Product Description: This volume brings together a cross-disciplinary group of anthropologists, researchers of craft, and designer-makers to enumerate and explore the diversity and complexity of problem-solving tactics and strategies employed by craftspeople, together with the key social, cultural, and environmental factors that give rise to particular ways of problem solving...read more

Product Description: Making Knowledge presents the work of leading anthropologists who promote pioneering approaches to understanding the nature and social constitution of human knowledge. The book offers a progressive interdisciplinary approach to the subject and covers a rich and diverse ethnography...read more

The town of Djenné on the Bani River in Mali has been a thriving settlement for more than two millennia. Renowned for its mud-brick architecture, monumental mosque, and merchant-traders' houses, Djenné remains one of Africa's most distinctive cities. The Masons of Djenné follows Trevor Marchand after he signs on as a builder's apprentice. Marchand takes readers on his journey from raw laborer to skilled craftsman. He explores the professional associations of masons, their social networks, training regimes, and changing fortunes. With his fellow builders, he produces mud bricks and plasters, constructs walls and ceilings, and sculpts rooftop crenellations using specialized tools. Marchand describes the raising of a mud-brick house and explores the technical, social, and magical processes involved in making buildings and renewing the unique urban environment of Djenné.