Between the Human and the Non-Human

Between the Human and the Non-human:

The Rhetorical Agency of the Cowrie Shells

Janis Palma

To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday.

- Jane Bennett

Contents

Abstract 1

Introduction. 2

The scientific outliers. 6

A rhetoric of interconnectedness. 11

From the Old to the New World: Things as Rhetorical Agents. 15

Conclusion. 20

References. 23

Additional Sources Consulted. 25

Abstract

In Eurocentric Western traditions, humankind has been attributed a protagonist role and considered to be the only living thing on Earth endowed with an intelligent mind, a soul, and the agency to effect change in their own lives, the lives of others, and the environment around them. In non-Western traditions, both living and non-living things on Earth have a spirit and the potential to exercise their agency to one degree or another, whether it’s the bark of a tree, bodies of water, the bones of a dead animal, palm leaves, or the shells that come from the ocean. This essay explores the agency of cowrie shells in divination rituals as one of those means for humans and non-humans to communicate, especially in Afro-Cuban Santería, a tradition brought across the Atlantic by the Yoruba people during the nefarious slave trade and one that has retained a continued relevance for their Caribbean descendants and, I will argue, for the entire world.

Introduction

       Rhetorical agency has been defined as the “capacity to effect change through speech.”[1] Speech in Western cultures,[2] as an organized system of signs by which communication is made possible, is considered an attribute of humans to the exclusion of all others, but in non-Western cultures speech can also be an attribute of objects and non-human entities to the extent they can communicate and, by doing so, effect change. This capacity for speech by inanimate objects and disembodied entities to the same extent as humans is one of the distinctive features of the beliefs and cultural traditions originating in West Africa that were brought to the New World by the enslaved Yoruba people, among others.[3] Elements of nature, like bone fragments or shells, participate in communicative exchanges between the human and the divine, playing significant roles in the lives of individuals and their harmonious coexistence.

       The rhetorical engagement ministered by the agency of certain objects is best understood when we divest ourselves of Western thoughts about human beings’ preeminence on Earth and look at this phenomenon through the lens of those indigenous peoples who believe that all living and non-living entities in the Universe are connected as one. This unifying worldview predates the onset of what is now called Western civilization, which has been consistently attempting to erase and replace humanity’s original understanding of the universe ever since logic and reason were systematized by the intellectual elites of Ancient Greece. Epistemological pathways were reduced to that which could be perceived through the five senses and explained according to mainstream scientific methods.

       As state and church consolidated their power, primeval ideas about phenomenological aspects of interconnectedness were explained by superimposing the Eurocentric lexicon over whatever forms of expression were available to the people of pre-Western civilizations. Where Neolithic Çatalhöyük inhabitants, for example, may have communicated with the spirits of their ancestors as an ordinary event in their everyday lives, Western scholars called that “ancestor worship.” Within the narrow confines of academic rhetoric, scholars may have been able to understand “that the practice of burying people within the house” suggested a shared and coetaneous presence of the living and the departed ancestors. However, they could only explain it in terms of “symbolic bonds between the community of the dead and that of the living.”[4] [Emphasis mine.]

       Religious rhetoric has had the same limiting effect on intellectual pursuits beyond the canonical teachings of every church, precluding many scholars from venturing beyond the boundaries that separate ancient traditional beliefs from institutionalized religions for fear of ridicule or, worse, excommunication—as it happened to Spinoza. Yet, the intersectionality between those two spiritual tracks is not difficult to find. There is usually a single god figure that is the source of all creation, including other gods. All deities have at least some anthropomorphic features, and they can be overcome by human passions, such as anger or revenge. They reward or punish humans to the extent that humans obey or disobey their rules or commandments.

       The Kaxinawá people’s belief that the rainforest is inhabited by spiritual entities residing in the plants, animals, rivers, and elsewhere within the rainforest, is akin to the Christian belief that God is present in all creation: "The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it" (Psalm 24:1) The same can be said about the Aboriginal Australians’ belief in the sacred connection between people, land, and ancestral spirits; or the Scandinavian Sámi’s belief that spirits inhabit natural elements like lakes, rocks, and mountains. Just about every indigenous group in the world shares, to one degree or another, the belief in the immanence of their sacred spirits, and in that sense are not so different from Western religions’ belief in the immanence of their god. The difference may reside in their respective lexicons more than in their theological principles, so in order to explain away the rhetorical agency of objects as a direct outcome of the humans’ interconnectedness with all living and nonliving entities, Western religions have fabricated such concepts as “miracles” or “divine providence.” By inserting their own referential language into non-Western practices, doctrinal teachings by Western religions will either deny or disguise the interconnectedness of the living and nonliving through such dichotomies as human versus divine, physical versus spiritual, or earthly versus heavenly.

