Cowrie Shells Archive

The Rhetorical Agency of Cowrie Shells (Gastropoda Cypraeoidea)

Janis Palma

Enchantment is something that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies. [4]

Introduction

      Rhetorical agency has been traditionally attributed to humans. “We use the term ‘rhetorical agency’ to refer to this capacity to effect change through speech.” [11] We could then think that such a small thing as a cowrie shell would have no rhetorical agency, no capacity to effect change in others, and certainly not through speech. And yet, there are many social groups throughout the world who share the belief that nature is a prolific source of objects capable of precisely this sort of agency over other objects as well as over humans and nonhuman entities. Such is the case of the cowrie shells. “[U]nderstanding 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.” [2] Here I will explore how these marine gastropod mollusks interface with human and nonhuman beings to effect substantial changes through a language that is understood only by the initiated Santería[1] priests and priestesses, who then translate its meaning for the uninitiated. I will rely on Jane Bennett’s [4] proposed rhetoric of enchantment for my analysis.

      This essay will not consider certain aspects of rhetorical agency that could be further explored through the same configuration of actants, such as the organizational rhetoric of Santería or the unequal distribution of agency within its religious community.

What is a cowrie shell?

     Cowries are small sea snails considered marine animals, found widespread along the tropical and sub-tropical seas. [16] Their shells have oval shapes with smooth shiny exteriors, and an opening along one side with tooth-like edges. They are unique in the way they are formed. “Unlike many shells which are created from the inside out, cowrie shells are created from the outside in, giving the surface its valued smooth and glossy surface.” [3] Their name “comes from Hindi कौडि (kaudi), from Tamil கவடி ("kavadi"), which has its origins in Sanskrit कपर्द (kaparda).” [8] They have been on Earth since the Upper Jurassic geological epoch. [9]

The rhetoric of enchantment

     Marilyn Cooper proposes that rhetorical agency need not be defined as something limited to the human’s capacity for speech. She suggests that agency can take place without a conscious intention and still effect change. [5] In the case of the cowrie shells, there are animate and inanimate beings that interact agentially with the shells to both energize and be energized by them. Santería traditions require that the cowrie shells be consecrated by the Olorichas,[2] which in itself is a powerful expression of intentionality linking the intangible to the tangible and opening the doors for the Orichas [1] to speak through the mouths of the cowrie shells. The Yoruba people of West Africa have used cowrie shells traditionally for sacred divination rituals, in the belief that the opening of the shell is the mouth of the deities who speak to their devotees. These traditional beliefs were brought from the African coasts to the coasts of Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and other parts of the Western world during the 17th and 18th centuries, mainly at the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese slave traders. In Cuba, the Yoruba traditions were transformed into the Afro-Cuban religion we now know as Santería, Regla de Ocha, Regla de Lucumí, or just Lucumí [1].

     Cowries had been used for centuries by shamans and sorcerers for protection and divination [17], contrary to Lundberg and Gunn’s essentially ethnocentric proposition 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.” [14] Archeologists have found cowrie shells in parts of Europe that were used for religious ceremonies, as well as evidence that the pre-Colombian Ojibwa and Menomini Indians in North American used them in religious rituals. [13] In “Burkina Faso, one of the centers for culture and spirituality in West Africa” [18] 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 by virtue of which they embody a different yet ontologically equal rhetorical agency, using ontology here in the sense that Barnett and Boyle define it: “an ongoing negotiation of being through relations among what we might, on some occasions, call human and/or nonhuman.” [4, 8-9] Cowries are “the first symbol of money and wealth known to mankind,” [18] When the “main source of cowries were the Maldives … preparation of the shells for export … was almost entirely done by Maldivian women.” [15] This interaction between womankind and cowries is the third fountainhead of their rhetorical agency, as they “are believed to help [women] conceive and have a safe birth.” [19] Thus, throughout the centuries, these shells have effected changes in human lives all over the world ranging from the strictly material to the profoundly spiritual.

The sacred agency of cowrie shells

     The oracle rituals in Santería with cowrie shells are aligned with the “concept of embodied understanding … in which the body attunes itself to its environment as a gestalt,” [6] birthing and nurturing the rhetorical powers of enchantment as each partaker becomes transfixed and spellbound by a transient state of being wherein all disbelief is momentarily suspended. By this act, Orichas, Olorichas, cowrie shells and humans interact “suasively and agentially in [various] rhetorical situations and ecologies” [4, 2] that encompass the immediacy of their encounter while simultaneously interfacing with the extended family of Santería believers near and far.

