118 research outputs found
The Minarets of Sanaa
No full textIn his mid-eighteenth-century poem titledThe Mosques of Sanaa,¹ the author Ali ibn al-Hasan al-Khafanji tells the tale of a visit paid by the Great Mosque of the city to the tiny ʿAddil Mosque, located in the former Ottoman suburb of Bir al-ʿAzab. The Great Mosque is personified as a character of wealth and distinction, and impoverished ʿAddil makes a desperate plea for improved conditions of his neglected state. In response, the Great Mosque forecasts that one day ʿAddil will be endowed with all the necessary amenities, including his own minaret andmuʾazzin(person who performs the call to prayer).²..
‘Buildings That Fill My Eye’:
No full textArchitecture is one of Yemen’s greatest cultural achievements. A staggering array of building styles and traditions has evolved in remarkable harmony with the diverse topographies and challenging climatic conditions of southern Arabia. Every setting possesses a distinct ‘sense of place’ that results from a mixture of native ingenuity and the supplies of natural building materials to hand. In Yemen, the arrangements and formal languages of space, place and architecture are deeply infused with local histories, social hierarchies, tribal relations, religious identities and gender practices
Trevor Marchand On Craft
No full textIt’s an unusual approach for an academic: a hands-on approach. Literally a hands-on approach. Trevor Marchand is an anthropologist interested in how information about crafts is transferred from expert to novice. This has led him to Nigeria, Yemen, Mali, and East London and has required him to use his hands to build, among other things, minarets and homes of mud bricks.Marchand, currently at SOAS, University of London, started his studies — in architecture — at Canada’s McGill University, which paved the way for field research on mud-brick building in northern Nigeria. That experience in turn spurred Marchand’s focus on an anthropological approach to architecture, a crafts-oriented approach to anthropology, and now study of how all of this plays out in a neuro-scientific context.This unusual approach has also allowed him to build up a pile of awards resulting from his investigations. For example, his 2009 monograph on The Masons of Djenné, written after his rise from apprentice to skilled craftsman in this Malian city, won the Elliot P. Skinner Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology, the 2010 Melville J. Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association, and the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute. Just last year he was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, an honor that recognizes exceptional work accomplished in the field.In this interview, philosopher Nigel Warburton asks about Marchand’s field work, looking at what ties these disparate locales together and what sets them apart, not just in techniques but how craftspeople approach their work and how it influences them.But as he tells Warburton, Marchand has a larger agenda behind his scholarship. “I think it’s extremely important for a general public to gain appreciation for the kind of skill and the diversity of knowledge that goes into producing something with the body,” he explains. “I think for far too long we’ve made that division between manual labour and intellectual work, and it’s something that goes back centuries. Leonardo da Vinci made that distinction between manual labour and intellectual work, and that distinction too between craft and fine art. And so, it’s been kind of relegated to the side-lines; it’s been marginalised and unfortunately vocational education – not just here in the UK but in other parts of the world – is something that children go into or are steered into when their peers or adults feel that they’re not academically inclined.
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The Art of Mud Building in Djenné, Mali
No full textAn introduction to the documentary film Masons of Djenné by the film's director, Emeritus Prof. Trevor H.J. Marchand of Social Anthropology at the school of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London
Craftwork as Problem Solving: ethnographic studies of design and making
No full textThis volume brings together a cross-disciplinary group of anthropologists, researchers of craft, and designer-makers to enumerate and explore the diversity and complexity of problem-solving tactics and strategies employed by craftspeople, together with the key social, cultural, and environmental factors that give rise to particular ways of problem solving. Presenting rich, textured ethnographic studies of craftspeople at work around the world, Craftwork as Problem Solving examines the intelligent practices involved in solving a variety of problems and the ways in which these are perceived and evaluated both by makers and creators themselves, and by the societies in which they work.With attention to local factors such as training regimes and formal education, access to tools, socialisation and cultural understanding, budgetary constraints and market demands, changing technologies and materials, and political and economic regimes, this book sheds fresh light on the multifarious forms of intelligence involved in design and making, inventing and manufacturing, and cultivating and producing. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography, as well as to craftspeople with interests in creativity, skilful practice, perception and ethnography.Contents: Foreword, Rosy Greenlees; Introduction: craftwork as problem solving, Trevor H.J. Marchand. Part One Practical Problem Solving in Craft: The prototype: problem work in the relationship between designer, artist, and gaffer in glassblowing, Erin O’Connor and Suzanne Peck; Producing Suffolk punch horses: craftsmanship with sentient media, Kim Crowder; Making ‘sense’ in the bike mechanic’s workshop, Tom Martin; Garbage-in, better garbage-out: crafting solutions on the cutting edge of digital videography, Peter Durgerian; Mastering mimicry: strategies of transference in print-based art, Jenn Law; From ‘in our houses’ to ‘the tool at hand’: breaching normal procedural conditions in studio furniture making, David Gates; Weaving solutions to woven problems, Stephanie Bunn. Part Two Social, Economic, and Philosophical Dimensions in the Problems of Craftwork: Problem solving and strategizing problems: social strategies and material fixes in Agotime weaving, Niamh Clifford-Collard; Feeling a way through: affective problem solving in dressmaking, Rebecca Prentice; Thinking through materials: embodied problem solving and the values of work in Taiwanese ceramics, Geoffrey Gowlland; The problem of the unknown craftsman, Malcolm Martin; The place of craft in building conservation: the craftsperson as problem solver and builder, Giovanni Diodati; ‘Textile thinking’: a flexible, connective strategy for concept generation and problem solving in interdisciplinary contexts, Rachel Philpott and Faith Kane; Afterword, Malcolm Ferris. Index
The Art of Andrew Omoding
No full textExplorations in Creativity with Andrew Omoding: artist, maker and raconteurCraftspace’s approach to exhibition development is driven by a process of enquiry and action research. In this instance, we collaborated with ActionSpace in London, which supports artists with learning disabilities, to create a residency for Andrew Omoding. The purpose was to enable Andrew to express his creativity and make new work in a larger space than was available to him in the ActionSpace studio. A shared aim was also to create a critical framework for the appreciation of Andrew’s creative process and its outcomes. We were keen to explore what we could learn from Andrew and how this might contribute to thinking and knowledge about craft and making. We commissioned social anthropologist Trevor Marchand to acquire a holistic understanding of and insight into Andrew’s creative practice through study, observation and documentation. The findings are represented in the exhibition in a film and the catalogue essay. We chose Trevor because of his previous field research into various craft practices. For example, he undertook a fellowship to study craft knowledge and vocational training with carpenters and furniture makers in England and he studied apprenticeship learning among minaret builders in Yemen and mud masons in Mali. His interest in “focusing on the complex relation between the human brain, hands and tools, as well as on problem solving with tools” has been highly pertinent to this action research project. Andrew’s residency took place at ACAVA one day a week for nine weeks between September and October 2015. It culminated in a sharing event at ActionSpace to display the scale of work produced and to reflect on his achievements. Andrew’s family, friends and other ActionSpace artists attended
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