Making Knowledge E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 576

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Making Knowledge presents the work of leading anthropologists who promote pioneering approaches to understanding the nature and social constitution of human knowledge. The book offers a progressive interdisciplinary approach to the subject and covers a rich and diverse ethnography.

• Presents cutting-edge research and theory in anthropology
• Includes many beautiful illustrations throughout
• The contributions cover a rich and diverse ethnography
• Offers a progressive interdisciplinary approach to the eternal questions concerning ‘human knowledge’
• Contributions by leading scholars in the field who explore a wide range of disciplines through an anthropological perspective

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue Book Series

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on contributors

Preface

Introduction: Making knowledge: explorations of the indissoluble relation between mind, body, and environment

1 ‘Practice without theory’: a neuroanthropological perspective on embodied learning

Virtuoso imitation in New York

Mimetic learning and imitation

Imitation without intention

Habitus as embodied knowledge

‘Embodied knowledge’ in place of ‘habitus’

Conclusion

2 Learning to listen: auscultation and the transmission of auditory knowledge

The ‘lub dub’

Before listening

Non-sense

Focusing

Listening alone together

Speaking sound

Harder hearing

Conclusion

3 The craft of skilful learning: Kazakh women’s everyday craft practices in western Mongolia

Methods, data and theory

The domestic setting for everyday learning

Learning and assessment

Making skill-based assessments with one’s fingertips

Incremental complexity

Reflective practice

Conclusion

4 ‘Something to talk about’: notation and knowledge-making among Central Slovak lace-makers

‘Choreography’ of the hands: how rhythm creates form

Becoming ‘skilled’: pedagogies of the village and the classroom

‘Generative’ vs ‘imitative’ craft

Conclusion

5 Embodied cognition and communication: studies with British fine woodworkers

Introduction: toward a theory of embodied cognition

Multiple modes of communication

Dynamic syntax and embodied communication

Conclusion: modelling mimicry and shared performance

6 Footprints through the weather-world: walking, breathing, knowing

On the ground

Along the path

In the wind

Know as you go

7 Unconscious culture and conscious nature: exploring East Javanese conceptions of the person through Bourdieu’s lens

Domination

From France to Java

Embodied difference

‘Nature’

Conclusions

8 Learning to weave; weaving to learn . . . what?

Preservation, promotion, and development

Innovation and improvement

Suitability and comfort

The problem is not with the loom; it is with weaving

Learning to weave, learning to be a weaver

The production and transmission of knowledge

Conclusion

9 Reflections on knowledge practices and the problem of ignorance

General orientations

An anthropology of ignorance

Bodily knowledge and craftwork

Knowledge and ignorance in French colonial practice

Conclusions

10 Anthropology of knowledge

Grounded cognition

The cognition of possession

From fieldwork to fMRI?

Index

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue Book Series

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the principal journal of the oldest anthropological organization in the world. It has attracted and inspired some of the world’s greatest thinkers. International in scope, it presents accessible papers aimed at a broad anthropological readership. We are delighted to announce that their annual special issues are also repackaged and available to buy as books.

Volumes published so far:

Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment, edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand

Islam, Politics, Anthropology, edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares

The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge, edited by Matthew Engelke

Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, edited by Elisabeth Hsu and Chris Low

Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind, edited by Roy Ellen

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland

Originally published as Volume 16, Special Issue May 2010 of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Making knowledge : explorations of the indissoluble relation between mind, body and environment / [edited by] Trevor H.J. Marchand.

p. cm.—(Journal of the royal anthropological institute special issue book series ; 4)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3892-8 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-4443-9148-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4443-9146-6 (ePDFs)

 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Mind and body. 4. Cognition and culture. I. Marchand, Trevor H.J.

BD450.M26265 2011

306.4′2—dc22

2010040512

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Notes on contributors

Emma Cohen is a researcher in the Research Group for the Comparative Cognitive Anthropology attached to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. She has conducted fieldwork on an Afro-Brazilian religious tradition in Belém, northern Brazil, focusing primarily on concepts, behaviours, and practices associated with spirit possession. Her publications include The mind possessed (Oxford University Press, 2007). She is currently researching the ways people (across cultural and religious contexts) represent the relationship between minds, bodies, and persons. Research Group for Comparative Cognitive Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Roy Dilley is Professor of Social Anthropology and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of St Andrews. He specializes in the study of Haalpulaaren (Tukulor) social organization and culture in Senegal, and published Islamic and caste knowledge practices among Haalpulaaren, Senegal: between mosque and termite mound (Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 2004). Other research interests include anthropological theory and cultural economics, and he is editor of two thematic collections entitled Contesting markets: analyses of ideology, discourse and practice (Edinburgh University Press, 1992) and The problem of context (Berghahn, 1999). Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK.

Greg Downey is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University. His research bridges cultural anthropology with biological and neurological studies of sport and embodied knowledge. He is author of Learning capoeira: lessons in cunning from an Afro-Brazilian art (Oxford University Press, 2005) and co-editor (with M. Fisher) of Frontiers of capital: ethnographic reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006). He is completing a monograph on The athletic animal with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has conducted fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology, and social organization in the circumpolar North; evolutionary theory in anthropology; biology and history; the role of animals in human society; and issues in human ecology. He is currently exploring the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture, and his latest book is Lines: a brief history (Routledge, 2007). Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeeen, UK.

Dr Nicolette Makovicky is Lecturer in Russian and Eastern European Studies at the School of Interdisciplinary Areas Studies, University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology at University College London, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her research considers the impact of socio-economic reforms and EU-integration on historically embedded modes of economic activity in Central Europe. Examining the political and social context of production and innovation in textile crafts since the early 20th century, she has a particular theoretical interest in processes of value creation, work ethics, entrepreneurialism, gender and citizenship in post-socialist society. An external tutor in the department of the History of Design at the Royal College of Art since 2007, she has also published on the relationship between craft, modernity and ideology, as well as memory and the domestic interior. Wolfson College, Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Trevor H.J. Marchand is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he teaches the anthropology of space, place, and architecture. He has conducted fieldwork with masons in Arabia and West Africa, and as an ESRC Fellow (2005-8) he studied training and practice among English woodworkers. His research focuses on embodied cognition and communication and he is the author of Minaret building and apprenticeship in Yemen (Curzon, 2001) and The masons of Djenné (Indiana University Press, 2009), and co-producer of the documentary film Future of mud (2007). Department of Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK.

