Uzma Z. Rizvi and Sarah E. Jackson
I claim the behind-the-scenes cultural labor as the making of theory, the crafting of politics, and the making and unmaking of structural inequalities such as race. (Kondo 2018: 7)
Crafting as Worldmaking: Relationality, Language, and Knowledge Sharing intentionally opens up the limits of what crafting as a concept provides for anthropological theory. Archaeological literature has often placed the role of crafting within discourses of craft specialization, anchoring it to questions related to sociopolitical complexity, which linked political processes with productive organization. The chapters in this book invite us to think differently and discuss crafting as a way of making, knowing, and being in the world. Through utilizing examples from various different time periods and across global landscapes, we reimagine questions of being and belonging, and other affective modalities related to how we articulate meaning, in text, image, or speech. Importantly, we consider what it means to make as a way to produce knowledge about the worlds we inhabit.
Crafting has often been investigated in archaeological contexts by looking at the affiliation of the specialists (i.e., if they were independent of the elite or if they were attached to elites or institutions), the nature of the production, the intensity (i.e., full-time or part-time crafting), and the volume of production or output (Brumfiel and Earle 1987). Expanding on those and complicating the inquiry, archaeology subsequently focused in on context, concentration, scale, and intensity of craft production (Costin 1991; see also Costin 2004; Sinopoli 2003; Wright 1991 for further development of those theories). The subtext of economics continued to maintain itself and for those not focused specifically on the sociopolitical, technology became a site of investigation (for example Agrawal 2000; Agrawal and Kharakwal 2003; Biswas 1996; Kenoyer et al. 1991; Sher and Vidale 1985). The backdrop of exchange looms even within the scholarship of the social contexts of technology (Dobres 2000; Leroi-Gourhan 1993 (1964); Miller 2007; Ratnagar 2007). Craft specialization or the study of specialized craft production became a key method of inquiry that provided archaeologists with the capacity to discuss “the nature and development of formalized system of social inequality in human societies.” (Sinopoli 2003: 13) This was a key point for those approaching craft specialization from a Marxian perspective and in relation to state formation (see Patterson 2005). While this desire to discuss social inequality is maintained in some of the investigations within this book as well, the approaches to the questions are notably different, and as such, they engender different avenues of discussion.
This volume expands conversations about crafting: discussions of artifacts, landscapes, human/animal relationships, materiality, and relationality stretch the limits of what crafting might mean within archaeological theory (see also Crossland 2014; Gullapalli 2013; Haakanson and Steffian 2009; Halperin and Foias 2012; Jackson 2018; Lau 2006; Pikirayi 2007; Rizvi 2018; Supernant 2004; Wright 2017; Yao 2012). Although their focus is on various materials, archaeological sites, and time periods, all the archaeologists in this book are invested in relationality, meaning making, and knowledge sharing through the act of crafting. Within the cacophony of ways of thinking about crafting represented, there is an element to this scholarship that centers around the idea of worldmaking. World-making is about recognizing what being in relation means, how space and place are made, how meaning is made, and how it all comes together to create worlds that hold, share, and make knowledge. Worldmaking is used in this book as a recognition of the multiplicity of worlds, times, and relations that exist simultaneously, and the ways by which we might understand their making. Holding up these ideas are clear commitments to further decolonial, feminist/queer, Indigenous, and other inclusive forms of knowledge production (Atalay 2012; Geller and Stockett 2006; Hodgson-Smith and Kermoal 2016; Ray 2016; Rizvi 2019; Tuck and Yang 2014).
This book pursues a much-needed shift in the ways we engage with crafting. While we intentionally eschew a single theoretical stance or unified perspective in the book, we hope the chapters invite us to understand humans, making, practices, and materialization. In particular, the perspectives that our authors bring dramatically expand how crafting is understood, and what counts as meaningful making, moving beyond a traditional directional analysis that examines crafted objects to trace back their chain of making. The intimate relationships explored through our lens of crafting shed light on much larger archaeological and anthropological questions about worldmaking, relationality, and the roles of knowledge and language.
Emergent within that construct of making/unmaking/remaking is a sense of worldmaking and visioning that creates the conditions to support social transformation. This manifests itself as an overarching concern identified in this book, one in which our contributors move between crafting and making as an intentional shift to speak about different ways of knowing and understanding how to be in relation. We have been inspired by Dorinne Kondo’s shift from crafting to making in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (2018). Kondo makes the claim that making “links structures of power, labor processes, and performances of gendered, national, and racialized subjectivities, in historically and culturally specific settings” (6).