     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.” [17] They provide guidance from departed ancestors and Orishas to those who seek their wisdom. In Spanish the shells are called Caracoles de Eleguá. Eleguá “has the ability to speak for all of the Orishas.” [17] He is the guardian of physical and spiritual paths, doors, and destinies. [10] Eleguá’s head is physically represented using cowrie shells for eyes, nose, mouth, and ears on a painted stone. Cowrie shells are also powerful agents as part of the elekes, sacred beaded necklaces meant to 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.” [1] To that extent, the rhetorical agency of the cowrie shells can be produced, accumulated, shared, and transferred, as proposed on different occasions by Foucault, Burke, Butler and Greene.

The monetary agency of cowrie shells

     Cowrie shells are as durable as metal coins, nearly indestructible, and impossible to counterfeit, which made them the favorite of King Gezo of Dahomey, who “said he preferred cowries to gold.” [7] They were sourced principally in the Maldives, where ocean water conditions were most favorable for their growth. Early sources identify cowries used as currency in China during the seventh century B.C. “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.” [7] These shells were also imported to the Americas from West Africa during the slave trade. [12] “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.” [3]

     The Portuguese traders who travelled between the “old” and “new” worlds’ commercial ports were mainly responsible for bringing cowries on their ships as ballast or currency, but also “[k]nowing that Africans used cowries as charms for protection, historians speculate the cowries may have been brought to America as talismans to resist enslavement.” [7]

Conclusion

     Santería is the ecosystem where praxis blurs the frontiers between the physical and the spiritual, where the traditional Western dualities of sanity and madness, worldly and otherworldly, either cease to exist or coexist as a single epistemological mainspring for the rhetorical agency the cowrie shells exert. When Olorichas read what the cowrie shells say, the messages received from nonhuman entities “are not readings of Earth Energies, but rather readings of intervention.” [18] The enchantment provoked by cowry shells’ readings grows out of a consistent repetition of movements and “the presence of a pattern or recognizable ensembling of sounds, smells, tastes, forms, colors, textures” [4] that sustain and nourish the wonderment of intentionality and impulsiveness, chaos and order, in symbiotic concurrence.

References:

[1] Achó Iyá, Eñi. About Santería. www.aboutsanteria.com/what-is-santeria.html. Last accessed on 29 August 2024.

[2] 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.

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

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

[5] 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.

[6] Cooper, Marilyn. (2016) “Listening to Strange Strangers, Modifying Dreams,” in Barnett, Scott and Casey Boyle, eds. Rhetoric, through everyday things. The University of Alabama Press. (17-29).

[7] “Cowrie Shells and Trade Power.” The National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smithsonian Institution. www.nmaahc.si.edu/cowrie-shells-and-trade-power#:~:text=Europeans%20in%20the%2016th%20century,at%20their%20use%20as%20amulets. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[8] Cypraeidae, in Döring, M. (2022). English Wikipedia - Species Pages. Wikimedia Foundation. doi.org/10.15468/c3kkgh.  Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[9] Davies, A.M. (1971) Tertiary Faunas, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. New York: American Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc. Cited in the Neogene Atlas of Ancient Life, Southeastern United States. www.neogeneatlas.net/families/cypraeidae. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

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

[11] 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)

[12] Hogendorn, Jan and Marion Johnson. (2003) The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press.

[13] Jackson, John Wilfrid. (1917) Shells as evidence of the migration of early culture.    Manchester, University Press. www.archive.org/details/shellsasevidence00jack/page/n4/mode/1up. Last accessed on 4 September 2024.

[14] 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.

[15] Pallaver, Karine. “Cowries, the currency that powered West Africa.” ReThink Quarterly, Issue 7: Equality. 20 January 2023. www.rethinkq.adp.com/artifact-cowries-west-africa. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

[16] Passamonti, Marco. (2015) “The family Cypraeidae (Gastropoda Cypraeoidea) an unexpected case of neglected animals.” Biodiversity Journal, 6:1, 449–466. www.biodiversityjournal.com/pdf/6%281%29_449-466.pdf. Last accessed on 30 August 2024.

[17] 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.

[18] “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.

[19] White-Clarke, Aerryel. “African Cowrie Shells: A Dive Into Their History And Meaning.” April 9, 2022. B.Eclectic. www.beclecticbrand.com/blogs/the-b-eclectic-blog/african-cowrie-shells?srsltid=AfmBOopEZwueMXLABp2XlEFNwlj5yd6QRBT0wmwSVZz6OdG6GUQe6jrU. Last accessed on 31 August 2024.

Endnotes:

[1] “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's 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.” [1]

[2] “An initiated priest or priestess of Santería.  Also called a Santero (male) or Santera (female). Often shortened to Olocha.” [1]