Basketry Motifs, Names, and Cultural Referents in Borneo
Résumé
Decoration has long suffered from relative neglect in material culture studies, now more focused on the social and cognitive processes behind the object. It has been regarded either as devoid of meaning, with motif names being simply labels, or as imbued with major socio-cultural and religious significance. This chapter, covering the field of basketry in Borneo, examines the underlying, potentially complex, relations between a motif or pattern, the way it is named, the meaning of this name, and what it denotes, both as an immediate representation and as a vector of metaphorical, symbolic, mythological, or religious referents. It stresses the need to view culture at the local level, as the current product of a given community's unique history of internal evolution and external cultural and social interaction, with high variability among communities. It concludes that a local catalogue of motifs is the result of an ongoing ad hoc collective bricolage, with possibly some kind of hierarchy among various classes of motifs, but in which norms, rules, and coherent naming and reference systems remain elusive.
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