Globalization from below

Instead of focusing on large-scale commercial interactions, this article emphasizes the ways Afro-Asian exchanges dramatically mark the bodies of West African Vodun practitioners who honour water spirits. Vodun practices resist post-Enlightenment logic through their rhizomatic, rather than hierarchical, structure. According to Dana Rush, Vodun reaches horizontally to resist structures of domination and must be understood in terms of integration and imbrication rather than separation and classification (Rush Reference Rush2013: 47). West African Vodun practitioners participate in what scholars of geography call ‘globalization from below’, defined

Although Indian spirits represent only a portion of Vodun ritual practice, devotions to these spirits demonstrate how Vodun practitioners integrate foreign images and elements into larger structures of healing, ritual identity and historical production. The ritual choreographies and sacred adornments through which Ewe and Guin-Mina ritual specialists interpret Hindu devotional images reorient both Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean frameworks as models of ‘globalization from below’ (Hawley Reference Hawley and Hawley2008: 8).

The fluid layering of histories, oceanscapes and religious iconographies present within contemporary practices of Togolese Vodun affords fertile ground for exploring the visual and material forms that signal speculative and historical encounters between West Africans and Indian ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996: 33, 35). The collision of West Africans with Indian mediascapes becomes even more complicated through narratives like dance studies scholar Kareem Khubchandani’s description of growing up in Ghana with little exposure to Indian culture save through Hindi films with their accompanying images, dances and musical forms (Khubchandani Reference Khubchandani2020: xvi). In Nigeria and Senegal, Hausa groups exposed to Arabic and Bollywood films first imported by Lebanese cinema owners in the 1950s note cultural similarities by proclaiming that ‘Indian culture is “just like” Hausa culture’ (Vander Steene Reference Vander Steene and Hawley2008: 117–19; Larkin Reference Larkin1997: 412). Additionally, although Indian consumer goods have a long history in West African markets (Venkatachalam et al. Reference Venkatachalam, Modi and Salazar2021: 27), since the mid-nineteenth century Africans have also travelled to India carrying goods, cultural practices and, in some cases, religious fervour for Pentecostal Christianity (Venkatachalam Reference Venkatachalam2022).Footnote ⁶ Such transoceanic flows of goods, religious practices and people demonstrate the interconnectedness of West Africans and Indians on a macrocosmic level, but leave lingering questions about the role of sacred art and performance in microcosmic exchanges of religious knowledge that result from such migrations.

Although art historians Dana Rush (Reference Rush1999; Reference Rush and Drewal2008a) and Henry Drewal (Reference Drewal and Drewal2008) explore sacred arts practices honouring water spirits as evidence of the presence of India in Africa, few scholars have yet interpreted the ways Indian Ocean worlds intersect with Black Atlantic embodied performances in the adornments and devotional practices of West African practitioners who claim Hindu imagery as a part of indigenous systems of knowledge. Instead of focusing on nation-based economic and political Afro-Asian exchanges between Togo and India, this article unravels microcosmic encounters among Indian merchants and Togolese religious practitioners as traced through the arts.Footnote ⁷ This art historical approach to Afro-Asian exchanges follows sacred adornments as archives of ritual knowledge.

By bringing dance and performance studies scholarship into conversation with African art history, this study frames the body as a critical transcultural intersection, a point of contact where images, objects, textiles and practices from various cultures meet and produce intersectional meaning (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991: 1299).Footnote ⁸ Although the performers with whom I work do not themselves claim the role of ‘choreographer’, their performances demonstrate the types of intellectual labour inherent in choreographic practice. Through attention to choreography, defined here as culturally specific modes of selecting dance movements, Vodun communities within Afro-Asian oceanscapes reconnect histories of trade and migration to their embodied realities. As culturally decipherable patterns projected into space, dances produced in cooperation with spirits relate to the etymological root of the term ‘choreography’, which means ‘dance writing’ (Browning Reference Browning1995: 35). Ewe and Guin-Mina ritual specialists access leadership positions and produce historical knowledge through the masterful selection of ritual gestures and objects. In short, through stylized gestures and adornments, Ewe and Guin-Mina performers in Togo transform understandings of commercial relations with foreigners into sources of empowerment and representations of a desire for social mobility.

