Spiritual Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds

Abstract

This article interrogates how people in Kaole relate to the ocean spiritually. Located on the Swahili coast in Tanzania, with a long history of transoceanic connections, Kaole is a fishing community where everyday life is lived alongside and through the ocean. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork in preparation of our new research project Swahili Ocean Worlds, in this article we share some of our initial findings, which we contextualise with the help of scholarly work on the Swahili world and Islam in Africa. To broaden our scope, we also engage with some comparative material from other parts of the world. In conceptualising Swahili ocean worlds, we draw on the anthropology of water, which has ascertained the centrality of water in the making of social worlds. But to grasp the spiritual relationality of the ocean, we adopt a pluriversal approach, with an emphasis on multiple worldings in an emergent world of many worlds. Our aim is to go beyond the focus on materiality and sociality in the anthropology of water, to interrogate the spirituality of the ocean in terms of spiritual beings as well as becomings.