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SIPATSI
Technology, Art and Geometry in Inhambane
Paulus Gerdes and Gildo Bulafo
Instituto Superior Pedagogico, Maputo, Mozambique, 1994. 103 pp., 9 color photos & 169 b/w illustrations, 2 maps. $8 softcover.
Reviewed by Lisa Aronson
Basketry designs were among the first African art forms scholars set out to study in a systematic way. By 1860 the German architect Gottfried Semper was looking at African plaited mat designs in his efforts to understand the history and evolution of architecture. He viewed such products as a kind of "primitive" architectural construction aimed at satisfying basic human needs (shelter from the elements) and from which the architecture of "civilized" (Western) cultures evolved. More than a century later, scholars have moved well beyond such evolutionist if not twisted ways of thinking about basketry and other African art forms. In fact, Paulus Gerdes and Gildo Bulafo, authors of the book Sipatsi: Technology, Art and Geometry in Inhambane, would argue that African basketry design reflects the universal if not complex nature of all human minds, both Western and nonWestern. Gerdes is a professor of ethnomathematics at the Instituto Superior Pedagogico in Mozambique, and Bulafo is his second-year graduate student. Together they have written a book--originally in Portuguese and now translated into English-about a type of basket from Mozambique known as gipatsi (pl. sipatsi). A Gitonga word, it refers to a basket composed of two pockets that fit into one another to create a folder used for carrying money and documents. For Gerdes and Bulafo, the fascination of sipatsi is in their geometric designs, whose underlying structures and...