       Mainstream Western culture in general has used evidence-based reasoning and logic as parapets to forestall non-Western thought from leaching into their dogmatic stranglehold. As recently as 2005, two scholars, Christian Lundberg, who teaches Rhetoric and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Joshua Gunn, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, co-authored a paper on rhetorical agency, asserting that “the idea that mere mortals could talk to the souls or ‘spirits’ of dead people” was born out of some new Calvinist moral agency after “[t]he Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century.”[5] This essentially Eurocentric proposition is a clear example of the shortsightedness that prevails in Western-dominant studies looking at cultural practices as outsiders, unable to cut across the cultural chasm between the abstract interconnectedness that institutional religions will concede and the concrete interconnectedness that primeval cultures live by. It is a kind of willful blindness to the transcendental beliefs of the people who first populated the planet, a blindness that provides a certain intellectual comfort to Western thinkers as they do not have to venture beyond the familiar and generally acceptable. But that refusal to leave their comfort zones has had the pernicious effect of depriving humanity of an accurate account of historical practices by indigenous populations, and consequently forestalling the possibility of adopting and incorporating their cultural legacy into current practices that could very well be more beneficial to the planet and everything in it.

The scientific outliers

       Throughout recorded history there have been outliers in the scientific communities attempting, albeit not very successfully, to rescue the worldview of the original peoples living on this planet. Western intellectual elites have considered the interconnectedness of all things on Earth in different contexts, but it has been mostly as a counter-proposition to mainstream ideas, as it happened with Baruch Spinoza, for example.

In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza proposed that there was no separation between God and Nature, including humankind, “[f]or nothing stands outside of nature, not even the human mind.”[6] Spinoza rejected the Judeo-Christian anthropomorphic conception of a distant god that existed separately from the rest of the Universe, asserting that “God and the world are the same substance,”[7] but his proposed interconnectedness was quite rigid, as it was meant to foster a virtuous life free of passions and guided by reason. Spinoza’s proposition would eventually lead to a life closer to the one god that rules over the entire universe. This was not the same interconnectedness of the original peoples that included all entities, whether or not alive, whether or not in this physical world.

On the other hand, well into the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed a much more fluid notion of interconnectedness. They resorted to the metaphor of a rhizome in opposition to the limited and limiting linear or tree-like connections established by Western philosophical traditions. Trees must have roots, rise up vertically from the ground and from their trunk grow branches that spread out and grow leaves. Figuratively, these structures have a very limited opportunity to connect to anything other than itself. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari proposed a structure that, in its inherent complexity, offered greater opportunities for the sort of interconnectedness that tears down the customary phenomenological boundaries of human activity. As they saw it, “[a] rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections”[8] therefore “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other.”[9]

According to Deleuze and Guattari, anything in the world can have a rhizomatic connection to anything and everything else in the world. However, where Spinoza forms his ideas about connectedness with a single spiritual being as the unifying force, Deleuze and Guattari form their ideas with no spiritual presence at all, only the multiplicity of planes, territories, circles of convergences, and machines that can be figuratively plugged into or out of.[10] They all come close but not close enough to the original and holistic interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.

       Around the same time as Deleuze and Guattari published A Thousand Plateaus, where they present their rhizome theory, James Lovelock published Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, proposing a model of the Earth in which its living and nonliving constituents interact as part of a complex system that forms a single organism,[11] a concept further developed by Lynn Margulis. Notwithstanding the great intellectual curiosity about interconnectivity during the 1970s, the Gaia theory also failed to incorporate a spiritual dimension. Its interconnectivity was reduced to humans and Earth inhabitants. However, it is not to be discarded altogether because it has become quite relevant in conversations about the Earth’s ecosystem during the Anthropocene because the Gaia theory proposes that Earth's living and non-living components interact in a self-regulating system designed to maintain suitable conditions for life on this planet. The theory is meant to demonstrate that humans and other organisms are connected to their environment, but only goes to the material level of existence and does not address the non-material constituents of life on the planet.

Overall, concerns about global interconnectedness by Western-dominant scientific communities in recent times has been focused on biogeochemical cycles and the reciprocal impacts of human activity and environmental changes. Although they cannot circumvent the interconnectedness of humans and the Earth’s ecological processes, they dare not go beyond the phenomenological dimension of these connections to explore the intangible exchanges between the visible and the invisible.

       Further into the 21st century, Jane Bennett offered a phenomenology of enchantment that “entails a state of wonder” in which there is a “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement.”[12] This is perhaps the most honest approximation to the rhetoric of interconnectedness from a Western perspective: “The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged—a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life.”[13] The rhetoric of enchantment as a theoretical framework does make room for inanimate objects to have the potential for agency. As they break away from their ordinariness, they can engage agentially with their surroundings or other entities to effect changes that would otherwise be unthinkable should we look at them from a Western-dominant perspective. But the rhetoric of interconnectedness not only allows for inanimate objects to have the potential for such agency; this rhetoric, in fact, incorporates the agency of humans, objects, and spirits as a power rooted in their interconnectedness. It is, thus, an integral part of the dynamic relationship between the embodied and the disembodied, the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human. A rhetoric of enchantment presupposes an unusual state of affairs, whereas a rhetoric of interconnectedness presupposes a usual state of affairs. Therefore, the agency of objects seen from the perspective of enchantment is an exception to the norm, while the same agency seen from the perspective of interconnectedness is the norm.

A rhetoric of interconnectedness

       For non-Western peoples, the rhetorical agency of objects, be they palm leaves, kola nuts, bone fragments, or cowrie shells, is always available for them to use, whether to heal, to maintain community cohesiveness, or to communicate with those who have departed but whose presence remain as a vital part of their world. Interconnectedness is intrinsic to their daily lives. We can find specific examples of this way of life among the various cultural groups inhabiting the African continent. The rhetoric of interconnectedness is undoubtedly the most powerful explanation for the mysterious zamgbeto, an icon of non-human agency and an ancestral figure in the traditional beliefs of the Egun people in Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Ghana, parts of the African continent also inhabited by the Yoruba people. The zamgbeto is a hollow construction of specially-colored raffia palm straws and circles of wood in a cone shape, but once it is put together the Egun people believe it becomes inhabited by the spirits of the night and it can then move, dance, speak, and even walk on water without human intervention.[14] The zamgbeto speaks a secret language that only one person can understand and interpret, usually one of the community elders or a chosen assistant. This spiritual entity is a protector, a law-enforcer, and a healer for the community. No one has been able to unveil the mystery of the empty straw cone that not only has the agency to move on its own but also to maintain law and order, heal the sick, and protect its people from evil spirits and outside threats.  The explanation for the zamgbeto agency cannot be found in the Eurocentric and materialistic concept of a world dominated by rational thought where the spiritual dimension of things is entirely lacking.

       Jane Bennett notes that “the word enchant is linked to the French verb to sing: chanter. To ‘en-chant’: to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream.”[15] Song and dance are incorporated into every ritual in which inanimate objects engage in agential interactions with humans and spirits. The musical portion can be a chant, it need not be a musical composition as we understand those in Western culture. The chant, song, or other rhythmical sounds are, nonetheless, important constituents of traditional healing rituals where the spirits provide guidance and empower humans and herbs, roots, flowers, and other vegetable matter to aggregate their rhetorical agency for the cure of illnesses, injuries, and other human ailments.

       While Bennet approximates the interconnected dimension of a dance-induced trance, she cannot get away from the Western concepts of magic and spells as manifestations of something unusual, something that does not belong in this world. Magic presupposes that humans retain control over the agential effects of a ritual instead of a nonhuman entity, such as a spirit or an object. There is also an undercurrent of deception embedded in the concept of magic, which means that magic is not to be trusted. The concept of a spell is also infused with untrustworthiness as synonymous of magic incantation. If enchantment is to be in any way linked to the rhetorical agency of objects, it should be as it relates to the French verb to sing: chanter.

       In Botswana, the San people, also known as the Bushpeople, perform a dance ritual called the N/um Tchai intended specifically to heal their sick. They dance during the entire night to the rhythm of songs and other vocal sounds, clapping, and stomping. Their power to heal comes directly from divine spirits, as narrated by a traditional healer from the Tsaukwe clan, Tsitano Muburunyara.[16] Healing, as this bushman tells it, is a gift from the gods that can be neither rejected nor wasted. In what seems to be a perfect fit with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, Tsitano describes how he can change into other animals during his trance and fly away or see other people or other parts of the world during the healing dance.[17] In his rhizomatic dance around a fire, he can “feel who is sick” and start to heal them. There is a symbiotic agency in the N/um Tchai dance that involves the entire community, some producing sounds and others getting healed through the agency of the dancers who are, in turn, channeling the healing powers of the spirit guides.