Anna Odland Portisch is a Postdoctoral Associate of SOAS, where she also received a Ph.D. for her studies among the Kazakh of western Mongolia. Her research examines learning and skill-based knowledge in felt-craft production, and her work is focused on apprenticeship, cognition, and identity formation. She recently curated an exhibit on Kazakh textiles for the SOAS Brunei Gallery, and was an ESRC Fellow at Brunel University, where she lectured on anthropological and psychological perspectives on learning. School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK.

Konstantinos Retsikas is Lecturer in Anthropology of South East Asia at SOAS. His research focuses include phenomenology, identity, and Islam. Recent publications include ‘The Semiotics of violence: ninja, sorcerers and state terror in post-Soeharto Indonesia’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (2006) and ‘Knowledge from the body: fieldwork, power, and the acquisition of a new self’ in Knowing how to know: fieldwork and the ethnographic present (eds) N. Halstead, E. Hirsch & J. Okely (Berghahn, 2008). Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK.

Tom Rice received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Goldsmiths and was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a Teaching Fellow at the University of Exeter. His research explores the sonic environments of institutions and the types of auditory knowledge used and applied in these settings. He has published articles on ‘auditory anthropology’ in Anthropology Today, Critique of Anthropology, and The Senses and Society. Room 313, Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.

Soumhya Venkatesan is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Based on fieldwork with Muslim mat-weavers in South India and carpet-weavers in Bukhara, her research focuses on materiality and the relationship between people and things, and explores issues of embodiment and the transmission of skills. Her present research on Indian potters and sculptors of venerated idols considers the relation between makers and objects. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her doctoral research. Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Preface

Trevor H.J. Marchand

School of Oriental and African Studies

In 2005, with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), I commenced a new project with woodworkers in East London that built upon my previous studies of building-craft knowledge and apprenticeship in Yemen and Mali. In addition to the fieldwork and theoretical investigations into motor cognition and embodied forms of communication, the project also allowed me to invite anthropologists with shared interests in skill-learning to present their research in a seminar series and a subsequent one-day workshop, both hosted at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2007. This volume grows out of the proceedings of that programme, initially titled The transmission of knowledge.

It is now three decades, and longer, since the works of Foucault (1977), de Certeau (1984), and especially Bourdieu ushered ‘everyday knowledge and practice’ to the fore of the social science agenda, and this focal concern is retained by the volume contributors. But while participants in the seminars and workshop gratefully acknowledged Bourdieu’s seminal role in excavating Mauss’s ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1934) and developing a theory of habitus (Bourdieu 1977), they were invited to consider the limitations of ‘practice theory’ (e.g. Bloch 1991; Farnell 2000; Jenkins 1992) in advancing their own empirically based accounts of learning, situated practice, and embodied cognition. A project statement and set of questions framed the seminar programme. In particular, participants were asked to consider: How might social anthropologists effectually chronicle manifestations of human knowledge that ‘exceed language’, including bodily and perceptual practices? In which ways can ‘know-how’ be cogently described and represented in our ethnographic accounts? How, and under what circumstances, are new practices taken up and honed? And by what combination of cognitive and social mechanisms do they become stabilized as ‘memory’ or ‘habits’ that are consciously or unconsciously enacted? What drives improvisation in activity? And how do innovations in practice become publicly recognized and validated? How are different domains of knowledge co-ordinated within the mind-body complex, thereby resulting in both intelligent and intelligible performance? How are different ways of knowing variously communicated and interpreted by participating members within fields of practice? And crucially, how might we appropriately account for the necessary but ever-changing relations of learning to the physical and social environment in which it unfolds?

The follow-up workshop provided an intensive forum for seminar speakers and an invited panel of discussants to present and debate issues of theory and method, and consider anthropology’s current and future contributions to the enduring, cross-disciplinary study of human knowledge. During the roundtable session we critically assessed the word ‘transmission’ and debated its appropriateness for accurately describing the myriad of complex ways in which knowing is articulated, acquired, and transformed in situ, involving communities of actors engaged in co-ordinated (and sometimes discordant) practices and communication. In the social sciences, ‘transmission’ has been regularly employed as a shorthand for the combined processes of teaching and learning, or for the operations of socialization and enculturation across generations, and several contributing authors rightfully use the term in this manner. But it can also bear problematic connotations of mechanical reproduction and homogeneous transferral of facts and information from one head (or body) to another. Lave has argued that ‘transmission and internalization [are not] the primary mechanisms by which culture and individual come together’, proposing instead ‘that activity, including cognition, is socially organized and quintessentially social in its very existence, its formation and its ongoing character’ (1988: 177). In wanting the title of our collective work best to convey our shared aims in representing learning and knowing, I have renamed the volume Making knowledge. ‘Making’, I feel, more accurately captures the processes and durational qualities of knowledge formation; and rather than being suggestive of hierarchical and methodical transfer, it fosters thinking about knowledge as a dialogical and constructive engagement between people, and between people, things, and environment.

This special volume of the JRAI features the works of leading scholars who promote bold, innovative approaches to understanding the nature and social constitution of human knowing. Notably, the theme, ‘making knowledge’, is not an intended revival or perpetuation of the ‘anthropology of knowledge’ subfield that emerged in the 1970s. Rather, the collection represents a concerted investigation into the core activity of all anthropology: namely ‘the making of knowledge about the ways other people make knowledge’. The ethnography, theory, and methods presented expose possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration and lay solid foundations for further investigations into embodied cognition and conceptual thinking. Ideas are couched in long-term, worldwide fieldwork; and a host of intriguing commonalities and differences emerge across the collection. All the authors are deeply unified in their concern for the appropriate study and representation of knowledge in its diverse forms and expression. Knowledge is explored both in its various modes of articulation (i.e. motor, sensory, and propositional) and in its range of social, cultural, and material manifestations. Conclusively, knowledge and practice are not fixed; nor are they hostage to unconscious reproduction. Rather what the chapters demonstrate is that our human knowledge, like our physical bodies, is constantly reconfigured in the activities and negotiations of everyday work and life.

