Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Investigador
en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte. / PhD in
Philosophy – University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origins of art.
A review of Carlos Mordo's book (2000): El cesto y el arco. Metáforas de la estética Mbyá-Guaraní
Introduction: a metaphor that says it all
There are books read with the head and books read with the body. El cesto y el arco, by Argentine anthropologist Carlos Mordo, belongs to the second category. Published in 2000 by the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos of the Universidad Católica (CEADUC) in Asunción, within the Biblioteca Paraguaya de Antropología, and with a prologue by critic and curator Ticio Escobar, this study of Mbyá-Guaraní aesthetics does not limit itself to describing objects: it proposes a way of looking that transforms our understanding of what it means to create.
Mordo died before seeing this book published, and it remains his intellectual testament. In its pages, the author unfolds a rigorous ethnohistorical work, based on interviews with caciques, religious leaders, and artisans, and on a meticulous tracking of the objects, rites, and customs of the Mbyá people. But what makes this book a singular contribution is not only its erudition, but the central metaphor that organises it: the opposition between the basket and the bow, between balance and tension, between the harmony of one's own form and the impulse toward the outside world.
This metaphor is not a literary ornament. It is an analytical tool that allows Mordo to articulate a matrix of complex interweavings between the moments that, on the one hand, safeguard memory and, on the other, project the community's aspirations. As the author himself notes, it is on the possibilities the Mbyá people have of facing imposed challenges —without letting go of the thread of memory or abandoning the course of their own desires— that the promise of a space disposed for the fullness of the human condition will remain open.
The basket and the bow: two gestures, two worlds
To understand the power of this metaphor, one must pause on the two objects that embody it.
The basket is the object of balance. Its closed form, its intricate weave, its symmetry. The basket contains, keeps, protects. It is the gesture of memory: what is conserved, what is transmitted, what is safeguarded. In Mbyá culture, the basket is a domestic object, but also a cosmological symbol: its weave reproduces the fabric of the universe, its designs refer to the animal and plant world, its structure embodies the order that gives meaning to chaos.
The bow is the object of tension. Its open form, its taut curve, its disposition toward the exterior. The bow projects, launches, reaches. It is the gesture of desire: what is sought, what is pursued, what is conquered. In Mbyá culture, the bow is a hunting instrument, but also a symbol of the agency that transforms the world. The bow is the gesture that leaves itself, that ventures into the unknown, that seeks what it does not yet have.
The opposition between the basket and the bow is not an opposition between good and bad, between one's own and the foreign. It is a productive tension: the balance of the basket and the tension of the bow need each other. Without the memory of the basket, the bow would be a gesture without roots, a violence without meaning. Without the tension of the bow, the basket would be a form closed upon itself, a memory without a future. Mbyá aesthetics, in Mordo's reading, is precisely the articulation of these two gestures: the form that closes to conserve and the form that opens to project.
The iconography of the basket: a woven bestiary
One of the most fascinating aspects of Mordo's book is his analysis of the iconography of Mbyá basketry. The designs that decorate the baskets are not arbitrary. They are visual metaphors of the environment, of the plant and animal world that surrounds the community.
Mbyá basket weavers, Mordo notes, were meticulous observers of nature. The patterns they wove referred to the skins of the snakes that inhabited the area, to the designs of the butterflies that appeared at the beginning of spring, to the scales of fish, to the shell of the armadillo. Each design had a name: the ornamental bands of the butterfly were called popo para; those of the yarará, rychy para; those of the coral snake, mbo'idayry para.
These designs, composed of geometric figures —zigzags, lozenges, triangles, checkerboard figures— were made visible thanks to the bichrome interplay generated by using wefts and warps of different colours. The weaver played with the number of threads taken and left in the weave, generating figures between the visible and hidden threads of the weft and warp.
