Craftwork as Problem Solving: Ethnographic Studies of Design and Making

Abstract

Trevor Marchand is a well-known anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His research has traversed areas of making from Minaret building and apprenticeship in Yemen to research at the Building Crafts College, London where he apprenticed himself on a course in fine woodwork. Validating his research through practice, he has become a touchstone for many writers on the crafts. In 2013, he convened a two-day workshop at the “Making Futures” conference in Plymouth, entitled “Craftwork as Problem Solving,” and the outcomes and papers given at this have formed the outline of this volume. The book has thirteen chapters written by “a cross-disciplinary group, consisting of designer makers, artists, an architect, a filmmaker and several anthropologists of craft,” who were invited to “examine the ways that problems are encountered, searched for, conceived of, and resolved in craft” (p. 1). Marchand describes how the term “Craft” is polythetic: the subjects in this book may be described as such, sharing “some but not necessarily all the properties” (p. 8) that Marchand attributes to the crafts: it is indeed very wideranging, from the craft of training Suffolk Punch horses to a chapter on the place of craft in building conservation. Marchand states that his “longer term objectives as an anthropologist (are) to better grasp how craftspeople come to