Between Whale Teeth and the Moral Uses of the Sea: Considering Religion in the US Whaling Industry’s Extractive Zone

Abstract

This article argues that the nineteenth century US whaling industry provides an oceanic perspective on extractive zones that illuminates their multi-sited, multiscalar nature where the local and global are deeply entangled. Further, I suggest that viewing this process through the underexamined lens of religion can contribute to a fuller understanding of the widespread, often neglected, impacts of extractivism. I take an 1845 sermon by liberal Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell, “A Discourse on the Moral Uses of the Sea,” read alongside the labors of the American whaling industry, as a mid-nineteenth century moment to consider the concealment of the natural resource extraction that is necessary for the production of the conditions of possibility for the imagination of “civilization” ideologically and theologically in the mid-nineteenth century. I look to the journey of whale teeth as they move between waste, items of trade in a global capitalist market, and powerful ritual objects in Fiji, assessing how the extractive zone as a contact zone also transforms religion, which in turn can be a location of agency and resistance. The article calls attention to the critical entanglements of indigenous and settler worlds, whose stories cannot be told separately from one another.

1. Introduction

Before natural gas, before petroleum, before lithium, before rare earth metals—all earth-bound elements that have come to define the current world of extractivism—there were whales. Sailing the world’s oceans for years at a time, whaling ships hunted and killed whales to extract two essential resources for nineteenth century civilization: oil and whalebone.

Whalebone (which is not actually bone but baleen, the brush-like fringed keratin plates hanging down from the roof of some types of whales’ mouths used to filter the krill and small fish they eat from the water) was essentially the “plastic” of the nineteenth century, used to make corset stays, umbrella spokes, buggy whips, skirt hoops, combs, and other items. Oil was primarily used for illumination and lubrication; the type acquired from sperm whales was preferred as higher-quality and cleaner-burning. It was used to light streetlamps in urban areas in the Americas and Europe, workhouses of sugar plantations, and the interiors of finer homes and businesses. It was also used to lubricate the machinery of industrial textile mills. Historian Jeremy Zallen’s account of the rapid growth of the whale oil industry from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries implicates it in “critical junctures in four processes at the heart of a global political economy: the transatlantic slave trade, the manufacture and trade of sugar, the making of the urban poor into the working classes, and the spinning of American cotton into factory textiles” (Zallen 2019, p. 18). The reach of this industry was enormous. The wharves of whaling ports such as New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Nantucket, Massachusetts, New London, Connecticut, or Sag Harbor, New York, were overflowing with the silent remains of whales from the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Bering Strait, in the form of oil-filled wooden barrels and piles of whalebone, waiting for sale.1

The story of American whaling is more than an economic story or a source of romantic imaginings of America’s past. The global reach of the industry had material and cultural impacts on both the United States and places around the world that reverberate today. In her recent book Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of U.S. Whaling, Jamie Jones has convincingly argued that nineteenth century industrial whaling structured the ways that the United States imagined energy and extraction as the country transitioned to a fossil fuel economy and conception of energy. “The US whaling industry was one of the conditions through which fossil modernity emerged; whaling culture scaffolded fossil fuel culture,” she asserts. “Fossil modernity is not a shiny alien spaceship that arrived from the future but a junkyard creature built from salvage” (Jones 2023). I suggest that viewing this process through the underexamined lens of religion can contribute to a richer understanding of the widespread, often neglected, impacts of extractivism.

The extractive endeavors of modern global capitalism arose with the history of capitalism itself and were an essential driver of the movement of European colonial rule and settlement around the world (Acosta 2013, p. 62; Simpson 2017, p. 75). In this way, not only fossil modernity but modernity itself in its global entanglements is “a junkyard creature” built from the “salvage” of the extractive enterprises of oceanic spaces. In this article, I first examine an 1845 sermon by influential liberal Protestant theologian Horace Bushnell about the “moral uses of the sea.” I consider the ways that the sermon works to conceal the centrality of oceanic natural resource extraction to the ideological and theological imagination of “civilization” in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, I point to the US whaling industry as a rich example of the extractive labors in the offshore depths that belied shallow liberal Protestant conceptions of “commerce.” I then turn attention to another site, Fiji, where the significance and uses of sperm whale teeth as ritual objects of exchange were impacted by extractive whaling. Between these sites, connected through the sea, networks of exchange, and human and other-than-human beings, lie complex religious intersections and configurations that can only be understood in their relation to each other in the extractive zone. Asking “where is the extractive zone?”, I suggest that the study of religion and extraction requires attending to this reality through multi-sited, multiscalar methodology.

I am inspired by Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lowe 2015). Lowe’s paradigm-shifting book examines the relationship between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas around the same time as the whaling era—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She found that the global networks of slavery, imperial trade, colonialism, and Euro-American liberalism were tied together, each impacting the other in critical, fluid, material ways that created the modern world. In that process, liberalism’s ideals of freedom and the “universal human” obscured the material conditions of their own possibility (including slavery, racism, and other injustices that ran counter to those ideals). I argue that viewing religion through extractive zones similarly illuminates the complicity of religion and extractivism, obscuring the material conditions of their own possibility. To better understand our present era of human-driven geological and climate change, most popularly known as the Anthropocene, requires that we pay close attention to the depth of the role that extractivism has played in creating the modern world and to the ways that basic orientation has shaped modern knowledge more generally, including religion (often in ways that have gone unseen).2