       Elsewhere, in the Akan kingdom along the Côte d'Ivoire, some of the women, known as the Komians, also use dance “to communicate with the world of spirits.”[18] The dance induces a trance state, allowing the spirits to manifest themselves at the “opening of [the woman’s] mouth.”[19] This is another example of what could be characterized as a rhizomatic connection between the embodied and the disembodied. In addition to the Komian dance, these women are initiated in various divinatory ways, including the throwing of shells.

       Throwing or reading shells, especially cowrie shells, is one of the rituals brought to the New World from West Africa that has prevailed to this day and by which the human and the nonhuman can communicate. This practice is common to the Yoruba, the Akan people of Ghana, the Ewe and Fon people of Togo, and the Zulu Sangomas, for all of whom cowrie shells are messengers of the gods and ancestral spirits. “[C]owries were clearly able to articulate meaning in the context of healing and divination that was understood by both diviners and the community they served.”[20] As one of the common denominators to the Old and New Worlds, cowrie shells hold a special significance even to this day as mediators between the human and the nonhuman.

From the Old to the New World: Things as Rhetorical Agents

       Humans, plants, animals, and all things on Earth share the air and the land equally. The spirit of one is the spirit of all. Whatever hurts one, hurts all. This belief is found among the Lakota and the Navajo, the Mapuche and the Aymara, the Cree and the Yanomami, and among many other indigenous peoples. It was also the belief of the enslaved Africans forcefully brought to the Caribbean islands and the American continent by European slave traders. Cowrie shells had a special place in this movement of people. On the one hand, they were brought by the slaves as talismans to protect them. On the other hand, they were brought by Portuguese traders mainly as ballast or currency.[21]

       “Cowrie shells were traded for goods and services throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, and used as money as early as the 14th century on Africa’s western coast.”[22] They were sourced principally in the Maldives, where ocean water conditions were most favorable for their growth. “The import of these cowrie shells to areas of West Africa rose exponentially from the late 15th century in connection to European trade in ivory, slaves, gold, and later palm oil. Their numbers grew from the 16th to 19th century, during which time billions of cowrie shells found their way to Africa, especially in regions of modern Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria.”[23] In “Burkina Faso, one of the centers for culture and spirituality in West Africa”[24] oral traditions tell of a powerful ocean Goddess who rewarded those who pleased her by gifting them cowrie shells. The monetary value of cowrie shells issues from this divine provenance. In fact, cowries were “the first symbol of money and wealth known to mankind.”[25] But their value extended far beyond their commodification; cowrie shells were the mouth through which the spirits spoke to their people.

       Perhaps one of the most important belief systems brought across the Atlantic was the Ifá and its pantheon of deities. As an oral tradition there is no exact number, but Ifá deities can range from anywhere between 400 and 700, depending on the region where it is practiced. Each one of those has a special attribute that intersects with the lives of ordinary humans. For example, Oshún will aid in matters of love, Changó in matters of justice, Yemayá in matters of fertility, and so forth.[26]

       Cowrie shells were and still are instrumental to Ifá divination as “a ritual mode for communicating with the divine.”[27] The Ifá traditions, rituals, and beliefs were transplanted to the fertile soils of the many territories where slaves were forcibly taken, but grew its deepest roots in the Spanish colonies, most especially Cuba, where the slaves quickly learned how to hide their own deities behind the Catholic saints. The Ifá pantheon, however, was significantly reduced to somewhere between 16 and 24 major deities in what became Cuba’s syncretic Santería.[28] In the cosmography of Afro-Cuban Santería, the orichas—as deities were called in the Yoruba Ifá—became Santos [Saints], which is where the name Santería “[the way of the Saints]”[29] comes from, and the Olorichas, who are the “initiated priest or priestess . . . [became] a Santero (male) or Santera (female).”[30]

In its etymology, “[t]he word orisha is related to several other Yoruba words referring to the head. The main one, ori, refers, first of all, to the physical head atop a person’s body. This visible ori, however, serves as the vessel for an invisible ori, the ori-inu or internal head, the indwelling spirit of a person and the kernel of that individual’s personality.[31]

The second part of the word, se or sha means "source,”[32] which is suggestive of the relationship between the pantheon of deities and their almighty  Olodumare, from whence they came.[33] Cowrie shells are also used in sacred beaded necklaces called elekes, which carry the Oricha’s aché or “spiritual energy, grace, power or blessings that can be possessed, given, and received in life through devotion to the Orishas.”[34] This aché has been compared to the Chinese chi,[35] as have other features of Santería, such as the I-Ching divination, which also recognize the interconnected nature of life and the influence of unseen forces on human affairs, and Reiki healing, which is based on the idea of a universal life energy that flows through all living things.

