BASKET WEAVING with James C. Bamba

Alie Ward· Host0:00

Oh, hey, it's your neighbor clipping his nails on the porch again, Ally Ward. Open up your fact basket 'cause we got a lot of cool info for you. If you have landed on Smologies and you are confused why there's an S-M in front of the ologies name, it's because they're small. They're smaller, shorter, kid-friendly episodes for everyone. So we took this episode about cool baskets, and we shortened it up, and we delivered it in a G-rated form. So enjoy. It's a fascinating world and amazing tales that he weaves. All right. Let's venture across the sea. Let's talk about weaving, shall we? So this ologist was brought to my attention by another ologist, the charming corvid thanatologist, Dr. Keighley Swift, who'd emailed me saying, "You gotta talk to this guy. He is one of the best basket weavers in all of the ocean." And immediately, I found that at least one time in the literature, someone has used the word canistramology from the Latin for wicker basket. So I'm in. Now, I thought wicker, by the way, was just a type of plant, but no, it just means something woven from plant reeds or fibers or sticks. But we're expanding on this ology to include the gorgeously intricate work of, in this case, the Pacific Islands, which feature typically angular, geometric, and almost, like, impossibly tidy methods of weaving, and they can be all one color of grassy green, or they can be faded golden, or they may have patterns in darker colors or checkerboards.