Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets

Conclusion: A Way of Living

Conclusion A Way of Living 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” (:), 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 :). 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 Armstrong, African sculpture has “presence,” a quality that belongs to the realm of feelings and affect rather than intellect (). For art historian Arnold Rubin, the way in which different materials are assembled and reconfigured in African sculpture is visually striking, and he attempts to capture this powerful effect with his descriptive concept of “accumulative sculpture” (:). Few scholars, however, have taken an interest in the old concept of fetish. Avant-garde artists had earlier resuscitated and refashioned this concept as art, with Minimalist sculptor Carl André stating, “Works of art are fetishes; that is, material objects of human production that we endow with extra-material powers” (quoted in Baker :). But it would take longer for scholars to distance themselves from the term’s tainted origins in nineteenth-century intellectualism. Maybe scholars have sensed all along that the act of flipping the term around and removing all traces of negativity does not save it from what it has always been across the disciplines—a concept turned upon itself, a monad. “Fetish” always smacks, if not of downright delusion, then certainly of misdirection, excess, fixation. “Fetish” always smacks of “fetishism.” Conclusion 135 In this book, which deals with the place of ontological fluidity in human life, I have given priority to the historically contextualized understanding of the lipele not in itself but in relation. Drawing on the fieldwork I conducted in northwest Zambia in the s, I have shown that the personification of divination baskets and the objectification of diviners within ritual, often discussed in the literature as fetishism and possession, respectively, are not only mutually entailed but also existentially and socially linked to the deobjectification of the diviners and their clients outside ritual. The sacred and profane may be spatially distinct, but they are not disconnected. For those seeking de-objectification, basket divination is a way of doing things through ritual, a way of knowing the truth, and a way of working and laboring. We should not confuse fetishistic interpretations of fetishes, scholarly or artistic, with the experience of fetishes in Africa. These material entities have presence and potency most certainly, but they are not solipsistic. Their mode of being is intersubjective, and their significance, in addition to being religious, moral, symbolic, artistic, social, economic, and political, is also existential. Ex-commodity If not “fetish,” then what? The term ex-commodity, meant by Appadurai as a thing that begins its career as a commodity—a thing exchangeable for other things or money—only to be quickly removed from the commodity state (), is further distanced from the lifeworld of its denotatum, the lipele itself. Unlike fetish, ex-commodity is relational (ultimately derived from an act of exchange) and politically innocuous (free of derogatory overtones); like fetish, however, ex-commodity is disconnected from the intersubjective and existential significance that the lipele has for its users. I was originally drawn to commoditization theory. It resonated well with my determination to eschew the Positivist concern with what kind of thing the lipele is and provided me with both a method of data collection and a sizable terminological kit with which to conceptualize that data. Its broad spatial and temporal range also served as a reminder that divination baskets are always liable to reenter the path of commoditization. Think here of the presence of divination baskets in private and museum collections, and consider the thought-provoking fact that, from the trader’s perspective, the de-commoditization and ritual enclaving of the lipele is the very condition on which depends its re-commoditization by diversion into the world market, a 136 market in which authentic African art is used art (Silva ). Commoditization theorists remind us that ritual enclaving, bounded, long lasting, and transformational though it is, should not blind us to the fact that the lipele is a commodity in potentia. Yet I...