Some chapters in this volume speak to those ideas more directly than others, but all of them have a kernel of the concern located within their discourse. The authors think about ways that value (implicit or explicit), specialization, intentionality, and crafter/maker identities inform the worlds that are made. While important differences between “crafting” and “making” may remain relevant and analytically useful, some authors also wonder whether distinguishing these concepts without unpacking them serve to elevate particular experiences, aesthetics, processes, or people in a problematic fashion. Our interest in linking crafting and making to larger processes of worldmaking means that we lean toward exploring connections and dissolving boundaries in how we conceptualize an act of creation (singular or multiple and ongoing) and the people involved with it. We find it productive to be inclusive in considering who makes (or crafts) and what all is made (or crafted). In some ways, this book is an experiment in seeing what happens when we open those doors very widely.
The book centers around three themes. The first is crafting as relational. This is an invitation to expand the many human/nonhuman/multispecies dimensions to crafting and how the act itself creates, sustains, nurtures, and transforms the affective ways of being and belonging to each other. Second, the text focuses on crafting as meaning making; this theme locates crafting and meaning in materials, languages, landscapes, and spiritual/cosmic understandings of self within worlds created and lived in. And finally, we engage with crafting as coproduction of knowledge and space of knowledge sharing, ideas that inherently link back to a metaphor of worldmaking and visioning. The contents of the chapters weave in and out of each of these themes as they are overlapping considerations and expansive conversations.
Opening up the notion of crafting produces an interesting insight into the relationship between crafting and making and our attendant preconceived notions related to skill sets. Shifting our attention to making and unmaking highlighted for us the many ways the negotiations and relationships between humans and nonhumans happen. The focus on making also provides space to recognize and appreciate experimentation and mistakes in the material record. Making begets improvisation and creativity; it allows for a multitude of pathways to production in comparison to a more prescriptive way of producing (Ewart 2012). By including both making and unmaking in our analyses, the questions that can be asked of the material past shift and expand to more inclusive ways of being in the world. In order to make things in a new way, sometimes they need to be undone, unmade. Increasing our capacity within archaeological theory to consider how things are unmade provides space to contextualize resistance movements, experimentation, and failings. The lens of making/unmaking/remaking provides us with the trial-and-error parts of experimentation and innovation (Sánchez-Aldana 2023). It provides a clearer sense of intentionality regarding what the meaning being made was aspiring to, and perhaps even why things needed to be undone.
We see this in chapter 2 by Christina T. Halperin, Sarah E. Jackson, and Céline Gillot, in which they use instances of mimesis, or copying, to explore assumptions around the process of making. As they discuss, copying and the attendant changes that play out from replication can take many forms; their comparative discussion looks at contexts ranging from Classic Maya ceramics, figurines, and text to modern-day Indonesian DIY designers, to a striking example of Iroquoian sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century pottery, among others. Through the varied processes of iterative making that characterize each of the examples, Halperin, Jackson, and Gillot consider how creativity works (or is assumed to work), how assumptions of value are made, and how social practices and relationships may be recorded in, and visible through close analysis of, the mimetic properties visible in some crafted objects. Their chapter illustrates the need to contextualize crafted items and the practices from which they result in much more expansive ways as part of democratizing the multiple stages of making and making space for the numerous, indeed sometimes conflictual, voices represented by the panoply of versions of made materials. Ultimately, their discussion raises questions about how we distinguish between making versus copying, and whether understanding those terms as more closely related might be productive.
In chapter 6, Praveena Gullapalli begins with the explicit premise that crafting and making have different meanings, associations, and practices; this is in contrast to some chapters in which a relatively undifferentiated perspective on crafting and making (and even copying) is taken. She then asks what happens if we make the boundary between them messy. In her words, she works to disassemble the construction of ‘craft.’ Her case study for delving into these ideas is from the South Indian Neolithic Iron Age, through which she examines the surprising and illuminating juxtaposition of ashmounds and metallurgy. In the process, Gullapalli points toward several analytical moves that may usefully transform how we approach making and crafting. Specifically, she asks us to consider how we understand intention in making processes, how the self is crafted, how we make meaning out of mistakes, and how the deconstruction of categories (including breaking down of crafting processes into constituent acts) may change our understandings.
