The following books are required reading for this course.
[Paxson] = 
Paxson, Heather. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. University of California Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780520270183. [Preview with Google Books]
[Adamson] = Adamson, Glenn, ed. The Craft Reader. Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. ISBN: 9781847883032.
Readings from these, as well as other sources, are included in the table below.
| WEEK # | TOPICS | READINGS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | "Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology; Including a Society of Arts, a Museum of Arts, and a School of Industrial Science. Proposed to be established in Boston." 1861. |
| Part I: Historical Perspective | ||
| 2 | From artisan to technician: the labor and value of craftwork before and after the Industrial Revolution |
Epstein, S. R. "Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe." Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (1998): 684–713.
Markowitz, Sally J. "The Distinction between Art and Craft." Journal of Aesthetic Education 28, no. 1 (1994): 55–70. [Adamson] Chapter 6: "On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures." [Adamson] Chapter 8: de Tocquevelle, Alexis. "How an Aristocracy may Emerge from Industry." From Democracy in America. [Adamson] Chapter 10: Marx, Karl. "Capital." (excerpts) [Adamson] Chapter 11: Braverman, Harry. "The Primary Effects of Scientific Management." From Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.
OptionalMontgomery, David. "Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century." Labor History 17, no. 4 (1976): 485–509. Lipartito, Kenneth. "When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920." American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1075–111. |
| 3 | The craft of scientific work |
Zetterberg, J. Peter. "The Mistaking of 'the Mathematicks' for Magic in Tudor and Stuart England." Sixteenth Century Journal 11, no. 1 (1980): 83–97.
Delamont, Sara, and Paul Atkinson. "Doctoring Uncertainty: Mastering Craft Knowledge." Social Studies of Science 31, no. 1 (2001): 87–107. Nutch, Frank. "Gadgets, Gizmos, and Instruments: Science for the Tinkering." Science, Technology, & Human Values 21, no. 2 (1996): 214–28.
Roosth, Sophia. "Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication." Science in Context 26, no. 1 (2013): 153–71. OptionalSchaffer, Simon. "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System." Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 203–27. |
| 4 |
Artisanship and modernist craft revival (and re-revival)
Screening: |
[Adamson] Chapter 20: Morris, William. "The Revival of Handicraft." [Adamson] Chapter 68: Gropius, Walter, and László Moholy-Nagy. "The Manifesto of the Bauhaus" and "Education and the Bauhaus." [Adamson] Chapter 33: Ferragamo, Salvatore. "The Shoemaker of Dreams." [Adamson] Chapter 43: Pye, David. "The Nature and Art of Workmanship." Crawford, Matthew B. "Shop Class as Soulcraft." New Atlantis 13 (Summer 2006): 7–24.
[Adamson] Chapter 60: Parker, Rozsika. "The Creation of Femininity." From The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine.
Lasky, Julie. "Finally, the Bowl Gets Its Due," New York Times, March 27, 2013. |
| Part II: Theoretical Perspective | ||
| 5 | Knowing and doing: Tools and technology |
Feibleman, James K. "Technology as Skills." Technology and Culture 7, no. 3 (1966): 318–28. [Adamson] Chapter 58: Gell, Alfred. "The Enchantment of Technology and the Technology of Enchantment."
Farrar, Nicholas, and Gill Trorey. "Maxims, Tacit Knowledge and Learning: Developing Expertise in Dry Stone Walling." Journal of Vocational Education and Training 60, no. 1 (2008): 35–48.
[Adamson] Chapter 40: McCullough, Malcolm. "Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand."
Optional
|
| 6 | Embodied practice and acquired skill |
Mauss, Marcel. "Techniques of the Body." Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88. Maynard, Ashley E., Patricia M. Greenfield, et al. "Culture, History, Biology, and Body: Native and Non-Native Acquisition of Technological Skill." Ethos 27, no. 3 (1999): 379–402. O'Connor, Erin. "Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle Towards Proficiency." Sociological Review 55, Supplement 1 (2007): 126–41. Grasseni, Cristina. "Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics." Social Anthropology 12, no. 1 (2004): 41–55. Richards, Ellen S. "Housekeeping in the Twentieth Century." American Kitchen Magazine 12 (1900): 203–7.
Sutton, David. "The Mindful Kitchen, The Embodied Cook: Tools, Technology and Knowledge Transmission on a Greek Island." Material Culture Review 70 (2009): 63–68. Optional
Gamble, Jeanne. "Modelling the Invisible: The Pedagogy of Craft Apprenticeship." Studies in Continuing Education 23, no. 2 (2001): 185–200.
Suchman, Lucy. "Embodied Practices of Engineering Work." Mind, Culture, and Activity 7, no. 1–2 (2000): 4–18.
|
| Part III: Anthropological Perspective | ||
| 7 |
Craft and value in a global economy
Screening: |
Venkatesan, Soumhya. "Learning to Weave; Weaving to Learn… What?." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, S1 (2010): S158–75.
