It is now widely recognized that much of African art has been created to sustain social harmony, improve living conditions, and encourage political cohesion. The varied functions of African works have been addressed in numerous exhibitions and books, yet for our times, there may be no topic more thought-provoking and inspiring than the resilient roles that African artworks play in healing and crisis management.

Art and Oracle: African Art and Rituals of Divination, published in conjunction with the exhibition Art and Oracle: Spirit Voices of Africa, explores the complex relationships between art and divination in a range of cultural contexts. The book, like the exhibition, presents some of Africa’s most outstanding works of art, articulating how they facilitate divinatory practices across the continent. Divination attempts to discern the causes of tragedy or explain how people’s lives can be changed by misfortune, providing hope, direction, and resolution in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In most African cultures, divination is associated with the reconstruction of past events in order to interpret the present; in a few others, it is directed toward prophecy. Through divination, ancestors and other spirits often impart wisdom and guidance. The preoccupations underlying African divinatory practices are universal human concerns, aimed at the reestablishment and maintenance of personal and communal well-being.

In Africa, as in all parts of the world, divination has assisted problem-solving for millennia. One of the great achievements of Art and Oracle is that it places African divination systems within a global matrix. Ancient divination forms are known from Etruria, Greece, and India to China and Tibet, and include popular examples like the Oracle of Delphi and the I Ching from eighth-century (B.C.E.) China. Extraordinary objects from these and other cultures underscore the fact that the divination arts of Africa reflect a common concern of all humankind—the quest for logical prognoses. Yet in Africa, divination techniques are as diverse as the continent’s cultures. A good majority makes use of objects and specially commissioned artworks as instruments of prophecy, interpretation, and mediation.

While only eighty pages long, Art and Oracle is a remarkably rich and substantive book. It comprises two essays, an extensive catalogue, and a checklist of the exhibition. The first essay is by the principal author, Alisa LaGamma, associate curator of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, she offers a cogent and well-written introduction to African divination systems and the arts associated with them. She presents the subject with palpable sensitivity—which is critical, given the tendency of Westerners to confuse African divinatory systems with “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” Divination encompasses some of the most important professions in Africa: medicine, pharmacology, psychotherapy, and adjudication. A diviner may combine all of these in his or her practice or work in collaboration with artists, herbalists, and other ritual specialists. Only by analyzing specific divination systems within specific cultures, worldviews, and histories can we hope to theorize about divination generally. As LaGamma aptly observes, form and function are often inseparable in African divination. How an object looks has everything to do with how it works. Efficacy in healing and reversing bad fortune depends, for the most part, on the capacity of divination instruments to effect transformation, and this capacity is enhanced as much by aesthetic as by ritual factors. This is a phenomenon worth stressing, for all too often African art is assumed to be simply utilitarian, frequently leaving the aesthetic dimensions marginalized, if not ignored altogether.

The second essay by John Pemberton III focuses on five African divination systems. These are Zande poison and friction oracles; Luba divination gourds whose interpretation depends on spirit possession and kinesis; the Yoruba system of Ifa in which objects and numerology reveal poetic verses; the Yaka healing discourse involving spirit mediums who make use of slit drums; and the astrology-based Islamic texts of the Malagasy people. Each system provides useful contrasts and comparisons with the others, and Pemberton deftly suggests how objects embody culturally constructed cosmologies and epistemologies. What emerges is that very different thought systems address very similar concerns, yet with significantly different art objects and praxes. Pemberton’s informative essay also elucidates the roles of Western scholars and how their disciplines, periods of research, and theoretical perspectives have determined how we view divinatory practices, from the old-guard ethnography of E. E. Evans-Pritchard concerning Zande peoples of the Sudan to René Devisch’s engagement with psychoanalytic and feminist critiques to interpret Yaka divination. Pemberton’s recent edited volume, Insight and Artistry (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), offers more information for art historians interested in different aspects of art and divination in Africa.

