Touching tacit knowledge: handwork as ethnographic method in a glassblowing studio

Abstract

This article draws from an enacted ethnography conducted over four years in a glassblowing studio, where I immersed myself in the learning process to become a glassblower. Specifically, it uses the visceral ethnographic experience of handwork in glassblowing to unpack the micro-meanings of hand coordination and examine Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge ‘from the body’ (Ingold, 2000; Pink, 2009; Wacquant, 2015: 5). Methodologically, handwork is the ‘point of production’ by which to reflect upon Polanyi’s analytical concepts (Wacquant, 2015: 5). Broadly engaging anthropology’s study of the relation of gesture and form both within and outside of glassblowing studios and the sociology of skill, this analysis brings the body’s embedded experience and constitutive power to bear on analyses of tacit knowledge to reveal how handwork is itself constitutive of form and meaning (Atkinson, 2013b; Harper, 1987; Keller and Keller, 1996; Malafourius, 2008; Marchand, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2001; Sudnow, 1978). It also grounds a reinterpretation of the proximal term in Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge.