Open firing techniques as community-based technology: Ari pottery making in Southwestern Ethiopia

The objective is to redefine the overall practice of pottery making by Ari potters as one of their community-based technologies. In comparison with the firing method of Japanese kiln firing, Ari's open firing was at first expected to cause an explosion or cracking of pots due to its abrupt rise of temperature. However, experiments on the ratio of contraction and water absorption of clay showed that they prevent the pots from exploding, even when the temperature of open-firing drastically goes up, by mixing plenty of ground-up broken pots with clay. They have achieved an effective way of making durable pots with minimum time and resources. In the analysis of Ari vocabularies for evaluating the traits of pots all through the process, specific folk categories, which were malki and aani, in evaluating the durability and quality were common to both makers and users. In addition, Ari potters explain the situation when pots are broken during open firing by using aani expression. Ari pottery making as a community-based technology was redefined that was influenced by the evaluation and social behavior are based on the various relationships, which are human-material relationships for making and classifying pots and human-human relationships for exchanging pots.