Basketry

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basketry, art and craft of making interwoven objects, usually containers, from flexible vegetable fibres, such as twigs, grasses, osiers, bamboo, and rushes, or from plastic or other synthetic materials. The containers made by this method are called baskets.

The Babylonian god Marduk “plaited a wicker hurdle on the surface of the waters. He created dust and spread it on the hurdle.” Thus ancient Mesopotamian myth describes the creation of the earth using a reed mat. Many other creation myths place basketry among the first of the arts given to humans. The Dogon of West Africa tell how their first ancestor received a square-bottomed basket with a round mouth like those still used there in the 20th century. This basket, upended, served him as a model on which to erect a world system with a circular base representing the sun and a square terrace representing the sky.

Like the decorative motifs of any other art form, the geometric, stylized shapes may represent natural or supernatural objects, such as the snakes and pigeon eyes of Borneo, and the kachina (deified ancestral spirit), clouds, and rainbows of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. The fact that these motifs are given a name, however, does not always mean that they have symbolic significance or express religious ideas.

Sometimes symbolism is associated with the basket itself. Among the Guayaki Indians of eastern Paraguay, for example, it is identified with the female. The men are hunters, the women are bearers as they wander through the forest; when a woman dies, her last burden basket is ritually burned and thus dies with her.

Though it would appear that basketry might best be defined as the art or craft of making baskets, the fact is that the name is one of those the limits of which seem increasingly imprecise the more one tries to grasp it. The category basket may include receptacles made of interwoven, rather rigid material, but it may also include pliant sacks made of a mesh indistinguishable from netting—or garments or pieces of furniture made of the same materials and using the same processes as classical basketmaking. In fact, neither function nor appearance nor material nor mode of construction are of themselves sufficient to delimit the field of what common sense nevertheless recognizes as basketry.

In this discussion the word is taken to mean a handmade assemblage of vegetable fibres that is relatively large and rigid, so as to make a continuous surface, usually (but not exclusively) a receptacle. The consistency of the materials used distinguishes basketry, which is handmade, from weaving, in which the flexibility of the threads requires the use of an apparatus to put tension on the warp, the lengthwise threads. What basketry has in common with weaving is that both are means of assembling separate fibres by twisting them together in various ways.