I thank the seminar speakers and workshop discussants for their co-operation in realizing this project, and the ESRC for their generous funding (Res-000-27-0159). The workshop discussants included Emma Cohen, Anna Portisch, and Charles Stafford. Chapter contributions from Cohen and Portisch are included in this collection. Regrettably, Rita Astuti, Susanne Kuechler, and Harry West had to withdraw from publication, but their individual contributions to the seminar series were highly valued. I also thank Richard Fardon and my fellow colleagues at SOAS for their support throughout the seminar series; and the students of SOAS and other colleges who regularly attended and enlivened the discussions with shrewd insights and penetrating questions. Finally, I thank Julia Elyachar and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of the volume, and Justin Dyer for his meticulous copy-editing.

REFERENCES

BLOCH, M. 1991. Language, anthropology and cognitive science. Man (N.S.) 26, 183-98.

BOURDIEU, P. 1977. An outline of a theory of practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: University Press.

DE CERTEAU, M. 1984. The practice of everyday life (trans. S. Rendall). Berkeley: University of California Press.

FARNELL, B. 2000. Getting out of the habitus: an alternative model of dynamically embodied social action. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6, 397-418.

FOUCAULT, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Smith.

JENKINS, R. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.

LAVE, J. 1988. Cognition in practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge: University Press.

MAUSS, M. 1934. Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie 32, 3-4. (Reprinted in his Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1936.)

Introduction: Making knowledge: explorations of the indissoluble relation between mind, body, and environment

Trevor H.J. Marchand

School of Oriental and African Studies

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, book 2, chapter 1: 31-2

In the above quote, Aristotle concisely describes the combination of nature and nurture that is us. As a species, we are composed, in part, of innate capacities – perceptual, cognitive, and motor – that engage us with the world of which we are a part, and thereby enable us to survive, adapt, and thrive. By contrast, ‘arts and virtues’ are not endowed, but realized and reinforced in practice. Anthropological studies of knowledge have traditionally concentrated on the by-products of nurture, consigning the discovery of ‘nature’ to the pure and applied sciences. Recent decades, however, have witnessed growing porosity in the boundaries that divide the social and natural sciences. There is widening recognition that nature or nurture should not be studied in isolation, for their interdependence is not trivial, but vital; and the processes by which they operate, and the effects that they yield, are not bounded, but coalesce.

The principal aim of this volume is to progress anthropology’s thinking about human knowledge through exploration of the interdependence of nurture with nature; and more specifically the interdependence of minds, bodies, and environment. In their individual pursuits on the topic, several authors delve variously into the fields of cognitive studies, philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, biology, and medicine, and others join their anthropological method to history, classical philosophy, and emergent ideas from the field of craft. While emphases on the roles played by environment and context in the processes of knowledge-making vary between the chapters, all draw the sentient, practising, tool-wielding body into the core of their work. The reader should not anticipate definitive answers to eternal questions of ‘How do we know?’ and ‘How do we come to know?’ But it is hoped that the ideas, ethnographic case studies,and anthropological perspectives presented here will abet deeper, better-informed questioning about knowledge, and stimulate interdisciplinary approaches to the study of learning, thinking, and practice.

I begin this introductory chapter with an overview of the (often conflicting) positions that dominated the ‘anthropology of knowledge’ in the closing decades of the last century. I continue with a discussion of the recent convergences between cognitivists, phenomenologists, and practice theorists that have generated a more inclusive space for ‘thinking about knowing’ in complex and productive ways. The contributing chapters exemplify this new general direction. And though the authors may diverge in theory and method, there is mutual recognition that knowledge-making is a dynamic process arising directly from the indissoluble relations that exist between minds, bodies, and environment.

In the following section, I reflect on my own studies with craftspeople in order to introduce several key issues regarding apprenticeship as both a mode of learning and a field method. In doing so, my aim is not to promote apprentice-style fieldwork as the paramount method for inquiries into knowledge. Rather, apprenticeships of one form or another were taken up by the majority of authors included in this collection, and as a field method it is explicitly geared toward the study of learning in practical contexts where verbal communication is frequently (but not categorically) of secondary import to physical skill and display.

Next, the idea that ‘cognition is individual’ is established, but it is equally conceded that ‘making knowledge’ is a process entailing co-ordinated interaction between interlocutors and practitioners with their total environment. As a minimum, the latter consists of artefacts, tools-to-hand, and raw materials; space, place, and architecture; paths and boundaries; time-frames and temporal rhythms; light, darkness, and weather. As sentient beings, we are engaged with a changing array of environmental factors at every given moment, all of which impact the thoughts we think and the actions we produce. But it would be near impossible to take comprehensive stock of the role played by every contextual element in an account of knowledge-making. Thus, not surprisingly, the authors bring focused attention to those they deem salient to the particular working, learning, or life-world environment under study: for example, the stethoscope, lace-making diagrams, woodworking tools, weaving looms, yarns and needles, the ground on which we walk, and the winds that blow as we journey. Before concluding with a summary of the scope and contents of this volume, I briefly present a theory of ‘shared production’ in knowledge-making that draws upon recent literature in cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. Making knowledge, after all, is an ongoing process shared between people and with the world.

Anthropology and knowledge: toward an interdisciplinary approach

The study of knowledge is the sine qua non of social and cultural anthropology. What people say and do, what they believe, and how they organize and classify the phenomena of their worlds have constituted the core foci of the discipline throughout its manifold developments (D. Boyer 2005: 141-2; D’Andrade 1995: 5-7). The post-structural turn advanced deliberations on the relations of knowledge to power, and promoted broader definitions of ‘discourse’ that encompass practice and performance in addition to spoken and textual exchange. But despite decades of meticulous study about the ways in which knowledge is articulated and made manifest in innumerable contexts, the majority of anthropological analyses stop short of providing satisfying explanation (or approximations) of how learning, knowing, and practice actually occur, take shape, and continually transform with situated bodies and minds. Fieldworkers customarily record what their subjects know, but they are less inclined to delve into questions of how we come to know as humans. The relevance of Malcolm Crick’s observation made more than a quarter-century ago endures: ‘[A]nthropologists speak of the creation of knowledge, of thought, and consciousness without detailing any processes or mechanisms’ (1982: 291). Both the phenomenological experience that accompanies doing and the human biological processes – anatomic and neurological – that are integral to learning and practice are sidelined by mainstream anthropology (Downey 2005: 207). And despite emphases on issues of agency, resistance, and performance, ethnography tends to omit histories of individuals and their unique accretion of experience; their physical, perceptual, or cognitive developments, as well as the corresponding limitations or deteriorations; and the particular dynamics that animate nested communities of practice within larger social groupings. Collectively, these give rise to the ongoing ways that individuals acquire skill and enhance ‘personal style’. Harris appositely proposes a pursuit of ‘knowing as an ongoing process’ rather than ‘knowing as certainty’ and, in so doing, he urges us to ‘move away from methods understood as formal procedures and tools … [toward] an artisanal approach to anthropology’ (2007: 4 and 12; see also Ingold 2008: 85-6).

