My presentation discusses the combined journey of natural plant fiber and a set of human skills in a given spatial and cultural context. I investigate how and why the bamboo basket-making community in South India holds shared knowledge and the skill for assessing the quality of bamboo as a material that turns it into an object like a basket. How did this shared knowledge and techniques of assessing and transforming the material change over time?

Bamboo basket-making accounts for the entanglement of fiber and skill in the history of object-making. Skill represents the embodied knowledge that has been acquired and transmitted among a community of makers and configures the practices of making. Object-making techniques are acculturated practices, encompassing a spectrum of tools, materials, and users. The unique quality of the fiber embedded within and extracted from the bamboo plant is a decisive factor in the making of the basket. Perhaps, extracting and segregating fiber from bamboo by hand could be narrated as an age-old method of ‘processing material’. Looking back at its long history, these unique techniques of extracting and segregating fiber are still used and transform with changes in the material (the plant species), tools, and the space where they are practiced. We need to explore how these changes relate to the social and technological context, and to regulations and environmental transitions in the geographical region.