Due to their ephemeral nature, organic baskets and fabric weavings have not left remains with which to write about cultural evolution or fill museum cases […]
The account by which gestures and technical skills, whose histories have been inventoried through archaeological remains, acquire symbolic function in the West – that is, how they went from being mere skills to art forms – privileges some of these gestures and not others. […]
They are modes of giving form to material through direct action upon it. The metaphor of control over that which has no form, over nature. These actions become sign value and are characterized as arts because they account for individual expression, or the force of a subjectivity that leaves a trace of the actions […] Nevertheless, the interweaving of warp and weft, subjected as it is to the grid structure that makes it possible, does not seem favorable for transmitting the individual mark that the historiographical canon has privileged as the motor of progress. To the contrary, it is a skill that seems, within its own structure, to refer to a social act, to collective knowledge.