ABSTRACT
Artefacts are made, organisms grow: at first glance the distinction seems obvious enough. This chapter considers the artefactual status of an everyday object as a basket to realise that the difference between making and growing is by no means as obvious as one might have thought. If the basket is an artefact, and if artefacts are made, then weaving must be a modality of making. The chapter explains what weaving entails, respectively, with regard to the topology of surface, the application of force and the generation of form. The notion of making defines an activity purely in terms of its capacity to yield a certain object, whereas weaving focuses on the character of the process by which that object comes into existence. The broad interpretation of weaving, though it may sound strange to modern, Western ears, is fully in accord with the understandings of the Yekuana, a native people of southern Venezuela.
