Making and Growing

Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts

Elizabeth Hallam, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Hallam, Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409436423
• eBook ISBN: 9781317102571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms, the book calls this distinction into question, examining the implications for our understanding of materials, design and creativity. Grounding their arguments in case studies from different regions and historical periods, the contributors to this volume show how making and growing give rise to co-produced and mutually modifying organisms and artefacts, including human persons. They attend to the properties of materials and to the forms of knowledge and sensory experience involved in these processes, and explore the dynamics of making and undoing, growing and decomposition. The book will be of broad interest to scholars in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, history and sociology.

1 Making and Growing An Introduction

Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam

DOI: 10.4324/9781315593258-1

The action of Make: production, creation, construction, preparation; conversion into or causing to become something.

The action of Grow: to arise or come into existence, to manifest vigorous life, to flourish, to increase gradually in size by natural development, to increase in quantity or degree, to advance towards maturity.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

You come across a craftsperson, bent over his or her work. ‘What are you making?’ you ask. ‘A pot’, says the potter, as he gently presses hands against soft clay. ‘A fine, inlaid table’, says the carpenter, as he carves out a groove for a mortise joint with his chisel. ‘Mittens for my daughter’, says the seamstress, as she sews pre-cut pieces of prepared animal hide with fine, even stitches. ‘A basket’, says the basket maker, as she weaves lengths of willow in and out, in and out, in a mesmeric rhythm. Pot, table, mittens and basket are all examples of what people in contemporary western societies commonly regard as artefacts. In making an artefact, it is supposed, you start with some raw material such as clay, timber, hide or willow, and end at the point when this material has taken on the form intended for it. Indeed the question ‘What are you making?’ is one that invites an answer in terms of an end product, an objective, the completion or fulfilment of which will bring the project to a close. All the activity seems to be concentrated there, in the interval between start and finish, each of which presupposes the other: for how do you know when you have finished unless you have an idea, at the outset, of what is to be made; and how can you get started without some conception of an end?

Makers know better, however. They know that the simple answer, designed perhaps to fend off your unwanted attentions as a meddling onlooker, leaves almost everything about their craft unsaid, and implies a certainty about ends and means that, in practice, is largely an illusion. Making things, for them, often feels like telling stories, and as with all stories, though you may pick up the thread and eventually cast it off, the thread itself has no discernible beginning or end. The story of clay does not begin with the potter, since the material he throws on the wheel has already had to be dug out from the ground and kneaded so that it is sufficiently pure and of the right consistency. Before that, it was sedimented through the deposition of water-borne particles, over eons of geological time. And when does the story end? On leaving the pottery, the life of a pot has scarcely begun: think of all the hands or heads that will carry it and the substances it will hold until, cracked and discarded, it is returned to the earth. Even this does not rule out the possibility that it might, one day, be unearthed by an archaeologist and pieced together from the fragments, only for its life to continue as a museum exhibit. ‘Finishing’, in short, is but a moment in the life of the pot: a rite of passage, perhaps, where it crosses a threshold from preparation to employment.

So too with the carpenter, who works with timber that has first had to be harvested from living trees, prior to a lengthy process of seasoning, and whose handiwork never ceases to respond to heat and humidity, long after it is allegedly finished. As it takes in moisture from the atmosphere and, in turn, releases it, wood continues to ‘breathe’ (Marchand, Chapter 10). Is the table, then, a complete artefact or just a phase in the life-history of a piece of wood? And where wood comes from trees rooted in the earth, skins come from the animals that inhabit it. They require long and laborious preparation before the seamstress can even commence her sewing. Once the mittens or other garments are sewn, they will clothe a human life just as they had once clothed the living animals from which they were taken (Wachowich, Chapter 7). And lastly, the basket-maker’s willow – which must be fresh, green and supple to be worked – will have first been cultivated and harvested, and will take root and sprout once again if reinserted in the earth (Bunn, Chapter 9). In effect, rather than standing over nature and effecting a change, from a seemingly raw to a completed or ‘artefactual’ state, makers of every profession appear to stand at the threshold, in amongst the stuff and tackle of their trade, easing the way for their ever-varying, protean material to pass from one form of life to another. Clay passes from earth-life to life as a pot, wood from arboreal life to living room, skin from animal shank to human hand and willow from bed to basket. As in rites of passage, one can discern in making the three phases of separation, in which the material is removed from its former life, of transition, in which it is treated in the seclusion of the workshop, and of reincorporation into the settings of its subsequent career.

