Situated Craft and More
I have this week finalized part one of my thesis (for my upcoming midway review). The introduction and three chapters have been crafted, in a literal sense and through multimodal means. As described in the Invitation, which is my introductory chapter, the making of my thesis comes about much like my fieldwork did. That is, through sensuous immersion in the world of olive oil in southern Puglia by photographic, droned, poetic, and textual means. I have conducted a different kind of ethnography (Elliot and Dunhane 2017), one reflecting the imaginative and creative means of its anthropological making (Ingold 2013) and sensuous practice (Pink 2015). It is corporeally situated from the feminist standpoint of mine (Haraway 1998; Harding 1993) and grounded in the experiential realities of particular practitioners of olive cultivation for making olive oil. It regards the lively existence of beyond human agencies (Barad 2007) and especially those of plants (Gagliano 2015; Hartigan 2019) in considering the matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that materialize through time in space (Freidman 2020; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). Abiotic and biotic things become realized through attentive arts of noticing (Tsing 2015) and scalar analysis (Raffles 2011; Swanson and Palsson 2016). It is my stance that the worldling of humans takes place in kindred relations to the worldling of the (a)biotic world (Haraway 2016). The emic perspective arguably tangents this notion through the kincentric ecology (Salmón 2000) by which human and landscape intimately connects in the context.
The collaborators and I are in the study approached as sentient participants who have come to know, learn, and practice our worlds such as we are socially, materially, culturally, and historically situated within them. I have cultivated an understanding for their doings through the anthropological means of my doings. That is, through observant participation, methodologically referred to as participant observation. At times, I have practiced that which Barbara Tedlock (1991) titles observation of participation. Chapter one, Making Olive Oil, exemplifies how a key collaborator had me learn by observation before he let me learn through participation. In other words, how he had the locus of active engagement shifted from the researcher to the research participants; like the narrative of Tedlock suggests. This is one narrative of many, their and mine, that becomes storied to make cultivated sense of the crafts by which olive oil from southern Puglia flows. The thesis takes form through cases, making case-in-point arguments for how specific conceptualizations of flow make sense of the situated crafts of olive oil in the context in general, that of extra virgin olive oil in particular.
The thesis is tentatively titled Cultivated Flows: Sensing the Crafts of Olive Oil from Southern Puglia. It has the subtitle An Anthropology of Practicing Artful Care. This blog post gives a brief outline of three key concept that I have developed as part of my research. As part of this, it notes how anthropological work can act to expand ideas of what constitutes art and who/what performs work.
It is early spring 2021 and my supervisors and I have a chat over zoom. I am at this point rather far along in the fieldworking period, and I find that I have enough experiences at hand to start thinking about where to take the ethnography. I mean as in really contemplating my doctoral work. I am the kind of anthropologist who regularly work simultaneously with curious exploration of worlds and critical thinking. To conduct research is for me processual: I read, write, collect experiences, theorize, and contextualize throughout the fieldwork, and I stand firmly rooted in its entangled nature. I am during this meeting with my supervisors both lost and found though. I have started to develop a few concepts, but feel quite anxious about what is expected from me: what new knowledge am I expected to produce as part of my PhD? I know that I, as part of my anthropological work per se, am satisfied with providing situated stories, and thereby expand and twist and turn the frames of perspectives by which things may be understood, undertaken, and experienced. I am also familiar with the conventions of academic practice and that I am expected to do more than to familiarize previously unfamiliar ways of being in the world. My very supportive supervisors confirm, on the one hand, that everything that I do is new for nobody have done this research before, and especially not as I do it; on the other, that I need not worry about theoretical knowledge production at the moment, but just continue as I have, and it will all come together once the crafting of my material starts materializing as a thesis. How right they were, for like sprouts grow into trees by means of the root work that foundationally sustains them and the touch of care cultivating them (detailed in chapter three, Rooted Matters), the key concepts carefully emerged cultivated through the crafts of words, footage, and the overall sensuous experience that creatively been noted in part one (of the thesis). While the realizing of them came across as epiphanies of sorts, they truly nuanced through (my processual) art of work.
It may be experienced as an epiphany to realize the shapes of the ancient trees rooted in Puglia. To realize their form, though, stand as an embodied example of the art of work that my thesis builds upon (emically, anthropologically, and intellectually). Trees have through multigenerational workings of people and plants grown peculiar in Puglia. Many have grown into emblematic forms through the sculpturing touch of time, hands, and root works. This is the foundation for the concept of art of work that I advance. The concept is a twist of the idiom ‘work of art’. I seek with it to shift the emphasis from art to work at once stay with art as a practice of making. This shift in perspective seeks to expand the notion of what art can be, but also to expand perceptions of work. What is work and who does it? I build my argument in the thesis, among others, along the lines of Ingold (2021). He writes about the ‘artefactual order’ and the ‘vegetative order’, and he argues that the craft of people works correspondingly to the growth of plants (ibid. 45). Time also gets it fair share of recognition in my idiom art of work. Although time does not carry out physical work per se, it does work though movements of sort par excellence. Hence it works, just through other means than the commonplace definition has it. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 175) argues in her discussion on temporalities, care, and the relations between human and beyond human agencies that time is made through everyday practices. I use this argument in my thesis to contemplate the dual ontogeny of olive plants as bush and tree at once. I use this dual ontogeny, in turn, to argue how practices materialize the work of time. The two following concepts advance how.
