Carnifaunal Cultures of the Indian Ocean World

Abstract

Archaeologies of the Indian Ocean World have long treated animals as cargo: commodities that moved, and bones that index diet. This paper argues that what crossed the ocean was never only the animal. I develop the concept of carnifaunal cultures — cultural complexes of belief and behaviour organised around a given taxon across three inseparable facets: the animal as a living being, the animal as a source of meat, and the meat itself. These facets cannot be disentangled, and the habit of studying them apart has obscured one of the most durable forms of connection across the ocean. Carnifaunal cultures moved as religions moved, and I argue that the models built to explain religious syncretism are the right instruments for explaining their movement. They arrived as suites, met suites already in place, and were almost never adopted whole. What followed is the sequence familiar from the study of religious encounter: accommodation, hybridization, transformation, and reactionary revitalization — the last never complete, since a movement defined by rejection carries the germ of what it rejects at its heart. Read through Giulianotti and Robertson, these are processes of glocalization; read through the anthropology of syncretism, their products are neither foreign nor local but indigenized, and indigenized so thoroughly that origin myths come to place them at home and to receive them from divine hands. Like Islam across this same ocean, carnifaunal cultures achieved coherence without uniformity, and unity through schism.Four cases carry the argument: zebu cattle entering African herds, the chicken carried west out of Asia, the pig's disappearance from the Swahili record, and the horse, imported into South Asia by the thousand and eaten by none. The Indian Ocean World was unified not by what moved along its routes but by internally diverse, pan-oceanic ideologies of proper human-animal relations.

About the Presenter

Dr. Akshay Sarathi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Archaeology) at the American University of Sharjah. An archaeologist of the Indian Ocean World, he specializes in zooarchaeology, archaeomalacology, and the archaeometry of trade beads, with a regional focus on the Swahili Coast and Zanzibar. He directs the Zanzibar Ethnography and Archaeology Project and a cave excavation project investigating long-term social-ecological adaptation on Zanzibar. Both are supported by the National Geographic Society, Fulbright-Hays, and the Firebird Foundation, and are carried out in partnership with Zanzibar's Department of Museums and Antiquities and local communities. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and previously held faculty positions at Texas A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, and Indiana University Bloomington.