Pinpointing water spirit worship as a site of contact between Hindu images and African Vodun demonstrates the embodied dimensions of transoceanic exchanges. Histories of cultural and economic exchanges between the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean world inform the contemporary sartorial practices and the everyday lived expressions of ritual specialists like Sofivi and Edem, who worship and perform in coastal Togo. With a focus on materiality and the transoceanic exchanges of goods and objects present in Togolese Mami Wata worship, this article teases out practices of critical consumerism, gender fluidity and ritual choreography that accompany such ceremonies. Finally, emphasizing the gender-bending performances of performers who embody multiple spirits at once, I argue that the body serves as an intersection and transit zone for multiple spirits, cultures, histories and objects, much like the oceans themselves. Through such small-scale choreographic movements, performers reframe macrocosmic migrations and commercial circulation, dramatizing how Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds collide.

Embodying Indian images in the Epé Ekpé festival

Ewe and Guin-Mina people in Togo host elaborate annual ceremonies to honour water spirits. Coastal Vodun practitioners located along the Bight of Benin honour water spirits in part due to their association with immense wealth. Many West Africans characterize water spirits as rich in the types of trade goods that coastal West Africans gained through economic exchanges with Europeans and South Asians visiting or residing in colonial entrepôts along the Atlantic coast. Mami Wata practitioners remember exchanges of currencies and goods during trade relations – including, but not limited to, the transatlantic slave trade – through performances that caution against prohibited or selfish wealth, jealousy and theft while soliciting collective wealth through prayers and invocations.Footnote ⁹

Coastal communities codify some events honouring water spirits in festivals including Epé Ekpé in Aného. Attended by tourists, government officials, visiting performers from neighbouring nations, and local community members from the city of Aného, Epé Ekpé culminates in the revelation of a sacred stone, the colour of which predicts the future of the small town of Glidji for the coming year. Epé Ekpé also marks the start of the lunar new year (Assiom et al. Reference Assiom, Eccoc-Aduadje, Kuakuvi, Amenoumie and Lawrance2005: 49).Footnote ¹⁰ According to R. E. G. Armattoe (Reference Armattoe1951), Foli Bebe founded Epé Ekpé and first celebrated the festival by making offerings to his royal stool of office in 1680. Today, Afa diviners preside over the process of determining the yearly message conveyed by the stones.Footnote ¹¹ Togolese anthropologists Komi Kossi-Titrikou and Inouissa Moumouni (Reference Kossi-Titrikou and Moumouni2009) note that a white stone predicts a happy year, a black stone signifies grief, red indicates eventual danger, green implies hope, and yellow announces good health. Afa diviners place a white stone beside a stone of another colour to speak for the Afa, a local system of divination and personal law through which people examine past behaviours to better understand present problems. The events and their associated feasts and rituals draw participants from the USA, UK, Germany, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. The festival occurs in Glidji-Kpodji, a town located near Aného, Togo. Vodun practitioners in Togo, including Epé Ekpé performers, index relationships with Indian merchants and with Hindu images by incorporating elements of Hindu iconographies into adornments representing families of local water spirits. For many performers in Epé Ekpé, adornments honouring water spirits become vessels for unfolding interpretations of Indian iconographies.

The silver apia (trident) gleams in the dancer’s left hand as he reaches towards the ground. Along the skin of his arms, back and legs, white clay swirls in sweeping arabesques. The white skirt he wears also sparkles with silver sequins that glimmer against the white of gossamer material. Albert, standing with the apia still clasped in his hand, sways right and then left with each foot keeping time by turning out and back parallel as he moves his weight from foot to foot. He stands in a long line of others processing across the festival grounds of the Epé Ekpé festival. As the procession picks up behind him, Albert’s shoulders wing forward before he pulls his arms and bent elbows back as if drawing wealth or water towards his chest. When the music slows, he leans forward once more as his tricolour red–blue–white beaded necklace swings from his neck. His arms somnambulantly gesture towards the ground in concert with the other dancers gathered behind him in neat rows. Men and women swathed in bright finery echo Albert’s songs to Mami Dan. Some wear armbands in the shape of serpents curled around their upper arms and most sport beaded regalia declaring their adoration for water spirits.

Albert enacts what anthropologist Christopher Pinney calls ‘corpothetics’, or aesthetic practices that ‘mobilize all of the senses simultaneously’ (Pinney Reference Pinney2004: 18–19). Albert’s adornments worn during the Epé Ekpé festival not only clearly indicate adoration for the serpent Dan but also assemble lavish imported lace textiles in concert with serpentine white clay designs and the silver trident that honours Dan. The apia, or trident, visually links the dancer to Hindu images of Shiva, who also carries a trident.

