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 nettingor 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 dicussion 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. the art and craft of making interwoven objects, usually containers, from flexible vegetable fibres, such as twigs, grasses, osiers, bamboo, and rushes. The containers made by this method are called baskets. A brief account of basketry follows. For full treatment, see Decorative Arts and Furnishings: Basketry. Basketry, on the whole, is a useful rather than a decorative art and has evolved to fulfill primarily utilitarian functions. Nevertheless, basketry has an aesthetic quality that is extremely varied and forms an important part of the art. Within the confines of the function of the object that he is making, the basket maker has considerable scope for artistic expression by means of colour, texture, pattern, form, and detail. Not all basketry products are receptacles or even exclusively useful objects. Mats such as the Japanese tatami mat, woven from flexible vegetable materials, are part of the art of basketry, as are the decorative and ritual masks and shields found in Micronesia. Basketry is distinguished from weaving in that, in most techniques of basketry (matting being a notable exception), the flexible fibres are usually interwoven with rigid ones. Even when only flexible fibres, such as grasses, are used, they are frequently woven and intertwined in such a way as to produce a relatively rigid continuous surface, either flat or enclosed. The coiled forms of basketry begin with soft, flexible fibres that are plaited and coiled to form receptacles that emerge quite rigid, capable sometimes even of containing liquids. Woven baskets, by contrast, are usually composed of a rigid framework of willows, twigs, or similar materials around and through which flexible grasses or like fibres are twisted and woven. The variety and type of vegetable material in a given geographic region determine the type of basketry feasible there. Certain materials, such as palms and other large-leaved plants found in tropical regions, require a plaiting technique somewhat different from that suitable to the dry straws and grasses of other regions. Basketry materials range in hardness from grasses and leaves to bamboo and cane. The function of the basketry object will determine in part the materials to be used in its construction. A utensil designed to hold grain or liquid, for example, will of necessity be dense and closely woven, while a cage, net, or trap will be of openwork construction. The techniques of basketry are numerous and varied. The principal distinction is between coiled construction, in which a single fibre is formed into a spiral of coils, stitched together in some way one upon another, and noncoiled construction, which includes the woven types such as wattle, lattice, and matting. The type of work known as wickerwork is of the wattle type of construction, in which stiff standards (framing elements) are interwoven with flexible threads. Matting is closest to textile weaving in construction, and all the materials are, at the outset, relatively soft and flexible. Baskets are used as domestic utensils or for storage of grains, nuts, or even personal possessions. They are used for hunting and for fishing, for winnowing grain, to transport people or objects, and for both large- and small-scale storage. There are even types of boatssuch as the coracle of Great Britain, the balsa of Peru, and the gufa of Mesopotamiamade with basketry frames. Certain cultures and regions have particularly excelled in basketry. These include the North American Indians, whose work is aesthetically pleasing as well as culturally useful and technically excellent. In Oceania and southern Asia the art of basketry has traditionally predominated over such harder arts as pottery and metalwork, owing largely to the abundance of available raw materials suitable for the craft. African basketry is exceptionally varied and refined, appearing widely throughout the continent. Additional reading H.H. Bobart, Basketwork Through the Ages (1936, reissued 1971); M.L. Lee, Basketry and Related Art (1948); G.M. Crowfoot, Textiles, Basketry and Mats, in A History of Technology, vol. 1 (1954); Geofrey H.S. Bushnell, Basketry, Encyclopedia of World Art, vol. 2, col. 387400 (1960); H. Balfet, La Vannerie, essai de classification, L'Anthropologie (1952; Eng. trans. and preface by M.A. Baumhoff, Basketry: A Proposed Classification, in Papers on Californian Archaeology, no. 4749, pp. 121, 1957), a detailed explanation of the classifications used in this article and the source of portions adapted for use here with permission of the Archaeological Survey, University of California, Berkeley; O.T. Mason, Aboriginal American Basketry, Annual Report, 1902 of the U.S. National Museum, pp. 171548 (1904), a classic work on basketry; H. Munsterberg, The Folk Arts of Japan, ch. 3 (1958); Ed Rossbach, Baskets as Textile Art (1973), on the aesthetics of basket design; Gloria Roth Teleki, The Baskets of Rural America (1957), a history of the origins and techniques of basketry. See also Shereen LaPlantz, Pleated Basketry: The Woven Form (1982); John Rice Irwin, Baskets and Basket Makers in Southern Appalachia (1982).