Learning and Labor in Ethnographic Apprenticeship

Abstract

This article describes apprenticeship as an ethnographic field method, exploring the forms ethnographic apprenticeship takes, the working knowledge passed through situated practice, and the impacts that working as a craft apprentice has on the work of anthropology. I draw on my experience as an apprentice luthier in West Virginia with two musical instrument makers to show how apprenticeship is a relational process contingent on context, its efficacy in communicating affective and embodied practices essential to understanding the meaning of craft labor to practitioners, and the implications for collaboration, reciprocity, learning, and documentation within ethnographic fieldwork and the discipline of anthropology.