The catalogue section of the book, written by LaGamma, is divided into eight themes, each illustrated by outstanding objects eloquently explained in the accompanying texts. The first theme (“Oracular Sculpture: Figurative Divination Instruments”) explores works that empower communication between human and spirit realms. For example, Baule figures called asye usu are commissioned by diviners to serve as a means of attracting the attention of unruly bush spirits. The figures depict idealized male and female companions, which the spirits view as desirable resting points. The second theme (“Visual Metaphors: Ifa Divination Instruments”) deals with artworks used in the Ifa oracle of the Yoruba. It demonstrates the fact that African art objects often function in assemblages, each item integral to the overall efficacy of the divination process, so that the whole is greater than its parts. The third theme (“Dynamic Devices: Kinetic Oracles”) draws attention to objects used performatively, often involving kinesis or physical manipulation of some kind to achieve their ends. Whether through friction oracles of the Kuba peoples of the Congo or the mouse divination vessels of the Baule of Côte d’Ivoire, divination demands spiritual intervention, which may be manifested through mystical rearrangement of signs and symbols. The fourth theme (“Visual Commentaries: Sets of Divination Signs”) foregrounds images whose meanings can be interpreted only through juxtaposition and association with other objects. Gourd and basket divination techniques of the Luba, Songye, and Chokwe peoples of Angola, the Congo, and Zambia clearly show that meaning can be made only through distinctions between and contingencies among objects. These images thus call attention to the role of narrative in divination and the ways that diviners learn to interpret objects in constantly changing configurations. The fifth theme (“Invoking the Spirits: Musical Devices”) features objects such as gong strikers, whistles, and drums, all of which work through acoustic rather than visual means. In contradistinction to the West, where aesthetic criteria tend to favor the visual over other senses, in African divination practices multisensory experience is crucial to otherworldly perception and communication. The sixth theme (“Emblems of Enlightenment and Power: Diviners’ Insignia”) concerns objects that signal the identity of a diviner and his or her exalted status, such as the beaded bag of a Yoruba babalawo (“father of the secrets”) from Nigeria, or the mystically serene mask of a Yombe diviner from the Congo. The seventh theme (“Empowering the Individual: Diviners’ Prescriptions”) deals with objects that represent the directives of divination procedures, such as Fon bocio and Songye nkishi power figures from Bénin and the Congo, respectively. A diviner may be one among many specialists who contribute to restoring well-being to a person’s life, as he or she may guide the client to an herbalist for a cure, for example, or to a carver for a shrine sculpture to be inhabited by a spirit that will ease the misfortune of its owner. The eighth and last theme (“The Iconography of Divination: Monuments of Divine Insight”) examines the role of objects whose iconography suggests the enduring importance of clairvoyance and transcendental thought. In other words, some objects, such as Fon life-size commemorative king figures, document the origins of divination or serve as mnemonic devices, preserving the memories of culture heroes whose extraordinary capacities influenced the course of events through divination.

Critical conclusions emerge from these examples that can be applied to other kinds of African art. While many objects function in shrine contexts, several others are meant to be “performed” in multisensory dramas—contrary to the static displays in many art museums. Most African art addresses social process and change; meanings are not fixed and linear but are transformed in time and space, being constantly subject to reinterpretation. Divinatory arts make these points especially clear, for divination is about process rather than statement.

This book is certainly a significant contribution to the fields of art history and museology, and the exhibition marks the first time that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has dedicated a major gallery outside the Rockefeller Wing to a show of African works. It is also the first time that works associated with African systems of medicine and healing have been accorded the same aesthetic importance as those from other parts of the world. LaGamma is to be commended for the elegant and scholarly manner in which she has handled such an intricate subject in all its complexity, while still making it comprehensible and accessible to a broad audience. It is projects of this sort that will slowly but surely transform and deepen Western understandings of the remarkable artistic and cultural legacies of the African continent.