Apprenticeship in western India

A number of recent attempts to describe what happens in the ‘embodied’ space between action and the discursive language used to describe that action have been primarily informed by various western theories of mind. In this article, I present an indigenous theory of what happens among Sunni Muslims in a South Asian context in the gap between linguistic utterances and the actions they purport to represent. The ethnography focuses on learning craft and social skills among apprentices in the shipyards in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is argued that acquiring both kinds of skills is underscored by particular conceptions of the body and the possible transformations of the soul through physical activity

Muscles, Morals and Mind: craft apprenticeship and the formation of person

The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts – like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities – are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as ‘intelligent’ is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprentice-style learning within our Western systems of education