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Posts from the ‘Basketry’ Category

Aug 14

A Honeysuckle Basket by Joan Shoemaker (Cherokee)

Pictured here (Figure 1) is a seed pot-style (i.e. globe shaped with a small opening) basket by Joan Shoemaker (b. 1937) (Cherokee Nation) (then) of Locust Grove, Oklahoma. It is of honeysuckle and has dyed elements in three colors produced with walnut hulls, polk berries, and blood root (natural) dyes. The basket comes with a signed artist card attached. It shows the date 1999, which is soon before I received it as a gift (in 2000). (The card also notes the material and dyes.)

Figure 1. Honeysuckle Basket by Joan Shoemaker (Cherokee), 1999. (10 1/4″ D x 6 1/2″ H)

As seen from the shot of the bottom (Figure 2), the upper section has suffered light damage over the past two decades.

As noted by Karen Cody Cooper in Oklahoma Cherokee Baskets (2016, 99), two Joan Shoemaker baskets are in the collections of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. These are: E/2003/1/001 (a round, flat tray of honeysuckle) and E/2000/1/002 (a round open-mouth basket of honeysuckle).

While the Gilcrease Museum holds paintings by Mrs. Shoemaker’s husband Ben Adair Shoemaker, it does (to my knowledge) not yet curate any of her baskets (Jackson 2000). There are not baskets by Mrs. Shoemaker in the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. There were no baskets by her in the collections of the former Mathers Museum of World Cultures, at Indiana University* 

At the time of this writing, two Joan Shoemaker basketry trays could be seen online at this commercial site: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/set-cherokee-indian-baskets-joan-1848909520

Note

*I served as a curator at the Gilcrease Museum between 1995 and 2000. This basket was a gift on the occasion of my departure to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where I worked between 2000 and 2004. I have been a research associate of the Sam Noble Museum since 2004. From 2014 to the present, I have also served as a research associate of the National Museum of Natural History. Between 2013 and 2019, I served as the Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.

References Cited

Cooper, Karen Cody. 2016. Oklahoma Cherokee Baskets. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2016.

Jackson, Jason Baird. 2000. “Southeastern Indian Basketry in the Gilcrease Museum Collection.” American Indian Art Magazine. 25 (4):46-55.

This is a first in a series of posts writing up baskets in my family’s modest (mostly-gifts) collection.

Figure 2. The bottom side of this basket, showing the darker (unfaded) brown color.

Nov 13

Article: “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China” in Museum Anthropology Review 16(1-2)

I am very happy to note a new co-authored article titled “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.” It was jointly written with Wuerxiya (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author) and Cuixia Zhang (fourth author) and it appears in Museum Anthropology Review volume 16, numbers 1-2. This is the special double issue published in honor of Daniel C. Swan, as noted in an earlier post on Shreds and Patches. The article is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society. In particular, it describes work undertaken through the auspices of, and in partnership with, The Institute of National Culture Research at Dali University. Special thanks go to the Institute and its leadership.

Find the article online at Museum Anthropology Review: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/34101

In this image is the first page of a journal article as typeset. The article pictured is "A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China." Visible are the names of the authors, the abstract, the key words and the first paragraph of text.
Presented as an image is the first page of the journal article “A Survey of Contemporary Bai Craft Practices in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China.”

Nov 13

Article: “Basketry among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” in Asian Ethnology 81(1-2)

I am very happy to note the publication of “Basketry among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” in the latest double issue of Asian Ethnology. This article is one that I co-wrote with my friends and collaborators Lijun Zhang (first author), C. Kurt Dewhurst (third author), and Jon Kay (fourth author) and it is based on work undertaken by a much larger bi-national team within the “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” sub-project of the broader “China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project,” a collaboration (2007-present) of the American Folklore Society and the China Folklore Society.

I am a huge fan of Asian Ethnology, a wonderful open access journal now in its 81st year. Check out the huge volume that our paper is a part of, Find Asian Ethnology online here: https://asianethnology.org/ and also in JSTOR

Find our article here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2386

Find Jon Kay’s companion article here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2387

His project is distinct from ours, but find William Nitzky’s article (also) on the Baiku Yao people today here: https://asianethnology.org/articles/2384

This is a image of page one of the published journal article "Basketry among Two Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China. It shows the author's names, the article title, an abstract and the keywords along with the journal's logo, which are a group of line drawn masks from Asian traditions.
A image of page one of the typeset version of the scholarly article “Basketry among Tow Peoples of Northern Guangxi, China” published in Asian Ethnology.

