Invisible Realms, Beings That Shimmer: Lively Mutualities of Mystical and Multispecies Worlds on the Swahili Coast

Join us for a talk by anthropologist Nathalie Arnold, who invites us to rethink the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds that shape life along the Swahili Coast. Drawing on her long-term ethnographic work in Pemba, Arnold follows the vibrant connections between human and more-than-human beings—relations that shimmer with meaning as the unseen and the material continually fold into one another.

Beginning with the mystical arts and the expert knowledge Pemban elders have long relied on to protect their communities, Arnold situates these practices within the geographic and maritime complexities of the region. She then turns to her latest research in Zanzibar, where she traces how pigeons act as storied companions to humans: figures through which people experience gender, love, divinity, longing and the elemental worlds of air and sky.