ABSTRACT
Introduction When I arrived at my fieldwork location at Colli Verdi in winter 2008, I undertook the task of vine apprenticeship; I was to learn how to work with and to care for vines.1 This effort was part of my doctoral research: a more-than-human ethnography of organic wine making in Northern Italy (Krzywoszynska 2012). The immense awkwardness and alterity of facing a vine for the first time in this context and asking: ‘who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ (Haraway 2008, p. 221) was one of the pivotal moments of my research, and led me to engage with feminist and materialist writers as I sought to understand both this event, and the developing relationship between the vines and myself. In this chapter, I suggest that the process of becoming skilled in vine work can be thought as an emergence of a new self, understood after Haraway (2008) as an open network of meaningful relations. Haraway’s perspective on the ‘self’ moves away from the idea of an inherent and fixed identity, and towards relational and mutable subjectivities that emerge from, and are constituted by, relations with human and nonhuman others. In this reading, skill can be seen as a reworking of a self through the development of new, meaningful relations with animate and inanimate nonhuman ‘others’.