2. The Moral Uses of the Sea

In July of 1845, influential American Congregational minister and theologian Horace Bushnell set sail aboard the packet ship Victoria, bound for a year abroad in Europe to rest and heal his body and soul after a busy schedule of writing and preaching in the US. Best known for his books Christian Nurture, published two years later in 1847, Nature and the Supernatural, published in 1858, and other works that prepared a path for a modern, expansive liberal Protestant Christian perspective embracing cultural and social sources of theological knowledge, Bushnell was also extremely interested in commerce. One Sunday during his 20-day voyage, he gave a sermon that tied these two interests together, titled “A Discourse on the Moral Uses of the Sea.” Bushnell presented the sea as a critical material agent in the production of human morality, civilization, and commerce. “Not a few have wondered,” he began, “why God, in creating a world for habitation of man, should have chosen to hide three-fourths of its surface under a waste of waters.” He continued,

Doubtless it had been as easy for him to have made it a good round ball of meadow and plough-land. … Why, then, asks the inquisitive thought of man, why so great waste in the works of God? Why has He ordained these great oceans, and set the habitable parts of the world thus islanded between them? Why spread out these vast regions of waste?”

(Bushnell 1845, p. 3).

Bushnell’s answer to this question is a lesson in the dematerializing abstractions of a modern Protestant Christian perspective, which Bushnell himself helped to construct. I suggest that his presentation of the religious significance of the sea represents a theology that obscured the material, extractive foundations of modern Euro-American life, directing attributions of the “power” of civilization to an abstract imagination of commerce and Christianity. His first move was to separate what he names the “moral” uses of the sea from the “practical” elements that what he calls a “natural philosopher” (a scientist) would focus on: the sea tempering the land’s climate, the sea as “a great store-house of provisions”, and so forth. These functions of the sea, he says, God could have taken care of through his own will without the sea if he wanted to. So the theological importance of the sea—the reason why God created so much water on the earth, according to Bushnell— was its moral uses. In addition, what were the moral uses of the sea? Bushnell described at least three aspects.

First, he wrote, the sea has historically acted as a natural boundary between kingdoms and nations, allowing each to develop on its own accord rather than be in constant competition and warfare. Second, the sea kept one part of the world separate from other parts—in Bushnell’s words, “preserving it for discovery and occupation at an advanced period of history,” which in turn would spur civilizations towards reform, improvement, and renewal—as when Europeans arrived in the Americas and “then was man called out, as it were, to begin again” (Bushnell 1845, p. 8). In addition, the sea, while a natural barrier, was also, at the right historical time, a connecting power, “bringing all regions and climes into correspondence and commercial exchange” (Bushnell 1845, p. 8). By means of the sea, nations that had developed apart from each other were eventually able to exchange in commerce with one another, creating a kind of cosmopolitanism.

Bushnell spent most of the space of his sermon elaborating this last point about the cosmopolitan role of commerce over the sea, connecting disparate peoples. I quote his comments at length to illustrate the mechanisms by which he understood commerce to be transformational:

The nations engaged in commerce will, of course, be the most forward nations. In perpetual intercourse with each other, they will ever be adopting the inventions, copying the good institutions, and rectifying the opinions, one of another; for the man of commerce is never a bigot. He goes to buy, in other nations, commodities that are wanted in his own. He is, therefore, in the habit of valuing what is valuable in other countries, and so, proportionally, are the people or nation that consumes the commodities of other countries. And so much is there in this, that the government, the literature, nay, even the religion of every civilized nation must receive a modifying influence from all the nations with whom it maintains an active commerce. In the meantime, the nations most forward in art and civilization are approaching, by the almost omnipresent commerce they maintain, all the rude and barbarous nations of the world, carrying with them, wherever they go, all those signs of precedence by which these nations may be impressed with a sense of their backwardness, and set forward in a career of improvement….

What I have said, thus far, is not so distinctively religious as some might expect in a Christian discourse. But you will observe that all which I have said, in this general way, of human advancement, as connected with the uses of the sea, involves religious advancement, both as regards knowledge and character. All the advancement, too, of which I have spoken, is, in one view, the work of Christianity

(Bushnell 1845, pp. 13–14).

Commerce across the expanses of seas that connect otherwise disparate nations was to Bushnell “the handmaiden of religion”, forging the infrastructures and clearing the grounds through which Christianity would spread around the world. “I do, indeed, anticipate a day for man, when commerce itself shall become religious, and religion commercial”, he stated (Bushnell 1845, p. 15).

Horace Bushnell was not the only Christian writer to take up the relationship between the sea and commerce and Christianity in the 19th century. For instance, Presbyterian William Aikman’s 1863 book The Moral Power of the Sea took up similar themes, reciting a history of the oceanic commerce that spread Christian civilization (and suggesting that commerce alone, unaccompanied by Christian morality, could be destructive). For Aikman, echoing Bushnell’s sentiments, the religious was the moral, and the sea “actually unites the people of the earth. It has become the bond which now holds the nations together. Above all other things it makes the people one. However men may foolishly talk of different origins of the races, and contend for diverse parentage and creation, the sea makes them one, and flowing by every shore, tells that they cannot be kept apart” (Aikman 1863, p. 18). God opened the oceans to global commerce when the time was right, argued Aikman, and not before. “When the world was in a state to avail itself, for its good, of new and enlarged means of intercommunication, then, and not before, they were given. Now the civilized world had something to hand abroad; here was an awakened civilization and a genuine Christianity to be given; here were arts and dawning sciences to be diffused, things worth imparting, and so the highway to all lands began to be opened up” (Aikman 1863, p. 24).

