The transmission and transformation of traditional building crafts : an apprentice-style ethnography with drystone wallers in Italy
This work focusses on traditional building crafts by taking into account the art of drystone walling and the way it is transmitted as well as how it is changing and adapting to current times. Drystone walling is considered a valuable intangible cultural heritage, but at the same time is also particularly relevant today because of its widely recognised features in terms of sustainable management and relationship with the environment. This research explores the current importance of this subject starting with three research questions that are necessary for the safeguarding of this knowledge system. The first one regards the constitutive elements of this craft, and it is an analysis of both explicit and practical knowledge that are considered the fundamental features of this art. In this sense, the main objective is to test the limits of codification when applied to crafts to show that a great part of the immaterial value of this art resides in its non-codifiable and untellable aspects, while at the same time expanding the codification of yet unwritten explicit knowledge. The second one is related to how this knowledge is transmitted, so as to analyse the way craftspeople are passing on what they know, also by taking into account the broader context in which transmission takes place with its possibilities and constraints. This question is crucially connected to the preservation of this craft today. The third question is related to the dynamic process of transformation of traditional crafts. The importance of this theme stands in understanding the way in which a craft changes while being transmitted. This work reveals the why and how a knowledge system and its practitioners adapt to current times to foster the continuation of this building craft. This research was conducted employing an ethnographic approach that included an immersion into the doing of the craft through apprenticeship. Ethnography allowed protracted interaction with the research participants in order to observe and analyse the work of a selected group of practitioners for more than one year. Since the study explores craft-skills, apprenticeship was considered the only way to get access to the know-how of drystone walling, and this approach proved to be fundamental to at least “point to” aspects of knowledge that cannot be written about. Moreover, the work employs an innovative combination of apprentice-style ethnography with the extensive use of video recordings that furnished some of the most important insights and data on the knowledge system in its real context of practice.
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