Making and Growing

Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms, the book calls this distinction into question, examining the implications for our understanding of materials, design and creativity. Grounding their arguments in case studies from different regions and historical periods, the contributors to this volume show how making and growing give rise to co-produced and mutually modifying organisms and artefacts, including human persons. They attend to the properties of materials and to the forms of knowledge and sensory experience involved in these processes, and explore the dynamics of making and undoing, growing and decomposition. The book will be of broad interest to scholars in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, material culture studies, history and sociology.

Elizabeth Hallam is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and Research Associate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of the forthcoming Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed, co-author of Death, Memory and Material Culture, and co-editor of Medical Museums: Past, Present, Future, and Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Tim Ingold is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of The Perception of the Environment, Being Alive, Lines, and Making, editor of Redrawing Anthropology, and co-editor of Ways of Walking and Imagining Landscapes.