Notedly, art of work brings about critically advanced senses of art, work, and time. It has developed as part of my sensuous engagement, and it occurs touched by the situated sense of craftsmen and the cultivated growth of plants (to make olive oil). It is as such intimately connected to another concept that I advance, namely that of practicing artful care. The domain of practice takes place as much in the work of collaborators as in the work of mine. Importantly, it relates to the atmosphere itself, and the flows it entails, such as with regards to wind and photosynthesis. Sara Schroer (2018: 76) writes about “atmosphere as movement” and she notes how “sentient beings relate to others and their environments” based on how atmospheric phenomena affect them. The thesis follows this thinking, and it correlates it to the sessile and highly sentient being of plants (Hartigan 2019; Gagliano 2015) in developing the concept of artful care. How it does this is exemplified in the thesis but suffice to say that although trees do not move from space, they move in place (such as affected for instance by workings of the atmosphere). The conceptual thinking, its advancement and usage, is explained as followed in the thesis:
“Anna Tsing (2015) writes for an art of noticing and she encourages anthropological pursuits to make use of such a perceptive stance to broaden narratives, the making inherent to them. This thinking constitutes part of sensuous scholarship. A case in point is its explicit attunement to the senses at work, human and beyond, in practice. Such caring for matters in practical undertakings is key to olivicoltura. I have through observant, at times practical, engagement in the work come to conceptualize this as artful care. Chapter three details “the importance of sensory embodied acts of cultivation” (Gagnon 2021: 21) in pruning olive plants. It situates the seamless working of hands and eyes and notes how l’arte fare olio means caring for the beyond human work at hand. That is, for the growth habit of olive plants. Bourdieu (1990: 89-90) writes in his logic of practice that “[P]ractical sense ‘selects’ certain objects or actions, and consequently certain of their aspects, in relation to ‘the matter in hand’…it distinguishes properties that are pertinent from those that are not”. I make use of this notion to situate the artful care of practitioners. I do so by thinking it relationally to Giorgio’s explanation of potatura and Ingold’s (2013) notion of properties as generated through the experiential realities of craftsmen; but also with relations (Strathern 1995) and the scales by which things (Raffles 2011) and geosocialities (Swanson and Palsson 2016) may occur approached in caring practice. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 154) notes how generative movements may cause endurance and change; she denotes change as “ethos creation” and concludes that “[I]n caring, an ethos creates its ethics”. I take stance in all this in my aim to expand the concept of art to include the emic awareness of how touches of people and wonders of nature come together through generations of cultivating the landscape in particular ways. Art is in this sense a caring inheritance of practice; the anthropology of practicing artful care an emic-laden broadening of its narrative.”
A key point in my thesis, however tacitly incorporated as it occurs in it, is that the craft of anthropology interconnects the craft of collaborators. The third concept that I advance speaks to this. Situated craft is namely both an account of the work undertaken by collaborators and of how it has been understood, subsequently also narrated, through the work of mine (as a feminist scholar, sensuous anthropologist, and photographically embedded poet). I make in the thesis a case-in-point reference to the skilled persona of Giorgio, a key collaborator, to introduce situated craft. I argue how his way of sensing a branch and the oil to become of its fruit influence his pruning practices. Giorgio is an agronomist and inheritor of a long-standing legacy of olive oil. Both of these dimensions of his work and heritage situates his practice in certain ways. He is also a first level taster, which means that he is certified to evaluate the quality of oils. Taking all of these together in writing the first part of my introduction, I realized his situated craft. In turn, my concept. In letting his story curiously take shape through my critically engaged words, I took stance in the concept of enskilment by Ingold (2000). He develops an analytical frame for thinking organism–in–environment dynamics, and the concept is used to explain why and how certain activities take place in particular settings by specific people. I wrote in connection to this about the situated perception of practice that Cristina Grasseni (2007) advances conceptually as skilled vision. I felt that neither really explored or captured the fundamentally sensuous horizon of Giorgio, nor the artful way that his skills come together in time and place making oil. The void of emphatic enough framing of the forces of materials, elements, and heritage that his work entails did its part to why I needed to develop my own idea from these established concepts too. I was at this point clear to me that his situated perspective must be emphasized alongside the skills, forces, and techniques of the body with which it is engaged in practice. Through my Swedish mother tongue, I connote the word craft with the term kraft [force], and I am now certain that this is what sparked the idea of adding craft to situated, making situated craft a key concept (and methodological approach).
References
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