Nov 4

Bamboo Basket Hampers Used by Tobacco Farmers in Nanhua County, Yunnan, China

While doing background work on FEI Xiaotong and ZHANG Zhiyi’s studies of the basketry industry(*) in Yunnan, China, my colleague W. discovered this webpage with a pair of images and a little bit of information on the production, sale, and use of large, oval-bottomed, oval-mouthed, open work bamboo tobacco hampers used by tobacco farmers to gather and transport mature tobacco leaves.

I will take down the screenshot below if called upon by the publisher to do so. Hopefully it is ok to share the page in its Google Translate version. The original Chinese text is available on the actual website, which is here: http://www.djcx.com/file_read.aspx?id=31810. The place pictured is Wudingshan town in Nanhua County, which is part of Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, in Yunnan, China. During our team‘s travels in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, we have not visited any tobacco producing regions and we have not ourselves documented this basket type, either in museum collections or in town or village settings.

*Fei, Hsiao-tung, and Tse-i Chang. Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945.

Oct 18

A Pack Basket Among the Lisu in Yunnan, 2004

If you click here, you will be taken to a Getty Images photograph by Zhang Peng/Light Rocket. The image shows a Lisu woman on her way to a market in Liuku, the prefecture seat for Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, China. This autonomous prefecture is located northwest of Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, where a group of research collaborators and I visited in 2013 and 2019. Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture is bordered on the west by Myanmar (Burma), on the north by Tibet Autonomous Region, on the Northeast by Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (Yunnan), and by Lijiang Prefecture-Level City (Yunnan) to the east and Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture (Yunnan) to the southeast.

Go look at the basket. I’ll wait.

Work on the manuscript dealing with basketry in Southwest China is, happily, now underway. While the study draws on work in communities that my collaborators and I have visited in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, I am working to gather information from other parts of the Southwest. I am reading the ethnographies available in English (the Chinese language sources will come later) and finding what I can in museum databases and on the Internet. As I am reading Michele Zack’s The Lisu: Far From the Ruler (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017) at present, I have been looking for Lisu examples online. This Getty photograph provides a particularly useful example to consider.

The woman in the picture is wearing a pack basket. She is about 250 kilometers west (and a little north) of the Erhai Lake/Old Dali area where our group has documented and collected pack baskets among the Bai. (There are some Bai, speaking a different Bai dialect, among the Lisu in Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture.)

The basket that she wears is different from those of the Dali area in a number of ways. Even using just the picture, some of these can be observed. In common with Dali-area backpacks, hers is also generally “square” (/rectanguar) in profile rather than having a round opening, as among the Baiku Yao in Nandan County, Guangxi. But the two Northwest Yunnan types are different in several other ways. Dali-area backpacks have four sturdy bamboo feet, which hold the backpack level and off of the earth when it is set down. The Liuku are example lacks this feature.

Such feet would not work with the Liuku example because it is less of a rectangular solid and more of a trapizoidal prizm (if I am remembering my geography properly), with a rectangular opening at the top that is larger than the rectangular base at the bottom. This is a feature (manifest more generally in narrowing-to-the-bottom forms) seen in pack baskets from (nearby) highland Myanmar and elsewhere in mainland Southeast Asia.

In addition to differing in shape, the weave of the Liuku area basket is also very different. It is more open, with larger bamboo strips but also larger spaces in between them. The key difference is the way that the vertical elements that run from the base to the rim work. A proper analysis of the weaving techniques in both types would be instructive, but the provisional way to put this is that the Liuku basket seems dependent on these vertical elements, which weave in and out around the static horizontal elements. In Dali-area baskets, in contrast, the vertical elements are static and the weaving is primarily done with very thin horizontal strips that encircle the basket, working upward from the base and producing a basket without large openings.

Comparing the Liuku basket with my own market shopping basket from Xizhouzhen near Dali, I see that the two use the same olive green commercial fabric straps. This commonality is very different, again, from the pack baskets of Nandan County, Guangxi, where the straps are themselves woven out of narrow strips of bamboo.

I wish I could have included the photograph here, but the whole point of Getty Images is to sell use rights to images. I hope that you went and checked out the picture. The picture is worth more than my words, but these words help move the basket study along.

Oct 26

#AFSAM19: Material Culture and Heritage Studies in Northern Guangxi, China

Notes on Basketry among the Dong People of Sanjiang County E

A title slide showing key project sites in the Dong areas of Guangxi and Guizhou.

