Senior Research Seminar with Professor Liisa Malkki (Stanford University)

Senior Research Seminar with Professor Liisa Malkki (Stanford University)Making/Thinking: Processes of Making Be And The Imagination in Metalwork

 

This paper is part of a ten-year multimodal fieldwork project into material practices of handwork and making as forms of thinking and imaginative knowledge production. It examines the vital importance of tactility and the other senses, as well as bodily engagement with materials and materiality, in practices of critical making, of “making be”. The first 3 years of the fieldwork for this project demanded intensive training in metalwork with a master smith. This paper is a report of that period. Since then, the project has required systematic training in other modes of making: typography and graphics; fibre work; and clay work. Each of these fields has opened up new dimensionalities of being in the world and of thinking newly about the possibilities of a truly multimodal anthropological fieldwork practice.