       Blending saints and orishas was a brilliant strategy by the African slaves to avoid punishment for what the Catholic Church condemned as heresy. Despite the brutal cultural imperialism unfurled by the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church, this strategy was so successful in Cuba that it remains as one of the most widespread and powerful foundations of their cultural identity. Cowrie shells have likewise retained their cultural relevance as rhetorical agents through their continued use in Santería rituals.

       As of today, the reading of the cowrie shells in Santería rituals foregrounds the powerful agency of sacred objects flowing directly from the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, while also pointing to the social cohesiveness furthered by these beliefs and practices. Cowrie shells are “the doorway through which we can access the world of the ancestors, the world that holds infinite knowledge and wisdom and a timeless view we cannot otherwise tap into.”[36] 

       Before they can be transformed into sacred objects, the cowrie shells used in Santería divination rituals must be consecrated by the Olorichas. Only then can they interact agentially with the gods and spirits from whom counsel is sought. This consecration is also a robust expression of intentionality that invests the objects “with [the] spiritual force“[37] that agentiates communication from ancestors and Orichas through the mouths of the cowrie shells.[38] In Spanish the shells are called Caracoles de Eleguá. That’s because Eleguá “has the ability to speak for all of the Orishas.”[39] He is the guardian of physical and spiritual paths, doors, and destinies.[40]

       Once consecrated as sacred objects, the Olorishas can then read them by throwing them randomly on a surface especially designated for this purpose. Divination relies on face-up or face-down combinations as the cowrie shells fall on the floor or table where the ritual is carried out. This act of throwing the shells is the physical manifestation of what Bennet would describe as Orichas, Olorichas, objects, and humans “suasively and agentially [interacting] in [various] rhetorical situations and ecologies.”[41] This interaction encompasses the immediacy of their encounter but also interfaces simultaneously with every other Santería practitioner given the necessary interconnection between all of them. The act of throwing and reading the cowrie shells is a “moment of pure presence”[42] where the frontiers between the physical and the spiritual are erased, allowing the Olorichas to interpret and convey the messages of the departed ancestors or the guidance of the Orishas as revealed by the cowrie shells.

Conclusion

       The sustained presence of cowrie shell throwing and the intricate initiations of the Olorishas in contemporary Cuban society is a testament to the resilience of indigenous, traditions and the underlying belief of an interconnected rhizome-type system in which objects and humans can share the same degree of rhetorical agency and, together, have the power to impact lives and their immediate ecosystem. The rhetoric of interconnectedness that has permeated the human experience since the beginning of time cannot be interpreted through the lexicons and icons of Western thought. There is no magic or sorcery, there is alignment with the unseen. There is no religion or witchcraft, there is belief and knowledge passed on from one generation to another. Where the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible are one and the same, there is no room for logic as an intellectual exercise. Where individual consciousness is likewise a collective consciousness of being in this physical world bound to everything else around, there is no room for syllogistic reasoning.

       Until the early to mid-20th century, scientists studying the original cultures of the world superimposed their own concepts and ideas on the cultural groups they were studying. While they resorted to words like “religion” to reference indigenous belief systems and “gods” to reference spiritual beings present in those indigenous cultures, it is more likely that the indigenous people had no such words to define their own spiritual concepts, their own beliefs, their own traditions, their own cultural systems. It is more likely that they simply identified different manifestations of their world with words that signified different embodiments or disembodiments as were perceived by them, both equally real and integral to their daily lives.