What emerges from this analysis is a conception of art radically different from the Western one. The Mbyá basket is not a work of art in the modern sense of the term. There is no individual "artist" who signs their creation, no "work" contemplated in a museum, no "aesthetics" separated from everyday life. The basket is an object of use, a domestic utensil, a container for transporting and storing. But it is also —and at the same time— a cosmological symbol, a metaphor of the world, a memory device.
As Mordo notes, in the intricate design of the baskets, metaphorical references to the animal kingdom abound, emerging in the densely grid-like or mottled surfaces, in the superimposed bands, in the suggested figures, weaving intercrossed patterns that allow us to imagine the synthesised strokes of a world in motion. The basket does not represent the world; it is the world, in its woven form.
The tension between domestic use and the market
One of the most acute aspects of Mordo's analysis is his treatment of the relationship between Indigenous artisanal art dedicated to sale and that of domestic use. This tension is, at bottom, the same as that of the basket and the bow: the tension between memory (the object conserved for one's own use) and desire (the object produced for the market, for the other, for the exterior).
Mbyá artisanal production, Mordo notes, developed over recent decades to add to the means of subsistence. Baskets that were once woven for domestic use began to be woven also for sale. This transformation has profound consequences: designs that once had a cosmological meaning are partially emptied of content; motifs that once referred to a shared symbolic world are copied from other traditions; the weaver who once wove for their community now weaves for an anonymous buyer who does not share their universe of meanings.
Mordo neither condemns this transformation nor naively celebrates it. He describes it as a tension that the Mbyá people must navigate: the tension between fidelity to their own memory and openness to the demands of the outside world. The question that pulses throughout the book is: how to keep the thread of memory alive without renouncing dialogue with the other? How to conserve one's own form without closing oneself to the possibilities of the world?
Connection with research on the origin of art (S/Y/C)
Mordo's analysis offers a concrete case in which the functioning of the Law of Biological Coherence S/Y/C that forms the core of our research can be observed (Mallo, 2023, 2025, 2026a, 2026b). Mbyá aesthetics, as Mordo describes it, is an exemplary unfolding of the three dimensions of our thesis.
The S (Survival) dimension manifests in the adaptive function of basketry. Mbyá baskets are not decorative objects; they are tools of survival. They are used to transport food, to store seeds, to gather fruits. Their production, moreover, has become an economic strategy that complements traditional means of subsistence. Mbyá aesthetics is not a luxury; it is rooted in necessity.
The Y (Symbolon) dimension is the heart of Mordo's analysis. The designs of the baskets are symbolon in the fullest sense of the term: acts of recognition through shared codes. The patterns that refer to the snake's skin, the butterfly's wings, the armadillo's shell are not mere representations; they are ways of recognising the world, of naming it, of inscribing it in the weave. The weaver who weaves a jegua mboi ("adornment of the viper") is not copying a snake; they are actualising an ancestral relationship with the animal world, a bond that goes back to mythical origins.
The C (Wholeness) dimension manifests in the search for balance that characterises Mbyá aesthetics. The basket, with its closed and symmetrical form, is an image of wholeness: the form that closes upon itself, that reaches its fullness in closure. But that wholeness is not static; it is the result of a dynamic tension between the balance of the basket and the tension of the bow. The beauty of the basket does not reside in its finished form, but in the process that produces it: weaving as a repeated gesture, as embodied memory, as aspiration to totality.
Surgical Philosophy invites us to make a precise analytical cut in Mordo's book. It is not about idealising Mbyá aesthetics as a "pure" form of art, nor reducing it to mere artisanal production for the market. It is about recognising that the tension between the basket and the bow —between memory and desire, between one's own and the foreign, between tradition and the market— is constitutive of all human creation. There is no art without tension; there is no beauty without balance; there is no memory without project. Surgical Philosophy allows us to distinguish these levels and understand how they are articulated in the concrete practice of Mbyá basket weavers.
Open tensions: what the book leaves unresolved
Mordo's book is not a closed treatise, but an invitation to keep thinking. His analysis of Mbyá aesthetics opens several questions that remain without definitive answers, and which constitute, precisely, its greatest richness.