Aesthetic accumulation of festival adornments for Epé Ekpé makes visible the ways individual performers spectacularize cultural and commercial exchanges between themselves and Indian traders, who first settled in the region as merchants and shopkeepers in the 1890s. Commercial exchanges between Indian and West African vendors and consumers initially intensified in the fifteenth century when Portuguese sailors and merchants of the British and Dutch East India company traded Indian cloth between India and West Africans in present-day Nigeria, Ghana, Benin and Togo.Footnote ¹² Much later, mass-produced Hindu images increased in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s after wealthy Indian merchants had established successful businesses along the West African coast (Drewal Reference Drewal and Drewal2008: 58). As a result of Mami Wata’s close association with both wealth and strangers, dancers, including Epé Ekpé performers like Albert, summon the spirits through the movements of their bodies while interacting with imported objects including beads, foreign perfumes and Indian-made chromolithographs that participants employ as tributes to the deity.

Indian lithography, European images and African mermaids

Communities in Togo and Southern Ghana often negotiate ambivalence about neoliberal capitalist modernity through visual culture, such as films, murals and personal adornments representing water spirits (Meyer Reference Meyer and Drewal2008: 383–98). In fact, Mami Wata devotions often grow in prominence in communities changing from gift-giving to cash economies as they oversee shifts from a focus on collective prosperity to preoccupations with personal commodity consumption and individual affluence.Footnote ¹³ Water spirits animate trees, rivers, streams, oceans, statues and altars across the African Atlantic. Togolese practitioners view Mami Wata as a class of spirits with many different names and purposes. When locals use the term ‘Mami Wata’, they refer to multiple spirits at once. These water spirits include Dan (the serpent), Mami Dan (wife of Dan), Adjakpa (the crocodile), and the riverine deity Densu, or Papi Wata, to name a few. The principal unifying feature of these spirits is their domain over bodies of water and their association with wealth and outsiders. Although communities popularly represent water spirits in a variety of ways, Evangelical Christian groups in West Africa often reject and denigrate Mami Wata spirits as dangerous and seductive ‘demons’, and artists including Ghana’s Almighty God depict them as such.Footnote ¹⁴ Pentecostal Christian communities in Ghana and Togo also demonize water spirits as entities in league with the devil (Meyer Reference Meyer1999). In Pentecostal visions of Mami Wata, like the 1996 films Women in Love I and II, the spirit demands that devoted followers become lesbian and abstain from heterosexual encounters (Meyer Reference Meyer and Drewal2008). The proliferation of Mami Wata spirits and the range of responses to them and ways to represent them mirror the diverse influx of mass-produced images into West African markets. Bodily adornments evincing recognizable patterns, colours and iconographies reconstituted from mass-produced imported images illustrate the enmeshment of local Togolese practices with global mediascapes as an ongoing commentary on economic mobility.

Ritual specialists devoted to water spirits embody Hindu chromolithograph images as depictions of local water spirits. Chromolithograph presses operated in India by the late nineteenth century and colour chromolithograph images circulated in India after Raja Ravi Varma established the first chromolithographic press in Bombay in 1891 (Inglis Reference Inglis, Babb and Wadley1995: 58; Rush Reference Rush1999: 63). According to art historian Giulia Paoletti (Reference Paoletti2022), colonial administrators in Senegal, especially the lieutenant governor Raphael Valentin Marcus Antonetti, viewed chromolithographs as dangerous and striking images that spoke directly to the imagination of West African people. In fact, by 1915, Antonetti had noticed coloured images of this kind circulating in Senegal and in Francophone West Africa and he described the images as ‘correspond[ing] to a need’, since ‘images that capture the eyes and force one’s attention … shape the mentality of native people, [who] … do not read’ (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2022: 781). Such images remain efficacious among Vodun practitioners, inflaming the imaginations of West Africans even as they inspire devotional responses.

Many practitioners also closely associate a foreign mermaid deity with a popular chromolithograph image depicting a South Asian snake charmer who worked in a circus in Hamburg, Germany, in the 1880s. Practitioners make ritual sense of the image by recognizing it as Mami Wata, who often manifests with serpents wreathing her neck or arms (some practitioners describe her as a wife to the serpent spirit Dan). Since Mami Wata spirits circulate as foreign travellers who visit the shrines of their devoted followers only at certain times of the year and spend the rest of their time in the ocean, the circuitous transnational history of the snake charmer image only adds to its appeal and relevance to ongoing devotional practices for water spirits. As explored in the work of Henry Drewal, circus director Carl G. C. Hagenbeck first commissioned the poster from Adolph Friedlander’s lithographic company in the 1880s as an advertisement for his famous ‘people show’ (Drewal Reference Drewal and Drewal2008: 15, 50–1). The Shree Ram Calendar company reprinted the image in Bombay in 1955 and sent 12,000 copies to Kumasi, Ghana, where the image enjoyed great popularity and spread throughout the region after a reprint in the 1960s. Today, Togolese performers model ritual regalia honouring water spirits on the signature iconographies of Hindu deities including Shiva, on the snake charmer image, and on imported images of mermaids.

