The paper explores the relationship between coming to know the world through weaving baskets, and the ways people understand mathematics, growth and patterning in the environment.
Basketry-like textiles are some of the earliest biodegradable textile forms made by humans. The hand-skills involved require familiarity with plant materials, hand-to-eye coordination, and dexterity. Makers learn to ‘feel across the species line’ (Powers), to ‘listen’ to the resistance of plants, to their cycles, growth and decay, and to nurture a developing human attention out into the world. At the same time, attention also turns inwards, as mind, body and environment become integrated through technique and action. ‘Humans and the world become enlaced such that inside and outside are not opposites…’ Merleau Ponty.
In its creation, basketry thus reflects environmental knowledge and developments in human skill and cognition. Yet it is also implicated in that development. By making, by attending, we develop an understanding of space, patterning and mathematical relationships which we build on. The gestural skills involved expand geometric and spatial comprehension along with a sense of what is beautiful, what is gracious - an aesthetic sensibility - in regard to the surrounding world. The two go ‘hand-in-hand’.
The paper considers how practical hand skills such as basket-weaving are implicated in both generation and regeneration of human intelligence and in the human-environment project. It explores these themes through recent research with basket-makers in Scotland, with a department of occupational therapy, and through an interdisciplinary research project with UK basket-makers and mathematicians.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2024
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre, except for Week 3, which will be in 64 Banbury Road.
Weeks 5-8 will also be on Teams at this link.
Convened by Chihab El Khachab and Charlotte Linton
