To Know The World We Must Feel It

Making is not about the product, but about the journey of self-discovery. I’d love to explore this idea by applying it to an experience I had some years ago while we were documenting the process of building balsas de totora (reed boats) in a fishing community in the south central Andes. 

The residents of Iruhito are fishermen renowned for their expertise in constructing balsas de totora. Totora is a native aquatic plant used in the production of different types of crafts, ranging from house roofs to hats. 

The making of balsas de totora involves a well-coordinated communal effort. It starts with gathering the longest totora reeds. Once collected, the reeds are left to dry under the sun for several days. While they dry, some members of the community are in charge of making several meters of rope. This is a very arduous task, these ropes should be strong enough to bind the reeds into thick, long cylinders that later will be assembled into boats.  Finally, when the materials are ready, the artisans work together to assemble the boats. This process reflects hundreds of years of repeated, structured, and deeply engaged social and material practices. 

During this process, two aspects caught my attention. First, the way these balsa makers interact and communicate with each other. Boat-building traces back to pre-hispanic times, and their coordination flows naturally and almost instinctively. Second, the way artisans perceive and “communicate” with their material environment. What an amazing experience for the ones making the boat, and for me as an observer of the process. Each boat, although made in the same way, turns out unique. Every boat represents two core concepts of the human experience: creation and transformation. 

Creation materializes our imagination, while transformation is a continuous process shaped by the interaction with materials. Neither people nor artifacts are “final versions”. The nature of materials shapes our actions and thoughts, just as we transform them. This is what Tim Ingold, author of Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture, calls “active following”. This idea captures the dynamic relationship of giving and receiving, in which the act of crafting becomes a form of inquiry, a dialogue with our material environment. 

The production of reed boats exemplifies this continuing relationship. Reeds are collected, dried, prepared, and then woven in a process of balancing tradition and adaptation. The artisans in Iruhito transform their environment, yet the materials also determine their actions. Materials demand workspaces, social organization, manual skills, and the activation of certain brain areas while working by hand. The result, a boat, is shaped by both human intent and its material properties.

What amazed me was the practical way of learning, a process quite different from the way a theorist would approach learning. A theorist has a predetermined body of knowledge and a finished product or idea in mind; a product that is the result of plans, designs, descriptions, and replicas, like building legos with an instruction manual. The artisan on the other hand, opens her perceptions to what is going on in the world. Creating and crafting, and in this particular case using ancestral knowledge, while also following the nature of her materials, which add the final touch, so she can in turn, correspond to the world without the need of instruction manuals. This way of making values learning as an emergent process shaped by interaction with the environment and its materials.

I’m more convinced than ever of the value of engagement with the material world through manual skills. The most interesting conversations I have with my students emerge from hands-on activities. This experiential learning encapsulates the iterative process of “making” where discovery emerges from this “dialogue” between the maker and the material, a dialogue that is sadly disappearing in our technology-driven age.    

The work of an artisan is an experiment, but not a formal scientific one, which follows a rigid procedure and ends up with a product. Instead, it is about starting something and following where it leads, learning by understanding in practice–learning by doing. This way of learning might also involve having the courage to cede control sometimes, surrendering to the restrictions of the material, celebrating its qualities, and getting to know ourselves during the process. 

Making is not about the product, but about the journey of self-discovery and transformation. 

To know the world, we must feel it, we must actively engage with it and let it shape us in return.