The Material Culture of Basketry: Practice, Skill and Embodied Knowledge

This book celebrates basketry as a culturally significant skilled practice and a theoretically rich discipline, with connections to mathematics, engineering, art, craft, and design. It showcases local knowledge of materials, plants, and place, and explores the therapeutic value of basketry for patients with brain injury, mental health problems, and dementia. It also highlights the craft's sustainable nature and its role in occupational therapy as an agent of recovery and well-being.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 18 May 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Basketry is a culturally significant skilled practice and a theoretically rich discipline that offers much to contemporary society. While often understudied and underappreciated, it shares similarities with mathematics, engineering, art, craft, and design, and can also serve as a socially beneficial source of skill and care. Contributors highlight the importance of local knowledge of materials, plants, and place in basketry, with case studies exploring the skill in weaverbird nest building, an engineer's perspective on twining Peruvian grass bridges, and the local knowledge embodied in Pacific plaited patterns and knots. Photo-essays explore materials and techniques from the point of view of artists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, revealing how the structure and skill in basketwork illustrate a significant form of textile technology. The therapeutic value of basketry is recognized through case studies that consider it as a healing process for patients with brain injury, mental health problems, and as a memory aid for people living with dementia. Basketry's inherent sustainability is also considered, demonstrating the continuation of basketry despite the general decline of handwork and profiling new and recycled materials. Above all, the book envisions basketry as an intellectually rewarding means of knowing, presenting the craft as embodying care for skilled making.

Weight: 900g
Dimension: 246 x 190 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350359901