The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts -like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities -are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as 'intelligent' is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprenticestyle learning within our Western systems of education.

There is growing recognition among social and natural scientists that nature or nurture should not be studied in isolation, for their interdependence is not trivial, but vital. The aim of this volume is to progress anthropology's thinking about human knowledge by exploring the interdependence of nurture with nature; and more specifically the interdependence of minds, bodies, and environments. This introductory essay begins with an overview of the (often conflicting) positions that dominated the 'anthropology of knowledge' in the closing decades of the last century before proceeding to a discussion of recent convergences between cognitivists, phenomenologists, and practice theorists in their 'thinking about knowing'. In the following section I use my own studies with craftspeople to reflect on apprenticeship as both a mode of learning and a field method, since the majority of authors included in this volume also took up apprenticeships of one form or another. Next, the idea that 'cognition is individual' is firmly established, but it is equally conceded that 'making knowledge' is a process entailing interaction between interlocutors and practitioners with their total environment. Before concluding with a summary of the scope and contents of the volume, I briefly present a theory of 'shared production' in knowledge-making that draws upon recent literature in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. Making knowledge, after all, is an ongoing process shared between people and with the world.j rai_1607 1.. 21 Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, book 2, chapter 1: 31-2In the above quote, Aristotle concisely describes the combination of nature and nurture that is us. As a species, we are composed, in part, of innate capacities -perceptual, cognitive, and motor -that engage us with the world of which we are a part, and thereby enable us to survive, adapt, and thrive. By contrast, 'arts and virtues' are not endowed, but realized and reinforced in practice. Anthropological studies of knowledge have traditionally concentrated on the by-products of nurture, consigning the

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