Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper explores how relational ontologies challenge the conception of skill development in rock climbing. Using especially the concepts of Tim Ingold and Phil Mullins, the paper suggests that pro-environmental behaviours, and relationships to place, can be fostered by direct involvement in skills development. This ontology is at odds with dualistic approaches that see climbing and pro-environmental behaviours as tensioned concepts. It is also contrary to historic practice theories that see climbing development as deriving from mastering oneself and conquering the climb. The paper proposes that climbing can be better understood as a craft and that each climb can be seen as co-created by the correspondence between the climber and the rock. This approach challenges the anthropocentric concept of the climb as a challenge to be overcome by skill and human endeavour, and instead suggests that a perspective of climbing as a craft better recognises the shared agency of the assemblage of rock and climber. Consequently, the paper suggests that completed rock climbs can be seen as co-evolved expressions of knowledge and action, and thus that climbing skills and pro-environmental behaviours derive from a creative process of engagement with the solid reality of the rock.

Since the emergence of the Thule culture (AD 1200), dog sledding has been perceived as a central means of transportation in traditional Inuit life in the Arctic. However, there is an absence of research concerning Inuit dog-sled technology and the tradition of the craft. This study investigates the Inuit dog-sled technocomplex using enskilment methodologiesby employing experimental and ethno-archaeological observations to explore the relationship between knowledge and technical practice. It involves the reconstruction of a historical West Greenlandic dog sled, shedding light on carpentry techniques and construction processes. This method emphasizes the interaction between humans, technology, and time, providing essential practical data for future archaeological and historical research, particularly for comprehending fragmented archaeological remains. By focusing on process rather than end product, this research provides insight into understanding Inuit dog sled technology and the complexity of the practice. The connection between artifacts and materially situated practice is demonstrated through the reconstruction of a dog sled, which illustrates the value of physicality in enskilment. It highlights how experimental archaeology can improve our insights into the historical and prehistoric Arctic societies’ technologies, economies, and practices.

The study of reindeer domestication provides a unique opportunity to examine how domestication involves more than bodily changes in animals produced through selection. Domestication requires enskilment among humans and animals, and this process of pragmatic learning is dependent on specific forms of material culture. Particularly with the domestication of working animals, the use of such material culture may predate phenotypic and genetic changes produced through selective breeding. The Iamal region of Arctic Siberia is generating an increasingly diverse set of archeological data for reindeer domestication that evidences such processes. Three early sites, Ust’-Polui, Tiutei-Sale I, and Iarte VI, contain artifacts proposed to be parts of headgear worn by transport reindeer, the earliest dating to just over 2000 years ago. Contemporary Nenets reindeer herders scrutinized replicas of these archeological objects, and comparisons with historic reindeer harness parts from Arctic Russia were also made. Nenets consistently interpreted barbed L-shaped antler pieces from Iamal as parts of headgear for training young reindeer in pulling sleds. Some types of swivels were also interpreted as transport reindeer headgear. Based on these consultations with Nenets and observations of their ongoing reindeer domestication practices, we argue that material things such as headgear, harnesses, and sleds are not merely technological means of using or controlling reindeer in transportation but instead were part of the meshwork within which some reindeer became enskilled to being domestic. Domestication of reindeer and other animals involves ongoing efforts, landscapes, and made things, all of which form the environment within which domestic relationships emerge.

In the past, atlatls were used in hunting and warfare to throw projectiles. This article examines evidence for ‘enskilment’ in atlatl use from the Par-Tee site ( c. AD 100–800) in northern Oregon. Several whalebone atlatls from the site appear to have been crafted specifically to fit the hands of children. The authors argue that this is the result of equipment scaling—the process of adjusting the size of an object to fit the body size of the intended user. The authors suggest, therefore, that proficiency in the skills required to use the atlatl was probably acquired during childhood.