In the early 1980s, Crick called for the forging of ‘serious links with the neurobiological sciences’ in order to progress anthropology’s study of knowledge (1982: 296). This challenge was echoed by Victor Turner (1983), who promoted interdisciplinary synthesis, arguing that recent work emerging from neurology was potentially beneficial to our understandings of religious belief and ritual. By the 1980s, the brain sciences were delivering results that promised imminent answers to age-old questions about memory, belief formation, and consciousness, and some anthropologists took these new ideas and findings on board. Charles Laughlin, for example, coined his approach to the study of consciousness ‘neurophenomenology’ (Laughlin, d’Aquili & McManus 1990). Though thought-provoking, the theory and method provided no substantial insights into the workings of the brain, and had minimal impact on mainstream anthropology. Other more resolutely cognitive anthropologists, such as Scott Atran (Atran, Medin & Ross 2006), Pascal Boyer (1999; 2001), Lawrence Hirschfeld (2006), Dan Sperber (1994; 2001), and John Tooby (Cosmides & Tooby 1994), have merited considerably more attention – both appreciative and critical – for their bold, formal approaches to the mechanics of thought and activity. These authors borrow variously from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary theory in order to assemble models of ‘massive modularity’, to map domain specificity, and to describe special-purpose cognitive devices. These structures and mechanisms purportedly enable us to have mental states, intentions, and beliefs; process environmental data and construct meaning; and economically execute the broad range of tasks and skills that are within our capacities. Pascal Boyer acknowledges, however, that ‘cognitive science is most helpful in describing and explaining “ideational culture”, that is, the set of mental representations entertained by members of a particular group that makes that group different from other’ (1999: 206). But by limiting the focus to ‘ideational culture’, and by underestimating the mutual dependencies between internal apparatuses and the world in which people live and the acting bodies with which they learn, cognitive modelling constricts description and explanation, and risks presenting only caricatures of human knowledge. In a deliberate turn against ‘internalization’, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s influential study on situated learning advocates, by contrast, a thinking about learning as ‘increasing participation in communities of practice [that] concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (1991: 49).

Similarly, Tim Ingold has countered such cognitivist approaches, maintaining that human beings are not devices for processing ‘information’. Rather, knowledge consists foremost of skill and is realized in ‘fields of practice’ (2001: 114). Ingold’s position is not adverse to biological explorations of our humanity per se, but he cautions ardently against scientific theory that entrenches a dualism of ‘inner self’ versus ‘public world’. He likewise makes a formidable case against the neo-Darwinian theory underpinning much cognitive theory in its ‘classical’ guise, disclosing the circularity of its reasoning. ‘Organic form is generated, not expressed, in development’, he states, and it arises as ‘an emergent property of the total system of relations set up by virtue of the presence and the activity of the organism in its environment’ (2001: 122). With compatible reasoning, Christina Toren insists that ‘the human mind cannot be analogous to a set of computer programs’, but rather ‘our cognitive processes are constituted through our embodied engagement in the world and predicated on inter-subjectivity’ (1993: 467, original emphasis). Living and knowing are the same thing, she claims, so the biology of cognition (and the possible existence of some forms of domain specificity) is necessarily a manifestation of historically located subjects (1993: 466). Moreover, in the case of the ‘historically located’ field researcher, Harvey Whitehouse considers how it is that we are susceptible to our hosts’ ways and understandings of appropriate behaviour. He writes against the idea that it is ‘the outcome of a shared “bridgehead” of genetically determined modules’ (1996: 113). Rather, what we and our hosts share in common is a ‘capacity for learning, against a rich and intricate background of prior learning’ (1996: 113).

At the turn of the millennium, Emily Martin took a decidedly contrasting position to that voiced by Crick and Turner, warning of the threat posed by ‘neuroreductionism’ to social and cultural anthropology, and its power to efface ‘context’ from our understandings of what it is to be human. She writes that in computational neuroscience models (e.g. Churchland & Churchland 1998; Lakoff & Johnson 1999) ‘individuals communicate, brain to brain, like nodes in a network, not like elaborately interwoven threads in a vibrant cultural tapestry’ (Martin 2000: 584, my emphasis). To be sure, reductionism in any guise renders only impoverished accounts of how people come to know what they know. The variability, dynamic nature, and situated-ness of knowledge demand theoretical complexity and careful consideration of the multiple (possibly innumerable) factors that exist both within and without the individual, and of the spatial and temporal arrangements in which these interact. But I contend that imagery such as ‘interwoven threads’ and ‘cultural tapestry’ lends no greater clarification to questions about the communication and learning of knowledge than do the computing metaphors used by many cognitive researchers and neuroscientists to theorize about the brain. Martin’s window onto the neurosciences is slightly polemical, failing to credit influential works of leading cognitive scientists and philosophers – Putnam (1988) and Searle (1998) excepted – who take context and complexity seriously, and whose findings, in turn, might actually enrich the field of our own inquiries.

In their writings on the ‘embodied mind’ nearly a decade earlier, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch already noted that the cognitive sciences have ‘slowly drifted away from the idea of mind as an input-output device that processes information toward the idea of mind as an emergent and autonomous network’ (1991: 151). Cognitive philosopher Jerry Fodor, author of the modularity thesis (1983), argues adamantly against ‘massive modularity’ (as formulated in, for example, Cosmides & Tooby 1994, and Sperber 1994) and the over-extension of computational models to explain ‘mind’. While maintaining a modular explanation limited to perceptual apparatuses, he insists that cognitive science (and thereby cognitive anthropology) must live with the fact that most thinking is non-modular; and that our higher-order thought processes are very likely inexplicable, at least within the computational paradigm (Fodor 2000). As an attuned anthropologist to these debates, Whitehouse notes that ‘most recent models in neuroscience and artificial intelligence describe relatively domain-general processes of learning’ versus innate, hard-wired domains (2001a: 5). Supported by Gerald Edelman’s neurological research (1992), Whitehouse challenges the modularity thesis that ‘child development follows a genetically specified schedule’ (1996: 105). Instead, he argues that the ‘developmental sequence results from the reinforcement of certain firing patterns through experience’, and thus ‘engagement with the environment is not a process of instruction (as in conventional computer-like processes), but of natural selection’ (1996: 106, original emphasis). ‘Emergentist’ alternatives in cognitivism, such as that proposed by Andy Clark, are credited with taking the kind of encompassing, non-reductive approach that may be necessary (Ingold 2001: 114). The goal of Clark’s thesis is to expel residual Cartesianism from cognitive studies by espousing a theory of ‘extended mind’ that accounts for interacting brain, body, and physical and social environments in equal measure (Clark 1997).