It is customary, in many settings, to say that trees and shrubs, like garden plants, grow in the soil, and that skin and fur grow on the bodies of animals. Such growth amounts to a material accumulation, as the living plant or animal absorbs or ingests substances from earth, air and water, incorporating them into its own flesh through the expenditure of energy ultimately derived from sunlight. This accumulation can assume astonishing proportions, as in the caterpillar of the Bombyx mori moth which, in 38 days from hatching and through the energetic consumption of mulberry leaves, multiplies in size by a factor of 10,000 (Field, Chapter 2). What the caterpillar creates, in this manufacture of bodily tissue, is itself. Growth, in this sense, is a process of self-making or autopoiesis. The philosopher A.N. Whitehead coined the term ‘concrescence’ to describe the way in which, in life, beings continually surpass themselves (Whitehead 1929: 410). Concrescence is not necessarily confined, however, to the organic domain. Inorganic crystals, too, can grow, when immersed in supersaturated solution. Mineral deposits grow through the accumulation of sludge (Paton and DeSilvey, Chapter 12). And in the domain of the social – what in an earlier anthropology was known as the ‘superorganic’ – people grow too, not just in strength and stature but in skill and wisdom. Indeed, to take growth or concrescence as the fundamental condition of beings and things in a world that is always surpassing itself is effectively to dissolve the boundaries between the inorganic, the organic and the superorganic. People, animals, plants and pots are all immersed in the process, and all play their part in it.

But if things grow, they are also grown. The gardener grows plants and the forester trees; in Australia, sheep-farmers call themselves wool-growers. The Bombyx mori caterpillar, better known as the silkworm, is grown in the production of silk. In each case what the grower does is to contribute, in some way or other, to setting up the conditions under which the growth of the things in question proceeds. Growing plants, for example, is a matter of ensuring the adequate provision of nutrients and water, and eliminating competition from weeds, coupled perhaps with a degree of control over ambient temperature and exposure to light. To grow wool one must see to the needs of sheep, principally for pasture and for protection against predators and parasites. To grow silk entails unremitting labour in keeping the worms supplied with the only food they will eat, namely mulberry leaves, and removing excrement (Field, Chapter 2). We have a word, ‘nurture’, to refer more specifically to this sense of growing as care and nourishment. An ancient yet seemingly entrenched discourse on ‘nature and nurture’ seeks to partition responsibility for the manifest forms of things between intrinsic drivers and environing conditions, and it is one that we routinely extend to people as well. Parallels between raising plants and raising people are commonplace, and not only in the West. Japanese foresters say that the trees in their care require stern discipline if they are to grow strong and resilient, which is why those on the weather sides of mountains, exposed to the fierce storms of winter, are always superior to those on the lee sides (Knight 1998: 200).

Making in Growing, Growing in Making

Our concern in this book is to think again about making and growing. Both words are among the richest and most polysemic in the vocabulary of English, and the last thing we want is to be sidetracked into arid questions of definition. Making can be defined in any number of possible ways, all of which serve well enough in particular contexts, and the same goes for growing. To make a bed means something quite different in the home from what it does in the joinery; and neither has much to do with what it means, for example, to make hay, fire, peace, love or an observation. And growing a beard is not quite the same as growing potatoes, or growing weary. Our interest is not in the meaning of each word taken in isolation, but in the possibilities opened up by their juxtaposition. Why, to take one example, would a farmer choose to say that he is growing grass on his meadows, rather than making it, but that in harvesting the crop and stacking it to dry he is making hay and not growing it? What subtle inflection of meaning is encrypted in this distinction? Perhaps it has something to do with nouns and verbs. The predicate of making, let us say, is nominal in form. It is an entity or an event. But the predicate of growing is verbal; it is a ‘going on’. Thus what the farmer brings about in the meadow, when he grows grass, is ‘grassing’ – the photosynthetic process which binds carbon dioxide in the air with moisture absorbed in the soil and taken up though the roots, in the presence of sunlight, to fuel the formation of plant tissues. And that is precisely what is brought to a halt when the crop is harvested to make hay. By analogy, the financier grows his investment, but makes a lot of money by cashing it in!