How do you witness the development and reproduction of a craft practice? This essay explores this provocation in relation to the craft practice of taxidermy and, in so doing, aims to stitch together non-representational and historical geographic concerns within the discipline. Mobilising and developing on an Ingoldian perspective on the process of skill, the author places herself in the position of apprentice to a practising taxidermist in recognition that the position of learner is a highly instructive context in which to enquire into how present-day practice relates to a representational culture charting the development of the craft in historical ‘how-to-do’ manuals. When juxtaposing contemporary ethnographies of taxidermy practice with descriptions of practice in historical ‘how-to-do’ manuals, the author shows how past and present practice resonates rather than replicates. Overall, this article aims to introduce and develop theoretical and methodological pathways for studying and storying (historical) geographies of craft and skilled practices.

Beekeeping is a highly skilled form of animal husbandry that dates back to centuries. It has become a popular hobby in the United Kingdom, but as an activity has rarely featured in geographical research. In this article, I present beekeeping as an interesting site of study for cultural geographers interested in enskilment processes, education and expertise. This article draws on in-depth ethnographic research with a community of hobby beekeepers in Lancashire, United Kingdom, to give a detailed analysis of the enskilment process of novice beekeepers, how this process is being shaped and influenced by a trend towards increasingly formal education tools within the community, and what this means for those interested in the power of skilled practice and expertise. In doing so, it explores issues around formal and informal learning environments, the role of social context in shaping learning, the power of government advice, and it illustrates the complexity introduced by close engagement with an insect.

Inuit kayaks are a hunting technology that requires a high degree of developed skill to operate. The practice involves special types of physical fitness, technical ability, social relationships and extensive environmental knowledge. Hunters must be able to work intuitively as a team, to recognize and react instantly to subtle environmental cues, and depend on instinctive physical capabilities that are committed to muscle memory. These requisite abilities can be developed only experientially. Kayak sports were a critical aspect of learning, and they provided simulative environments to practise and develop sub-sets of hunting skills. Through an examination of a weapon-throwing game, commonly represented at Arctic sites by stone features that are arranged to outline a kayak, this paper explores the didactic nature of sports and theorizes their value in the situated learning of skills for hunter-gatherer technologies.

This article uses an account of dwelling to interrogate the concept of curriculum making. Tim Ingold’s use of dwelling to understand culture is productive here because of his implicit and explicit interest in intergenerational learning. His account of dwelling rests on a foundational ontological claim—that mental construction and representation are not the basis upon which we live in the world—which is very challenging for the kinds of curriculum making with which many educators are now familiar. It undermines assumptions of propositional knowledge and of the use of mental schemas to communicate and share. At the level of critique, then, dwelling destabilizes contemporary ideas of curriculum as textual, pre-specified content for transmission or pre-defined objectives or standardized activity. The positive claims of dwelling are equally challenging, for these are that the world is a domain of relational entanglement in which an organism can be no more than a point of growth for an emergent ‘environment’, and meaning only inheres in these relations. The paper articulates how differentiation (of learner, salient meanings, knowledge, skill and place) are possible in such an ontology, and how curriculum making can be understood from this perspective as being the remaking of relationships between these.

How do we come to know the places we inhabit? What do places mean to us? What associations do we make with them? As an ethnographer and outsider I have grown, in a small way, to know places at sea along the northwest coast of Hudson Bay. In this paper I explore my growth into that knowledge, and how the sea became transformed from a blank space to a place filled with memory and association. I compare my short experience with that of local Inuit, who make use of the sea on a daily basis. Where and how do Inuit learn about places at sea? And how important are those places in their use of and movement through their marine environment?

Beyond the institution of apprenticeship, most strongly associated with Medieval guilds, apprenticeship can represent a powerful model to think about learning. Through a discussion of some of the most influential theories on apprenticeship learning in the social sciences, this chapter aims to find ways to think about apprenticeship in its complexity and diversity as a mode of learning, and specifically in relation to professional learning.