Making and unmaking as conceptual portals open the world of materials into the everyday, allowing both tangible and intangible affective making to occur (see also the conclusion and Crossland, chapter 3; and Welz 2015). Indeed, many of us in this volume spoke of the ways we made relationships and scholarship. What is made then is in multiples—it is never just one thing, and it is always made in relation (Rizvi 2019). As Eliana Sánchez-Aldana writes in the abstract of the beautiful text “(Un)crafting Ecologies: Actions Involving Special Skills at (Un)making Things Humans with Your Hands”:
I crafted this piece (which is both textile and text) from diverse threads. One thread is made of a myriad of threads and brings the story of the making of a textile piece. An activity that produces the cloth and shapes relations, humans, knowledge, textile materials and subjectivities within it. The crafting of a hand-made ecology. The second thread is spun of fictional voices of various theorists and my reflexive voice. It is aimed to (un)make in order to understand what happens while weaving. And the third thread tells my personal story of grief and how I (un)make myself through crafting.
Therefore, the meaning of craft was modified for this piece. Here, it is both verb and noun. It is an activity involving special skills not only to make, but to (un)make; and not only things, but humans. And it is also a textile woven. (Sánchez-Aldana 2023: abstract)
In much the same manner, this book is also a reflection of relationships made as a woven textile, or how each of us is a bead holding together a design. Writing about the process of writing and thinking together became incredibly meaningful for all of us, in particular because we were all experiencing the impact of a global pandemic. As a part of this volume, we have reprinted an essay written for the (now archived) anthropology blog anthrodendum, entitled “Unexpected Happiness in Virtual Spaces.”1 A more reflective conversation on the whole project found its way into the book as a conclusion highlighting the many ways we came together and how this book was made.
Deeply connected to making and unmaking, the theme of crafting as relational expands the many human/nonhuman/multispecies dimensions to crafting. It honors the ways in which the act itself creates, sustains, nurtures, and transforms the affective ways of being and belonging to each other. Archaeological literature about craft specialization importantly speaks to the ways by which the organization of production impacts the ways division of labor and thus relations of production and/or gendered relations (for example, Hendon 1996; Patterson 2005). In conversation with that work, the chapters in this volume reorient the ways by which relations are understood. To be in good relation, as we learn from Archaeologies of the Heart (Supernant et al. 2020), is a way of being in the world that impacts the ways we are with the past, the present, and the future.
Dawn Wambold uses “crafting relationships” in chapter 8 to examine traditions of beading and accompanying practices of sharing food and drink in nineteenth-century Métis hivernant (overwintering) communities. Her case study brings up intriguing complexity of how the enduring making of beaded objects (typically seen archaeologically through recovered beads rather than the objects themselves) and of community relationships was experienced, and can be seen archaeologically, in a context of community mobility. Furthermore, her examination shifts the focus from consideration of work of the bison hunters in these communities to the constitutive activities that were happening within the home. In so doing, she challenges how we characterize and think about a “hunting camp,” and illustrates how Indigenous theories and ways of knowing (in this case, wâhkôhtowin and keeoukaywin) provide compelling analytical lenses for thinking through this context.
Continuing to challenge our relations with landscapes and animals, Joshua Wright (in chapter 7) approaches the archaeological landscapes of early mobile pastoralists in Mongolia as coproductions drawing from the relationships and opportunities of humans and domestic animals and their geomorphological settings. Through this investigation we are invited to consider theories of placemaking as coproduction of space (something we see in Rizvi, chapter 5, as well). Coproduction is conceived of as being understood as an act that strengthens communities and belonging though the enactment of knowledge shared by humans, animals, and landscapes.
In chapter 3, Zoë Crossland invites us to consider the happiness (or positive affect) involved with making. In this sense, her chapter is a celebration, as well as an exploration, of the work that our group undertook together. She uses a case study drawn from Madagascar, of wooden carvings made by men belonging to Zafimaniry communities, which are described by the makers as having no explicit, discursive meaning. For Crossland, this process offers the opportunity to focus on the role of affect and, in particular, to explore different types of affective relationships experienced with the same crafted materials (e.g., by carvers and by tourists). Crossland suggests that as an approach to crafted materials more broadly, we should begin by paying close attention to the stickiness of affect in order to understand the relationships that contextualize that which is crafted. Indeed, the manner by which affect impacts material culture is in relation, informing the indexical and metonymic ways of meaning making within culture.