Complicating the foreign identities of water spirits, West African practitioners associate them with European as well as Asian others.

The russet hair of the pearlescent-skinned mermaid figure contrasts with the blue waters that appear like a splash against the white background of the framed and printed image. The figure, defiantly positioned with her right shoulder hidden, seems on the point of darting away due to her slightly arched back and curved fish tail rendered in a variegated pale blue that evokes the slick sheen of fish scales.

Images like this white mermaid, shown to me in Mamissi Sofivi’s water spirit shrine room, not only indicate that practitioners recognize Mami Wata spirits as foreigners, but also that they encode many levels of difference, including racial and ethnic differences. For Mamissi Sofivi – a middle-aged Mami Wata priestess and grandmother who trains young women in Ewe dances, songs, modes of dressing and codes of behaviour – Mami Wata spirits hold sway over trade and mobility because of their dominion over the Atlantic Ocean. The common depiction of water spirits as mermaids may have gained additional layered meanings with sixteenth-century (and subsequent) sightings of majestic mermaid figureheads on European trading and slaving vessels on the West African coast (Drewal Reference Drewal1988: 162). Contemporary practitioners also integrate images of white mermaids into water spirit shrines to indicate proximity to imported wealth.

The association of Mami Wata spirits with European and Indian ‘others’ shows that Ewe and Guin-Mina communities link the spirits to layered interpretations of and desires for immense wealth. Incorporation of Hindu religious images may also signal contact with Bollywood films imported in the 1950s and wartime rumours carried by West African soldiers in Ghana and Nigeria who fought in India during World War Two and returned to tell tales of how Hindu deities had protected them during their time in foreign lands (Wuaku Reference Wuaku2013: 3; Shankar Reference Shankar2021: 181–2). Practitioners who honour water spirits agglomerate a variety of historical and cross-cultural images that arrive on the shores of West Africa through transoceanic trade and commercial exchanges with Europeans and Asians.Footnote ¹⁵ In performances that occur during harvest festivals, fetatrotro ‘new year’ celebrations, initiatory celebrations and funerals, performers demonstrate connections not only to spirits who bring wealth from across the ocean but also to the Indian merchants who first sold these images in West Africa.

By carrying, displaying and dancing with objects and adornments associated with powerful foreigners, Ewe Mami Wata practitioners use their bodies as sites through which they reimagine and redefine their local communities. During small-scale events called fetatrotro, water spirits come to the aid of families and individuals. Such rituals often serve as sites of mourning for the dead, opportunities to resolve conflicts in communities, and forums during which to pray for the type of wealth and transoceanic mobility that Hindu images represent for coastal Togolese communities. Vodun practitioners often negotiate desires for prosperity by incorporating notions of alterity into ritual ceremonies and claim that all water spirits share the ocean and are not bound by ethnic divisions (Hill Reference Hill2022: 63). When asked about Mami Wata’s origins, a local from Aného, Togo, informed me that ‘you can find Mami Wata anywhere in the world … What Indian people do in India is the same as what we do here in Togo … With Mami … you find the same [spirits] … at the bottom of the sea [in other places] as here.’Footnote ¹⁶ In such framings of the geographic placelessness and mobility of water spirits, practitioners frame oceanscapes, including the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, as ‘crossroads … space[s] of convergence and endless possibility’ (Alexander Reference Alexander2005: 8). Practitioners invite wealthy water spirits to join in the movements of bodies enthralled in worship. Such movements constitute gestural manifestations of longstanding, often generational and intimate relationships with gift-giving water spirits.

Ritual performers celebrate interactions with South Asian traders by employing aesthetics borrowed from chromolithograph images embodied as local water spirits. In such cases, performers recontextualize images based on their own needs, enacting interpretations that evade simplistic binaries between sacred and secular or African and Asian. Togolese practitioners engage with what Christopher Pinney calls ‘the “rhizomatic” global patterns of image circulation’ in ways that elude neat Western classifications as part of either Black Atlantic or Indian Ocean flows (Pinney Reference Pinney2004: 164).Footnote ¹⁷ By repurposing foreign images within ritual choreographies, Togolese performers disrupt the Western, ‘linear logic of hegemonic control of visual and other realities’ (Roberts Reference Roberts and Morgan2009: 133) that divides Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean cultures by conjoining Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean influences on their bodies based on West African aesthetics and religious philosophies.

