Spinning wool on Kihnu Island

Abstract

Wool crafts are an essential part of cultural heritage and daily life on Kihnu Island in Estonia, and they begin with animal husbandry and wool preparation. People and sheep cooperatively produce wool, maintain the land through conservation grazing, and facilitate heritage activities while external and internal conditions and forces, like changing economic and demographic factors, provide challenges and friction. An ecological study of wool crafts in context requires attention to creative processes, tools, materials, landscapes, and human and other-than-human animals that are engaged in complex flows of activity and meaning with one another. Both ethnographic encounters and autoethnographic reflections on craft practice provide vital insight into these entanglements.

Keywords

• wool crafts
• ecology of materials
• practice-led research
• cultural heritage
• animal-human relations