Beyond the Heartlands: Deindustrialization, Naturalization and the Meaning of an 'Industrial' Tradition

Deindustrialization is a complex and multifaceted series of processes and transitions, reflecting the equally complicated web of social relationships and interdependencies that constitute(d) an industrial society. Contemporary scholars have looked beyond just the economic impact of industrial loss, to the cultural, temporal and spatial legacies and impacts wrought by the mass closures of the 1980s, as well as the continuing presence of an industrial identity in struggles over representation and regeneration. However, deindustrialization has a history that precedes the volatility and culmination of that period, and has impacted upon a more geographically diverse range of former industrial locations than are commonly represented. The narratives that surround some sites are complicated by their displacement in time, place and discourse; they lack the political capital of an ‘industrial’ identity through this disassociation. In this article I aim to go beyond what we might consider the industrial ‘heartlands’ of the UK to a place that has felt the impact of deindustrialization, but which falls outside of the usual representations of the UK’s industrial past. I explore how the industrial identity and memory of a place can be naturalized and selectively re-worked for the needs of the hour, the very meaning of ‘industrial’ altered in the process. I argue that for sites unable to access or utilize the imagery of modern, heavy industry for community or promotional aims, deindustrialization becomes a process of re-writing an historic identity – one that sheds new light on industrial loss in diverse situations, and at an ever-increasing distance from closure

Moulding minaret makers A study of apprenticeship and spatial cognition with traditional builders in Sana'a, Yemen

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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

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