Arts of Being Yorùbá: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric by Adélékè Adéèkó (review)

It is refreshing and riveting to read a book that takes on a multi-methodological and multifaceted analytical approach to the study of religion. Adélékè Adéèkó's book, Arts of Being Yorùbá: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric, is an enriching read that takes us into the depths of Yorùbá practice. While Adéèkó explores unique features and complex entanglements of Yorùbá practice as praxis and epistemology, at the center of this work is a deeper interrogation of a Yorùbá world through a cunning, in-depth philosophical, literary, linguistic, and material analysis of the religion. He challenges our understanding of, as well as methodological approaches to, the study of Ifá divination by providing us with a rich, complicated linguistic analysis of cultural and epistemological processes within the practice. This text is full of semiotic analysis in a way that does not allow us to ignore the complexities of Yorùbá as praxis, history, tradition, narrative, culture, and ontology. For the author, the practice of Yorùbá is layered and nuanced with cultural and symbolic processes, often overlooked, which help us to critically understand and appreciate all it offers to the production of academic knowledge.

This is an important work that deepens our vision of divination pathways in Yorùbá. One critical contribution in Adéèkó's analysis is his textual approach to Ifá stories, demonstrating how divination pathways "[turn] on a system of written inscriptions" (3). Such textual and literary "turns" not only reveal Ifá divination as a "consultation of a consultation" (19) but are foundational for understanding profound epistemic questions about the practices of being Yorùbá. Adéèkó wants readers, including scholars of Yorùbá studies, to acknowledge the relationality of Ifá divination to unique ways of being within space and time, and with respect to the presence of others who seek consultations, for example. Ifá divination as a dimensional relation in Yorùbá praxis is anchored by various, even numerous, narratives and forms of storytelling, and therefore compels scholars to apply multi-methodological study of these realms.

Through a textual and linguistic analysis of Ifá stories and proverbs, novels, and even a wide range of photography, the author poses theological questions regarding divination narratives, identifying referential relationships in Yorùbá writing. For Adéèkó, "cultural being or living as a Yorùbá is not very relevant to the specific identity of a God," but rather "the referent of the Ifá story is the inscription and not the event of the story" (23). This referent argument is critical for situating how Yorùbá priests draw not only from narratives and letters as referents, but from symbolic matter as instruments, including palm nuts and the chain (23), for divination communication. Adéèkó states that "Ifá clients do not just seek a reading; they are best served only when the 'writing' is done correctly" (23). Writing becomes multidimensional as the past, present, and future are "written" by multiple mediums at once. This relationality is challenging to interpret for scholars who do not cross these analytical boundaries.

Another critical intervention in the book is the linguistic analysis of proverbs in Chapter 2. The author argues that "evidence in proverbs about proverbs—metaproverbs, as it were—suggests a complicated relationship among the verbal text, cultural wisdom, and historical (conversational) meaning" (26). Since proverbs are essential markers for socio-cultural meaningproducing language in the African tradition, here we learn a lot about how texts in the "proverb inventory, like divination inscriptions" (26) translate various forms of speech and communication, and deepen a lexical landscape of wisdom and meaning in cultural and subjective speaker positionalities that has not been considered until now. This lexicality analysis pushes the boundaries on how one might think about the relationship of the contents of largely...