Dancing chromolithographs

Seated upon a ceremonial stool at Epé Ekpé, Edem watched other initiates perform. A design drawn in white laces his forehead and follows the curve of his brow to project down onto the bridge of his nose. Between his eyebrows, he has marked his head with a red design like a bright third eye. A string of red, white, blue and silver beads rings his neck like a choker. Two small silver porpoise rings adorn his left hand while his right hand sports a large silver dolphin ring. He also clasps a silver trident, which gleams against his luxurious garments of white lace.

Dancers festooned with beads, textiles and body decorations invoked Mami Wata spirits as they performed in the 353rd edition of the Epé Ekpé festival in Aného in 2015. Guin-Mina people call this event kpesoso, or ‘the taking of the sacred stone’. In preparation for the revelation of the stone, lavishly dressed dancers process and perform to honour water spirits and the clan divinities of Aného. These West African Vodun practitioners also actively participate in global markets through processes of critical consumerism, the creative practice of ‘making do’ (De Certeau Reference De Certeau1984: xiv) with readily available commercial goods to re-signify images and objects. Through ritual regalia, Edem and his fellow performers enact critical consumerism, or the conscious choices practitioners make as they purchase and assemble available objects into adornments meant to entice the spirits. By layering new objects with older ones, and locally produced glass beads passed down in families with newly purchased beads and textiles, Epé Ekpé performers arrange glorious adornments upon their bodies. These objects – beaded bracelets, necklaces, armlets and anklets – and handheld power objects draw together concepts of specific oceanic spaces and reinvent Hindu chromolithographs to conjure aesthetic historical narratives. Practitioners associate the various Mami Wata spirits conjured through their ritual regalia with wealth, capitalism and sumptuous goods brought from across the ocean.

Performers like Edem recast images of Shiva, who is depicted with living snakes twined around his upper arms and neck, by wearing beads representative of allegiance to the serpent deity around their necks and silver bands shaped like serpents clasped around their upper arms. These performers replace Shiva’s rudraksha, beads made of dried stone fruit that Hindus honouring Shiva wear as prayer beads, with trade beads. In such cases, performers express memories of trade with Indian merchants through performances that embody Hindu chromolithograph images as depictions of local water spirits. Practitioners represent not only Dan, who is iconographically identified with Shiva, but also Mami Dan, a wife of Dan, who is closely tied to the Indian-made chromolithograph image of a South Asian snake charmer. Mami Dan combines Dan, the serpent, and Mami Wata, the mermaid. The apia, or trident, visually links Dan and his devotees to the Hindu god Shiva, whose iconography includes river water flowing from his hair, a third eye in the middle of his forehead, a trident, and snakes wrapped around his neck and arms. Mami Dan dancers decorate their skin with drawings meant to resemble reptilian undulations. The combination of ephemeral kaolin clay designs on the body with regalia crafted from sea glass, shells, trade beads and imported liquor bottles brings together oceanic connections through visual displays of histories on the surface and through the movements of the body. Through embodied visualities modelled on Hindu iconographies, practitioners wear aesthetically dense regalia to transcend local perceptions of economic decline. Furthermore, they deploy the imagery of ‘Indian’ spirits who ‘invariably’ emerge from the sea as a means of reckoning with economic decline through references to the imported wealth of South Asians (Rush Reference Rush and Hawley2008b: 150).Footnote ¹⁸

Edem joins the other initiated participants from Aného and the nearby town of Glidji-Kpodji to perform devotions to Mami Dan through their choices of display and decoration as well as through their representation of the character and movements of the spirit.Footnote ¹⁹ Through multiple levels of representation, including drawings on the skin, objects carried and worn on the body, and movements performed across ritual spaces, performers indicate and encapsulate multiple mobilities and transoceanic flows. Vodun communities in the major slave port and historical commercial centre of Aného encode historical encounters and shifts in power and affluence through performances that caution against prohibited or selfish wealth, jealousy and theft, while soliciting collective wealth through prayers and invitations (Jones and Sebald Reference Jones and Sebald2006: 6).Footnote ²⁰

