Professor Trevor Marchand awarded fellowship to study carpentry hand skill and tool use
14 May 2012
Professor Trevor Marchand from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology has been awarded a Mid-Career Fellowship by the British Academy to study the relationship between the brain, the human hand and the tools used in carpentry.
Marchand’s field study of skill learning and practice among UK woodworking trainees will involve a combination of participant observation, interviews, digital recording technology, and motion-capture analysis software. This will produce a database for carefully analysing grasp, gesture, posture and tool-wielding movement at the workbench and in the carpentry shop.
Marchand’s earlier Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research involved ethnographic fieldwork at the Building Crafts College in East London, where he gained his own trade qualifications. Marchand said he was very excited to begin this next project, which is a logical progression from his previous work: “It will allow me to conduct a more detailed and in-depth study of tool use and skill-learning that will hopefully result in a better understanding of the wondrous connection between the brain, the human hand and the tools that we use."
The ultimate aims of the research are to thoroughly investigate and better define the term 'embodied knowledge' and to expand popular understandings of ‘intelligence’ to include the intelligent hand at work.
