This entry links diverse bodies of scholarship on ‘making’ with economic anthropology: making objects (through technology), making futures (through innovation), and making ‘plenitude’ (through self-making and collaborative economic relations). It is a broad palette, which the entry conceptualizes as having in common a focus on deskilling and reskilling, particularly with reference to devising alternative provisioning systems. ‘Making’ is thus contemplated as combining political and technical aspects, including frontier knowledge about production (as in digital fabrication), but also experimentations with novel organizational, relational, and financial setups – such as short chains and cooperative networks. Critical considerations about the role of craft, artisanship, and apprenticeship within global commodity systems are relevant to how the latter intersect (productively or adversely) with ecological contexts, infrastructures, and power setups. Ethnographic examples contextualize the reinvention of craft in late capitalist consumer societies such as the Netherlands and the United States.