Both of these men present a theology of time and space in which the sea played an integral role in the entanglements of capitalist and Christian expansion across the globe, as well as a teleology of progress that underwrote a hierarchy of human difference. Yet, for all of their awareness of the role of economic and material forces in the development of religious transformation, their vision of commerce over the sea’s expanse remained shallow. At this juncture, it is worth considering what sorts of commerce Bushnell and Aikman were referring to. What were the major seagoing trades of the mid-nineteenth century that were bringing about the sorts of intercultural exchanges that they felt were so important? In the Pacific, where their examples pointed, an important form of commerce was merchant shipping between the United States and Asia. Those ships, in many cases, were carrying raw natural resources such as furs extracted from the Pacific Northwest and sandalwood or beche-de-mer from the Pacific Islands. These were traded in China for silk, furniture, tea, and other goods desired by US consumers in a complex network of global extraction and exchange.

The other major seafaring trade, of course, was whaling. In fact, in July of 1845, at the time that Bushnell presented his sermon in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, there were easily over 400 American whaling ships plying the world’s oceans (Lund 2001).

3. American Whaling

Whaling has both Indigenous and Euro-American roots in the United States. Some coastal Indigenous communities such as the Wampanoag in what is now Massachusetts and the Shinnecock in what is now Long Island historically made use of beached whales and those caught just offshore for food, oil, and bone (Strong 2018). The Shinnecock had a spiritual relationship to whales; their sacrifice and the distribution of their fins were ceremonial events. As soon as European settlers arrived on the east coast of North America, they saw the economic potential for whale hunting. A memoir of their first year in Plymouth noted that the Mayflower’s captain and mate “professed we might have made three or four thousand pounds” of oil, had they the tools for it, and made a “very rich return” (Shoemaker 2008). In coastal areas whaling was a central activity through which colonists and Natives interacted and established structures of relations.

Indigenous whaling cultures related to whales as spiritually powerful kin, honoring them in a context of ceremony (Strong 2018, pp. 15–19). Congregational minister Cotton Mather’s Thanksgiving sermon addressed to “Whale-Catchers” in 1717 described a different relationship to the creatures, informing Euro-American whaling: “You that Encounter those mighty sea-monsters and Extend the Empire of Mankind, unto a Victory and Dominion over those formidable Animals; most certainly, You ought upon some Accounts to be Christians of the First Magnitude” (Mather 1717, pp. 24–25).

Within a few decades of their arrival, settlers created laws pertaining to the rights to beached whales, the labor of cutting them up, and eventually the work of hunting and killing whales offshore, asserting these concerns as a source of power and control over Native communities. For instance, in 1708 New York passed an act for the “Encouragement of Whaling”, offering benefits to Native men who signed on a whaling crew. In some cases, Native men created whaling companies themselves to gain more agency in their labors. Ultimately, the growing whaling business was controlled by powerful settlers and their designs, exemplifying resource extraction as a site and method of colonial relations to both Indigenous and the other-than-human beings (Strong 2018).

By the mid-1700s, Nantucket Island in Massachusetts had become the center of the American whaling industry, growing from shore whaling (learned from the Wampanoag) to offshore whaling and eventually focusing on sperm whales in addition to right whales. The demand for sperm oil grew quickly due to its purity for illumination and lubrication, and spermaceti candles, made from the waxy substance recovered from the whales’ bulbous head chamber, also became highly desired commodities. By the end of the century, spermaceti candles and sperm oil lamps replaced expensive beeswax candles in many churches and upper-class homes. The development of the whaling business, its various markets, and the particulars of building, outfitting, and managing ships and crews is too complex to get into here. The industry as a whole was stalled by the American Revolution and the War of 1812. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, it grew quickly, to the point that whales, especially sperm, were increasingly scarce and difficult to find in the north Atlantic, driving ships south and, eventually, around Cape Horn into the Pacific.

The first American whaleship entered the Pacific in 1791 (Dolan 2007, p. 182). Longer journeys to farther distances required larger ships that could hold more oil and bone and process whales on board at sea. Larger ships required home ports with deeper harbors, and when the industry got back on its feet in the early-nineteenth century, New Bedford, Massachusetts, took the mantle from Nantucket as the largest whaling port in the United States—and, by about 1840, the world. One whaling historian has written that New Bedford was “perhaps the richest city per capita in the world” in the mid-nineteenth century (Allen 1973, p. 82). At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, whaling was the third largest economic sector in Massachusetts and the fifth largest in the United States (Davis et al. 1997, p. 4).

4. Whales and Civilization

Bushnell emphasized commerce, a kind of surface engagement with the ocean (commerce happens across the ocean’s surfaces), and the whaling industry certainly played a role in global commerce and the expansive process of global transformation that Aikman and Bushnell described. However, these theologians did not account for the extractive labors that were the basis for this commerce in their analyses of the religious significance of the sea. Alexander Starbuck, in his monumental 1878 book History of the American Whalefishery from Its Inception to 1876, noted that “It may be safely alleged that but for whalers, the western oceans would much longer have been comparatively unknown. … Into the field opened by them flowed the trade of the civilized world. In their footsteps followed Christianity. They introduced the missionary to new spheres of usefulness, and made his presence tenable” (Starbuck [1878] 1989, p. 3). It was in fact the crews of whaling ships who spent years on end sailing around the Pacific in search of their prey—stopping ashore on the Islands for provisions, shipping Islanders aboard as crew, and returning home with tales of their voyages—who forged America’s familiarity with the Pacific and its inhabitants. Their stories were instrumental in bringing Pacific Island peoples to the attention of missionaries. Whaling ships also acted as transportation for missionaries heading to the Pacific to convert Islanders (Busch 1994, p. 117).

