A lipele is a basket that contains sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to coins and wooden carvings. These articles have individual names and symbolic meanings; collectively, they are known as jipelo.¹ People in northwest Zambia will tell you that a lipele is first and foremost a material object, a chuma, much like a food basket, a hammer, a stool, or a house. Yet they will also say that the lipele is an extraordinary object. A lipele, it is said, is capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding; it communicates by means of jipelo articles...

I wished from the start to work closely with Sanjamba,¹ a senior diviner renowned for his wisdom, boldness, and wealth. He headed a populous and prosperous village; had several wives and many children; owned cattle and two big houses with glass windows; and among his smaller possessions he counted a sling reclining chair, a radio, a bicycle, and an oxcart newly painted in bright blue, reading on one side: Kumona Njamba (Seeing the elephant), a shorthand for the Luvale proverb Kumona njamba kwenda (Only he who travels sees the elephant). His praise name was Kufumana chaPawa Mwiza Kuchimbachila Ngimbu (The...

On the same day Sakutemba stole the basket from basket maker Pezo, he had it initiated into a mature oracle during a nightlong ritual. Basket divination led me from one ritual to another ritual. In addition to being a way of making a living, basket divination was also a way of doing things through ritual. The more I traced the biography of divination baskets, following them as they moved in space, the deeper I entered into liminal arenas and the clearer it became that the significance of the lipele could not be captured by such terms as ex-commodity and enclaved...

When a newborn lipele is ritually initiated into divination, it becomes an oracle. An adult lipele is a personified basket, a basket endowed with agency, cognitive skills, and psychological traits. From the perspective of the diviner whose basket becomes an oracle, however, the lipele is much more than an awe-inspiring person who stands at the core of sociocultural life in south Central Africa. Basket divination is part of who the diviner is. It would not be far fetched to describe the lipele as a prolongation of his body, as Marx does the working tool.

Because the product of divination is...

The lipele is caught in a lifelong ontological ambiguity, being simultaneously subject and object, spirit and matter, person and tool. It is endowed with that quality that Pietz calls “irreducible materiality” (1985:7), and yet it is empowered.

This idea of irreducible materiality is at least as old as the Latin origin of the term “fetish,” facticius, which means “made” or “manufactured” (Pietz 1987:24). Despite the weight of intellectualism in the history of social sciences and humanities, a number of scholars have given due credit and much thought to the materiality of such entities, now perceived as art. For anthropologist Robert...