Abstract
Taking a definition of technology that posits it as an aspect of skilled handwork and embodied practice, this chapter draws on Bunn’s recent research into basketry and mathematics, referencing thinkers such as Bryan Pfaffenberger, John Dewey, Tim Ingold, Trevor Marchand, Ricardo Nemirovsky, and Juhanii Pallasmaa. The chapter explores how technology cannot be separated from the skilful person who employs it. Exploring the boundaries between basket-weaving and loom-weaving technologies highlights that, as an unmechanisable technology, basketry reveals how humans and technology are part of a dynamic whole.
If we define technology as separate from hand skills, an approach quite common since the industrial revolution, this masks how skilful embodied learning has value for the development of human cognition. Through hand skills such as basketry, people develop dexterity, spatial awareness, and design and engineering skills. This impacts on more ‘abstract’ capacities, such as geometry, problem-solving, and mechanical understanding. If we lose sight of the value of hand skills for human cognition, we may, therefore, as Ingold argues, become the authors of our own dehumanisation.
From so simple a beginning, endless forms so beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.
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Notes
- 1.
I am very grateful to Joanna Gilmour for directing me to this quotation.
- 2.
W. Wendrich, Who is afraid of basketry: a guide to recording basketry and cordage for archaeologists and ethnographers, Leiden University, Centre for Non-Western Studies, 1991; R. Ellen, ‘A modular approach to understanding the transmission of technical knowledge: Nuaulu basket-making from Seram, eastern Indonesia’, in Journal of Material Culture, 2009, pp. 243–76.
- 3.
K. Von Frisch, Animal Architecture, Harcourt, 1974; M. Hansell, Animal Architecture, Oxford University Press, 2005
- 4.
- 5.
The Yakutat Tlingit origin story, for example, how the human wife of the Sun one day ‘took some roots and idly began to plait them together in the shape of a basket’. Her husband increased its size and ‘lowered her and her children to their homeland the earth. Their great basket settled near Yakutat on the Alesk River and that is the reason that the first baskets in south-eastern Alaska were made by the Yakutat women’ (Petkau 2002, p. 25). See also Marcel Griaule’s (1965) account of Dogon creation, where the primordial Nummo brought plant fibres to earth, modelling the granary, itself a model of the cosmos, on a woven basket.
- 6.
See also Mitchell (2020) for a discussion on the relationship between braiding and dancing.
- 7.
This provided a model system for early computers.
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Bunn, S. (2022). Technology as Skill in Handwork and Craft: Basketwork and Handweaving. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_3
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