Object Lessons: Making, Knowing, and Growing Things

Abstract

Object Lessons: Making, Knowing, and Growing Things Lina Hakim (bio) Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, editors Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge ann arbor, mich.: university of michigan press, 2014 xi + 430 pages; isbn: 9780472119271 Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, editors Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts farnham, u.k.: ashgate, 2014 xiv + 244 pages; isbn: 9781409436423 object lesson n. (a) (now chiefly hist.) a lesson in which a pupil’s examination of a material object forms the basis for instruction; (b) fig. a striking practical example of a principle or ideal.1 object lessons were a key element of nineteenth-century education based on learning things with things. During an object lesson, children’s attention were directed to a specific object, their interest usually excited by a particularly compelling aspect of its nature or behavior. They were encouraged to closely inspect and manipulate the object in order to develop their investigative and analytical skills, and then discuss their findings so as to furnish their scientific vocabulary. In this way, object lessons offered practical examples of the ways in which the trained eye, the skillful hand, the discerning senses, and the inquiring mind could uncover the secrets [End Page 127] of the surrounding world—the myriad hidden connections, forces, and history that it contains. In so doing, they also presented moral lessons about the ideals of attentiveness, care, and learning. Object lessons offer a very useful framework for considering the two books reviewed here. The collected essays in both are grounded in specific case studies of material culture. Like Victorian object lessons, they also offer practical examples of the various kinds of reflection and questioning that can be brought to bear on things and on the range of practices articulated in and around them. Victorian object lessons were often introduced with myths and fairy tales to evoke a sense of wonder at the mysteries of nature and entice children to learn its secrets. The two projects under review here are likewise introduced with stories, narratives of creation to be specific, to invite the reader on a journey into the world of making. Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge opens with the Greek myth that tells of how Metis, the goddess of wisdom, swallowed by her husband Zeus when she was pregnant, “set about weaving and smithing for Athena, the daughter she would bear” (2), who later emerged full-grown from her father’s head, clothed in the robe and helmet made by her mother. The story, for the editors, rather than representing “the idea of wisdom emerging fully-formed from the head of the chief ruler of the heavens”(3), in fact points to the fact that Athena emerged “only after a knowing mother had endowed her with helmet, robe and shield”(13). The myth, that is to say, is in fact an allegory about the interrelatedness of making and knowing, which the book offers to help us discover. The introductory chapter of Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts makes reference to a verse in the book of Psalms: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). This line, as the authors point out, describes “a kind of making-in-growing, or growing-in-making” (5). It illustrates the way in which form, “rather than being applied to the material, is emergent” (5) within a field of “forces and relations both internal and external to the things under production” (4). In this way, it is the perfect parable for the processes that the book proposes to explore. By focusing on the interrelationships between making and “knowing,” in one case, and “growing,” in the other, both books draw attention to specific biases in recent studies concerned with material culture and propose correctives. Ways of Making and Knowing challenges the emphasis in studies concerned with the epistemological dimension of material culture on biographies of objects and the socio-economic networks in which they circulate, which tends to overlook the specifics of making.2 Making and Growing questions the focus in...