Convenors
Laura Centemeri, CNRS CENS EHESS
laura.centemeri@ehess.fr
Raffaele Pinelli, Université Côte d’Azur
raffaele.pinelli@univ-cotedazur.fr
The panel explores the problematics of technical gesture, its transformation, and its transmission, looking both at “communities of practice” (Lave, Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 2005; Jacob, 2007) and movements supporting productive worlds and ways of life that are alternative to the industrial-capitalist ones, described in the literature as “sustainable materialism” (Schlosberg, Craven, 2019) or “alternative pathways” (Hess, 2007). The notion of technical gesture is to be understood broadly, starting from the techniques of the body, and investigated as the expression of ways of relating to oneself, to others, and to materiality (following Mauss, 1973; Leroi-Gourhan, 1993; Lemonnier, 1992; Sigaut, 1994; Cresswell, 2003).
Moving from a theoretical space that crosses pragmatic sociology, valuation studies, STS and anthropology, the panel sets out to explore the social processes of valorization and devalorization of sensory knowledge in the transformation and transmission of technical gestures, analyzing (de)valorization as processes of “dis/assembling value” (Greeson, Laser and Pyyhtinen, 2020) that are related to issues of knowledge and power.
Three axes structure the panel’s reflection.
The first concerns the sensory, tacit (Polanyi, 1996), and emplaced (Pink, 2009) knowledge, grounded in the body’s capacity to grasp differences and qualities that escape formalization, and decisively dependent on a capacity for “attunement” (Ingold, 2021). What interests us here is not the presence of such knowledge per se, common to every technical gesture, but its differential visibility and social legitimacy: we ask how the nature of this knowledge comes into play in sociotechnical controversies concerning technical gestures, what arguments are made for its valorization, and what forms its discrediting takes.
The second concerns the economies through which this differential visibility and legitimacy is produced. We are interested both in the economy of courses and certifications that secure the transmission of valorized sensory knowledge, in relation to an increasing commodification of authenticity, and in the economic pressures that threaten it upstream and erode its transmission: pressure toward standardization of technical gestures, the restructuring of supply chains, tourism, deindustrialization.
The third concerns the position of the researcher within these dynamics of (de)valorization, and their direct implication in the collectives under study, through applied research, collaborative action research, and research-creation. We ask to what extent participatory ethnography, including through tools such as ICH (Intangible Cultural Heritage) inventory records or professional certifications, can reactivate, document, or modify the value attributed to these gestures.
The panel welcomes contributions in Italian, English, and French. Proposals may address empirical case studies from any domain of activity, such as craft and artisanal trades, agriculture, the performing arts and other artistic and ritual practices, industrial labour, healing practices, or heritage and museum work, or offer theoretical/methodological insights.
Open questions
- When the sensory knowledge of a technical gesture is recognized and made visible, what kinds of collectives (communities of practice, artisan networks, mutual help groups, etc.) structure its transmission, and through what modes of organization?
- How is the boundary between technical gestures and their standardization constructed, modified, and renegotiated? What role do certifications play in maintaining or reconfiguring this boundary?
- How does the devalorization of sensory knowledge operate, and what forms of loss does it produce when that knowledge goes unrecognized?
- How does the researcher’s direct implication in the communities and collectives under study affect the ways in which knowledge linked to technical gestures is observed and described, and what effects do the initiatives they undertake, alone or jointly with others, have on that knowledge and on the value attributed to it?
- What asymmetries and power relations characterize the transmission, recognition, and valorization of the sensory knowledge of technical gestures?
- What forms of collaboration with the bearers of technical gestures, and what modes of inquiry with (rather than on) them (applied research, collaborative action research, research-creation), are possible? What are the effects on the groups concerned?
- How do technical gestures change when materials, tools, technologies or environmental conditions change, and what persists through these changes?
- How are technical gestures learned and taught (apprenticeship, imitation, formal training), and what happens when their transmission moves from informal to institutional settings or becomes the object of commercial offerings (courses, certifications issued by private bodies or individuals)?
- What becomes of technical gestures once they are documented, analyzed and disseminated (heritage inventories, museums, tourist and media representations), and what role do researchers play in this process?
- How do economic transformations (restructuring of supply chains, tourism, deindustrialization, etc.) change the conditions under which technical gestures are practiced and transmitted? How, by whom and according to what criteria are gestures chosen to be recognized as “authentic” and transmitted outside the communities and collectives that developed them?
Keywords
technical gesture; alternative practices; sensory knowledge; (de)valorization; authenticity; patrimonialization and certification; engaged research
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Pragmatic sociology; Science and Technology Studies (STS); Valuation Studies; Anthropology of techniques; Economic sociology and alternative economies; Heritage and patrimony studies; Engaged research methodologies
References
Cresswell, R. (2003), “Geste technique, fait social total. Le technique est-il dans le social ou face à lui ?”, Techniques & Culture. Revue semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques, no. 40, Les Éditions de l’EHESS.
Greeson, E., Laser, S., Pyyhtinen, O. (2020), “Dis/Assembling Value: Lessons from Waste Valuation Practices”, Valuation Studies, 7(2). https://valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view/3134.
Hess, D. J. (2007), Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalization, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.
Ingold, T. (2021), Correspondences, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Jacob, C. (2007), Lieux de savoir [vol. 1]. Espaces et communautés, Paris, Armand Colin.
Lave, J., Wenger, É. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, New York, Cambridge University Press.
Lemonnier, P. (1992), Elements for an Anthropology of Technology, Ann Arbor, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan (Anthropological Papers, 88).
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993 [1964-65]), Gesture and Speech, trans. A. Bostock Berger, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. Orig. ed. Le geste et la parole, Paris, Albin Michel.
Mauss, M. (1973 [1934]), “Techniques of the Body”, Economy and Society, 2(1), pp. 70-88. Orig. ed. “Les techniques du corps”, Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 32.
Pink, S. (2009), Doing Sensory Ethnography, London, Sage.
Polanyi, M. (1966), The Tacit Dimension, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Schlosberg, D., Craven, L. (2019), Sustainable Materialism: Environmental Movements and the Politics of Everyday Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Sigaut, F. (1994), “Technology”, in T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, London/New York, Routledge, pp. 420-459.
Wenger, É. (2005), La théorie des communautés de pratique, Québec, Les Presses de l’université Laval.
Convenors’ bio
Laura Centemeri is Senior Researcher in Environmental Sociology at the French CNRS and a member of the Centre for the Study of Social Movements (CEMS) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). Her current areas of interest and research projects include the sociology of valuation and evaluation applied to environmental issues, the cultural and political dimensions of agroecological movements, and the sociology of improvisation. She is the author of La permaculture ou l’art de réhabiter (Éditions Quæ, 2019) and co-editor, with Sezin Topçu and J. Peter Burgess, of Rethinking Post-Disaster Recovery: Socio-Anthropological Perspectives on Repairing Environments (Routledge, 2022).
Raffaele Pinelli is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and musicologist, associate researcher at LIRCES (UPR 3159), Université Côte d’Azur. His research, at the crossroads of fundamental and experimental research (applied, action-research and research-creation), explores the worlds of music (practice and instrument-making), their actors, spaces and tools, through the lenses of the anthropology of techniques and knowledge, of heritage, and of communities of practice. Author of several articles in international journals and peer-reviewed volumes, he is currently preparing a book on the cultural history of the diatonic accordion, from the late eighteenth century to the present, for the French publisher Vrin.