Sarah E Jackson

The workshop “Crafting as World Making: Relationality, Language, and Knowledge Sharing” intentionally opens up the limits of what crafting as a cultural concept provides for anthropological theory. Archaeological literature has frequently placed the role of crafting within discourses of craft specialization, anchoring it to value related to production, consumption, distribution, and exchange, and in turn, technology. Workshop participants challenge these limits and are invited to discuss crafting instead as a way of making, knowing and being in the world. Through utilizing examples from various different time periods and across global landscapes, participants reimagine questions of being and belonging, and other affective modalities related to how we articulate meaning, in text or image or speech, and what it means to make as a way to produce knowledge about the worlds we inhabit. Discussions during the workshop will center on three topics: the first being crafting as relational. This theme expands the many human/nonhuman/multispecies dimensions to crafting and how the act itself creates, sustains, nurtures, and transforms the affective ways of being and belonging to each other. Secondly, our conversations will center on crafting as meaning making; this theme looks to crafting meaning in material, language, landscapes, and spiritual/cosmic understandings of self within worlds created and lived in. And finally, we consider crafting as coproduction of knowledge and space of knowledge sharing.