Glassblowing Tools: Extending the Body Towards Practical Knowledge and Informing a Social World

Understanding tools in the development of practical knowledge and in the formation of social worlds is critical for the sociology of culture insofar as they reveal how matter, or material, informs practice and discourse. This article is an ethnographic exploration of the variations of the maker-tool-material relation in glassblowing, informed by Bourdieu's logic of practice as well as phenomenological considerations of the body's dispositions towards and interactions with the material world. These relations form the backbone of the glassblowing studio, and more importantly provide the subject matter of ‘tool talk,’ studio talk about tools, which forges feelings of empathy and consequently contributes to the formation of the glassblowing social world. Through this exploration, we come to understand how material, the subject of much studio discourse, is a structuring force of a lifeworld, the glassblowing studio.

Erin O’ConnorEmail: