Chapter 1. An Anthropologist’s Journey into Craftwork & Apprenticeship
Chapter 2. The Carpenters’ Company & Early London Apprenticeships
Chapter 3. The Building Crafts College: a history
Chapter 4. Getting Started
Chapter 5. Crafting Craftspeople
Chapter 6. Vocational Migrants to Craftwork
Chapter 7. The Intelligent Hand
Chapter 8. Problem Solving at the Bench
Chapter 9. Managing Pleasurable Pursuits
Chapter 10. Skill and Ageing

Epilogue: Towards a Hands-on Curriculum

Bibliography
Index

The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work

Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England

Trevor H. J. Marchand

482 pages, 21 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-274-2 Hb Published (November 2021)

eISBN 978-1-80073-275-9 eBook

Details

“This book stands at the pinnacle of the body of work produced over the course of a career by a distinguished academic; it is the masterpiece of a craftsman who has sought ceaselessly for greater nuances of skillful expression both in his chosen crafts and in his writings about them.” • Roy Dilley, University of St Andrews

“The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work is an outstanding contribution to the anthropology of craft and education. Marchand’s ethnographic inquiry into British woodworking is intellectually versatile, bringing the fields of economics and work, education and ideology, as well as neuroscience and philosophy to bear on the everyday concern of crafting a meaningful identity and pleasurable life.” • Erin O’Connor, Marymount Manhattan College

Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’. The animated and scholarly accounts of learning, achievement and challenges reveal the deep human desire to create with our hands, the persistent longing to find meaningful work, and the struggle to realise dreams. In its penetrating explorations of the nature of embodied skill, the book champions greater appreciation for the dexterity, ingenuity and intelligence that lie at the heart of craftwork.

Trevor H. J. Marchand is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Rivers Memorial Medal. He is also a trained architect (McGill University) and qualified as a fine woodworker at London’s Building Crafts College. Marchand has conducted fieldwork with craftspeople around the world and published extensively, including the monographs Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (Routledge, 2001) and The Masons of Djenné (Indiana, 2009).