Learning to weave; weaving to learn ... what?

Abstract

This paper places the anthropology of learning in conversation with the anthropology of work by unpacking the interrelationship between the processes by which a skill is learned and knowledge about the skill, its possibilities and ramifications. The paper's ethnographic focus is the Labbai mat‐weavers of Pattamadai town in South India, who are ambivalent about being weavers. It contrasts this ambivalence with the excitement that weaving generated in a development practitioner who sought to promote the weaving industry and who also learned how to weave. The same skill is approached differently by different kinds of persons: they understand and learn different things. Learning and knowing cannot be easily separated. By focusing on the various purposes and modes of learning, on the social production of knowledge, and on instances of communication and miscommunication, the paper explores the embodied and historicized production of knowledge by different kinds of person: the mat‐weavers, the development professional, and, to a certain extent, an anthropologist. Résumé Le présent article confronte l’anthropologie de l’apprentissage à l’anthropologie du travail en révélant les relations entre les processus d’acquisition d’une compétence et la connaissance de cette compétence, de ses possibilités et de ses ramifications. Le sujet ethnographique de l’article concerne les tisserands de tapis Labbai de la ville de Pattamadai, dans le Sud de l’Inde, qui ont une attitude ambivalente vis‐à‐vis de leur statut de tisserands. L’auteur met en regard cette ambivalence et l’intérêt éveillé par le tissage chez un intervenant en développement qui cherchait à promouvoir l’artisanat du tissage et avait même appris à tisser. La même compétence est approchée différemment par différentes sortes de personnes : celles‐ci voient et comprennent des choses différentes. L’apprentissage et la connaissance ne peuvent pas être facilement dissociés. En se concentrant sur les différents buts et modes de l’apprentissage, sur la production sociale de connaissance et sur des cas de communication bien et mal menée, l’article explore la production incorporée et historicisée de connaissances par différentes sortes de personnes : les tisserands, le professionnel du développement et, dans une certaine mesure, l’anthropologue.

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Technological intimacy: Re-engaging with gender and technology in the global factory

“…A growing body of anthropological literature on apprenticeship reminds us that, within these communities, skills or techniques for using tools and machines are transmitted through physical display and demonstration, observation, imitation and mimesis as much as direct experience (Coy, 1989;Marchand, 2010;Wacquant, 2004). These embodied modes of learning are never only technical in content and studies of apprenticeship in diverse craft contexts (Naji, 2009;O'Connor, 2005O'Connor, , 2006Venkatesan, 2010) offer ethnographers of the global factory important cues for exploring how novice workers acquire normative values, ethics and ideologies of work at the same time as they acquire a practical know-how (Prentice, 2008).…”

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