Mauro Adenzato and Francesca Garbarini are a part of that new school of neuroscience which is expanding its frontiers and searching for explanations beyond computational models. They confidently assert that second-generation cognitive sciences have surpassed the functionalist metaphor of the brain as a syntactic information-processor akin to the Turing machine. Acknowledging ‘that cognitive processes are rooted in the neuroanatomic substrate’, they follow the ideas of Clark and of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in describing mind as ‘an emerging property of the brain’ (Adenzato & Garbarini 2006: 748). Drawing on a spectrum of source material that includes Rizzolatti and Craighero’s research on the mirror-neuron system (2004), Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception (1962), and Ingold’s studies of skills (2000), Adenzato and Garbarini explore the indispensable relationship between an organism and its environment. Their perspective of ‘embodied cognition’, shared by a cross-disciplinary community of scholars, views mind as a biological system rooted ‘in body experience and interwoven with action and interaction with other individuals’ (2006: 748). The biological, environmental and social are thereby integrated within a unified framework of analysis. In an analogous manner, neurologist Frank Wilson’s meticulous study of the hand (1998) marshals neuroscience, anatomy, psychology, and his own ethnographic accounts of puppeteers, musicians, and other practitioners to construct a lucid portrayal of the evolution and skilled intelligence of human hands at work in various settings and on diverse tasks.

So, despite Martin’s anxieties over computational analytic hegemony, anthropologists should derive satisfaction from the fact that our practice of fieldwork and studies with people, and our principal concerns with history, context, and environment in the study of ‘being human’, have taken root in prominent quarters of the brain sciences. An inclusive research space that productively accommodates ‘neurological, psychological, and sociological theories’ (Whitehouse 2001b: 221) is on the horizon, offering precious opportunity for academic collaboration on enduring questions about human ways of learning and knowing, the nature of agency and consciousness, and the mind-body relation. Oliver Sacks was a key emissary in emphasizing the value of ethnographic fieldwork in neurological studies of mind (e.g. 1996). In exchange, anthropologists pioneering the subfield of neuroanthropology are exploring the potential contributions that neuroscience can make to our discipline. Paul Mason (2007) eloquently states that the focal concern for neuroanthropology is ‘the reiterative causality between brain, culture and the environment’.

Greg Downey (2005; 2007; this volume) and I (Marchand 2001; 2003a; 2007a; this volume) have also probed the productive interface between anthropology and neuroscience in our respective studies of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira and building crafts. Current research on the aforementioned mirror-neuron system – a network of brain areas in the pre-motor and parietal cortices that is activated by both producing and recognizing the same object-orientated movement performed by the self or others (Arbib & Rizzolatti 1997; Rizzolatti, Fogassi & Gallese 2001) – has enabled us to conceptualize more clearly the sorts of imitative learning that we and our fellow practitioners engage in either in the roda (capoeira ring) or at the construction site. Studies of motor cognition, and especially research into the relation between motor execution and simulation (e.g. Jeannerod 1994; 2006), have propelled our individual thinking about the mind-body complex; the fluid composition and mechanics of ‘intelligent action’ and the ‘uncoordinated’ trials of novices; and the nature of embodied communication and the cognitive interface between ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’. In short, scientific learning about the brain in combination with ethnographic field data gathered by observation, interview, or direct phenomenological engagement with environment, actors, and activities can mutually contribute to the formulation of new questions in the search for more nuanced understandings of human being, learning, and knowledge.

Rita Astuti, too, has asserted that participant observation, linguistic proficiency, and a systematic method for recording ethnographic data are essential, but not entirely sufficient, for exploring and describing the ways knowledge is manifested. To sustain the ‘innovative spirit with which Malinowski created our discipline’, she advises that we ‘be prepared to advance our methodology by co-operating with other disciplines’ (2001: 443). In studies with the Vezo of Madagascar, Astuti’s novel insights into the relation between implicit and explicit knowledge arise from a constructive engagement with cognitive psychology (2001: 432). But her call for interdisciplinarity, I believe, is not about relegating anthropology to partnerships solely with branches of the brain sciences. Rather, more generally, anthropologists are urged to be critically aware and responsive to the methods and findings of the other disciplines with equally vested interests in human learning and knowing such as philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and educational studies. In doing so, we stand to benefit from different but complementary expertise and thereby enhance our own understandings and explanations. For certain, there is no singular trajectory in this pursuit, or ideal interdisciplinary arrangement. Learning about learning and coming to know about knowing are colossal tasks beyond the scope of any one enterprise. Frederick Barth concluded his Mintz Lecture on An anthropology of knowledge with a similar message: ‘[T]o unravel more of the processes and dynamics of the human varieties of knowledge, it seems that we have an unending program of discovery and analysis ahead of us’ (2002: 11).

An aim of the present volume is to contribute to this programme of discovery and analysis. Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris have noted that ‘ways of knowing’ include both ‘modes of knowing’ and ‘pathways to knowing’ (2007: 327). The ideas formulated here engage reflectively with both. Each chapter advances anthropology’s engagement with ‘knowing’ in a novel manner through cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, innovative field methodology, or the charting of unexplored territory in the discipline – and in several cases, a daring combination of all three. A mode of engaged anthropological inquiry stands firmly at the core of the work. Anthropology, Ingold reminds us, is not a study of, but a study with: ‘Immersed with [people] in an environment of joint activity, [anthropologists] learn to see things (or hear them, or touch them) in the ways their teachers and companions do’ (2008: 82). Indeed, for several contributing authors, an apprentice-style method of ‘learning about practice by practically doing’ nurtures truly ‘embodied’ discoveries about the temporal, social, and physical processes that are inseparable from acts of learning and communicating knowledge (see also Dilley 1989; O’Connor 2005; Sinclair 1997; Stoller 1989; Wacquant 2004). ‘How do we know?’ (or not) and ‘How do we come to know?’ are driving questions in these explorations. There is nothing new in either the quest or the questions posed – in fact they are refreshingly timeless. What are new are the ways and the contexts in which the contributors investigate situated and inter-subjective practices in ‘making knowledge’.