Sylvanus, Nina. "The Fabric of Africanity: Tracing the Global Threads of Authenticity." Anthropological Theory 7, no. 2 (2007): 201–16. [Adamson] Chapter 36: Doris, David T. "Destiny World: Textile Casualties in Southern Nigeria." [Adamson] Chapter 61: Tulloch, Carole. "There's No Place Like Home: Home Dressmaking and Creativity in the Jamaican Community of the 1940s to the 1960s." Click around the Global Mamas site to get a sense of the organization, its production and distribution methods, and products. OptionalWest, Harry G., and Nuno Domingos. "Gourmandizing Poverty Food: The Serpa Cheese Slow Food Presidium." Journal of Agrarian Change 12, no. 1 (2012): 120–43. Humphreys, Rachel. "Skilled Craftswomen or Cheap Labour? Craft-based NGO Projects as an Alternative to Female Urban Migration in Northern Thailand." Gender and Development 7, no. 2 (1999): 56–63. Sylvanus, Nina. "Fakes: Crisis in Conceptions of Value in Neoliberal Togo." Cahiers d'Études Africaines 51, no. 205 (2012): 237–58. Feng, Xianghong. "Gender and Hmong Women's Handicrafts in Fenghuang's 'Tourism Great Leap Forward,' China." Anthropology of Work Review 28, no. 3 (2007): 17–26. |
| 8 |
Design politics Guest lecturer: |
Bonanni, Leonardo, and Amanda Parkes. "Virtual Guilds: Collective Intelligence and the Future of Craft." Journal of Modern Craft 3, no. 2 (2010): 179–90. Latour, Bruno. OptionalBonsiepe, Gui. "Design and Democracy." Design Issues 22, no. 2 (2006): 27–34. |
| 9 |
Screening: Q&A with Dr. Theodore C. Bestor, Reischauer Institute Professor of Social Anthropology, Harvard University |
Optional
|
| 10 |
Artisan lives and artisanal cheese |
[Paxson] Chapter 1: American Artisanl. [Paxson] Chapter 2: Ecologies of Production. [Paxson] Chapter 4: Traditions of Invention. [Paxson] Chapter 5: The Art and Science of Craft. |
| 11 |
Craft publics: collecting and display Guest lecturer:
Screening: |
Mashberg, Tom. "Hopis Try to Stop Paris Sale of Artifacts," New York Times, April 3, 2013. Peterson, Karin Elizabeth. "Discourse and Display: The Modern Eye, Entrepreneurship, and the Cultural Transformation of the Patchwork Quilt." Sociological Perspectives 46, no. 4 (2003): 461–90. Duncan, Sally Anne. "From Cloth to Canvas: Reinventing Gee's Bend Quilts in the Name of Art." Museum Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2005): 19–34. Additional ReadingMyers, Fred. "Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange." American Ethnologist 31, no. 1 (2004): 5–20.
|
| 12 |
The quest for authenticity: from craft tourism to craftivism
Screening: Jenine Providence. "Handmade Nation Trailer." January 19, 2009. YouTube. Accessed August 27, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwFbMFqfsKM |
Terrio, Susan J. "Performing Craft for Heritage Tourists in Southwest France." City & Society 11, no. 1-2 (1999): 125–44. Creighton, Millie. "Spinning Silk, Weaving Selves: Nostalgia, Gender, and Identity in Japanese Craft Vacations." Japanese Studies 21, no. 1 (2001): 5–29.
Rosner, Daniela K., and Kimiko Ryokai. Dawkins, Nicole. "Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics of Handmaking (in) Detroit." Utopian Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 261–84. OptionalMinahan, Stella, and Julie Wolfram Cox. "Stitch'nBitch: Cyberfeminism, a Third Place and the New Materiality." Journal of Material Culture 12, no. 1 (2007): 5–21. Dilemna, Anna. "Spynning Stories." Craft 8 (2008): 32–33. Rosner, Daniela K., and Kimiko Ryokai. |
Further Readings of Interest
Pinch, Trevor, and Wiebe E. Bijker. "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other." In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. MIT Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780262517607. [Preview with Google Books]
Carlson, Bernard W. "Building Thomas Edison's Laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey: A Case Study in Using Craft Knowledge for Technological Invention, 1886–1888." History and Technology 13 (1991): 150–67.
Myers, Natasha. "Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography." Social Studies of Science 38, no. 2 (2008): 163–99.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 1974. ISBN: 9780226672885. [Preview with Google Books]
Collins, H. M., G. H. de Vries, et al. "Ways of Going On: An Analysis of Skill Applied to Medical Practice." Science, Technology, & Human Values 22, no. 3 (1997): 267–85.
O'Connor, Erin. "Glassblowing Tools: Extending the Body Towards Practical Knowledge and Informing a Social World." Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 2 (2006): 177–93.
Rosner, Daniela K., and Alex S. Taylor. "Binding and Aging." Journal of Material Culture 17, no. 4 (2012): 405–24.
Appadurai, Arjun. "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." Chapter 1 in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780521357265. [Preview with Google Books]
McBrinn, Joseph. "Handmade Identity: Crafting Design in Ireland from Partition to the Troubles." Chapter 7 in NeoCraft: Modernity and the Crafts. Edited by Sandra Alfoldy. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2008. ISBN: 9780919616479.
Seymour, John. Forgotten Household Crafts: A Portrait of the Way We Once Lived. Knopf, 1987. ISBN: 9780394558301.
Greer, Betsy. 
"Taking Back the Knit: Creating Communities via Needlecraft." (PDF - 1.4MB) MA thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2004.