Ewe and Guin-Mina practitioners use ritual performances honouring Mami Wata to secure external, or foreign, power with which to intervene in the health and prosperity of their communities. These fetatrotro events, based on the lunar new year, welcome water spirits from time spent in the ocean back into local communities. Much as performers across West Africa, including sites in Guinea, contend with their inability to attain ‘the good life’ (Cohen Reference Cohen2019: 719) through excesses of movement and lavish spending in the form of cash ‘spraying’ (ibid.: 729) in sabar dances, Togolese performers in Epé Ekpé cluster expensive jewellery, beads and textiles to defy the limitations of their peripheral place in the global economy.Footnote ²¹ Vodun communities in the global South employ the aesthetics of excess to solicit divine assistance, grapple with economic decline, and posit various ways of engaging with the circum-oceanic circulation of goods and images.Footnote ²² They use the aesthetics of danced devotions to Vodun spirits as forums for cultural exchange, community building and debates about collective and personal prosperity and wellness. Performers make aesthetic choices through which they communicate with spirits, viewers and other participants.

Before the culmination of Epé Ekpé in the revelation of the colour of the sacred stone that portends the future of the town of Glidji-Kpodji, initiates gather on the festival grounds dressed in white, pink or blue and wearing white clay body decorations, beads and jewellery to perform for the forty-one clan divinities. The clan spirits of Aného include wealth-bringing water spirits said to emerge from the sea for the occasion. In addition to migratory water spirits known along the West African coast as Mami Wata (mermaid), Dan (serpent), Adjakpa (crocodile) and Densu (a three-headed river spirit), Epé Ekpé honours the forty-one clan divinities that include spirits like Ata Kpessu, whose name means ‘stone that changes colour under water’. First, the dancers shift calmly from side to side. Their feet take on a rhythm – shift–together–shift–together – as each dancer steps to one side, brings the heel of one foot to meet the arch of the other foot and then mirrors the gesture on the other side. Their shoulders remain steady as their elbows wing out. Their arms lighten as the dancers’ shifting feet keep time.

These movements draw water spirits into the bodies of the performers to enact a version of intersubjectivity – the consolidation of personal and collective concern. I follow literary scholar Ashraf Rushdy in defining intersubjectivity as the intersection between individual and collective experience, essentially the ability of individuals to see others as parts of the self (Rushdy Reference Rushdy1994: 129, 132). Practitioners acknowledge water spirits dancing within rituals as both close kin and foreign intercessors who bring external power and opportunities for healing. Building on understandings of intersubjectivity to demonstrate how men and women practise sacred devotions to water spirits, performers become a nexus of choreographed movements and accumulative sacred objects. Ritual specialists refashion chromolithograph images using an array of imported objects in the service of culturally specific ends. Consumers value Hindu images not merely for how they look but also how they ‘work’, since the images become ‘animated’ through ongoing interactions with the beholder, and, in the case of Vodun practice, with performers who embody and reanimate the images (Pinney Reference Pinney2004: 190–1).

Choreographic movements to entice water spirits assert circum-oceanic aesthetics. West African Vodun practitioners display the depths of transhistorical Afro-Asian exchanges by deploying regalia and reflecting images from temple murals and chromolithographs in their ritual choreographies. These sacred arts emblematize the materiality of chromolithographs as the images become dialogic models for the structuring of new narratives and devotional practices that bring hidden histories into view. Through encounters with spirits in the bodies of community members, worshippers evaluate relationships with spirits, with one another, and with landscapes beyond their shores, but not conceptually or spiritually beyond their reach. They engage with different possibilities for relating to and experiencing the world. Devotees set gestures honouring water spirits apart from everyday life as interfaces between the visible and the invisible, the actual and the possible, within spaces of liminality and flux. In so doing, these artists, performers and communities take up and extend art historical discourses in which Black bodies become evidence of the ‘eternal potential’ (Rush Reference Rush1999) of Vodun cosmologies and, thus, sites of reinvention anchored by the movements of the physical body.

The body as intersection: gendering circum-oceanic images

During ritual performances for water spirits, performers highlight gender fluidity and social mobility through displays of critical consumerism. Notions of intersection and assemblage govern the entangled variations within Vodun practice and West African understandings of intersubjectivity. The term ‘intersection’ acknowledges the visual registers of intersubjectivity, the extension of the self by the other. Black studies scholar Roberto Strongman reworks notions of transcorporeality (the connection of the body to the environment) as a way of rethinking the Black body, pointing out that ‘the philosophies of African peoples conceive of the body as an open vessel that can be occupied temporarily by a variety of hosts’ (Strongman Reference Strongman2019: 4). Unlike Western ideas of a ‘unitary self’ fixed in the body, Afro-diasporic religious traditions perceive of the body as upholding a ‘concavity’ of a self that is ‘removable, external, and multiple’ (ibid.: 21). By conjoining local and foreign elements on the body, performers express the merging of many selves within a single body. As Vodun communities perform to honour water spirits, devotees construct bodies capable of crossing the borders between different gendered identities and roles. Through sartorial choices, imported objects and choreographic practice, Hindu iconographies and African performances converge in microcosmic circum-oceanic intersections instigated by non-elite African performers in Vodun communities.

