Reinventing the Wheel

mid-20th century through 2013. The wheel is analysed as one element in a complex and dynamic
assemblage of people, resources, technologies, meanings, places, and time. Primary data come from
ethnographic observations and interviews in a Sinhalese Sri Lankan potter community followed
since 1974. As they shifted from one potter’s wheel to another, these potters have altered social and
physical supporting technologies for procuring and preparing clay, acquiring fuel, organising labour,
and marketing pottery. Some, having reached the limits of a wheel’s capabilities and their own bodies,
have abandoned the wheel in favour of moulds and mechanical presses, setting off more cascades of
change. Their experiences help to clarify the adaptive capacities and limitations of both potter’s wheels
and their users. As this story unfolds in often unanticipated ways, it reveals the importance of attending
to spatiotemporal scale. Locally, the wheel highlights the relatively fast-changing affordances and
constraints with which individual potters, households, and communities engage. But the wheel also
brings into focus the slower moving consequences of regional heterogeneities and paths laid down by
national colonial and post-colonial policies decades ago.