Basketry and Design Regimes: Critical Ethnography of Authorship, Value, and Territory

This article analyzes, from an intersectional perspective, the recent transformations in the production and circulation of pilagá basketry crafted by Indigenous women from Formosa, Argentina. Based on long- term ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how these women negotiate
their aesthetic, technical, and economic agency within a scenario marked by unequal relations with the contemporary design market. The article reflects on how different discourse ranging —from ecological essentialism to current neoliberal aestheticization— have redefined the symbolic and economic value of their crafts, often displacing or rendering invisible the technical, territorial, and communal knowledge involved. It analyzes how design operates as an aesthetic regime that establishes symbolic hierarchies between the artisanal and the designed, creating unequal conditions for negotiating authorship and circulation. Finally, it analyzes indigenous artisanal production as a complex system of the expanded reproduction of life, shaped by structural inequalities of gender, ethnicity, and class, and opens a discussion on how value, circulation, and authorship are defined in the design field.