Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts

259 Pages·2014·3.99 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Hallam

Making and growing
anthropological Studies of
Creativity and Perception
Series Editor: Tim ingold, University of aberdeen, Uk
The books in this series explore the relations, in human social and cultural life,
between perception, creativity and skill. Their common aim is to move beyond
established approaches in anthropology and material culture studies that treat the
inhabited world as a repository of complete objects, already present and available for
analysis. instead these works focus on the creative processes that continually bring
these objects into being, along with the persons in whose lives they are entangled.
all creative activities entail movement or gesture, and the books in this series
are particularly concerned to understand the relations between these creative
movements and the inscriptions they yield. Likewise in considering the histories
of artefacts, these studies foreground the skills of their makers-cum-users, and
the transformations that ensue, rather than tracking their incorporation as finished
objects within networks of interpersonal relations.
The books in this series will be interdisciplinary in orientation, their
concern being always with the practice of interdisciplinarity: on ways of doing
anthropology with other disciplines, rather than doing an anthropology of these
subjects. Through this anthropology with, they aim to achieve an understanding
that is at once holistic and processual, dedicated not so much to the achievement
of a final synthesis as to opening up lines of inquiry.
Other titles in the series:
design and anthropology
Edited by Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan
imagining Landscapes
Past, Present and Future
Edited by Monica Janowski and Tim Ingold
redrawing anthropology
Materials, Movements, Lines
Edited by Tim Ingold
Conversations with Landscape
Edited by Karl Benediktsson and Katrín Anna Lund
Making and growing
anthropological Studies of organisms and artefacts
Edited by
ELizabETh haLLaM
University of Aberdeen and University of Oxford, UK
TiM ingoLd
University of Aberdeen, UK
© Elizabeth hallam and Tim ingold and the contributors 2014
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Elizabeth hallam and Tim ingold have asserted their rights under the Copyright, designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
ashgate Publishing Limited ashgate Publishing Company
wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union road Suite 3-1
Farnham burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, gU9 7PT USa
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
a catalogue record for this book is available from the british Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
hallam, Elizabeth, 1967–
Making and growing : anthropological studies of organisms and artefacts / by Elizabeth
hallam and Tim ingold.
pages cm. – (anthropological studies of creativity and perception)
includes bibliographical references and index.
iSbn 978-1-4094-3642-3 (hardback : alk. paper) – iSbn 978-1-4094-3643-0 (ebook) –
iSbn 978-1-4724-0260-8 (epub)
1. Material culture. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) – Social aspects. i. ingold, Tim,
1948– ii. Title.
gn429.h35 2014
306.4'6 – dc23
2013033632
iSbn 9781409436423 (hbk)
iSbn 9781409436430 (ebk –PdF)
iSbn 9781472402608 (ebk – ePUb)
III
Printed in the United kingdom by henry Ling Limited,
at the dorset Press, dorchester, dT1 1hd
Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Preface and Acknowledgements xiii
1 Making and Growing: An Introduction 1
Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam
2 Silk Production: Moths, Mulberry and Metamorphosis 25
Jacqueline Field
3 Between Nature and Art: Casting from
Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe 45
Pamela H. Smith
4 Anatomopoeia 65
Elizabeth Hallam
5 Artefacts and Bodies among Kuna People from Panamá 89
Paolo Fortis
6 Designing Body-Pots in the Formative La Candelaria Culture,
Northwest Argentina 107
Benjamin Alberti
7 Stitching Lives: A Family History of Making Caribou Skin
Clothing in the Canadian Arctic 127
Nancy Wachowich
8 Gardening and Wellbeing: A View from the Ground 147
Anne Jepson
9 Making Plants and Growing Baskets 163
Stephanie Bunn
10 Skill and Aging: Perspectives from Three Generations of
English Woodworkers 183
Trevor H.J. Marchand
vi Making and Growing
11 Movement in Making: An Apprenticeship with Glass and Fire 203
Frances Liardet
12 Growing Granite: The Recombinant Geologies of Sludge 221
David A. Paton and Caitlin DeSilvey
Index 239
List of Figures
1.1 A witch and a devil making a nail 11
1.2 Processing of pewter 13
1.3 Still life of leaves and flowers, Hong Kong 14
1.4 Two human bone-forming cells growing over crystals of the
ceramic material, monetite 16
2.1 Silkworms. Fourth stage silkworms feeding on fresh
mulberry leaves at a Japanese silk farm 28
2.2 Silkworm glands 32
2.3 Reeling silk 35
