“Crafted Forms, Skillful Doing” invites cross-disciplinary conversations on crafting that take into account the processes by which things are made, and the contingent entailments of crafted objects. Foregrounding metals and minerals, a set of materials that can be considered both resource and product, we ask how breaking away from a phased imagination of object life cycles (production, consumption/use, and re-use/discard) might enable new insights into the significance of craftwork—as an activity and as a site of reflection. 

Metals and minerals encompass a vast range of materials that are extracted from the earth, expertly processed, transported across distances, and transformed into objects used, repurposed, stashed away, and appropriated anew. We ask how the highly variable realm of objects crafted from metals and minerals can invite novel considerations on the importance of form—in haptic, visual, and aesthetic terms. In what manner might a historically minded approach towards a material’s qualities and uses enrich the discourse on economies of extraction, thrift, and waste? How could the journeys of metals and minerals, as materials and artifacts alike, breathe new life into familiar discussions of trade and circulation? How might an investigation into the politics of apprenticeship, and the relationship between craft and community, help redefine questions of tradition and political economy?

Craftwork—and, increasingly, artisanal knowledge—have grown as domains of study across disciplines. Anthropologists, archeologists, historians, art historians, and scholars of design each bring discipline-inflected sets of concerns and orientations of thought and method to bear on this particular realm of activity. The symposium “Crafted Forms, Skillful Doing” invites scholars to think across and through the tensions of their training to discuss what makes craftwork distinct, meaningful, and exciting to think about.