Knowledge Weaving: A global tapestry of human sense-making
(Listen to our Interview with Dr. Murray on the Embodied Worlds podcast.)
“...he approached a lovely spot in Uruvela by the bank of the Nerañjara River. Here he prepared a seat of straw beneath an asvattha tree (later called the Bodhi Tree) and sat down cross-legged, making a firm resolution that he would never rise up from that seat until he had won his goal.”
From The Buddha and His Dhamma
Despite being a universal faith that is shared across the world, Buddhism privileges the particular site of a Bodhi tree, located in the village of Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. This is where Siddhartha Gautama gained enlightenment and was convinced by the Gods to teach his Dharma to others. The Bodhi tree is just one of many trees of wisdom, alongside the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden and the Yggdrasil in Norse mythology. What's noteworthy here is not just the tree as a symbol, but the idea that knowledge has a specific place. Thanks to the evolution of printing, it is easy to view knowledge as an abstract entity that is easily distributed around the world. Do we have to be in a particular place to know a specific ‘something’?
Civilisations are known particularly for their places of knowledge, such as the eighth-century House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and now the many libraries, museums and universities in every country. Knowledge needs a home and today, it must be a home that is both a commons as well as one that can be accessed from virtually anywhere. This statement is also a temporal one as with COVID, the abstraction of knowledge was stretched even further with networks that had no common physical place but could be in the same sensory space. Physical sites of knowledge were made virtual, such as the mediation “campfire” of The Stoa and Zoom sessions for collective quiet reading.
It was during the COVID lockdowns that colleagues and I started developing an international association of craft scholars. Of particular interest was the challenge of voicing different frameworks for craft (loosely defined as “objects made by hand”) beyond Western modernism. This involved looking beyond the studio model of individual craft artists making work for galleries. We were representatives from Australia, China, France, Japan, India, Samoa, Senegal, South Korea and Tonga. We avoided any singular definition of craft in order to open up different cultural perspectives. In giving structure to this online association, we looked to customary spaces of knowledge in the wider world. We considered the Mbari houses in Nigeria that were made from local anthill clay and accommodated the practice of Igbo cosmology. In Moana Oceania, there are many knowledge houses, such as the Māori Whare Wananga, which houses powerful objects of knowledge including the Mauri stones.
It was thanks to the members from Moana that we took the idea of a knowledge “house". Despite having no one cultural framework, we borrowed customary elements, such as a salutation to begin our conversation series Reinventing the Wheel. (The wheel was chosen as both an Eastern symbol of knowledge and a device for craft processes.) The house has attracted a diversity of members, including those based in non-Western universities, especially those under Western sanctions such as Iran. Members are largely independent scholars and what might be called "thinker-makers" who combine craft skills with writing.
Knowledge weaving
Given our individual interests, the challenge was to find a commons that would bring us together. The process of “knowledge weaving” was developed to provide a collective platform for making sense of the global field. Such weaving is designed to produce a "knowledge graph" as a web of connections linking concepts and references.
Listen to our podcast interview with Dr. Murray here.
The “knowledge graph” was popularised by Google in 2012. Instead of searching by matching keywords, it offered contextualised results based on interrelationships. As a symbol of knowledge, the graph of web links replaced the hierarchical tree structure developed during the great encyclopedia projects of the early modern era. The knowledge graph enables a return to early associations of weaving. In classical Greece, the three fates harboured knowledge of life and death. Athena combined her role as the goddess of knowledge with the invention of weaving. The annual Panathenaic festival in her honour featured the sacred Peplos textile, woven over nine months by Arrephoroi, a group of several young aristocratic girls. (This is a connection further developed today in the Penelope Project.)
Today, knowledge weaving is facilitated by a new generation of software for building bespoke knowledge graphs. This parallels the development of the spreadsheet in the late 1970s when accounting became something that ordinary people could perform. The start of COVID saw the rise of many note-taking applications for producing graphs. Obsidian is one such popular application for building knowledge graphs. It has the advantage of being run by a small independent team, strongly supported by its community, and can be stored offline.