Shreds and Patches has been quieter than usual as I work my way through a really complicated semester. In the midst of the jumble of unforeseen circumstances, there are some good things actually happening according to plan. One of these was the most recent in a series of panels at the American Folklore Society Annual Meetings reporting on the work of the museum partners in the China-U.S. Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. Earlier this month, at the start of the 2019 meeting in Baltimore, members of our group, presented a panel on “Material Culture and Heritage Studies in Northern Guangxi, China: Ethnographic Reports from the China-U.S. Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project.” This is the panel abstract:

In a three-year phase of the China-U.S. Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project, researchers from six museums have collaborated in a bi-national program of ethnographic research in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. In this panel, project participants will report on the research, sometimes emphasizing textile practices such as embroidery and basketry, sometimes focusing on heritage issues, sometimes discussing the lessons of the collaboration. The presenters will share their findings in accessible ways but China specialists may wish to know that research has taken place among the Dong people of Sanjiang County and the Baiku Yao people living in Nandan County.

Carrie HERTZ (Museum of International Folk Art) presented on “The Fabric of Life: Baiku Yao Textiles in Huaili Village.”

Hertz - The Fabric of Life

A title slide related to the textile arts of the Baiku Yao people of Nandan County, Guangxi.

FAN Miaomiao (Anthropology Museum of Guangxi) presented in absentia on “Field Research on Dong Textiles in the Tongle Area of Sanjiang County.”

Micah J. LING (Indiana University) shared her paper “Mijiu and Mai Wup: Trilingual Fieldwork and an Indigo Dying Method.”

LIANG Ziaoyan (Anthropology Museum of Guangxi), also presenting in absentia, shared her paper “Imagination and Enlargement: Daily Performance and Life History in Ethnographic Video.” Her paper focused on her experiences in our work in Sanjiang County.

C. Kurt Dewhurst (Michigan State University Museum) presented a paper that he and I, with help from ZHANG Lijun (George Mason University), worked on together titled: “Notes on Basketry among the Dong People of Sanjiang County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.”

I (Jason Baird Jackson, Indiana University) presented a paper for which Lijun was co-author. It was about “Building a Museum Collection of Work Baskets in Northern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.” The paper focused on the collection of baskets assembled for the collections of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.

AFS2019 Jackson and Zhang C (Slides)

A slide evoking in basketry collected for the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.

The session concluded with a presentation of a film by Jon Kay (Indiana University) titled “A Rice Basket: Basketmaking in a Baiku Yao Community” It is now viewable online on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/QrD_-lrB9UY

This session, and one that preceded it in 2018, will be a springboard for more sustained writing by many project participants. We have learned much during our collaborative work in Guangxi. I thank many the local people in Nandan and Sanjiang Counties who have taught us and our hosts and partners at the Sanjiang Dong Ecomuseum, the Nandan Baiku Yao Ecomuseum, and the Anthropology Museum of Guangxi. Special thanks also go to The Henry Luce Foundation, the China Folklore Society, and the American Folklore Society for their support of the broader projects of which ours museum and material culture efforts are just a part.

 

 

 

Jul 29

A Cooperative Craft Survey in Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Part 1

A note on photographs. Here just a few photographs from the first day of our May 2019 travel in Yunnan are presented. It will take time to work through all of the images that were made during the travels described in this post. When a fuller report is ready, the team will share additional images.

In May, after the conclusion of the Seventh Forum on China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage (where our focus was Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies), I was part of a group of American museum folklorists who traveled to the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in China’s Yunnan Province. A spin-off project from the China-US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage Project, our group was very generously hosted by the Institute of National Culture Research at Dali University in the city of Dali (Figures 1-2). Together with members of the Institute’s faculty, we traveled throughout the prefecture meeting Bai craftspeople working in a range of material forms. From them, we learned about their craft disciplines and about their experiences participating in formal intangible cultural heritage initiatives. This opportunity to learn from talented makers in Yunnan offered a wonderful comparative experience, pointing to commonalities and differences with northern Guangxi, where our group has been pursuing collaborative studies with partners from the Anthropology Museum of Guangxi, the Nandan Baiku Yao Ecomuseum and the Sanjiang Dong Ecomuseum.

Institute of National Culture Research Discussion Photograph (Size Reduced)

Figure 1. Dr. CUN Yunji, leader of the Institute of National Culture Research at Dali University, hosts a discussion on heritage research. Participating were faculty, researchers, and students from the Institute and visitors from the three participating institutions in the United States (Michigan State University Museum, Museum of International Folk Art, and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, Indiana University. May 23, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the Institute of National Culture Research.

A full account of the Dali-area craft survey is in preparation and I am hopeful that we can share it later. Here my aim is to thank our very generous hosts and interlocutors.

