ABSTRACT
The artisan's inherently speculative approach effectively responds to the contingencies of persons, places, materials, and things. This also means that artisanal ‘making’ does not conclude in finished objects but is rather carried forth as a momentum into proceeding creations. Likewise, ethnographers learn by doing, and are open to the unexpected, or the hidden, unseen, and even the invisible or unseeable. To see the unseeable means the artisan or ethnographer must follow a shifting horizon composed of multiple perspectives. For these reasons, many studies of skilled making are problematic; they over-emphasise sight, along with (contradicting) concepts of flow and tacit knowledge. These theories of embodied knowing distort thinking-in-doing and freeze lines of thought into point-to-point or connecting-the-dots and transform following-lines into regimes or dogmas. This chapter challenges these ideas through reflections on long-term fieldwork with the coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, México. Studying alongside master makers as an apprentice from inside the centre of practice, one soon learns that knowing-in-doing means seeing-as-feeling the unseeable through movement. How do techniques of the body follow (invisible) lines that grow, wander, travel, or trace? How are artisans more like moles or rhizomes moving sightless and unseen? How does artisanal methodology offer new ways to rethink ethnographic seeing and feeling, knowing and being? How can reconceiving the internal and external transform observant participation by helping us observe the unseen through reflexive participation and intersubjectivity?