It must be acknowledged that these note-linking applications have been succeeded by Large Language Model programs such as Google's NotebookLM. However, these no longer involve manual "weaving" of links and instead employ algorithms to make sense of the information. It is critical for a craft-based metaphor of knowledge that it be based on human actions rather than abstract formulae.
There are two major activities at the Knowledge House for Craft: Reinventing the Wheel talks and the Value of Craft Project.
Reinventing the Wheel
Buddhist dharma wheel, Manjushri Kadampa Meditation Centre, Ulverston in Cambria, England. Image credit.
We confronted the challenge of revising the Western model that has characterised histories of modern craft. We developed Reinventing the Wheel as a space to open up the understanding of craft by introducing a diversity of voices into the conversation. The conversations were recorded and woven into the knowledge base: each talk was a “spoke” in the wheel. It began with the Indian scholar Aarti Kawlra speaking about the lineage of anti-colonial craft thinking featuring Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi and Kamaladevi. Importantly, she also went beyond imperialist and nationalist registers to illuminate decolonial readings of the deployment of craft in modernity. Beyond India, Tagore was drawn to the ideas of Japanese thinkers such as Yanagi Soetsu who contrasted the spirituality of the East against Western materialism. To complicate the situation, Hyeyoung Cho spoke about the evolution of Korean cultural identity in opposition to its colonisation by Japan and its turn to the USA. Beyond East Asia, Tongan scholar Okusitino Mahina observed the influence of Tagore in the development of his culture in response to Western colonialism. This Indian-centric craft perspective therefore highlighted the complex role of craft in opposition to coloniality.
From the "Near East", Kuwaiti designer Laila Al-Hamad presented an argument for the privileging of smell in Arab cultures. Smell has many layers of influence, including trade and religion. But she arg ued its key value today is in "rituals of hospitality", especially those that mark the beginning and end of social occasions. Jewellery scholar Sigrid van Roode added that the use of scent in rites of passage helps maintain "in between states". Sachiko Tamashige spoke about the courtly Kyoto “Way of Kodo” that entailed "listening to smell". Others referred to smell craft in India, Senegal and France. The Arab-centric perspective thus helped identify the role of smell in craft overwise overlooked in a predominantly visual West.
Sachiko Tamashige presented her work on the resonance of metalsmithing in Japanese culture. She referred to the Shinto mirror polished by Yamamoto Akihisa, a Japanese bronze mirror maker. The mirror has importance in Shintoism as a source of light seen to magically emanate from the spirit world. The act of polishing is thus a form of religious devotion. Sachiko related this to the vibrant culture of amateur astronomy in Japan. The following conversation referenced the presence of mirror craft in other cultures, such as those ground with sand in Morocco and their use in Indian embroidery. The discussion around Sachiko's talk not only reflected on the spiritual origins of particular crafts but also the materiality of an object like a mirror: what seems on the surface an illusion becomes a material object.
Other conversations opened up different craft perspectives. The "talanoa" from Oceania Moana by Toluma'anave Barbara Makuati-Afitu (Samoa) and Kolokesa Uafā Māhina-Tuai (Tonga) demonstrated the value of "talking critically yet harmoniously". They identified customary events such as the annual Tongan White Sunday, or Fakame, as examples of how the church functions as an important craft venue.
Kaamya Sharma offered a newer Indian perspective that was sceptical of the elitism that has evolved around the craft establishment. She identified a "sartorial bio-moralism" that elevated the handwoven natural-dyed fabrics above the ‘common’ machine-made chemical-dyed versions and opened up the broader question about the role of the user in our understanding of craft. This troubling elitism associated with craft was also reflected in Alessandro Gerosa's talk about the hipster economy.