       The rhetorical agency of the cowrie shells, like all things originating in the divine, is a concept that Western scholars have often been unable to grasp and, just like the Spanish colonizers did, have superimposed their own cultural referents from a “dark and confused premodernity,”[43] because “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity requires different orientations on rhetoric, orientations inclusive of human beings, language, and epistemology, but expansive enough to speculate about things ontologically.”[44]

       Rhetorical agency from a Eurocentric perspective is only possible by humans in human interactions, but for indigenous peoples inhabiting the Earth since the beginning of humanity, rhetorical agency is possible with every living and nonliving thing because they all have a part to play in the ecobalance of the planet and of human existence itself. This is the ontology that Barnett and Boyle define as “an ongoing negotiation of being through relations among what we might, on some occasions, call human and/or nonhuman.”[45] In fact, Barnett and Boyle are pointing to a historical presence of this ongoing negotiation that Western culture has all but erased.

       The rituals that awaken the power of sacred objects to mediate between the realms of the visible and the invisible, the human and the nonhuman, as is the case in Santería, embody that rhetoric of enchantment “fostered through deliberate strategies,”[46] to be “transfixed [and] spellbound.”[47] But then again, as Marilyn Cooper proposes, rhetorical agency need not be defined as something limited to the human’s capacity for speech.[48] In fact, the cowrie shells’ ritualistic embodiment of Santería’s oracle, engaging with the Orishas and the Olorishas as both conduits and agents of change, is exactly the sort of rhetorical agency that fits very well with Cooper’s proposal.

       Beyond the lessons we can learn from the first people on Earth, this consciousness of a global interconnectedness is a step in human evolution that the Anthropocene Era needs to embrace. Faced with extreme environmental disasters caused by unprecedented climate fluctuations, it behooves all humans to contemplate all the ways in which we can restore ecological balance and harmonious coexistence for all living and nonliving things on Gaia by restoring our consciousness of interconnectivity. Perhaps this is the path to save our planet for future generations.

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“Spirit Animals: Unveiling the Symbolic Power of Animals in Indigenous Cultures.” Justo. June 23, 2024. https://nativetribe.info/spirit-animals-unveiling-the-symbolic-power-of-animals-in-indigenous-cultures. Last Accessed on 6 December 2024.

“Spirits of Africa: Preserving Africa’s Spiritual Heritage.” Part 1: The San people of Botswana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyLF3y1YJKA&list=PLrBj5pWEiKEE0qGjY3DZ7eE3anI535yvv&index=4. Last accessed on 3 December 2024.

The Art of Cowrie Shell Divination. Posted March 14, 2017. www.originalbotanica.com/blog/cowrie-shell-divination-obi- diloggun?srsltid=AfmBOopKRopXFo_JWAVDf9N28f1feA6FYqywzbPfF- yJjYTeBqzd6oD_ Last accessed on 29 August 2024.

“The Gift of Cowrie.” Kebtah, The Earth Center. www.theearthcenter.org/post/the- pilgrims-walking-stick-benben-the-gift-of-cowrie-ff45. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

“The festivals of Ivory Coast: dances and music. Komian divination.” TransAfrica. https://transafrica.biz/en/the-festivals-of-ivory-coast. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

Additional Sources Consulted

Brandon, George. (1997) Santeria from Africa to the new world: the dead sell memories. Bloomington : Indiana University Press. https://archive.org/details/santeriafromafri00bran.

Hagedorn, Katherine J. (2001) Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington/London: Smithsonian Institution Press. https://archive.org/details/divineutterances00hage/page/n5/mode/1up?view=theater.

Jones, Steven. “The Spiritual Meaning of Cowrie Shells: An In-Depth Guide” August 14, 2024. Updated on August 15, 2024. https://hiddensignificance.com/spiritual-meaning-of-cowrie-shells/#google_vignette

Mikkelsen, Egil. (2000) “Archaeological Excavations of a Monastery at Kaashidhoo. Cowrie shells and their Buddhist context in the Maldives.” National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research, Republic of Maldives, Male. https://www.academia.edu/4163869.

Marrero, Kristi. “Speaking With the Orishas: Divination and Propitiation in the Lucumi Religion.” B.A. University of Central Florida, 2008. https://sciences.ucf.edu/anthropology/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/Marrero_K.pdf

Usman, Aribidesi and Toyin Falola. “Geography and Society.” The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. iv–iv. Print. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/yoruba-from-prehistory-to-the-present/geography-and-society/CC682B3D24A7A9648C018BABC1E2EDEA

Endnotes

[1] Hoff-Clausen, Elisabeth. (2018) “Rhetorical Agency: What Enables and Restrains the Power of Speech?” in Ihlen, Øyvind and Robert L. Heath, eds., The Handbook of Organizational Rhetoric and Communication. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (287-299)

[2] Western culture is defined, for purposes of this essay, as the Eurocentric philosophies, social practices, belief systems, political structures, and other values originating principally in Western and Southern Europe, notwithstanding its current geographic diffusion.