As a ‘mamissi’, or priestess, and an initiated Vodun practitioner, Sofivi intervenes on behalf of her community to communicate with and host Vodun spirits in her body through trance and on her altar through sacred objects. During field research conducted between 2012 and 2015, I apprenticed with a traditional association in Tsévié, Togo, to work with Mamissi Sofivi. She honours and encounters these spirits through a shrine in her home. As I sat with Mamissi Sofivi on the porch of her home in Tsévié at the very end of my year-long dance apprenticeship under her direction and mentorship, I urged her to tell me more about Mami Wata spirits. I wanted her to pinpoint local iconographies for water spirits and reveal what made dances honouring water spirits distinctive and recognizable. As I pressed her for more details, she began to laugh at me. Deeply amused, she observed:

Mamissi Sofivi maintained that, since manifestations of Mami Wata spirits are varied, dances for water spirits can be quite heterogeneous between regions and communities. The dances, in short, can be as diverse as the many Mami Wata spirits themselves.

Towards the end of my year-long field research in Togo, Mamissi Sofivi invited me into the shrine room for her water spirits. ‘You cannot leave without seeing my water spirit altars,’ she chided once she realized that I had never set foot in the room. The room was dim as I moved from the bright outdoors. Sofivi moved around the room making last-minute adjustments to the presentation of objects. Within the room, mirrors glinted and gleaming tin bowls overflowed with gifts for the water spirits, including imported mouthwash, sweet biscuits in crackling wrappers, scented talcum powders, liquor bottles, and colourful artificial flowers. A ceremonial stool draped in a white cloth sat in front of the Mami Wata altar. On the other side of the room stood a painted, wooden, three-headed Densu figure with what resembled a painted green serpent wrapped around his waist. The artist had painted the wooden figure wearing an ecru-coloured Western-style button-up shirt, slacks and black boots. The Densu figure rested on an altar between two stools and beside a bottle of Youki lemonade.

Sofivi offered Mami Wata, and Papi Wata, food, including eggs and bananas, as well as little pleasures like liquor, cigarettes, perfumes, lemonades, scented talcum powders and decorative flowers.Footnote ²⁴ Practitioners furnish such altars as banquets for the spirits. Another Mami Wata spirit called Densu, or Papi Wata, was translated from a print of the Hindu deity Dattatreya. In ‘Eternal potential: chromolithographs in Vodunland’, Dana Rush discusses the popularity of calendar art and the rapid spread of foreign images in West Africa during the second half of the nineteenth century (Rush Reference Rush1999: 63). She emphasizes the multiplicity of uses to which practitioners put chromolithographs as representations of various spirits. According to Rush, many mamissis see imported chromolithographs of Dattatreya as Densu who manifests in ritual performances as a riverine deity. Although Hindu chromolithographs of Densu, sometimes locally known as Papi Wata, depict him as a three-headed man, at a ritual held by a friend of Mamissi Sofivi in Tsévié, Densu arrived at the ritual in the dancing body of a young woman.

Fafa wore a large blue scarf imported from India over a white scarf that had been wrapped into a topknot. This intertwined topknot of cloth projected from her head, replicating the look of Densu’s turban in the popular renderings of his likeness in paintings on the walls of shrines. For most of the performance, Densu stood and surveyed the dances. At one moment the dancer suddenly leaned over with her knees bent and her grasping hands nearly touching the dirt. Her feet matched the rhythm of the drums even as her hands seemed to clutch at the air just above the dirt, each shoulder dipping in time with the pull of her arms. She quickly finished her dance and returned to her aloof stance.

