BAMAKO, Mali — Political tumult in the last few weeks — a military coup, a Tuareg and Islamist takeover in the north — has all but eliminated tourism in this West African nation, which has long been a magnet for Western travelers in search of firsthand encounters with living art traditions.


But in calmer times the usual focus of such a quest is the landscape of cliffs and gorges in central Mali known as Dogon country. The classical tour includes two standard items: a Dogon masked dance performance and a view of a mural-size expanse of rock paintings, reputedly ancient, in the area.


Dances are arranged by appointment. You book one through a local hotel, pay upfront and hire a driver to ferry you out along cratered roads to a village. There, with the help of guides, you make your way up a cliffside to a shelflike clearing.


At a scheduled time two dozen or so young men, some on stilts, all with masks representing spirits and animals, silently emerge from behind high rocks. They circle the clearing at a measured pace, then, one after another, go into short, tightly choreographed solos danced to the driving rhythms of a drum orchestra.


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 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.


In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.


Once this idea sank in, Africa blossomed for me, knocked me off balance and kept me that way.


Songho, a Dogon village and the other regulation tour stop, is famous for a cliff face covered with rock paintings that mark the site of a male circumcision camp. Although the village is now Muslim, Dogon initiation still takes place every three years, with boys coming from the surrounding countryside.


The paintings, done in black, white and brick-red pigment, are of floating shapes, some recognizable as humanlike figures, others looking uncannily like cartoon versions of recent communications hardware: televisions or computers or iPhones complete with small screens and keypads.


No one has yet cracked the symbolic codes here.