Appendix 2.2
Mêtis
Detienne and Vernant describe mêtis as “a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic.” Located outside of the definitions of epistemology in Greek philosophy, cunning intelligence includes the kind of knowledge attributed to medicine, art, navigation, war and politics (Detienne and Vernant, 1991: 1-8) as well as carpentry, weaving, oration and midwifery. As such, mêtis is bound up with the senses and it increases with experience. Newman identifies the “cunning intelligence” of certain craftspeople in Greek mythology, including Daedalus’s sublime metalwork, Prometheus’s forbidden fire, Arachne’s more-than-divine weaving, and Icarus’s fatal flight as the genesis of alchemical making. Each of these artisans or makers breached the safe boundaries between artifice and creation with their intelligence (and were punished for it), and were renowned for their creative transformations and inventions (Newman, 2005: 12).
I would like to reconfigure the statement by Detienne and Vernant to place emphasis on the sensory aspects of mêtis. Their definition above indicates that mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour is the desired product of various elements including practices and experience among others. Artisanal knowledge, especially mêtis, is embedded in a particular place and time. It is built upon the experience of a craft over time, giving the practitioner the ability to recognize factors in play before they might be noticed by others. It is a deep sensory engagement with one’s surroundings and craft, combined with the ability to act on one’s perceptions. Mêtis is not a contemplative mode, it is active, engaging variables that change with time, both in the building up of experience over time, and in the ability to act on one’s observations quickly.
By bridging the sensory world of materials, objects and making, I participate in the hands-on experience-driven interaction with matter, processes and bodily learning that anthropologist Tim Ingold has defined as his area of expertise in Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Materiality for Ingold is a property that rests within the material. He states, “every technical gesture (of artisans) is a question, to which the material responds according to its bent. In following materials, practitioners do not so much interact as correspond with them” (Ingold, 2013: 31). While this kind of understanding may be useful in educating novices in material processes, it does not engage the historical or cultural context in a meaningful way to contribute to sensory (re)construction. For Ingold, meaning is directed out of material and into the artisan, and the artisan is in effect a good listener with a skill-set to be able to interpret and act on the forces of the material. Materials such as stone or sugar would, for Ingold, give an artisan the same direction whether they were in 16th century England or 21st century Ottawa, making material anachronistic and running contrary to the emplaced and attuned understanding of materiality in this text.
Pamela Smith (2024) and Spike Bucklow in art history and Ken Albala in cookery, take the relationship between material, objects and making a critical step further to include the body of the artisan, society and culture as an integral part of the world of the work. Trevor Marchand, David Howes, Constance Classen and Alberto Perez-Gomez each further expand and embrace the architectural environment and atmosphere of works and worlds in time and place.