Paper short abstract:

This paper explores an apprenticeship in core-formed vessel-making to suggest that, far from being packaged knowledge which is firstly transmitted and secondly imbued with ‘culture’, craft ‘tradition’ is a kinaesthetic experience of interaction with materials possessed of intrinsic cultural meaning.

Paper long abstract:

When the term 'tradition' is used to refer to craft production it has often been conceived of as 'knowledge which is passed on'. This reification and abstraction of craft has made it easy for it to be treated as a thing which is transmitted and helps to explain why the activity of making, and particularly the process of becoming dexterous, is comparatively unexamined in some theoretical approaches to, and ethnographic accounts of, craft production. This missing dimension has led to craft production being 'informed' extrinsically with cultural values borne out of social relations. This paper aims to unpack the notion of a 'craft tradition' through a study of an apprenticeship in an archaic form of glass working, that of core-formed vessel-making. (Instead of being inflated these vessels were moulded around a clay core which was then scraped out.) It is suggested that becoming dexterous is of itself a value-positive process and that craft activity is a shared kinaesthetic experience which is temporal as well as spatial, possessed of intrinsic cultural meaning, and formed through interaction with materials.