Whaling and the shipping of natural resources also draw attention to another aspect of the oceanic commerce that these men praised as instrumental in the spread of Christianity and civilization. While they focused on surfaces, in its living depths and its islands, the ocean is a space of complex relations between human and non-human beings and, at the same time, a space of natural resource extraction that was the foundation of modern Christian civilization as it developed in Europe and the United States. Whales played an integral role in this scenario. As one of the nation’s largest industries, whaling provided resources necessary for the production of “civilization”, as Americans had come to know and desire it, which was never simply an ideology but also a material product. In short, industrial whale hunting was a necessary condition for the material significations of Bushnell’s image of modern civilization.

The language of civilization—used to describe what Native peoples lacked and to define Anglo-Christian American supremacy—is a complicated language, sometimes used to refer to moral values, sometimes to governance and social ethical systems, usually entailing some sort of progressive evolutionary framework. Yet, how did people tell the civilized from the uncivilized? What did it mean to recognize civilization? Civilization was not only about moral behavior but also material practice (Francis 1998). Clean-burning streetlights and lamps, the high fashion of corsets, perfumes, and soaps, the industrial technologies of textile and other manufacturing—these are also the signs of civilization. They mark visually, in high relief, the signs of civilization vs. savagery, especially during the Victorian period. One only needs to look to Christian missionaries in the U.S. and Canada who, at this same time, were actively working to “civilize” Indigenous American communities, in large part through transforming their material cultures towards “Western” forms of dress, hairstyle, foodways, housing, and agricultural training. These items signify, too, civilization’s desires of not simply liberation from dependency on nature’s forces (a central theme carried over from the Enlightenment), but the transcendent value and desire of transformation of the world into art, fashion, and human invention.

In the nineteenth century, as I have already suggested, a key element of making this desired civilization a material reality was the extraction of oil and bone from whales. Without whale hunting, the “civilization” that Bushnell and Aikman and Starbuck and so many others had in mind when they talked about a way of life intimately linked to Christianity that they desired to spread throughout the world would not exist. Certainly, there might have been other models, figurations, and materializations of something called “Christian civilization” that would have emerged, but the one that did emerge and shaped the nineteenth century depended upon whales. In addition, in their theological praise of commerce and promotion of civilization and “progress”, liberal Protestantism increasingly erased the extractive labor and natural resources that made such things possible, delivering them simply to God’s will.

Bushnell’s presentation of the spaces of the ocean as “waste” paralleled the colonial and extractive project that classified some places and peoples as empty, void of inherent value. Marco Armiero has described the modern world of extraction as the “Wasteocene”, conceptualizing waste as a colonial and capitalist creation that is not a thing but a “set of wasting relationships” that produce wasted human and non-human beings. “The practice of ‘othering,’ which is inherent to the colonial project, rests at the heart of any wasting relationship,” Armiero continues. “The production of waste is connected to the production of the other, or the outside, and of the ‘us” (Armiero 2021, p. 2).

In describing the ocean as “waste”, Bushnell implicitly “othered” any non-human beings that inhabited the ocean depths, valuing them only as resources, not as inherently valuable beings in their own right, and producing a relationship to them that was not one of reciprocity or obligation or flourishing but rather a “wasting relationship.” I will explore later how the US whaling industry in this Pacific space defined certain parts of whales’ bodies as valuable and others as waste. Sperm whale teeth, for example, were thus devalued. However, through a different system of signification and exchange, they were highly valued by many Indigenous Pacific Islanders. Whale teeth ultimately transformed in meaning, usage, and value as they became entangled with the global reach of resource extraction.

In his depiction of the void of the sea, Bushnell further suggested that islands were likewise waste. As, presumably, were the people who inhabited the islands. Bushnell would certainly characterize Island Natives as being among the “rude and barbarous nations of the world” whom commerce would “impress with a sense of their backwardness, and set forward in a career of improvement.” Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa would talk back this conception in his powerful and influential 1993 essay, “Our Sea of Islands”, where he declared Oceania a place of connection and relationship between peoples and islands through the sea, not a collection of isolated, disconnected, and inconsequential communities. Hau’ofa’s portrayal disrupted the colonial categorization of Pacific Island cultures as “uncivilized” or “primitive” and essentially “waste” that fed into Western teleologies of progress expressed by the “civilized/primitive” dichotomy (Hau’ofa 1993).

Bushnell’s surface-level presentation of the ocean as waste, having “moral use” only insofar as it allowed for commerce that would lead to the “civilizing” of “barbarian” peoples, submerged the material and cultural interactions between human and other-than-human beings necessary not only for the production of “civilization” but also for the justification of his particular liberal Protestant modern morality. It justified the killing of whales for human use, transforming them into commodities. It justified interactions with Indigenous peoples, transforming them into laborers and, in due time, into data for the human sciences (such as the study of religion). In addition, it justified the expanding extractive system of colonial capitalism that established the scaffolding through which fossil modernity emerged. Diving into the depths of relationships between the ocean, its creatures and peoples, and the global networks of capital, exchange, and extraction through which the whaling industry operated illuminates more complex cultural and religious productions shaped by exractivism.