In all of these ways, it is important to keep in mind that a representation cannot only be thought of in terms of what the craftsperson wants it to say; rather, it must be conceptualized also as a dialogue or a relation between bodies and materials. That is to say, the act of crafting produces an affective and embodied response (Rizvi 2018).
It may seem obvious that when we make things, we make meaning. It is that sense of obviousness that some of the chapters in this volume interrogate. How is meaning made that then makes self and place? Much like language creates worlds, we argue that crafting and making also create and sustain worlds.
As Rizvi (2018 and chapter 5) invites us to consider, if we approach meaning as a spatial concern, we can think through Ruth Tringham’s (1991, 1994) argument that archaeological places should be understood as deliberate creations of past actors that are in a continuous process of becoming (see also Gullapalli, chapter 6). The simultaneity of a crafting of both material and place is unique in that it links the act of place making to specific technological motions and movements, each repetitive practice in the space helping to producing the place. If the location of a site is determined with special regard to function within a production system (however loosely defined), the craft practiced there becomes a significant framework/subtext to most, if not all, aspects of the individuals who live, operate, and move through these spaces, and the place itself can be defined by its function (hearkening back to Binford 1982). The materiality of the craft and the processes of production are intricately linked to the ways in which the craftspeople and associated populations who inhabit the site begin to identify themselves (Sinopoli 2003). In this manner, producing place is directly linked to forms of social identity (Kealhofer 1999). The place becomes personal as the body is intimately involved in social practices undertaken in those areas, even if they are not technologically or functionally relevant. Often, place making in archaeological scholarship is linked to more sensual and memory-based stimuli (e.g., Ingold 1993; Tilley 1994; Witmore 2006). Within contemporary archaeological practice, place making, as a theoretical consideration, has also been linked to an act in the present of recognizing or acknowledging the past (e.g., Rubertone 2008). Places become on a continuum of experience; on one hand, places are formed through locally specific daily usage and, on the other, are interventions of control enacted by political elite. It is the constant reproduction of experience at multiple scales in the place that situates and engenders a sense of belonging, producing sensorial and affective meanings that link bodies to local geographies (Harmanşah 2014).
It is within this landscape of understanding that Rizvi (chapter 5) invites us to think more capaciously about why MohenjoDaro was made into the site that it is today. Rather than presenting an archaeological site or an ancient city as a conceptual fait accompli, as a place that exists and is being documented, why archaeology made the archaeological site, and why certain relations of place simultaneously made the city and the urban subject are at the core of her contribution. The chapter moves within these spaces of affective belonging that can be traced in the ancient past, as well within heritage discourse in the present. Recognizing that the query of why one is not bound by time, this chapter also homes in on the relationship between the ancient built environment and urban subjectivity. By shifting the question to ask why, a different facet of resonance is illuminated, providing an alternative perspective on the making of relations of and with place.
Thinking through how relations with place effect communication, in chapter 10 Sarah E. Jackson asks us to accompany her on a stroll through her Ohio neighborhood, as she notices and documents texts (ranging from signs to graffiti to domestic artifacts). She approaches texts as made or crafted materials (akin to other crafted objects considered in this volume). In her examination of thematically grouped photographs of texts, she opens up methodological and analytical approaches to crafting and making that are translatable to other materials, exploring how we might bring a different type of looking to both texts and other crafted materials. Along the way, she plays with loosening edges of how a making process is bounded, and she considers what else is made (whether in concert, or adjacently, or relatedly to the primary made thing). Jackson records texts in the banal elements of everyday living: Her recognition of the ways in which we are surrounded by texts connects these quotidian instances to the common thread of this volume in considering worldmaking, and resonates with the shifted perspectives on bodies, sensing and scale in relation to making that come up in many of the other chapters of the book.
