Baskets of wisdom: Bahnar basketry, folk taxonomies, and the maintenance of upland environmental intelligence in Vietnam

The backpack basket has become an iconic element of Highlanders’ culture in public media and cultural heritage representations in Vietnam. The dominant Vietnamese language in those domains has only one term, gùi, to denote the most common types of ethnic backpack baskets, despite each group creating very diverse basket types. The use of outside overgeneralized terms can potentially contribute to cultural stereotypes and consequently hide diverse Indigenous cultures and knowledge. Our research focuses on baskets of the Bahnar (or Ba Na) ethnic group in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. In this research, we explore the richness of the Bahnar cultural and environmental knowledge contained in their diverse types of baskets and narratives about basketry. Related folk taxonomies are evidence of how the Indigenous groups precisely classify the natural and cultural world they live in and interact with.