The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), hosted by the British Museum and financed by the Arcadia Fund, exemplifies initiatives that aim to preserve diverse material knowledges and practices variously threatened with disappearance. Based on insights from six EMKP projects, we critically interrogate such an emphasis on “endangerment,” highlighting how endangerment is closely entangled with resilience. Spanning six distinct material knowledges practices (wild silk textiles; hide and fiber crafts; artificial island-building; felt hats; dry stonemasonry; dyes) in six geographical locations (Burkina Faso, Mongolia, Solomon Islands, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Colombia), the featured EMKP projects highlight how endangerment and resilience are not mutually exclusive. Instead, enmeshed paradoxically through social embedding, endangerment and resilience are intimately intertwined, constituent parts of each other. We propose the notion of “demonstrably sustainable technics” as an analytical category to better account for the endangerment-resilience nexus, to better understand why and how some material practices and knowledges persist despite various threats to their continuity, that of their human and non-human participants and broader socioecological contexts. Simultaneously, “demonstrably sustainable technics” allow for a nuanced understanding of the imbrication of acts of cultural and social erasure paradoxically with the very same traditions of documentation attempting to be overturned or at least confronted by these projects.
Hobbis et al. (2026) studied this question.