2.4 A Uyghur woman reeling silk. Kashgar, Western China 36
3.1 Wenzel Jamnitzer (attributed). Life-cast lizard. Lead 46
3.2 Wenzel Jamnitzer (attributed). Writing box 50
3.3 Bernard Palissy (follower of). Oval plate 51
3.4 Wenzel Jamnitzer, Daphne 53
3.5 Life-cast lizard. Silver 58
4.1 Photograph of David Tompsett with a corrosion cast 67
4.2 Corrosion cast of thoracic and abdominal viscera 71
4.3 Photograph of museum technician Sydney Bartlett 75
4.4 Tools used by David Tompsett 82
4.5 Corrosion cast of the arteries of a child at birth 84
5.1 Leopoldo Smith carving a female nuchu 93
5.2 Nuchukana 95
5.3 Nixia Pérez sewing a mola 100
5.4 Mikita Smith posing with her nuchukana and one of her nephews 103
6.1 La Candelaria body-pot 108
6.2 Detail of roughly incised lines 112
6.3 Faceless body-pot 114
6.4 Pierced nose of pot 117
7.1 Caribou skin mittens made by Damaris Ittukusuk Katdlutsiak 132
7.2 Photograph of Damaris Ittukusuk Katdlutsiak sewing a
pair of mittens 135
7.3 Close-up of the back of a caribou skin parka 136
7.4 Qaumayuq and her family, Ellesmere Island 139
8.1 View of the garden project 151
8.2 Pumpkin in the garden 155
8.3 The youngest project participant watering his transplants 158
8.4 Working together, digging 159
viii Making and Growing
9.1 Traveller’s frame basket 165
9.2 Na Hale ‘Eo Waiawi, by Patrick Dougherty 170
9.3 Willow in a variety of colours and tones 172
9.4 Shetland kishie made in a workshop led by Ewen Balfour 175
9.5 Spiral base of woven basket 178
10.1 Jack at the Building Crafts College 187
10.2 Jack machining a piece of timber 189
10.3 James Verner at his workshop in Devon 191
10.4 James mentoring a trainee 193
10.5 George Pysden, Master Craftsman 196
11.1 A core-formed alabastron 204
11.2 The order of procedures for the making of core-formed alabastra 205
11.3 Aspects of the experience of becoming dexterous with
tools and materials 210
11.4 Top: core covering, knife technique. Bottom: core covering,
trailing technique 213
12.1 ‘The sludge stream negotiates and overflows a series of
corroded steel drums … ’ 222
12.2 ‘Near the gathering piles of off-cuts … I can still see the
trace of suspended granite …’ 225
12.3 ‘I … press my bare foot into the sludge … and try to
make my mark’ 230
12.4 ‘The edges of the print gradually close in, erasing the
surface trace …’ 231
Notes on Contributors
Benjamin Alberti is Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University
and lectures at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. He has published
on sex/gender, masculinity and anthropomorphism in South American archaeology
and Bronze Age Crete in a number of international journals and edited books.
He is co-editor of the Special Section of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal,
‘Animating Archaeology: of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies’ (2009,
with T. Bray), Género y Etnicidad en la Arqueología Suramericána (2006, with
V. Williams), Latin American Archaeology (2000, with G. Politis) and Archaeology
After Interpretation (2013, with A. Jones and J. Pollard).
Stephanie Bunn is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.
She has been conducting research among Kyrgyz pastoral nomads in Kyrgyzstan
and Tajikistan for the past 15 years. Research themes include relationships with
the environment, perception and creativity, home, space, and tent textiles. She
also works as a practising textile artist and sculptor. Recent publications include
Nomadic Felts (2010) and the website Sound and Anthropology.
Caitlin DeSilvey is a cultural geographer whose research investigates the aesthetics
of obsolescence and the cultural significance of material change. Recent projects
include a connective ethnography of copper-mining regions and a collaborative
documentary project on mending and repair practices. She has also carried out
research on themes of landscape and memory, adaptive heritage management,
and the intersection between geography and contemporary arts practice. Recent
publications include Anticipatory History (2011, with Simon Naylor and Colin
Sackett) and the website A Celebration of Repair (with Steven Bond and James
Ryan). She is based in the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University
of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus.
Jacqueline Field is a textiles and dress historian. She was formerly Costume
Curator at Westbrook College, Portland, Maine, where she taught textile and
dress history. She researches silk production and consumption with a focus on
the relationship between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian sericulture
and the United States silk industry. Currently she is investigating the manufacture
and export of turn of the twentieth-century Canton (now Guangzhou) gambiered
mud silk textiles and clothing. Her interests include developments in non-textile
uses for silk. She is lead author of the co-authored American Silk 1830–1930:
Entrepreneurs and Artifacts (2007). Recent articles include ‘The North