Doing to learn and learning to do

In a previous incarnation as an architecture student, I had the good fortune of working summers as a building inspector, and later of overseeing the construction of my residential designs. During those work experiences, I was regularly struck by the way that site carpenters carried out often-complicated tasks with a Spartan economy of words – and typically with minimal reference to my carefully prepared plan drawings. I recall observing a junior carpenter eyeballing his supervisor for cues while endeavouring to co-ordinate the pattern of his own activities after those of the old man. I, too, enjoyed making things, and my surfacing queries about the carpenters’ on-site learning resonated with my as-yet-crude musings about intelligent practice and ‘knowledge beyond language’. I therefore came to anthropology to research these questions and have worked ever since alongside craftspeople, learning their skills while learning about their learning and their lives. Having apprenticed with Yemeni minaret-builders in the city of (2001) and Malian mud masons in the town of Djenné (2009), I commenced a new study in 2005 with carpentry trainees at the Building Crafts College in East London (Marchand in preparation). In this section, I reflect upon aspects of my own field experiences and theoretical interests in order to draw out some of the general issues and questions about apprenticeship, learning, and the transmission of knowledge that are addressed more comprehensively and site-specifically in the contributing chapters.

Two years of fieldwork at the Building Crafts College consisted of daily participation as a trainee in the fine woodwork programme. In addition to National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) and a City & Guilds Diploma, I earned a solid skill base in joinery and furniture-making, and became a member of a professional community of craftspeople. A principal objective of the study was to arrive at a clearer understanding and description of the sort of embodied cognition and communication I was witness to, and regularly immersed in, at the workshop. An apprentice-style method, like that used by Roy Dilley, Greg Downey, Nicolette Makovicky, Anna Portisch, Tom Rice, and Soumhya Venkatesan (all this volume), squarely situated me as a subject within my study, and compelled me to reflect carefully upon my own ways of learning and exercising what I was coming to know as a practitioner. It also plunged me into the daily interactions and social politics at college; and engaged me directly with co-operative strategies and competitive struggles between trainees. As a member of that group, I was subject to college authority and subordinate to the expert status of my instructors, and to the advanced know-how of some colleagues.

Unlike a mason’s apprenticeship in Yemen or Mali, my London training was segregated from the everyday operations and economies of a construction site. As paying students, we attended college to learn; and, as college employees, instructors were there primarily to teach. Categories of persons, and their corresponding roles and duties, were more starkly delineated and differentiated than those on the Arabian and West African construction sites, where making buildings – not qualified individuals – is the priority. In those locations, the collective activity of constructing with homogeneous palettes of building materials, a limited kit of tools, and uncomplicated methods generates a more porous division of labour in practice, if not necessarily in job titles and rank. College tasks, by contrast, were mainly individual: each student making, for instance, his or her own casement window, panel door, or staircase; and by the second year producing pieces of furniture and resolving individual designs with different arrays of timbers, tools, and cabinetry methods. Timescales for the completion of projects also varied depending on the trainee’s levels of aptitude, motivation, and physical stamina, as well as on their commitments outside college. Such circumstances contributed to less interdependence among trainees and a more competitive individualism than witnessed among site apprentices and labourers.

The college curriculum is formally structured in accordance with government criteria, and includes separate theory components, textbooks, and written examinations. The vast majority of technical teaching and learning was nevertheless achieved with a paucity of oral explanation or textual instruction, and more readily relied upon demonstration, imitation, and repeated practice. Words and utterances were regularly used for deictic purposes: to highlight the salient aspects of a tool-wielding practice; to stress particular bodily positions and postures; or to draw attention to aspects of a tool or qualities of the timber being worked. This does not imply that the workshop was a Carthusian atelier – silent but for the industrious tapping of tools. By contrast, the buzz of conversation was constant, and biting banter ricocheted from one workbench to the next. As I was born and raised in Canada, my fieldwork was also a steep socialization into ‘English’ culture, conduct, and humour. Indeed, like Yemeni and Malian building sites, the workshop was not merely a space for technical learning; it was an arena for competing masculinities and femininities, and a forum for assertions of ethnicity and race, as well as social class. Michael Herzfeld aptly notes that, in qualifying ‘apprenticeship’, any attempt to separate the social from the technical ‘is in some sense a Cartesian convenience’ (2007: 96). Talk across workbenches and over canteen lunches frequently included deliberations on craft ethics, environmental issues, and utopian ideals of satisfying work; and these concerns informed the ongoing constructions of identity, practice, and aspirations of the men and women I trained with (Marchand 2007b; also Wacquant on pugilistic pedagogy, 2004: 111).

Like college pupils, Yemeni and Malian apprentices also pay for training, but with the free or cheap labour they supply, not cash. Disciplined comportment and obedience improve prospects of establishing a career in the trade and of inheriting work and clientele. Acquiring skills is mandatory for any who wish to stay employed or ascend the ladder of command, but for apprentices and masons alike, learning is largely a by-product of participating in the work programme and instances of explicit teaching are exceptional. As Howard Becker (1972) observes, apprentices have responsibility in organizing their own curriculum and recruiting necessary teaching or guidance from superiors. Motivated individuals must identify what they need to know (including craft technique, business skills, appropriate conduct, trade secrets, powerful benedictions, etc.), strategize their physical position in proximity to mentors, and tactically seize opportunities that provide access to practice. In Djenné, a degree of questioning is tolerated, but less so in , where a rigid patriarchal order curtails easy interaction between junior and senior members of the work team, and questioning is interpreted as a challenge to authority (also Goody 1989: 252-3). Navigating access to the right examples and discovering how things are done are valuable skills in themselves, and are mastered only through years of determined experience, as any field researcher knows.