From mainland China, Anying Chen reflected on the unique culture of workstations in which universities seek to apply their research to local economic development. The Chinese interest in robotics in craft techniques was reflected in Patricia Flanagan's presentation on the haptic recording of gestures by Suzhou embroiderers. And from Hong Kong, Sharon Tsang-de Lyster advocated for the role of craft by displaced persons, which often slips between the responsibilities of nation-states.
Overall, the Reinventing the Wheel series demonstrates the role of an oral platform for craft discourse in opening up the field. The “conversation” brings in alternative cultural perspectives. In the capitalist Western model, we have a highly developed discourse around craft as a commodity, whether produced by "makers" for markets or "craft artists" for galleries. Such a framework overlooks important cultural dimensions of craft in ritual and community. These worldly discussions help open minds not only to different meanings of the handmade, but also possible ways of living beyond consumer capitalism.
Value of Craft Project
In the craft field, we frequently hear reports of the positive role that the handmade plays in our world. These range from good news stories in mainstream media to funded academic research published in peer-reviewed journals. These stories have a brief public exposure before they are replaced by the next story: there is little processing of this information. This is partly because news media focuses only on the most recent developments and academic publications require new and original research.
There is a powerful story to tell in synthesising this breadth of information about the value of craft into a knowledge base that can be shared for common use. For "knowledge workers" in the crafts, this is also an opportunity to create a resource that can benefit the broader craft community. While academic research is useful, it rarely reaches back to the subjects from which it draws information.
Particularly in the "developing" world, craft often has a stigma of backwardness. In India, it is sometimes described as one of the "sunset industries" that is destined to be replaced by advanced manufacturing such as computer chips. Children of artisans are drawn to more secure employment through tertiary education in urban centres. For those that remain, there needs to be a positive story about craft that gives dignity to their work.
One organisation that can reach a broad cross-section of artisans is the World Crafts Council. In 2019, under the Presidency of Dr Ghada Hijjawi-Qaddumi, the Asia Pacific Region proposed to develop a Value of Craft Report that could distil a powerful message to reach artisans and the local craft councils that represent them. COVID provided an opportunity to bring together craft knowledge workers online in a knowledge-weaving laboratory to start synthesising the information.
The first challenge was to break down the value of craft into its different areas. This was done according to three categories:
Practical values relate to outcomes that benefit all.
Disaster relief value of craft
Economic value of craft
Health value of craft
Psychological value of craft
Scientific value of craft
Social value of craft
Symbolic values give meaning which is a good in itself.
Aesthetic value of craft
Creative value of craft
Cultural value of craft
Historical value of craft
Spiritual value of craft
Ethical values relate to justice, rights and equality.
Environmental value of craft
Gender equity value of craft
Indigenous value of craft
Peace and justice value of craft
Recovery value of craft
This tripartite division provided the basic architecture for the project.
The report is developed using a form of knowledge weaving that combines vertical and horizontal threads in the form of references and the values they demonstrate. A reference such as the article “New rich a blessing for Vicenza’s artisans” in the Financial Times included a report on artisans in the gold sector in the town of Vicenza (in the North of Italy) who lost their jobs due to globalisation but were able to recycle their craft skills in the leather industry under Bottega Veneta. This vertical warp thread was connected to the horizontal weft theme of the economic value of craft in the way a skill base can contribute flexibly to local industry.
Over time, the values were broken down into several specific claims. This reference was then assigned to the claim that craft provides an enduring source of employment. While global corporations might provide significant employment to poor communities, this is vulnerable to a range of international factors such as the relative price of labour elsewhere, trade agreements or sanctions and environmental regulations. Local skill-based crafts can offer a more resilient form of employment.
A key challenge in the knowledge-weaving process is in preparing the reference. Using the textile metaphor, this was akin to spinning a thread to increase its strength on the loom. Many abstracts or bylines are descriptive of the reference, rather than identifying the solid evidence or testimony that it contains. Some references have no real substance but are more like manifestos arguing for an ideal world. A Knowledge Weaving Laboratory of craft scholars met monthly to ensure that each reference had a solid contribution to knowledge.
