Paper short abstract:

Making mistakes is not only an inevitable facet of learning, but also an informative process in itself, for that it often elicits the communication of embodied experience amongst research participants. I address this unique cognitive value of mistake-making in this essay.

Paper long abstract:

Mistakes, as well as the act of making mistakes, have been addressed in a number of ethnographic research on crafts. Nevertheless, they are seldom discussed in conjunction with the discourses regarding the transmission of intersubjective experience from the teacher to the learner (or the other way around). In the context of an apprenticeship, the learner's "Ah! It is a mistake!", although sometimes individually perceived, is often collectively reflected by the learner and his/her teacher. I suggest, it is precisely when these mistakes are encountered, evaluated and addressed during the process of making, that the respective modes of interaction and self-representation of the individuals involved in the research transform and assume a level of complexity that would otherwise be non-existent: a level of complexity that facilitates the communication between the learner and the teacher, of embodied understanding(s) of engaging with materials.

In this presentation, I share my fieldwork experience of learning traditional Estonian log-building practice with a master carpenter from rural Estonia. I intend to focus on illustrating the part of the experience where I make mistakes on carving out the joints on the logs and discussing how the interactions between me and my teacher proceed from there.