This theme embodies some of the key aspects of the workshop from which this volume emerged: a commitment to connective conversations and an intertwining of knowledge and making. Rather than thinking of knowledge as extractive and in the service of production (in an economic sense), these chapters articulate different ways of knowing and sharing through making and crafting. In some cases, such as what Sven Haakanson Jr. in chapter 1 invites us to consider, what is being made and unmade is knowledge itself, and through that a fuller sense of self. Through his journey we are able to read the impact of unmaking and remaking naming conventions, history and culture, heritage, stories, and what it meant to learn how to make traditional Sugpiaq paddles. Within this narrative, through the making and unmaking and remaking, Haakanson demonstrates the role of craft within the coproduction of knowledge and how spaces of stories are spaces of knowledge sharing, and a deep understanding of design.
Design is also at the heart of George F. Lau’s intervention in chapter 4, an invitation to consider the formal relations between media that are used to make things. In particular, Lau is exploring the Recuay cultural tradition in order to better understand the affinities with lowland Amerindian crafting traditions that feature specific designs across different media. He argues that in looking to multiple media, interregional interactions can be better understood. This chapter also looks at the design tradition itself, which demonstrates exemplary technical skill. Finally, by situating the conversation within graphic arts, Lau proposes that the decoration stresses shared values imparted on the artifacts and bodies, which would include identity, status, and belonging. And it is that totality that maintains the integrity of a local social group.
Thinking through how design may express itself across many media, in chapter 9 Kisha Supernant and Krista Leddy speak explicitly about what might be considered Métis design. This chapter holds a conversation between Kisha Supernant, a Métis archaeologist and member of our working group, and Krista Leddy, a Métis artist and beader, who joined our group and shared her beading expertise and stories with us. Their conversation in this chapter raises themes that are close to their hearts, and that resonate with themes explored in other parts of the book. Their discussion draws linkages between past and present, underscoring how a lens of relationality can connect entities across time as well as space (including during the pandemic, an undercurrent to the work and thinking in all the chapters of this book, and through the possibilities of online connections). The intertwined, not dichotomous, natures of knowing and making emerge in this chapter through naming and categories (e.g., problematic characterizations of “ethnographic collections” or materials characterized as “native” in museums) and the movement that characterize made materials and the relations in which they are held (e.g., as experienced through the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism). We see the centrality of story making, captured so beautifully in the words of this chapter.
The concluding chapter, which takes the form of a conversation, represents both the spirit and values of the people who contributed to this volume. In it, we hear the intertwining of multiple voices that both wander and arrive. Through our dialogue, we touch on topics that are about bodies, materials, connections, fragmentation—the varied elements of being scholars, archaeologists, human beings, and friends through the pandemic and beyond. The conversation was facilitated through a series of queries that we posed and responded to, mirroring our process from the seminar. These included queries about surprising or unusual things that folks made in the last few years. Another question had to do with how our own approaches and thinking around crafting may have changed in that time, and if there were additional themes we might now consider if we were to do this again. Of course, the question that brought up a lot of feelings was one in which we all thought about what else was made for us in this process and during this time. As we hope has become apparent in the chapters of this book, there are not clear bounds or edges of what we each made and are making, whether individually or as a group. What we have noticed and experienced—the worlds we have made—includes vegetables, birds and spiders, cancer treatment, saunas, tears, graves, and words. Through empathy and relations, we have sustained each other through a challenging historical period, finding comfort through the connective net woven by all of these world elements.
In the appendix are two pages of our zine that introduce it and provide a table of contents. The full zine and workshop instructions may be found on the book webpage (see notes section below).
In so far as this book has been a labor of love and collaboration, we, as editors, could not imagine writing a final chapter without everyone, reflecting our process, and holding within it the deep respect and affection we all held for each other. As a conclusion to the book, the final chapter is intended as a portal, one that opens up a multitude of possibilities for future engagements with crafting and making. The format of the chapter itself, with multiple voices and directions, and with understanding emerging through the interactions among them, represents what we see as a fruitful direction for studies of crafting and making, characterized by a departure from the linear or orientation toward the product, and by a commitment to a multiplicity of positions and perspectives in relation to crafting processes. With this in hand, we invite you to engage with the many ways crafting and making/unmaking/remaking can be understood in the ancient and historic world.
Uzma Z. Rizvi is professor of anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is the Principal Investigator for the Laboratory of Integrated Archaeological Visualization and Heritage (LIAVH.org), bringing together archaeological research with data management, visualization, and heritage practice.
Sarah E. Jackson is professor of anthropology and also serves as inaugural dean of the division of social sciences, in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder.
You can find the zine and workshop instructions on the book webpage: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/gallery/RizviCrafting.