On Dullness: A Sensory Portrait

Abstract

Dullness is a quality that is hard to pin down for a woodworker; it defies easy definitions, and yet has the power to radically change the temper of experience. Using methods of self-observation drawn from sensory ethnography, I describe how I encounter dullness in my own skilled craft practice. I capture the intersensory nature of perception, how dullness is known through touch, sight, and sound. I follow traces of dullness on the wood I carve, in my body, and along the edge of my tool. This sensory portrait of dullness as elusive, relational, and shifting is a textured and nuanced account of how a craftsperson knows what they need to know from the body and experience. In the analysis section, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the inexhaustibility of perception to enhance my claim that dullness is not a fixed object, but a state filled with ambiguity. Perception does not give us easy answers. The article counters popular renderings of craft as practical or technical know-how with a contrary theory of craft as filled with poetic ambiguity.

Keywords:

• perception
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• sensory ethnography
• embodied knowledge
• wood carving
• skill
• phenomenology
• craft process

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more on craft as tacit knowledge see Peter Dormer, The Culture of Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 147, 228–229; Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109; Erin O’Connor, “Touching Tacit Knowledge: Handwork as Ethnographic Method in a Glassblowing Studio,” Qualitative Research 17, no. 2 (2017): 217–230; Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1967); Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 172.

2 Sarah Pink. Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: Sage, 2015), 25–50.

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2014), Ixx.

4 Ibid, 103.

5 “When I see an object, I always feel that there is still some being beyond what I currently see…a depth of the object that no sensory withdrawal will ever fully exhaust.” Ibid., 224.

6 Ibid, 242.

7 Some examples of the interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of the senses in craft include: Tim Ingold, “Walking the Plank: Meditations on a Process of Skill,” in Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, ed. John R. Dakers (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006), 65–80; Tom Martin, “Relational Perception and ‘the feel’ for Tools in the Wooden Boat Workshop,” Phenomenology & Practice 15, no. 2 (2020): 5–23; Erin O’Connor, “Touching Tacit Knowledge”; Caroline Potter, “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer,” Ethnos 73, no. 4 (December 2008): 444–465; Tom Rice, “Learning to Listen: Auscultation and the Transmission of Auditory Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 1 (May 2010): 39–58.

8 Trevor H. J. Marchand, “Introduction: Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between Mind, Body, and Environment,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 1 (May 2010): 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Hawes

Kate Hawes is a New York based woodworker, educator, and writer. They received a Masters in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College in 2023 and a Certificate in Cabinet and Furniture Making from North Bennet Street School in 1997.