Introduction speech

Joseph Reagle

Outline

Japanese word for “mud dumpling”;
a traditional children’s pastime.
Re-popularized by Fumio Kayo, a professor of developmental psychology.
- {he’s fuming, but won’t Knock [me] Out}
- He learned of children making mud balls in preschool.
- He not only studied how children collaborated to make them,
- he learned to make mud balls himself, even creating a scale for rating the balls’ shininess.

Of course, you can see that mine is aluminum.
- It’s not as fragile as a mud one and is easier to share.
I love this because I learned of it by way of others’ enthusiasm; shared enthusiasms are the best.
Lots of Youtubers have videos about dorodango,
including those cutting the aluminum balls in half.
There’s also a Mythbusters episode where they tested the saying, “you can’t polish a turd”—that you can’t make crap awesome.
- They did succeed in making ostrich and lion scat dorodango.

While I hope to make a great mud dumpling one day,
the aluminum one, too, speaks to my love of craft.
In Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft
- {using a mat to craw under a Ford in shop class}
he writes that, unlike office work which can be abstract and subject to politics, craft means:

the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. (Crawford 2009, p. 60)

If the dumpling is lumpy, it’s lumpy;
if I round and smooth it, I get a satisfaction that is real, independent of anything external.