In the eyes of my minaret and mud mason colleagues, the prized fruits of their labours are the structures that they make, the financial remunerations they receive, and the mason-subjects formed under their guidance. Though they seldom ‘teach’ in an overt manner, they readily acknowledge the instrumental need to equip younger generations with skills in order to sustain a qualified workforce, perpetuate craft know-how, and preserve the architectural heritage of their respective towns (both of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites).1 By way of example, a site master’s activities communicate skilled know-how and, above all, adeptness in calculation and production. The workplaces that they organize and manage offer site opportunities for ambitious individuals actively to learn by doing – and by doing, earn a living. In similar ways that the dance studio (Dyck & Archetti 2003: 10), the capoeira roda (Downey 2005), and the gymnasium (Wacquant 2004) are places of ‘collective teaching’, so too is the building site. Activities are carried out in a co-ordinated manner between individuals, and each participant is a ‘potential visual model’ (Wacquant 2004: 113). Building-craft apprentices effectively ‘steal with their eyes’ (Herzfeld 1995: 139-40; 2004: 107) and other perceptual senses, and improvise imitative and experimental responses to the surrounding tasks and activities that demand their involvement (Hallam & Ingold 2007). Practice and understanding unfold dialogically with one another, and as a new posture, gesture, or action is ‘apprehended-comprehended’, it serves as ‘the support, the materials, the tool that makes possible the discovery and thence the assimilation of the next’ (Wacquant 2004: 118).

The ways that we, as humans, ‘apprehend’ and ‘comprehend’ physical activity begs further investigation. As anthropologists in the field, we can bear witness to, or experience first-hand, physical practices; and we can draw upon the conceptual knowledge we gain about the context in which they occur to enrich our interpretations of those phenomena with social, cultural, and historical significance. But by relying solely on participant observation, oral accounts, or ethnographic reasoning, we limit our insights into the cognitive and anatomical processes involved in learning and doing. In my estimation, detailed sketches are needed – like those composing this volume – of the mutual dependencies between biology, society, and environment. In drawing variously upon expertise from the brain sciences, linguistics, philosophy of mind, psychology, or phenomenology, many of the present chapters strive to understand what goes on ‘inside’ us without losing sight of what happens ‘outside’. The ideal places for this exploration, as the authors demonstrate, are sites of everyday practice and communication. Together, practitioners and interlocutors structure their places of learning through activity and dialogue in the spaces they define and organize; along their pathways of movement (Ingold); and with the tools, implements, and artefacts they use, create, and destroy. Making knowledge – or ignorance (Dilley) – is a constant process in capoeira training (Downey), auscultation classes (Rice), and carpentry workshops (Marchand); within the homes and communities of syrmaq-makers (Portisch), lace-makers (Makovicky), and weavers (Venkatesan; Dilley); and in everyday constructions of ethnicity and distinction (Retsikas).

Since Michael Coy’s edited work on ‘apprenticeship’ as both research topic and field method (1989), apprenticing as a means of inquiry has been safely secured within anthropology’s canon of standard practice, spurring some to pursue topics that complement personal as well as scholarly interests. Apprenticing and direct participation enable academics to acquire some level of first-hand experience, and possibly ‘expertise’, in the practices that they theorize and write about. Regular schedules of participation in (sometimes monotonous or gruelling) exercises allow reflection on one’s own learning, mistakes, and progress, as well as the pains and pleasures that accompany physical labour. In the exchange of ‘toil’ for ‘ethnographic knowledge’, fieldworkers are exposed viscerally to the learning environments and livelihoods of fellow workers, craftspeople, and athletes; and they are able to interact more competently within the multiple mediums and nuanced forms of communication that are employed in the transmission of skills and comportment (Marchand 2008). By adopting an explicitly apprentice-style method, or by actively engaging in the practices they study (see, e.g., Lee & Ingold 2006; Retsikas 2008), the contributors to this volume have developed their individual understandings about learning and knowing by ‘doing’ what they study. Cultivating such understanding, as they convincingly convey, demands long immersion, perceptual and kinaesthetic awareness, careful reflection, persistent questioning, and a constant probing of the complex and multiple factors that constitute any field of practice.

Shared productions of knowledge

In his foreword to Lave and Wenger’s study Situated learning, William Hanks remarks that ‘the apprentice’s ability to understand the master’s performance depends not on their possessing the same representation of it, or of the object it entails, but rather on their being engaged in the performance in congruent ways’ (1991: 21, my emphasis). The idea that we learn through participation was embraced in studies of learning (Pelissier 1991) and apprenticeship, but the cognitive manner in which mental representations are individually constructed by co-practitioners and interlocutors has received comparatively little attention from anthropologists.

A theory of ‘mental representations’ (including acoustic, visual, olfactory, haptic, motor, propositional, etc.) implies that stimuli received from our total environment are cognitively and corporeally mediated. For example, in contemplating the processes of cultural transmission, Maurice Bloch writes that it ‘is not a matter of passing on “bits of culture” as though they were a rugby ball being thrown from player to player. Nothing is passed on; rather, a communication link is established which then requires an act of re-creation on the part of the receiver’. And this act of re-creation, he goes on to suggest, entails an integration of the original stimulus ‘into a different mental universe’ (2005: 97). Bloch is not suggesting that we are separated from the social and physical environment in which we exist; but rather, how we know and what we can know or experience of the world (including ourselves) is always and necessarily a product of our species-specific perceptual apparatuses, cognitive architecture, and biological constitution, which, together, give us life and enable us to survive. Ethnographic studies of knowledge-making aptly demonstrate that perceptual abilities are sharpened or deteriorate during the course of people’s lives, livelihoods, and pastimes (Grasseni 2007; Rice, this volume); synaptic networks and neural pathways are established and modified through practice, experience, disease, or ageing (Downey 2005; Whitehouse 1996); and anatomical constitution is (re)configured, minimally, in activity (or lack thereof) (Ingold, Retsikas, Venkatesan, this volume). The fact that biological constitutions evolve, change, and decline buttresses the claim that experiencing (and thus learning and knowing) is individual, and is likewise temporally situated (Rapport & Harris 2007). But at the same time, acts of making knowledge are always and necessarily realised in interaction with others and with the world.

In the passage below, I offer a straightforward example of the way that knowledge is made, updated, and constantly reconfigured in the flux of everyday interactions, and I briefly outline a possible explanation of the individual cognitive processes involved in what has been coined a ‘shared utterance’ (Purver & Kempson 2004). My aim more generally is to convey the sorts of theoretical concerns that inspired this project and that are taken up in various and divergent ways by the contributing authors.