The first is the relationship between meaning and form. Mordo describes in detail the patterns of basketry and their names, but he does not always manage to reconstruct the mythological content those names evoke. What did weaving a popo para mean exactly for a Mbyá weaver? What relationship did that design have with the butterfly, with its life cycle, with its seasonal appearance? The book offers clues, but not a complete answer. That gap is not a defect of Mordo's, but a reflection of the difficulty of accessing a symbolic universe that has been transmitted, to a large extent, orally and that has been transformed through contact with the non-Indigenous world.
The second is the relationship between tradition and innovation. Mbyá weavers do not mechanically repeat inherited designs; they transform them, combine them, adapt them to new contexts. How to distinguish, in that transformation, what is fidelity to memory from what is a response to market demand? Where does tradition end and invention begin? Mordo offers no univocal answer, and perhaps there is none. The tension between the basket and the bow is, at bottom, irreducible.
The third is the relationship between art and life. Mbyá aesthetics, as Mordo describes it, does not separate art from everyday existence. The basket is an object of use and a work of beauty at the same time. What does this indistinction imply for our understanding of art? Does it force us to rethink the categories inherited from Western aesthetics? Or does it invite us, rather, to recognise that those categories were always partial, situated, historical?
These questions have no easy answer, and Mordo does not pretend to give them. His book is, in this sense, an exercise in intellectual humility: the recognition that the beauty of a culture is not exhausted in its analysis, and that all interpretation is, at bottom, a form of dialogue with what resists being completely understood.
Final considerations: weaving as a way of life
Carlos Mordo's book reminds us of something fundamental about art: there is no creation without tension. The beauty of the Mbyá basket is not a static beauty, but a beauty that emerges from the unstable balance between opposing forces. The basket that closes and the bow that opens; memory that conserves and desire that projects; tradition that anchors and the market that attracts. These opposites are not resolved in a synthesis, but maintained in productive tension.
For our research on the origin of art, Mbyá aesthetics offers a valuable lesson. Art, in its origin, was not an activity separated from life, not a luxury of specialists, not a disinterested contemplation. It was —and continues to be— a way of inhabiting the world, of weaving it, of naming it, of conserving it and projecting it. The Mbyá basket is not a work of art because it is in a museum; it is a work of art because it makes world. Because in its weave the memory of the ancestors and the aspiration of the living intercross; because in its form an entire way of being in the cosmos is condensed.
Mordo taught us to look at the basket and the bow as metaphors of existence. We add: art is, at its root, the form of that tension. Without the basket, there would be no memory; without the bow, there would be no desire. And without both, there would be no art.
References
Mallo, B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Doctoral thesis, University of the Basque Country - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea]. ADDI Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
Mallo, B. (2025). Arte y biología: Una aproximación neurofilosófica al origen de la experiencia estética. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y5WZMK
Mallo, B. (2025). Art and biology: A neurophilosophical approach to the origin of aesthetic experience. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y6C2XN
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57196
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo [Kindle edition]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
Mallo, B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57197
Mordo, C. (2000). El cesto y el arco. Metáforas de la estética Mbyá-Guaraní (Biblioteca Paraguaya de Antropología). Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, Universidad Católica. https://www.portalguarani.com/detalles_museos_otras_obras.php?PqwoiflUYTeslk=MzY1Mg==
Autor / Author
Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía – Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Investigador independiente en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte.
Bernabé Mallo
PhD in Philosophy – University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Independent researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origin of art.
Enlaces / Links
Página de autor Amazon / Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9002-9728
Plataforma EHUenRed / Link EHUenRed: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/masterrak-eta-graduondokoak/red-latinoamericana-de-posgrados
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuroideas815
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsf6OZ482NjST6QA-hvYtQ
Publicaciones y proyectos en desarrollo / Publications and projects:
https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
https://ehuenred.theglocal.network/ideas/el-origen-del-arte-en-el-cerebro-de-makapansgat-al-moma-del-primate-al-sapiens