[3] Murrell. Nathaniel Samuel. (2010) Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Available at  https://www.academia.edu/74403713. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

[4] Düring, Bleda S. (2008) “Sub-floor burials at Çatalhöyük: Exploring relations between the dead, houses, and the living.” Córdoba, Joaquín Mª, Miquel Molist, Mª Carmen Pérez, Isabel Rubio, Sergio Martínez, eds. Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 3-8 April 2006. https://www.academia.edu/586655. Last accessed on 13 December 2024.

[5] Lundberg, Christian and Ioshua Gunn. (2005) "’Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 35:4, 83-105. www.jstor.org/stable/40232610. Last accessed on 3 September 2024.

[6] Nadler, Steven. “Baruch Spinoza”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Spring 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#GodNatu. Last accessed 9 December 2024.

[7] Cartwright, Mark. "Baruch Spinoza." World History Encyclopedia, 29 Jan 2024. https://www.worldhistory.org/Baruch_Spinoza. Last accessed on 12 December 2024.

[8] Deleuze, Gilles and Féliz Guattari. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

[9] Ibid, p. 7.

[10] Deleuze and Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus, Op. Cit. FN 8.

[11] Lovelock, James. (2000) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press. Available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9bX852JMJ__MDk5NWI3MzQtYjQ3Ni00OTdhLThjZjEtOGJkMTJmOWRhY2M2/view?ddrp=1&hl=en&resourcekey=0-QuSxRLQp71l0JaOZD_ZXHA. Last accessed on 3 December 2024.

[12] Bennett, Jane. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings and Ethics. Princeton University Press. (p. 5)

[13] Ibid.

[14] Aragão do Nascimento, Valdir, Sônia Maria Oliveira de Andrade, Lilian Raquel Ricci Tenorio, Antonio Hilário Aguilera Urquiza and Nathalia Novak Zobiole. (2018) “The society of the mask: the social function of worship of the zangbetos in West Africa.” International Journal of Development Research, 8:3, (19290-19293). https://www.journalijdr.com/sites/default/files/issue-pdf/12265.pdf. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

[15] Bennett, p. 6.

[16] “Spirits of Africa: Preserving Africa’s Spiritual Heritage.” Part 1: The San people of Botswana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyLF3y1YJKA&list=PLrBj5pWEiKEE0qGjY3DZ7eE3anI535yvv&index=4. Last accessed on 3 December 2024.

[17] This correlates to the centrality of animals in other indigenous cultures. “In the rich tapestry of indigenous cultures across the world, animals hold sacred significance beyond mere creatures of land, sea, and sky. They are revered as spiritual guides, guardians of the earth, and symbols of wisdom, strength, and transformation.” [Spirit Animals: Unveiling the Symbolic Power of Animals in Indigenous Cultures. Justo. June 23, 2024. https://nativetribe.info/spirit-animals-unveiling-the-symbolic-power-of-animals-in-indigenous-cultures. Last Accessed on 6 December 2024.] 

[18] LeClerk, France. “Spirited Dancing in La Côte d’Ivoire.” January 23, 2022. https://franceleclerc.com/2022/01/23/spirited-dancing-in-la-cote-divoire. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

[19] “The festivals of Ivory Coast: dances and music. Komian divination.” TransAfrica. https://transafrica.biz/en/the-festivals-of-ivory-coast. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

[20] Moffett, Abigail Joy and Simon Hall. (2020) “Divining Value: Cowries, the Ancestral Realm and the Global in Southern Africa.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 30(2):313-326. (p. 318) https://www.academia.edu/48045254. Last accessed on 1 December 2024.

[21] “Cowrie Shells and Trade Power.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/cowrie-shells-and-trade-power. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Benge, Elizabeth. “The Ocean’s Currency: Cowrie Shells in African Art.” The Art Institute of Chicago. October 3, 2023. https://www.artic.edu/articles/1077/the-ocean-s-currency-cowrie-shells-in-african-art. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[24] “The Gift of Cowrie.” Kebtah, The Earth Center. www.theearthcenter.org/post/the- pilgrims-walking-stick-benben-the-gift-of-cowrie-ff45. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Bascom, William. (1980) Sixteen Cowries: Yorùbá Divination from Africa to the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[27] Grillo, Laura S. (2024) “Divination in Afro-Caribbean Religions.” Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions. Available at https://www.academia.edu/120381967. Last accessed on 4 December 2024.

