Oceanic intersections: boundary-crossing performances of Indian images in Ewe and Guin-Mina sacred arts

Abstract Ewe and Guin-Mina people in Togo often use festival and ritual events as forums for cultural exchange and as opportunities to reinterpret and repurpose images and objects imported from India. Instead of focusing on large-scale commercial interactions, this article illustrates Afro-Indian cultural exchanges enacted microcosmically upon the canvas of West African bodies. I examine small-scale encounters between Ewe and Guin-Mina Vodun practitioners and South Asian merchants, paying close attention to ritual performances for Mami Wata – a pantheon of Pan-African water spirits often depicted as mermaids and venerated for their dominion over maritime trade. Specifically, I consider how ritual specialists devoted to Mami Wata index histories of trade with Indian merchants through performances that embody Hindu chromolithograph images of deities like Dattatreya and Shiva as depictions of local water spirits. Focusing on movements, gestures and transoceanic flows of currency, goods and objects present in Togolese Mami Wata veneration, this article teases out the threads of critical consumerism, gender fluidity and choreographic practices that accompany such ceremonies, especially during moments of transformative copresence with spirits. Exploring ways Ewe and Guin-Mina performers in Togo use stylized gestures and adornments to transform understandings of commercial relations with foreigners into sources of agency and transformation, I examine ritual choreographies in public festivals and private rituals as oceanic intersections: material representations of desires for social, transcultural and transnational mobility.