As a political project, the Value of Craft Report must take a form that can make an impression in the wider world. To this end, the breadth of values needs to be synthesised in a key message that becomes part of public discourse. To assist this process, the preliminary findings will be workshopped at the upcoming Indian Ocean Craft Triennial to identify a powerful slogan. This will then be presented as a publication at the General Assembly of the World Crafts Council in December 2024, as part of its 60th anniversary celebration. The message can then be disseminated through social media.
Beyond the report, the knowledge base can then continue to function as a resource for processing new references. Ideally, it can be used to identify areas where more research is needed to better understand particular values and claims. Like Wikipedia, it will function as a collective knowledge project supported by a community of editors. But unlike Wikipedia, it is designed to fulfil the specific purpose of identifying the value of the crafts.
The weaving metaphor: Who owns it and how can it be enhanced?
Drawing on the weaving metaphor raises the issue of its relation to actual weaving practice. Much intellectual work is possible because of craft metaphors in the form of sayings and idioms generated both by makers and non-makers. The skilled manipulation of materials certainly helps give structure to ideas and values, such as James Watson who “discovered” the double helix by manipulating cardboard models. But to what extent is this representation of a craft process something we can consider as knowledge work? As core practices of civilisation, is it just about the necessity of obtaining permission to use a particular metaphor for a craft process or is it about a wider issue of relating a tangible, embodied practice (and the types of knowledge it engenders and is part of) to the representational capabilities of a virtual platform?
As argued by Claire Le Pape (2024), it is important to acknowledge those who are "custodians" of these metaphors in their original form, which is the action of making or doing something. Le Pape is contesting the right of, say, a politician who uses a weaving idiom in a culturally elitist manner but fails to realise the work involved because he has never actually done it. More importantly, she brings a useful literal-mindedness to weaving knowledge by asking how it is enacted by specific bodies and with what effects. This attention to the situated-connectivity dynamic of craft knowledge and discourse or what Le Pape equates to the social power of the artist is what also licenses weavers in colonial settler countries such as Sara Lindsay to develop programs for building social connections.
While the recent trend has been to replace workshops with universities as places of craft learning, there is potential to move in the opposite direction. A real weaving workshop might also accommodate researchers who find the proximity to craft activity both inspiring and grounding. As a research practice like "knowledge weaving" evolves, it is possible to reconnect with the “vehicle” of the craft metaphor so that the resulting knowledge is not a transcendence or reification of material practice. If possible, we can go back to the source and develop the metaphor further by incorporating more details of the weaving process, such as how the loom is set up.
Conclusion
Weaving is an enabling metaphor for knowledge work around craft. The perpendicular encounter of warp and weft reflects the dual process of gathering evidence and theorising connections. The role of the wheel in spinning is also a powerful symbol of knowledge passed down through generations.
At a time of increased global dialogue through video platforms, “knowledge weaving” provides a familiar framework for working together. The Knowledge House for Craft has used this metaphor to build a knowledge graph that reflects the diversity of craft voices and the breadth of value attached to craft in our world today. Yet there are also limits to the kinds of knowledge that can be gathered through a purely virtual format or with today’s digital technology, and future iterations may pay attention to finding new solutions for gaps within the archive.
It is important that this use of the weaving metaphor acknowledges those whose craft practice keeps this concept alive. Many weavers are now employing this metaphor of ‘weaving knowledge’ to extend the meaning of their craft. Similarly, others speak of crafting knowledge. At a time when artificial intelligence threatens to replace human sense-making, knowledge weaving now appeals as a means of sustaining our active engagement in generating, collecting, and storing craft ideas and practices. Just as the weavers rebelled against the industrial mills in nineteenth-century northern England, so we can draw on this ancient craft to help sustain our collective investment in understanding the world.
References
Claire Le Pape "Tisser du lien, Textile art as a tautological performance and embodiment of an expression" Mohan, U. ed. (2024). The Efficacy of Intimacy and Belief in Worldmaking Practices. Routledge.
