Cowrie Shells: Culture, Currency and Adornment

Some of the oldest cowries we know of were placed in graves. In predynastic Egypt and the Neolithic Levant they were laid with young girls, and in some burials arranged around the skull. The Egyptians later copied the shell in faience and gold as an amulet, worn at a woman's girdle to protect her, particularly in pregnancy. Long before the cowrie was money, it was a symbol of deep spiritualism.
Across very different cultures these shells have held great power in a myriad of meanings. The cowrie comes from the sea, which many peoples understand as the realm of the ancestors, and it is white, a colour widely tied to spirits, purity, health and insight. Its slit opening has been read as an eye, watchful and protective, and as a vulva, the portal of birth and the source of feminine power and potency. Western observers long reduced all of this to the evil eye or fertility, not a true reflection of its meanings throughout the world. Follow one shell and you can trace half the world. It begins in a warm, shallow lagoon in the Maldives, where I spent parts of my childhood and fell in love with shell designs. It was a very different island nation then and shell belts and necklaces were given or bought as we went between islands on dhonis that I still have and treasure. Cowrie shells have been woven through my life, from picking them up on beaches to being surrounded by pieces across Asia and Africa. From a baby and upwards, even my bath was surrounded by shells. The money cowrie, Monetaria moneta, lived in those lagoons in numbers found almost nowhere else, and for well over a thousand years the islands harvested it for the world. One European writer, marvelling at the quantity, supposed they had been left in the ground when the Flood receded.
From there the shells travelled to Bengal, the Swahili coast and across the Sahara. The 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta described cowries as both adornment and currency in the Maldives and in Mali, separated by a quarter of the known world and holding significance wherever they travelled.

Small, glossy and smooth as porcelain (the word itself comes from the old Italian name for the cowrie, porcellana), it was also money. The money cowrie became the most widely used shell currency on earth: small, durable and almost impossible to counterfeit. The Chinese character for money began as a picture of a cowrie.India gave the shell its name, from the Hindi and Urdu kauri, with roots in Sanskrit, and for nearly nine hundred years, Bengal bought cowries from the Maldives to use as everyday money. Yet the shell was more than currency there. In Bengal a cowrie is still the token fare for a soul's ferry across the river Vaitarani. In Kerala, where I went for my undergraduate thesis, I saw cowries worn as adornment. Across the Sahara, a year's journey through the trans-Saharan trade, the shell reached West Africa. There the shell speaks. Yoruba priests cast sixteen cowries in the divination known as owó mẹ́rìndínlógún, reading the fall of the shells as the voice of the Orishas. Among the Akan, goldsmiths cast cowries in gold, and the Asantehene, chiefs and royal wives wore them on anklets, bracelets and sandals to show access to great wealth. For the Mende the shell stands for womanhood, birth and wealth.

Then the story darkens. In the 16th century the Portuguese reached the Maldives and realised the islands were the source of the shells so wanted in West African ports. European traders shipped them in enormous quantities, and they became the shell money of the transatlantic slave trade. By the 1680s the price of one adult had risen to between 10,000 and 31,000 cowries. Part of what made it work as money was sameness: one shell was much like the next, so it could be counted in billions. When the slave trade ended and colonial coinage took over, the cowrie economy collapsed. The memory survives in language, in the Ghanaian cedi, named for the Akan word for cowrie. Yet the shell that priced human lives crossed the Atlantic as something else. In Brazil the búzios are cast to consult the Orixás, and curators describe cowries in the diaspora as carriers of ancestral memory and resistance, a small piece of homeland that could be held onto.
Cowries belong to the same world as ancestors in Indonesia, where we source and make our signature designs. Iban jackets from Borneo are edged with cowries and bells. On a jacket from the Kaur people of West Sumatra, cowries and hornbills sit at the centre of the front and back, where curators read a talisman for luck and protection.

And at sea are the Bajau, among Indonesia's last sea nomads and the people I work with in Sulawesi, free-divers who go down some twenty metres and hold their breath for as long as five minutes. Their relationship with the ocean is closer to kinship than ownership. Traditionally a newborn's placenta is given to the sea, because the sea is the home of the child's sibling. Bajau communities and many others bring shells into major ports around Indonesia to trade and we source directly from the women who run the trade and sift through kilos of the raw material. Our cowries come to us through that relationship. Bajau communities in Sulawesi gather shells only after they have naturally detached, never from live animals or reef. Each shell is certified through Indonesia's Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries and CITES approved, then cleaned and polished by hand in Bali, its natural variation left to show. (More in CITES & Why It Matters to Our Shells.)

It was outside Jayapura, in Indonesian Papua, that the shell found me. I had gone to Indonesia to look at a forestry project, and came away fascinated by Papuan ceremonial dress, where shell has been jewellery and dowry since prehistoric times. In Bali I began collecting necklaces, and the search for pieces led me to the artisans I still work with today.
Our artisans in Bali and the islands beyond, hand-sew the cowrie onto organic bamboo, cotton and leather across the collection. In our gold jewellery, it returns to where the Asante placed it, as a mark of wealth and goddess-like adornment inspired by stories of spirits, oceans and civilizations. I first incorporated the shells into our iconic ankle cuffs and then a collection evolved around them to make the shell my own talisman of my signature style.

Cowries have been worn by men too, as marks of rank and strength on Akan chiefs. But for thousands of years women have worn them as protection, potency and a declaration of feminine power, due to their resemblance to intimate and erogenous zones. That is the lineage our womenswear carries, from the Aquata ring to the Calliope Cowrie Collar and the shell dresses.
When a piece reaches the end of its life, the shells come home. Through ELECTRA Returns the bamboo is composted and the shells begin again in a new design. After a history of being spent, these ones are kept.
For centuries the cowrie has stood for what a society holds sacred, whether that was wealth, ancestors, birth or the sea. Worn today, it still carries that power and those stories.

Photography: Electra Gillies and Dara Muscat. Museum images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution