves into being, echoing the notion that “all sacred things must have their place”.
Conclusion
The Yankadi–Makru dance is not merely an aesthetic sequence of steps, but a ritual performance of structural oppositions, rendered through the symbolic recombination of movement, rhythm, gender, and social interaction. It is a dance of becoming, a bodily metaphor, and a mythic system disguised as festivity.
In Lévi-Strauss’s terms, it is a perfect example of “the savage mind” at work—not primitive, but profoundly systematic, encoding knowledge, desire, memory, and myth in a language of embodied symmetry.