In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

This concluding chapter draws together several strands and original dimensions of Leroi-Gourhan’s technology. Alongside his palaeontological and archaeological research, Leroi-Gourhan also addressed two seemingly contradictory dimensions of techniques: the machine and the artisan. Given his long-standing interest in machines and mechanical devices, including photography, film and also computers, Leroi-Gourhan’s quasi-cybernetic understanding of prehistoric flintknapping is less surprising. Moreover, such a broadly positive attitude towards modern techniques needs to be understood in relation to philosophical and intellectual debates emerging during the post-war years of economic and social reconstruction. While thinkers like Jacques Ellul emphasized the risks of disruption and loss of control associated with modern techniques, Leroi-Gourhan retained, on the whole, his technophile confidence in the cumulative and incremental continuity of techniques, as demonstrated (in his view) across prehistory. This approach also derived from his distinctive Catholic faith and his affinities with the thoughts of Jesuit-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It embodied his belief in the long-term redemptive capacities of techniques, as evidenced by the plenitude achieved by the artisan of all times who ‘thinks with his fingers’, a crafting Homo faber present in each and every one of us.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

This chapter seeks to relate the toolmarks observable on sculpted objects to the ways of making and understanding that sustained ancient marble carving as a generative strand of cultural production. The discussion concentrates on the carved lines and planes that came to constitute Athenian stelai as standard material supports for inscribed texts, sculpted figurations, or combinations thereof. It begins by highlighting the contradiction between human creativity and material determinism in previous literature on Greek sculpture and the opportunities that enactive notions of knowledge present for evaluating ancient craft in cross-disciplinary debates about human technicity. The two subsequent sections examine how grooves were carved into planes and what this procedure might reveal about the epistemic affordances of linear marks. The conclusion connects the finished carvings with their origin in quarry-bedded marble blocks to bring out the broader arc of cultural knowledge involved in accommodating natural fissures in stone into the spatial projections of Athens’ evolving monumental landscapes. The exploration was made possible through collaborative replication experiments with a contemporary stone carver, which aimed to foreground lines and planes as mutually dependent phenomena, creating varying ontological conditions for telling things with stone.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.

This chapter examines how movable renderings of animals contributed to sociopolitical experience in Minoan Crete, with close attention to zoomorphic vessels. Beginning in the Prepalatial period, we examine a group of clay body-form vessels that could stand independently. While typically labelled “anthropomorphic,” the vessels’ identities are more complex: their forms do not neatly suggest a particular species, and their affordances as objects are integral to what they are and how they are experienced. Through analysis of their unique corporeal characters and depositional circumstances, I argue that these figures could have been experienced as distinct productive agents, who participated in cultivating community space between Prepalatial tombs and settlements. Next, looking forward, we consider how animalian vessels continued to contribute to Cretan social venues, while subtle changes to how they embodied animals could imply profound shifts in their presence and performance. From the late Protopalatial, we see rhyta rendered as bodiless animal heads, most bovine. Unlike the Prepalatial vessels, these appeared dramatically dependent on living people to become productive, placing emphasis on human action. I contextualize these rhyta with a problematization of palatial-era politico-environmental developments and changes in social performance and “cattle culture.”

In ‘Aristotle on the Stages of Cognitive Development’, Thomas Kjeller Johansen examines Aristotle’s contributions to our thinking about concepts from a different perspective, namely in connection to Aristotle’s psychology. He revisits Aristotle’s account of how we acquire universal concepts mainly on the basis of Metaphysics A.1, Posterior Analytics 1.31 and 2.19, and the De Anima. The chapter begins by articulating the following puzzle. On the one hand, Aristotle points out (An. Post. 1.31, 2.19) that we perceive the universal in the particular. On the other, he suggests (Metaph. A.1) that it is only when we have craft and science that we grasp the universal, while perception, memory, and experience all are concerned with the particular. Building on the widespread view that, according to Aristotle, the universal grasped in craft and science is the universal cause, Johansen argues that we should understand perception, memory, and experience teleologically, as stages in the ordering of perceptual information that allows this causal concept to emerge.

Human beings become scarcer than before in the simile world of the Aeneid, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect the world around them. Both Aeneas and the characters in the simile world are marked by solitude and isolation. The human characters in the simile world of the Aeneid share few strong ties with other creatures, and they often fail to affect the world around them in ways that their fellows in Greek epic would take for granted. In the story world, similes highlight moments of furor, the overpowering rage that underlies both love and war and threatens not simply Aeneas’ mission to found Rome but also the existence of a rational world order. Similes draw out isolation and overwhelming passion as two poles of emotion in the poem with little in between. They use new storytelling techniques that appear rarely or not at all in the similes of earlier epics, and they often lack an exit expression joining a simile to the story. These features weaken the conventional distinctions between similes and other components of epic narrative.

The simile world of Homer’s Odyssey is teeming with human connections, and family relationships play a central role. This distinctive aspect of the simile world of the Odyssey helps to tell the poem’s tale of human relationships, the burden of sorrow when they are disrupted, and the heroic task of keeping relationships alive through danger, separation, and loss. The Odyssey is not just about Odysseus’ homecoming but also homecoming itself. How do we know when we are truly “home”? What if we reach our home, but we cannot return there? What are the costs of a long absence, both for the person who returns and for those who remain at home? In what way can homecoming be considered a form of heroism? What complex mixture of feelings accompanies a long-awaited return home? The intertwined gladness and sorrow that defines the Odyssey’s tale of homecoming arises from the characters and incidents of the simile world at least as much as from the story of Odysseus and from the process of integrating the two more than from either sort of narrative individually.

Evidence-based policing (EBP) is perhaps the most significant police reform movement of the last 30 years. Most notable for identifying what does or does not work, and for trying to integrate science into policing, much of EBP’s focus remains on program evaluation methods and investigating crime prevention strategies. This vision for policing often characterizes the craft of police work as an obstacle rather than a useful contributor to science. This is changing, as proponents of EBP begin to embrace a wider variety of methods to assess a broader range of outcomes, and to treat both science and experience as necessary elements of successful police reform. In this chapter, we recommend that EBP focus more attention on assessing the choices that patrol officers make in their everyday encounters with the public. Drawing on a case study of a neighbor dispute, we show how EBP could benefit from listening to practioners and learning what their rich experiences have taught them about how best to respond. We also suggest ways that research might help generate knowledge on the essential normative or moral questions that characterize street-level discretion, and thus combine knowledge about what works with knowledge about doing the right thing.

The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

Jeffrey Gore’s entry on technē offers a survey of diverse workers throughout Shakespeare’s writing: artisans, lawyers, medical doctors, and educators. It situates the Greek word technē – meaning “technical expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” – within Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics as both a pedagogical model (“the craft analogy”) and a marker of social class among different laborers, from “leather apron” craftspeople to elite Latin learners and modern teachers of the liberal arts. In brief accounts of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on Aristotle, the entry addresses how technē was often believed incompatible with some ancient and early modern notions of citizenship and demonstrates how many of Shakespeare’s characters – such as the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – challenge us to understand the role of craft in facilitating artistic expression and strengthening political community.