5. Where Is the Extractive Zone?

With ships mostly setting out from, and returning to, the American northeast on voyages that lasted an average of three to four years each, mostly throughout the Pacific Ocean, before returning to their Atlantic home ports, where do we locate the extractive zone? Unlike merchant ships that needed to travel as quickly as possible from point of origin to destination, whaling ships meandered once they reached known whaling grounds, sometimes “laying off and on” for days as they sought their prey. They stopped at islands for food, water, and supplies when needed. When they did capture a whale, they processed them onboard and continued their hunt. A whaling vessel was a mobile factory, designed not only for hunting and killing the largest mammals on the planet but also for “cutting in” to them to extract bone and blubber and for “trying out” the blubber by cooking it in “tryworks”, a large furnace structure that rendered it into oil that was barreled and stowed the hold. In some sense, the extractive zone was the ship itself. However, the ship, too, was mobile, moving not along a set path but in directions dictated by the weather, the currents, the ocean’s swells, the presences of other ships, and the embodied knowledge of the captain and crew who had experience with this labor. In 1851, American naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury created a chart based on data from ships’ logs that showed where different types of whales tended to congregate at different times of year. It was something of an attempt to locate the natural resource for extraction, to make the hunt more targeted, more controlled, and more efficient, and to some degree it did. However, that knowledge was already known to many sailors through experience, and the areas marked on the chart were huge expanses of open ocean.

The words “natural resources extraction” often conjure thoughts of fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—and metals such as copper, iron, gold, silver, or lithium. Resources that are ripped from the ground, usually leaving visible, physical destruction of the land in their wake. Whaling shifts attention elsewhere, to a very different location and a different form of extraction. That land-based forms of extraction are most visible is related to what historian Marcus Rediker calls the terracentrism that pervades scholarship in the humanities and social sciences (Rediker 2010). As human-based disciplines, terracentrism is somewhat understandable. Human beings live on land. However, human beings have also associated with, depended upon, traveled over and through, and worked upon the world’s oceans throughout history. Seafarers spent enormous amounts of their time aboard ships at sea; the spaces of the ocean put human beings in relation to other-than-human beings and forces that are unlike those common on solid ground. Looking away from the land, toward the ocean, changes what we see and how we see it (Blum 2010; Mentz 2009, 2023). A mine or a plantation is concrete, located in a place. The ocean, however, is different. The ocean covers over seventy percent of the earth, and most of it below the surface is unknown to humans. Even something fixed in place in the ocean, such as a deep sea mine, is deep under the water, out of site, and away from human habitation. It is difficult to imagine—though digital media technologies are creating ways to visualize and imagine the ocean floor (Han 2024)—nearly impossible to experience, and indirect in its effects on daily life (DeLoughrey 2019, pp. 134–35). And whales are a whole other matter. They do not sit still. They are always on the move and spend most of their time under the water. Some species migrate thousands of miles each year. The extractive work of whaling therefore cannot be isolated to one site. Attending to the whaling industry compels us to see extraction as a process, part of a larger network of various labors, sites, and institutions that all impact one another, creating a wide range of contact zones and effects. Attending to the extractive work of the whaling industry requires multi-site, multi-scalar historical ethnography that brings into focus the situated ways that the world is made and unmade through material and cultural interactions that are both embedded within particular contexts and informed by vast networks, both historical and emergent; never entirely local but never not localized.

The familiar images of land-based extraction may also be due in part to a contemporary bias toward equating extraction with energy production and the dominance of fossil fuels in global energy regimes. The resources extracted from whales were not energy-producing, at least not in the same way, despite whaling’s reputation as the early “oil industry.” In fact, the concept of “energy” as a sort of fuel, tied to ideas of “fossil-fueled work” that is so familiar to us today, was not created until the mid- to late-nineteenth century in relation to thermodynamics, as historian Cara New Daggett’s revealing research shows (2019, p. 4). Whaling calls attention to a variety of other non-energy-related, non-fossil-fuel extractive enterprises that are and have been essential to the development of the modern world—and global capitalism and colonialism—such as the fur trade (Gibson 1992), sugar (Mintz 1986; Taussig 1980), coffee (Sedgewick 2021), cotton (Beckert 2014), tin (Nash 1979), rubber (Taussig 1987), timber (Tsing 2005), sandalwood (Shineberg 1967), and palm oil (Taussig 2018; Chao 2022), to name just a few.

I suggest that an oceanic perspective makes what is common to all extractive zones easier to see: it is not simply located in one place but is rather a system, a network of sites that work together—though not always in harmony, often with frictions, contradictions, and complications (Tsing 2005)—for the purpose of extracting elements from existing ecologies and biosystems to be put to human use, usually for profit. Macarena Gómez-Barris describes the extractive zone as “the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion” (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xvi). She continues, “the ‘extractive zone’ names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems” (Gómez-Barris 2017, p. xix). The moving ship, in search of whales that its crew seeks to kill and transform from living creatures into commodities of oil and bone, was not moving of its own accord. Its purpose, its agency, was constructed by this larger system of capitalist resource extraction that seeks out resources wherever they may exist in the world, removing them from their embedded location (or life), transforming them into something else for human use after abstracting them barrels of oil or pounds of whalebone (ships’ logs translate the number of whales caught in terms of bbls and lbs) and ultimately into money. That system was made up of multiple sites or nodes, including the end-users of the products, processors, manufacturers, investors, owners and agents of the whaling vessels, fashion designers, bourgeois social expectations, and tradespeople, and such other “outside” elements (not inherently part of the capitalist project) as sailors, missionaries, Pacific Islanders, various local communities the vessel may come across, weather, wind, currents, sea life, social systems and rules in diverse locations, and on and on. The work of extracting whale oil and bone was necessarily shaped by, and shapes, all of these things. The point of extraction, the actual killing and processing of the whale aboard the ship, was only made possible, in the particular form that it took place, by all of the various factors in this network. Conversely, each of those factors was made possible and impacted by the success of the others in the extractive process, particularly (but not limited to) the killing and rendering of whales.

