“Writing practices” and writing “practices”

Most discussion about the writing practices of data collection still tends to be abstract and prescriptive rather than reflective of actual experiences. Anthropologists have by now long recognised that the ethnographic process is in fact a series of acts of translation and co-production. Wood emphasises how the skilled and embodied processes through which weavers learn and make their work sit in a dynamic relationship with the expectations and desires of their audiences and larger historical–social environments. The cognitive, embodied, subjective, and tactile nature of craft skill and practice means that research into it is more likely to suffer from such maladies: perhaps like a kind of culture-bound illness of craft researchers. Through paying attention to these moments of difficulty, the people may ultimately find new research strategies and forms of documentation that will better allow the reader to deal with the challenges that they represent.