Theories of the body as a vessel temporarily inhabited by multiple hosts, practitioners, ancestors, histories – or copresences – align with theories of the body as an intersection through the collection of multiple objects and textures on the body in reference to a variety of diverse images. Within such rituals, communities attach gender, like ethnic identity, to signs and symbols layered on the body. Much as Mami Wata moves between land and water and merges human and fish, Mami Wata also exemplifies gender fluidity through the plasticity of spirit possession (Browning Reference Browning1995: 57). Adepts of Mami Dan exemplify the ability of performers to evade and complicate gendered identities through Vodun practice and Mami Wata performance. Initiated men perform as female spirits to characterize Mami Dan, an iteration of Mami Wata who appears as a snake-charming mermaid wreathed by Dan himself. During Epé Ekpé, festival viewers described male performers honouring Mami Dan as men who adorned themselves like women to show that they cultivate copresence with Dan’s snake-wreathed wife. Since linguistic designations of gender are much more fluid in Ewe language than in English or French, in an Ewe or Guin-Mina context, community members can linguistically identify a man as a ‘spirit wife’ just as easily as a woman (Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal1998: 185–6).

Adorned in meaning-laden layers of objects, dancers swirl while circumnavigating, bisecting and traversing dance spaces by performing movements generated through collective frameworks. These embodied intersections materialize palimpsests of meaning. Performers mobilize miniature worlds made up of fragments through which they rearrange various relationships and power positions microcosmically. They do so to reform and critique social possibilities and economic realities. The previous lives of the objects and the citational references to images displayed upon embodied intersections become important aspects of the efficacy of the events in which performers deploy choreographies and cross-pollinated adornments. Never still, religious images often migrate in complex, unintended and unpredictable ways. According to African Studies scholar Allen F. Roberts, such images ‘float’ (Roberts Reference Roberts and Morgan2009: 115) based on the specific economic, political and social agendas of different groups, accumulating meanings and functions as they move. Much like Huey Copeland and Thompson’s (Reference Copeland and Thompson2017) concept of the afrotrope, the migration and repurposing of religious images map and delimit diasporic formations. Thompson defines the afrotrope as a neologism that gives form to tropes transmitted and translated across Afro-diasporic populations and across time, space and media. The afrotrope addresses ‘key recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and have become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity … [They] have a profound effect on how black subjects imagine themselves and negotiate technologies of visual transmission’ (Thompson Reference Thompson2018: 81). Yet, as Roberts reminds us, religious images transcend African diasporas, borrowing from other spaces and influencing multiple flows of information, devotional practices and material goods (Roberts Reference Roberts and Morgan2009). Such images and objects, and the dancing bodies on which communities remake them, often provide links between seemingly disparate locations and times. These images also become deeply linked to social structures. As a female Densu dancer, Fafa embodies ritual gender fluidity and circum-Atlantic aesthetics through the simultaneous intersection of multiple spirits of various genders and identities within her body. By purchasing and reusing available objects according to their own ceremonial needs, such performers adorn themselves through processes of critical consumerism. Viewing the bodies of Vodun performers as altars in motion allows for theories that resist isolating these dances from the transnational, ritually gender-fluid and transoceanic relationships through which communities of Vodun practitioners produce them.

Conclusion: an Indian–Atlantic cultural matrix?

The movements and gestures of Vodun practitioners integrate innovative versions of Hindu iconographies that offer new visions of West African social mobility and devotional practice. Togolese performers employ aesthetics borrowed from chromolithographs to fashion personalized ritual regalia. By combining bodies, objects and choreographies into embodied intersections, Ewe communities reveal how communities become enmeshed through performance and praxis. Since many practitioners associate Mami Wata spirits with wealth and otherness, these spirits illustrate the ongoing importance of transnational flows and social mutability to West African communities of labourers, market vendors, farmers and fishermen. Tracing the flows of images and ideas across the ocean reminds us that bodies can signify sites of cultural and commercial exchange and may, on their surfaces and through their movements, figure the generative possibilities of cross-fertilization in ways that animate local art forms.

During the Epé Ekpé festival, Togolese ritual practitioners reinterpret and repurpose images and objects imported from India in ways that demonstrate embodied connections to sacred images and commodities from Indian Ocean worlds. The festivals and small-scale events explored in this article dramatize the movements of goods and practices that ‘float’ across oceans and ethnic divisions to serve various new functions (Roberts Reference Roberts and Morgan2009: 115). Ewe performers integrate imported Hindu aesthetics into pre-existing cultural frameworks and networks of spirits. Attention to contemporary embodiments in ritual choreographies shows how West Africans actively participate in global markets through processes of critical consumerism. West African Vodun communities re-signify images through religious regalia and choreographic activations in ways that fundamentally restructure understandings of diasporic flows across the Indian Ocean and into a more capacious Black Atlantic than previously imagined.