For this reason, the study of the extractive zone must account for scale. From the most macro scale, where the wider economy, historical forces, geography, supply chains, and structures of desire, for instance, are in focus, to the most micro scale, say, the individual sailor’s journal, or the intimate interactions between a Pacific Native woman and a beachcomber who has fled his whaling ship for a life on the island, and everywhere in between, different scales require different questions, methods, and data. This is no less true if the subject matter is ecological impacts of extraction, climate change, or, as I have been examining, religion in extractive zones. The study of the latter could attend primarily to the religious lives of whaling men aboard ships and how they shape and are shaped by the labors of extraction. Or it could look at missionary organizations and their relationships to various Pacific Island Natives, the whaling industry, and trends in American religious history. It could also focus on religiously informed resistance to or embrace of systems of extraction among Islanders or in American whaling ports. The possibilities are countless. Meanwhile, religious change was also happening in ways that these American Christians had not anticipated and would probably not even recognize.

6. Global Material Religious Entanglements

Before I turn attention to whale teeth in Fiji and the impact of American whaling’s extraction zone, I want to highlight a particular point of intersection between the theoretical concerns of both the academic study of religion and studies of extraction: extraction zones as contact zones and the importance of contact zones to the production of religion.

The global quest for natural resources—and the labor to extract them and new markets in which to sell them—has brought different peoples and cultures into complicated interaction with each other. As such, sites of extraction have always also been “contact zones”, fraught sites of power and production where material, cultural, social, and epistemological differences often clash, merge, transform, and create new perspectives and practices (Pratt 1991). Whaling was a critically important element of the development of this history. As ocean historian John Gillis has noted, coasts and shorelines are complex contact zones, what he refers to as ecotones, productive areas where two ecosystems “connect with, challenge, and reinvigorate one another” and produce rich resources (Gillis 2012, p. 182). The contact zones of the Pacific Islands should also be understood through Australian anthropologist of Oceania Greg Dening’s conception of “the beach” as a place of bi-directional crossings in a context of power imbalances wherein non-Western perspectives and histories may go unacknowledged, even unrecognized, within Western representations and scholarship (Dening 2004). Oceanic contact zones in the extractive zone of the whaling industry have brought together human communities with very different epistemological and ontological understandings of the relationships between human and other-than-human beings.

Scholars of religion have for the most part accepted Jonathan Z. Smith’s contention that “religion” as a modern concept emerged from the context of European contact with non-European—particularly Indigenous—cultures (Smith 1998). Trying to make sense of these cultures and the ideas and activities of their members, Europeans engaged in a comparative enterprise in which “religion” was a key term of translation. Moreover, it carried with it a value judgment: European Christianity was asserted to be the truth against which to measure other ideas and practices that seemed to be analogous to Christianity in one way or another. Exactly how to make sense of such differences was contested and changed over time and place and theology; religious difference could signify ignorance, false religion, no religion, or undeveloped religion. The comparative study of religion developed by working through theories about these potential interpretations. In a more pointed and contextualized manner, extending a perspective articulated by Charles H. Long, David Chidester has shown that the “contact zones” that were the occasion for such comparisons were themselves charged sites of power. The primary reason that Europeans were in those places was for the operation of imperial and colonial endeavors (Long 1986; Chidester 1996, 2014). Part of their curiosity in the social, cultural, and religious systems of other peoples was in the interest of governing them. We can expand further on this idea, recognizing that the imperial and colonial expansion of European power was also in the interest of acquiring and exploiting natural resources and markets. This is the context in which the academic study of religion emerged and developed. In other words, the economic and political were not something other than the religious. Material history is religious history. “Academic debates about the definition of religion have usually ignored the real issues of denial and recognition that are inevitably at stake in situations of intercultural contact and conflict,” according to David Chidester. “The frontier [or the contact zone] has been an arena in which definitions of religion have been produced and deployed, tested and contested, in local struggles over power and position in the world. In such power struggles, the term religion has been defined and redefined as a strategic instrument” (Chidester 1996, p. 254).

With this in mind and noting the far-reaching entanglements of the whaling industry, I suggest that the “contact zone” of the whaling industry, like the extractive zone, is multiple, both always local and always connected to wider networks. At each contact zone there are religious impacts that are site-specific, yet all related to the same extractive endeavor. The following stories illustrate examples of religion in the extractive zone of US whaling, illustrating a method of how the study of religion in extractive zones might attend to their systemic, networked, non-local power.

7. Whale Teeth: Transforming Value

To the whaling industry, sperm whale teeth were waste. Most of the other whales they caught had baleen instead of teeth, and baleen was a useful product. However, once baleen and oil and the spermaceti in a sperm whale’s head were extracted, everything else was waste. To be sure, sperm whale teeth did become an artistic medium as whaling men carved pictures into them to make scrimshaw pieces that at first had mostly sentimental value before, later in the twentieth century, becoming expensive collectables. Nevertheless, for the whaling industry itself, whale teeth were waste, exemplifying the “wasteocene” idea that what was not “useful” in the eyes of the industry held no value.

However, whale teeth—particularly sperm whale teeth—were extremely valuable to the people of many Polynesian Islands, including Hawai’i, Tonga, Tahiti, and the Marquesas. In Fiji, where they are called tabua (from tabu, or “sacred”), they are especially important as ceremonial items of ritual exchange and signs of power and authority. “The ‘whale’s tooth’ … possesses a mystical power that makes it much more sacred than any other object of ceremonial offering,” notes Indigenous Fijian anthropologist Asesela Ravuvu. “Being thus endowed, the ‘whale’s tooth’ is potent and has mana or power to effect good or evil when offered and accepted” (Ravuvu 1987, p. 23). Ravuvu’s perspective is helpful, as most scholarship on tabua has been produced not by Indigenous Fijians or Pacific Islanders but by non-Indigenous American anthropologists.3 And so I turn, provisionally, to those sources.