Dali University Institute of National Culture Research Group Photograph (Size Reduced)

Figure 2. Members of the Institute of National Culture Research, Dali University together with the visiting team from the United States. May 23, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the Institute of National Culture Research.

During our time in the Bai region, our bi-national team visited with a silversmith, a wood carver, a ceramicist, an embroiderer who also makes elaborate fabric figures and miniature dioramas on ethnographic topics, two tie-dye artists, and two basket makers. In each case, these craftspeople maintained active studios and most guided the work of many students, apprentices, and junior colleagues. Nearly all were recognized as masters on some formal level (national, prefectural, county, etc.) within China’s system of intangible cultural heritage recognition, promotion, and safeguarding. We also attended a key calendrical festival of regional importance and visited the Three Pagodas of the Chongsheng Temple near (old) Dali (Figures 3-5). While old Dali was our home base, we traveled to many towns and villages and spent one night in old Shaxi. We enjoyed traveling with our colleagues from Dali University and holding discussions with them on areas of shared research interest while visiting the university’s beautiful campus. Many layers of cultural history are evident when traveling in the Dali area. Long favorited by international and Chinese tourists, Dali and the whole region has an elaborate tourism economy and infrastructure, reflective of dramatic and constant change within the period of China’s “opening up” (see for instance, the research of Beth Notar). As throughout the country, one can also see Dali-specific evidence of older historical eras, from the time of the cultural revolution to the republican and imperial eras. In this region, particular emphasis is given (at present) to long-distance trade on the Tea Horse Road. Intercultural connectedness is a theme in tourism and historical consciousness that draws on the story of trade routes, the region’s religious complexity, and its distinctive place in the region’s long history.

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Figure 3. Erhai Lake and the Dali Basin as seen from the Dali University campus near Dali (Old Town). May 23, 2019. Photograph by C. Kurt Dewhurst.

I record here our deep appreciation for our generous and knowledgeable colleagues at Dali University and in Yunnan more broadly. Many friends in the Chinese folklore studies community assisted us making this journey. We look forward to sharing the fuller story of this trip and to thanking our partners by name in a more formal report. Special thanks go, of course, to the craftspeople who opened their studios, workshops, and homes to our team of Chinese and American scholars.

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Figure 4. A view of The Three Pagodas and the Cang Mountains. May 23, 2019. Photograph by Jason Baird Jackson.

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Figure 5. A small glimpse of the very large Chongshen Temple and Monastery complex near (old) Dali.  May 23, 2019. Photograph by Carrie Hertz.

Dec 23

Material Culture Journalism, 4

“Five Siblings Run the U.S.’s Only Baijiu Distillery in Their Mom’s Backyard” by Anne Ewbank in Atlas Obscura. (HT/TL) #foodways

“Chanel Shoes, but no Salary: How One Woman [Anthropologist] Exposed the Scandal of the French Fashion Industry” by Stefanie Marsh in The Guardian. (HT/MB) #exploitation #precarity #fashion

“New App Uses Indigenous Basketry Patterns to Teach Math Concepts” by Diane Luckow in Simon Fraser University News. (HT/KH?) #basketry #technology #ethnomathematics

“The Dollar Store Backlash Has Begun” by Tanvi Misra in Citylab. #inequality #retail

“Dollar Stores Are Targeting Struggling Urban Neighborhoods and Small Towns. One Community Is Showing How to Fight Back” by Marie Donahue and Stacy Mitchell at Institute for Local Self-Reliance. #inequality #retail #urban&rural

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Aug 19

Some Writings: Summer 2018

Some (smaller) writings from summer.

Lijun Zhang and I self-published another short piece today on Medium. Check it and out help us get it in circulation.

This fall is all about writing, so I am hopeful that some longer works will be in the works soon.

View at Medium.com

Jun 20

A Gallery Talk at Sam Noble Museum in Conjunction with the Putting Baskets to Work in Southwest China Exhibition

Chinese Baskets Talk Image

I will be doing a gallery talk at the Sam Noble Museum on Sunday, June 24 at 2:00 pm in the Higginbotham Gallery, which is where the exhibition Putting Baskets to Work in Southwest China is now on display.

Information on the event is available here: http://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/calendar/gallery-talk-collecting-baskets-in-south-west-china/

The exhibition is discussed here: http://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/permanent-exhibits/current-exhibits/

Everyone is welcome! Anyone who loves, for instance, river cane baskets (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, etc.) will enjoy seeing these bamboo work baskets.

 

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