Fire Craft is a story about the meaning of making, of glassblowing, which is simultaneously a more general story about the human condition. It documents my experience learning to blow glass in the hotshop of a New York City glassblowing studio, where glassblowers ply their art on small teams amidst fire, smoke, and heat. Through this immersive and sensuous first-hand account, Fire Craft details the experience of embodiment and its relation to the acquisition of skill. So much of the "meaning" of an art is entangled with bodily experience. From this insight, I address the broader entwinement of human intentionality and materiality as one of “elemental complicity”. On the one hand, humans are human. But, on the other hand, there's so much to being human that is non-human. For the glassblower, this has so much to do with fire. Realizing this made me further realize that I’m not an ethnographer of the elements but rather an elemental ethnographer. My story about learning to blow glass is not simply an account of the transmission of skill among humans, that is. It's also about how the non-human world, matter, nature, the environment, materiality - whatever you might call it - contributes to and shapes that human experience.It’s in this way that Fire Craft fundamentally addresses the question of ontology, a theory of being. Studio glass canonically distinguishes itself as glassmaking liberated from the factory. In one sense, this is accurate. But the Euro-Western ontology that separates man and the natural world persists. It’s this legacy that permits me to connect the studio glass movement, settler colonial glassmaking, and imperialism in Chapter 1, The Glassy State: Setting the Pot of Man and World, where I begin my investigation of elemental complicity with “earth, land, and ground”. From there, the reader follows “water, flow, and transmission" in Chapter 2, Embodied Knowledge: The Ebbs and Flows of Skill Acquisition, “fire and heat" in Chapter 3, Fire and Sweat: Calorific Bodies and Teamwork, "air" in Chapter 4, Blow: Time, Space, and the Vessel, and the fifth element, “quintessence” in Chapter 5, Quintessential Craft: Cupmaking and the Turns of Métis. Dialing out from elemental practical imaginaries, Chapter 6, Materia Erotica: Love and Strife in the Hotshop, considers the logic and practices of their orientations. The Conclusion, Heart of Glass, embraces the contradiction at the heart of human intentionality and elemental complicity. If you look at sociological or anthropological studies of craft, they typically describe making from human intention to object completion, accounting for the acquisition of practical knowledge therein. The Craftsman (2007) by one of my doctoral advisors, Richard Sennett, is a case in point; Sennett considers the role of failure and even, drawing on my early work, the significance of materiality. That said, Fire Craft is unique in its deep dive into the elemental imaginary and experience that animates the craft. It’s no coincidence that the very last line of the book, the one to conclude four years of fieldwork and a decade of thinking and writing: "Admittedly, I am still hot and bothered. Long ago infected with the glass bug, I'm not sure I will ever recover. Gladly so.” Glassblowing’s fires illuminated the meaning of making and the human condition, but so too did they become me, body and soul. We are beyond human. We are more than human. All humans are.