Marshall Sahlins, a highly influential American anthropologist, defines tabua as having “creative and destructive powers coming from beyond society, not unlike those of the god.” He continues,

As objects of exchange, whale teeth are also human-structuring powers; they function in the active or performative mode and in response to contingent circumstances. Of old, they were presented to allies or would-be allies to enlist them in war, to allies of one’s enemies to cause them to defect, and again to warriors in return for enemy bodies brought for sacrifice and consumption. Given as betrothal gifts and carried by the bride to the husband’s house, whale teeth were reciprocal prestations of the noble form of marriage. They thus made political alliances between clans and lands, that is, as marital alliances of ruling chiefs. God-houses and chiefs’ houses were built by whale teeth, the expert and collective labor being thus engaged and compensated. According to those who cared for the newborn chiefly child and those who cared for the body of a deceased ruler, tabua made the chief appear and again transformed him into an ancestor—which is to say that, in this respect as in others, whale teeth affected the life-giving passages between visible and invisible modes of divinity. Their use in contracts of assassination of rival or rebel chiefs was a darker form of the same transactional logic. … Whale teeth have totalizing powers: they organize and reorganize the higher levels of society

(Sahlins 2000, pp. 378–79).

Interestingly, Fijians historically were not whaling people. They acquired whale teeth from whales that were beached or washed up on the shore, or through trade with Tonga. Tongans considered whales to be relatives, ancestors, and deities. The Fijian idea that the whale teeth come from outside of society, outside of the Fiji Islands, is part of their power according to origin stories (Thomas 1991, pp. 70–71). And here is where the American whaling industry and the complexities of the widespread oceanic extractive zone impacted the ceremonial world of Fiji.

Whaling was not the only seafaring trade that Americans and Europeans were involved with in the Pacific in the early 1800s. Another immense enterprise was trade with China. Europeans and Americans desired tea, spices, furniture, and silk from China, and China wanted sandalwood. As it turned out, sandalwood trees were plentiful in Hawaii, Fiji, the New Hebrides, and the Marquesas. Sandalwood was the first major American extractive enterprise in the Pacific in a boom that lasted from about 1804 to 1815 (Shoemaker 2019, p. 9). However, American sandalwood traders had to find something to trade with Polynesian Natives for access to sandalwood. It was here that the two extractive labors of whaling and the sandalwood trade intersected, as traders learned that Islanders—particularly Fijians—were willing to trade a large amount of sandalwood for a smaller amount of sperm whale teeth. Commodore David Porter recalled, “of all things on earth, these [Marquesan] natives chiefly valued whales’ teeth; and it is asserted that for ten of these a ship could have been loaded with sandal wood at Nookaheeva a cargo worth, in Canton, nearly a million dollars” (Porter 1875, p. 176).

In this context, sperm whale teeth took on a new value for Americans. Whaling crews would trade teeth for supplies or even sell them for a cost to sandalwood traders, who in turn would use them to acquire sandalwood or the right to extract sandalwood from the Islands. As a result, the number of whale teeth, tabua, increased in Fiji. Interestingly, the influx of supply did not decrease their ritual power. As Sahlins put it, “the more whale teeth in circulation, the more power in existence in the Fiji Islands” (Sahlins 2000, p. 379). When the sandalwood trade declined in the 1920s because it had decimated the supply of sandalwood trees in the Islands, American traders exchanged whale teeth in Fiji for beche de mer (sea cucumbers) to sell to China, where they were considered a delicacy with medicinal power (Shoemaker 2019, pp. 25–29). Nantucket whaling men David Whippy and William S. Cary, beachcombers from two different whaling ships in Fiji in the 1920s, were critical mediators in the whale tooth trade for decades (Melillo 2015).

More available power in the form of tabua had social and political effects in Fiji, creating new chiefs and new alliances across the Islands and beyond. This was not simply a matter of economic and political power, as one might interpret it in a secular sense. Yes, it was certainly economic and political. However, the social power derived from and created by the economic acquisition and ritual exchange of tabua was related directly to divine power. Hardly examined in the academic study of religion, though well known in social and cultural anthropology, tabua are an excellent example of the murky space of the extractive contact zone where definitions of religion are contested. Whale teeth themselves moved in and out of different systems of value, translating, one might say, between the secular and sacred, between capitalism and ritual exchange, between life and death, having great power and powerful effects in each. An “unintended consequence” of the whaling industry, their significance as border-crossing, transformative objects, whale teeth, like the sperm whales they came from, were foundational to the modern world insofar as they facilitated and grounded global trade networks, Fiji’s integration with a wider political and economic system, and the development of religion—both traditional Indigenous religion and Christianity—in Fiji and, in turn, the Pacific more widely.

As tabua became a translator between the local and the foreign, between local forms of power and foreign capitalism and “civilization”, it also mediated Christian missionization and the local ways that Protestant Christianity intersected with Fijian cosmology and epistemology. For example, when British Wesleyan missionaries arrived in Fiji in the 1830s they found that they “needed to obtain whale’s teeth in order to conduct the routine business of evangelism”, drawing them into the circulation of whale teeth as they moved across the different meanings and values of waste, object of trade, sacred item of ritual exchange, and even art (Tomlinson 2012, p. 222).