[28] “Santería is also called the Regla de Ocha and the Lucumí religion. It's a religion with roots in Western Africa and Cuba. Today it is practiced worldwide by people of all races. Santería promotes a connection between the divine, the human, and the natural world by teaching us how to live in harmony.” [Achó Iyá, Eñi. About Santería. www.aboutsanteria.com/what-is-santeria.html. Last accessed on 29 August 2024.]

[29] Grillo, p. 307.

[30] Achó Iyá, About Santería, Op. Cit. FN 28.

[31] “Orisha.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/orisha. Last accessed on 7 December 2024.

[32] Los Santeros Cubanos: Rituales Prohibidos. Documental. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqfkFFz5HAc. Last accessed 9 December 2024.

[33] “Orisha”, Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/orisha. Last accessed on 7 December 2024.

[34] Achó Iyá, About Santería, Op. Cit. FN 28.

[35] Los Santeros Cubanos, Op. Cit. FN 32.

[36] The Art of Cowrie Shell Divination. Posted March 14, 2017. https://originalbotanica.com/blog/cowrie-shell-divination-obi-diloggun. Last accessed on 29 August 2024.

[37] Grillo, p. 309.

[38] This is reminiscent of the spirits who speak through the mouths of the Komian dancers. See FN 18.

[39] The Art of Cowrie Shell Divination. Op. Cit., FN 35.

[40] “Eleguá (orisha)”, Enciclopedia Significados. www.significados.com/elegua. Last accessed on 29 August 2024. (All translations are mine.)

[41] Bennett, p. 2.

[42] Bennett, p. 5. Citing Fisher, Philip. (1998) Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Harvard University Press. 

[43] Bennett, p. 3.

[44] Barnett, Scott and Casey Boyle. (2016) “Introduction. Rhetorical Ontology, or, How to Do Things with Things.” In Barnett, Scott and Casey Boyle, eds. Rhetoric, through everyday things. The University of Alabama Press. 1-14.

[45] Barnett and Boyle, pp. 8-9.

[46] Bennett, p. 4.

[47] Bennett, p. 5.

[48] Cooper, Marilyn M. (2011) “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted.” College Composition and Communication, 62:3, 420-449. www.jstor.org/stable/27917907.

Last accessed on 4 September 2024.

Janis Palma

Visual Rhetorics - Final Project

RCID-8040 - Fall 2024

Prof. Eddie Lohmeyer

Assignment: Submit 1-2 written paragraphs detailing the revisions made.

I expanded my first essay on The Rhetorical Agency of Cowrie Shells, which explored the Afro-Cuban Santería ritual of throwing and reading cowrie shells by the Olorishas, or Santeros, to receive guidance from the Orishas, also referred to as Santos in this syncretic practice that combines Catholicism with the Yoruba Ifá traditions of West Africa. For my first paper, the theoretical framework was Jane Bennet’s rhetoric of enchantment.  I gave a very brief historical account of cowrie shells used for divination practices in different parts of the world, and also included a general overview of the cowrie shells’ agency as currency in China, Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, then eventually in the American continent as both currency for the slave trade and talismans kept by the enslaved Africans.

In this paper, to which I have added the title Between the Human and the Non-human, I trace the roots of Santería to the source of African belief in the agency of spirits during everyday interactions with humans, plants, animals, and things. This holistic consciousness is foundational for the communication between spirits, gods, and humans. It is not just an integral component of their social organizational structures and governance, but it is also the underpinning of their respect for all living things and creatures. I am bringing into the analysis a contrast with the Western-Eurocentric thought that attributes agency solely to humans and how the cultural imperialism that spread during the slave trade tried to erase the indigenous traditions by characterizing them as sorcery and black magic, to be feared rather than accepted. While I have incorporated some of Bennet’s rhetoric of enchantment in order to keep some coherence with my first essay, I have shifted my focus this time to the interrelatedness of all things human and nonhuman as the primal force that sets in motion the rhetorical agency of things, as in the case of the cowrie shells. I am proposing that this interrelatedness is what has nurtured the survival and permanence of Santería in Cuba, and that such resilience brings to the foreground the need to shift from individualist isolationism back to an all-encompassing mindfulness of the interconnectedness between humans and nonhumans.