The Sociality of Enskilment

Abstract

How do skills accrue? Bourdieu used the image of sedimentation to describe the accruing of habitus in the body, an image borrowed from Merleau-Ponty (Csordas 1993, 62-64; Herzfeld 2004, 37) that implies incrementation and historicity. In the same way, in activity theory, an activity contains the sediments of past activities (Engeström 1993). Grasseni (2004, 45) uses this same image of sedimentation to speak more specifically about skills, in her case 'skilled vision' (c.f. Knappett 2011). Clearly, it takes time to acquire skills; anthropologists have described the apparently endless repetitiveness of tasks and procedures that are part of an apprenticeship (e.g. Wacquant 2005; Gowlland 2012), procedures that are at first awkward and eventually become second nature. But what kind of time is this? What is the quality of the time of enskilment? A motif that appears in the literature on enskilment is that skills do not develop linearly, there is a shift in the quality of one's engagement in a skilled practice (e.g. Ingold 2000, 406-19; Marchand 2007; O'Connor 2006). At one moment it feels awkward, and then it becomes natural; we practice over and over the same routines, and suddenly things click into place, and we 'get it'. The unfolding time of enskilment is not linear, at moments it accelerates and at other moments it seems to drag on, mirrored by the boredom one might feel during endless repetitive practice. This unfolding, non-linear, time of enskilment is not only of a skill becoming engrained, accrued, in our muscles and minds, it is also unfolding social time, time spent not necessarily alone, or necessarily not always alone. Practice in a workshop involves solitary practice, but also interaction with more experienced practitioners, with peers and those in a more novice position. This is not only the time of instruction and explicit directives, but the time of interruptions, conversations, exchanges of jokes and gossip, or visits of peers from other workshops. For Lave and Wenger (1991), becoming proficient is part and parcel of developing an identity as a practitioner. Trevor Marchand (2008) has in the same way noted how the knowledge gained by an apprentice is only in part made up of skills and procedural knowledge-it is also about the shaping of worldviews, and the carving of a social position within a community of practitioners.

The seduction of craft: Making and value in artisanal labour

“…Consequently, I want to suggest that anthropologists studying craft communities and practices – and indeed, any other aspect of productive life – ought to pay more attention to the ways in which ethical considerations are grounded in our ontological disposition towards the material world. Equating morality with socialization, scholars of craft have already demonstrated that processes of enskillment socialize apprentices into a moral community of makers, transmitting not only technical knowledge but also ‘ideas about person, mind, implicit pedagogies, value judgements, and inter-generational relations’ (Gowlland, 2017: 521; Marchand, 2008). Lacemakers’ concerns about the purpose and value of their craftwork, however, appeared to be shaped as much by their perception of metaphysical order as they were by the normative parameters of the working community to which they belonged.…”

The question of access: Toward an equitable future of computational design

“…Enskilment involves fine-tuning one's perception and action by "expanding their focus of attention" to attune to the world around them, learn about their actions and how they shape materials, tools, and their peers. 39,40 Unlike the passive learning interaction revealed in the first case study, participants here actively engaged in manipulating materials, making drawings, making code, making digital models, and making artifacts-for knowledge to emerge through their senses, their bodies, and the materials (Figure 3). The study builds on previous research in 2017 where art educators and students interested in art and craft aged between 14 and 22 learned hands-on computational approaches to the wire-bending craft.…”

Primate tool use and the socio-ecology of thinging: how non-humans think through tools

“…With each act, material engagement shapes the environment as it is perceived by others, feeding back into the broader meshwork ( cf. Ingold, 2011), so that the development of proficiency is as much the development of technique as it is the development of place within the broader constellation of conspecifically available technologies (Gowlland, 2019; Lave & Wenger, 1991). As Lemonnier (1993) puts it, ‘techniques are first and foremost social productions’ (p. 3): to ignore the interactive nature of tool use is to ignore the technology’s social relevance.…”