Where Craft Starts

Abstract

This essay illustrates my pedagogical approach on the MA in Critical Craft Studies (MACR) and explains some of the philosophical commitments that underpinned my teaching there. Working as Core Faculty on the program for three years, I regularly led students through embodied ethnographic trials as a way to help them tune their attention to the kind of everyday understanding so often overlooked in academic research. In addition to being the kind of understanding usually expressed in craftwork, this bodily perceptual engagement is – I argue here – our most basic and fundamental way of knowing. With the closing of the MACR program, we lose one of the few spaces with a dedicated focus on this kind of learning.

Keywords:

• teaching
• perception
• being
• embodiment
• sensory research
• dance
• phenomenology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pronounced “Maker”.

2 This part of the discussion invokes the concept of “hexis” from Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

3 Here, specifically discussing the work of Greg Downey, “‘Practice without Theory’: A Neuroanthropological Perspective on Embodied Learning,” in Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between Mind, Body and Environment, ed. Trevor Marchand (London: Wiley, 2010).

4 In this instance, we discuss the work of Trevor Marchand, “Embodied Cognition and Communication: Studies with British Fine Woodworkers,” in Marchand, Making Knowledge.

5 This discussion prompt is inspired by Marchand, who writes that “Athletes, acrobats, and dancers can ‘rehearse’ exercises and routines by imaginatively ‘feeling’ their muscles and limbs wend their way systematically through the procedures. … Indeed we all engage in this form of motor-based mental activity when imaginatively re-enacting familiar activities or preparing for new ones.” Marchand, “Embodied Cognition,” 101.

6 Examples of such “scaffolding” are discussed by Greg Downey in “Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art,” American Anthropologist 110, no. 2 (June 2008): 204–13.

7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002). chap. I/4, “The Synthesis of One’s Own Body”.

8 Merleau-Ponty, Perception, chap. I/3, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body And Motility”; also, Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18, no. 1 (1990): 5–47.

9 Merleau-Ponty, Perception, chap. I/1 – I/4.

10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), div. 1, chap. III “The Worldhood of the World”.

11 The meaningful world is revealed to us in terms of the future possibilities that it presents; “Understanding is grounded primarily in the future”. Heidegger, Being, 401.

12 Heidegger, Being, div. 2, chap. IV “Temporality and Everydayness”.

13 In addition to the citations that appear in this article, work by Marchand connected to the ideas presented here include his book The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England (New York: Berghahn, 2021) and the essays presented in his edited volume Making Knowledge.

14 See work by O’Connor on embodied practice in the glassblowing studio, particularly “Touching Tacit Knowledge: Handwork as Ethnographic Method in a Glassblowing Studio,” Qualitative Research 17, no. 2 (2017): 217–30.

15 Work by Ingold and his collaborators served as perennial scholarly touchstones in this program; of particular relevance to the ideas presented in this article are the essays appearing in his edited collection Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Martin

Tom Martin holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where he researched perception and understanding among wooden boat builders on the American East Coast. Tom currently works with sensory ethnography, aesthetic philosophy, and other ways of connecting mind, body, and socio-material world; he teaches these topics at the City University of New York (CUNY) after the closing of the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies. His current book project is an interspecies exploration of the aesthetics of longing, provisionally titled Bears and the Beautiful.