"The long history of crafting clay shows three ways of becoming aroused consciously by materials, in altering, marking, or identifying them with ourselves. Each act has a rich inner struture: metamorphosis can occur through development of a type-form, combination of forms, or domain shift. Marking an object can be a political act, not in the programmatic sense, but in the more fundamental matter of establishing one's presence, objectively. Anthropomorphosis reveals the power of metaphor and a technique for manufacturing symbols. In the history of clayware, none of these three processes proved as simple as these summary labels might suggest. The worker in clay coped slowly with technical change, with political oppression rendering him or her invisible, and with the class of human attributes. We could of course treat clay simply as a material that is necessary for cooking and for shelter. But in this utilitarian spirit we would eliminate most of what has made this substance culturally consequent."
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (p. 144)