Paper short abstract:

Linking my legitimate peripheral participation in different modes of ceramic production with Lambros Malafouris's theory of material engagement, I will attempt to integrate non-discursive, situated and embodied knowledge, mētis (itself a peripheral knowledge), into ethnographical cognition.

Paper long abstract:

Apprenticeship and other forms of situated learning require what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have called "legitimate peripheral participation". Ethnography conceived as research through practice is also based on legitimate peripheral participation in situated processes. Situated learning is usually involved in passing on manual and bodily skills, or acquiring embodied knowledge. In the research through practice the role that the body's non-discursive knowledge plays in comprehension and interpretation takes on immense significance. However, given the intellectual legacy of the Aristotelian distinction and hierarchization between practical and theoretical knowledge and the Cartesian dualism in the Western cognitive tradition, the non-discursive knowledge of the body has a peripheral status in legitimate knowledge production. I will ground my paper in the practice of working on a potter's wheel and of casting porcelain ware, both in the studio and in the factory conditions. Linking my legitimate peripheral participation in different modes of ceramic production with Lambros Malafouris's theory of material engagement, I will attempt to integrate non-discursive knowledge of the body into ethnographical cognition. Following Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, the non-discursive situated knowledge of the body which resists abstraction is described with the Greek term mētis.