It would seem, in short, that making is to growing as being to becoming. So which comes first? Does growing span the intervals between fixed states of being, or does making punctuate the movements of a world in perpetual becoming? The first alternative is already presupposed in the conventional language of continuity and change, epitomized in what could be called the ‘my, how you’ve grown’ syndrome. As a child, you recall, a distant relative would make infrequent visits to your household, and every time, on first clapping eyes on you, she would exclaim ‘my, how you’ve grown’. She remembers you only as she saw you last, and seeing you now she is struck by the change. Growth, for her, bridges the gap between then and now, and accounts for the difference between your previous and present appearance. But for you and for those around you, growth is going on all the time: you do not register it as change, or as a transition from A to B, but as life itself. Yet this life of yours was punctuated by significant events: looking back, you remember them as formative moments in your career that contributed to making you the person you are today. And this takes us back to the idea of making as akin to a rite of passage, and to our characterization of the maker as one who stands at the threshold, easing the persons and materials in his or her charge across from one phase of life and growth to the next. Writing of initiation rites in East Africa, Turner observes that ‘to “grow” a girl into a woman is to effect an ontological transformation; it is not merely to convey an unchanging substance from one position to another by a quasi-mechanical force’ (Turner 1967: 101–2). Likewise, according to this second alternative, the maker effects an ontological transformation in the material, not through the application of exterior force to inert substance, but through intervening in a play of forces and relations both internal and external to the things under production.

In rethinking making and growing, our aim is not to substitute for a view of the world in which everything is made – for example, nature by God, artefacts by man – one in which everything grows and is grown. The question is rather one of ontological priority. In a classic essay, Martin Heidegger (1971) asked this question of building and dwelling. Do we dwell in a world that is already built, with its structures in place for us to occupy, or can we build only because we already dwell, in body and mind, in the world in which we find ourselves? Heidegger’s purpose was to reverse the prioritization of building over dwelling bequeathed by modern thought. We can do the same for making and growing. What would happen if we were to think of growing not as something that takes place in the space intermediate between God-given nature and man-made society – as the organic was once conceived to be sandwiched between the inorganic and the superorganic – but as the very ground of becoming from which the forms of the artificial take shape? What if we were to suggest, adapting Heidegger’s turn of phrase (ibid.: 148, 160, with original emphasis) by substituting ‘grow’ for ‘dwell’ and ‘growing’ for ‘dwelling’, that ‘we do not grow because we have made, but we make and have made because we grow, that is because we are growers … Only if we are capable of growing, only then c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Making and Growing: An Introduction
• 2 Silk Production: Moths, Mulberry and Metamorphosis
• 3 Between Nature and Art: Casting from Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe
• 4 Anatomopoeia
• 5 Artefacts and Bodies among Kuna People from Panamá
• 6 Designing Body-Pots in the Formative La Candelaria Culture, Northwest Argentina
• 7 Stitching Lives: A Family History of Making Caribou Skin Clothing in the Canadian Arctic
• 8 Gardening and Wellbeing: A View from the Ground
• 9 Making Plants and Growing Baskets
• 10 Skill and Aging: Perspectives from Three Generations of English Woodworkers
• 11 Movement in Making: An Apprenticeship with Glass and Fire
• 12 Growing Granite: The Recombinant Geologies of Sludge
• Index