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This article concerns the possibilities for developing a public folklore practice concerned with social transformation. Using basketry as an extended metaphor for the complexity of the artistic process and the ways folklorists and artists can collaborate and interact, the article is divided into two sections. In the first, several examples are offered from the author's fieldwork with immigrants, prisoners, and internal migrants, discussing the social functions that basket weaving serves in various communities. The second section outlines the different types of social change that the arts can bring about through collaborative efforts, from individuals and small communities to society at large.
When I was in graduate school, one of my housemates was a medical student. A fellow folklore major in college, trained to look at social phenomena inductively and blessed with a folklorist's gift for synecdoche, she came home from her hospital rotation one morning and declared, "To know the kidney is to know all of medicine." That assertion has stayed with me. If the idea is transferable to another field, then I venture to say "to understand a basket is to understand all of art." The longer I work in this field, the more I recognize the nature and value of baskets. I am not alone in this. Barre Toelken, writing more than twenty years ago, notes that baskets "are so richly interdependent with all forms of cultural expression and concern that indeed it would be difficult to find another art form so saturated with symbolic and broad cultural value" (1982:26), concluding that "basket making is one of several main epitomes of art itself (36). Writing several years earlier, archeologist J. M. Adovasio points out that basketry dates back at least 11,000 years ( 1977:1 ) and that "no class of artifacts available to the archeologist possesses a greater number of culturally bound and still visible attributes" (1977:4; cf. Mason 1904; Weltfish 1932).
This contradicts the widely held pejorative concept in American higher education and in everyday folk speech that basket making is the representative prototype of lack of rigor and learnedness. We have all heard people say, "Oh, he's majoring in basket weaving." Search the term "study/ing basket weaving" or "basket weaving 101" on the Internet and there are a host of...