Along an African Border Angolan Refugees and Their Divination Baskets [Paperback]

The divination baskets of south Central Africa are woven for a specific purpose. The baskets, known aslipele, contain sixty or so small articles, from seeds, claws, and minuscule horns to wooden carvings. Each article has its own name and symbolic meaning, and collectively they are known asjipelo. For the Luvale and related peoples, thelipeleis more than a container of souvenirs; it is a tool, a source of crucial information from the ancestral past and advice for the future.

InAlong an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how Angolan refugees living in Zambia use these divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. Silva documents the special processes involved in weaving the baskets and transforming them into oracles. She speaks with diviners who make their living interpretinglipelemessages and speaks also with their knowledge-seeking clients. To the Luvale, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means ofjipeloarticles drawn in configurations, interact with persons and other objects, punish wrongdoers, assist people in need, and, much like humans, go through a life course that is marked with an initiation ceremony and a special burial. Thelipelefunctions in a state between object and person.

Notably absent fromlipeledivination is any discussion or representation in the form of symbolic objects of the violence in Angola or the Luvale's relocation struggles—instead, the consultation focuses on age-old personal issues of illness, reproduction, and death. As Silva demonstrates in this sophisticated and richly illustrated ethnography,lipelehelp people maintain their links to kin and tradition in a world of transience and uncertainty.

With great originality, [Silva] accesses the life stories of these human subjects through the material objects with which they (inter-)relate. . . . Silva provides lÃ