In linguistics, the term ‘shared utterance’ describes the phenomenon whereby one interlocutor interrupts the verbal utterance of another in order to complete a statement or, more saliently, an ‘idea’ (i.e. mental representation) that both speaker and hearer are incrementally constructing in the real time of dialogue. A sample of conversation from the college carpentry workshop where I trained illustrates this point:

Instructor (): I think oak is the right choice for this design. The trouble with oak is it’s …

Trainee (): Expensive! Yes, I realized that when I went to price it up.

Speakers and listeners fluidly swap roles in this manner, whereby the producer of an utterance becomes the parser (whose cognitive task is incrementally to assign context-dependent interpretation to the words of a string as they are received on-line) from the moment that the listener takes over as speaker. In constructing an interpretation of an utterance as it is received on-line, it is possible (and normally desirable from the speaker’s perspective) that the hearer is entertaining a representation that matches the communicative intent of the speaker. But the representation that a hearer constructs may also differ or diverge, thereby establishing the possibility for carrying the dialogue in new directions unanticipated by the initial speaker. In other words, if the parser interjects to take over as producer of the string, like in the above example, he may complete the statement with information that was not in the speaker’s mind to convey. For instance, the instructor might have intended to complete her string with ‘… a bugger to work with’, referring to the extreme hardness of oak timber. The trainee, however, cuts her off to complete the utterance with ‘Expensive!’, thereby laying the groundwork for a shift in conversation. The potential consequences of this are multiple. Interlocutors may, for instance, carry on talking ‘past one another’ without achieving parity in the semantic representations they individually construct, and ultimately failing to ‘communicate’. Alternatively, the initial speaker, in this case the instructor, may choose to supply additional information to correct her interlocutor’s intervention and re-establish her own intended message and meaning in the dialogue context. Or, interestingly, the first speaker may modify the initial ‘idea’ that she intended to communicate by parsing the input supplied by the intervening interlocutor and thereby constructing a revised or alternative representation. If so, then the dialogue may take a turn following the second speaker’s lead, and so on. This last possibility, in particular, demonstrates that though the cognitive processes of interpretation are individual, the production of knowledge, as mental representations, is social. Knowledge is realized on-line: in communication and, more generally, in interaction. The dynamic nature of interaction presents constant opportunity for new and possibly divergent ways of thinking and speaking about things. Thus dialogue is not an articulation of fixed things already known, but rather it is a kind of ‘knowing in progress’. The state of ‘knowing’ is one of constant flux, update, and transformation; and careful study of this reveals the underlying processes of social and cultural change.

The phenomenon of ‘shared utterance’ occurs frequently in spoken dialogue, but, equally, what might be coined ‘shared performance’ (Marchand 2007a) describes numerous practices. In obvious examples of playing sports, dancing, working, or making things together, practitioners regularly co-ordinate their activities, and at some point, mid-action, one may intervene and successively complete the motions of another’s goal-directed sequence. In other words, co-practitioners swap roles as observers and generators (or parsers and producers) in performing tasks. We all regularly do so in the co-ordinated (and sometimes not-so-co-ordinated) tasks and activities that we do together, and that we have been doing since our days in the childhood nursery. Probing this seemingly mundane, everyday occurrence unleashes a multitude of questions concerning the ways that shared activity, and consequently shared productions of knowledge, is achieved. What are the processes (cognitive, motor, and otherwise) that enable an observer to leap to the conclusion of what their co-practitioner has in mind to do, intercept the activity, and complete the task? And how, like shared utterance, do parser-cum-producers introduce new directions to the motor-based interpretations that co-practitioners are simultaneously constructing as they work together, and thereby introduce change to skilled practice? And what role, too, does the environment of tools, materials, fellow actors, artefacts, and physical setting play in the interpretation and generation of activity?

The chapters in this work variously address such issues and questions through a combination of ethnography and theory. The theoretical reflections are not necessarily couched in cognitive, linguistic, or neurological research, but the individual approaches demonstrate a shared concern with the dynamic interaction between practitioners and their environment, and the consequent productions of knowledge and skill. The five chapters that comprise the first half of the volume present in-depth explorations of the mutually constituting activities of teachers and learners, and the role of the learning environment in forming pedagogies, identities, values, attitudes, and performance.

Teaching and learning

In the first chapter, Greg Downey directly addresses issues of motor understanding and imitation with his ethnographic research on capoeira. As a long-time practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian martial art, his own experiences and careful studies of training squarely challenge Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus. Downey writes that hard divisions between propositional and embodied forms of knowledge are part of the same Cartesian legacy that propagates the assumption that perception and action are coded separately by the brain, and co-ordination of the two systems requires some type of overarching system, like the habitus (Bourdieu 1977; 1990). With lucid references to current neurological research, Downey carefully examines individual strategies of transmission and enskilment among his fellow practitioners to reveal the complexity and challenge involved in mimesis. Conscious and concerted effort is displayed, for instance, by the Mestre (teacher), who scaffolds student attempts to imitate by physically adjusting their postures and movements. For students, acquisition of capoeira techniques is characterized by its ‘slow pace, inconsistency, and piecemeal’ nature (p. 31). While some aspects of imitation are hard-earned, others proceed more automatically and entirely ‘without theory’. Mirror-neuron theory demonstrates that we perceive motor activity in the same neural functions as we ourselves act, therefore requiring no symbolic mediation. In Downey’s view, this makes everyday automatic activity a poor candidate for the sort of unifying treatment proposed by the habitus, and he calls its existence into rigorous questioning. The theory of a ‘unified structuring structure is elegantly modernist and functional’, he observes. In reality ‘the human brain and body … are baroque, cobbled together by evolution, biological processes, and individual development’ (p. 32).

Tom Rice, too, emphasizes diversity in individual effort and creative strategizing that take place within a community of professional practitioners. As an ‘honorary observer’ and participant among medical trainees in London, Rice, in his research, focuses on the art of auscultation in cardiology. He carefully considers how biological constraints impact the transmission and acquisition of perceptual skills, and how training transforms perceptual apparatuses and modes of attention. Learning to listen and to identify types of heart murmurs form the core of stethoscopic training, and Rice’s ethnography throws into relief a field of sensory practice and expertise little explored in anthropology. In contrast to more familiar depictions of the objectifying ‘medical gaze’, we learn that stethoscopic listening produces a sensation of being penetrated by the patient like a ‘sonic draught reaching the head’ (p. 46). Learning to tune one’s ear to the body is highly individual and, like Downey’s Mestre