Anthropologist Matt Tomlinson tells an illuminating story about villagers in Kadavu Island, Fiji, in 1859 presenting Methodist missionary James Royce with a tabua. A year earlier, Royce had established the first permanent mission on the island. Royce wrote in his journal,

This morning the Kaduva god was brought to me. It had been kept secret till the present time; the god is no more or less than a fine whale’s tooth, and by appearance and report a venerable fellow. Its name is Takei, taken from takelo, [meaning] crooked, being curved like the new moon; it is said to have been the god of food, and always to dwell in the land of plenty. If ever there was some a scarcety [sic] of food on Kadavu, or in case of war, it was then conveyed to some distant island and only returned when peace and plenty were restored

(Royce 1859, p. 354).

Royce later reported to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in London, according to Tomlinson, that he kept the tooth, hanging it in his study.

Tomlinson writes, “At first, this story seems straightforward. The villagers, who had already declared their support for the church, had presumably listened to the missionary denounce their ‘heathenish’ ways for a year and had finally decided to forfeit this token of the old divinity” (Tomlinson 2012, p. 216). This is what Royce surely thought, and it is likely what someone like Bushnell would have thought as well: Christianity comes to the islands that were known as “the Cannibal Islands” for the reputation of their inhabitants, on the heels of commerce, and the islanders, recognizing the ignorance or falseness of their divinities and ceremonies, quickly convert to Christianity and begin living more civilized lives. However, Tomlinson urges us to look more closely at the situation from the Fijian standpoint, with a deeper understanding of the meanings and practices of tabua in Fijian culture. Recent (late twentieth and early twenty-first century) examples from Fiji of communities presenting tabua to the Methodist Church in atonement and apology for past misdeeds (such as the murder of missionaries), when they try to enact their desire to be “civilized” and “Christian”, Tomlinson helps us to see, are attempts to enact complex temporalities of colonial and missionary entanglements with their cultural pasts and identities. “They are trying to transcend their own history by appealing to God, trying to slip free of lingering entanglements with non-Christian forces of the vanua. But, by convention, the way to do this is to use the most cherished symbol of the vanua, the whale’s tooth. In this way, attempts to transcend the vanua depend on the use of a material token inextricably linked to the vanua’s authority and power” (Tomlinson 2012, p. 227).

It is important to understand the term vanua. Tomlinson writes, “The term carries terrific emotional resonance in indigenous Fijian discourse, as it draws together land, people, and chiefdoms, threaded through with strong connotations of the old, time-tested system of indigenous Fijian society. In short, the vanua is inextricably tied to an idealized tradition. As land and social identity, the vanua is considered a gift from God and one’s inalienable, permanent foundation—but at the same time it is perpetually considered to be under threat” (Tomlinson 2012, p. 218). The persistence of the vanua and the continued use of the whale’s tooth to address issues of “civilization” and “Christianity” indicate an intricate state of affairs. “Although the presentation of a whale’s tooth to the church seems, on its surface, to be an act in which the church is exalted,” Tomlinson concludes, “it effectively brings Christianity within the orbit of the vanua, partly subverting Christian authority as it ostensibly submits to it. … In apologizing to the church and seeking new beginnings, ritual actors reinforce the vanua’s dominance” (Tomlinson 2012, p. 2027).

The continuing important, if ever-shifting, place of whale teeth tabua in Fijian religious, economic, and social life, even as many in the population converted to Methodism in the nineteenth century, is a significant and dynamic outcome of the impact of the global extractive zone of whaling. The whale teeth embody both an integration of global extractivism and a form of resistance, subverting its terms and transforming its “waste” into transcendent value. Even today, the power of tabua is illustrated by their presentation and representation on coins, in Methodist ceremonies, as the name of the rewards program for Fiji Airways, and during important occasions such as weddings and funerals (Solomon 2017). While the US whaling industry certainly did not create tabua, it had a powerful hand in transforming this item and its ritual and social uses through both supplying unheard of numbers of whale teeth to Fiji and, in using them for trade, multiplying the meanings and uses of this already multivalent and highly charged object.

8. Conclusions

In modern capitalism, as viewed through the ocean, the extractive zone is global. Nothing is isolated, and everything is founded in relationships to the natural world. Thinking through the Anthropocene teaches us that humans are not separate from the rest of the world, and our extraction efforts shape not only economies and politics but also species well-being, geology, climate, and religious worlds—especially of those whose relationship to the natural world—to other-than-human beings such as whales and to powers embodied in objects such as whale teeth—are central to their social, cultural, and sacred lives. Just as the Anthropocene discourse and global climate change push us to think on a planetary scale, so too does exploration of global networks of exchange and extraction in oceanic spaces push us to think of extractive zones on a planetary scale, networks of connection that have far reaching and indirect impacts that are often submerged, out of sight, challenging us toward different ways of seeing.

When thinking about religion in extractive zones, scale matters. While my discussion about liberal Protestantism and Fijian tabua in the expansive contact zone of whaling are only preliminary suggestions, I hope that readers will take away the perspective, born of the space of the ocean, that the extractive zone is always local, yet always global, and these two are not separate even if those in particular “locals” do not see how they are connected to others. Therefore, with the co-editors of this special issue, as articulated in their introductory essay, I encourage multi-sited perception because all sites are linked in the extractive zone. I further encourage conceptualizing extractive zones as contact zones and therefore as sites of religious production, innovation, and contestation—and therefore, also, always, sites where a single definition of religion will not be sufficient because the very idea of what counts as religion is contested. Bushnell and Aikman would not have thought of whale teeth as religious or the impact of whaling on the uses and meanings of whale tabua as religiously significant. However, in Fiji, they were—and, moreover, they impacted the acceptance and the practices of even Protestant Christianity there.