Critical Craft

Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism

Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, Alicia Ory DeNicola, Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber, Alicia Ory DeNicola

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

From Oaxacan wood carvings to dessert kitchens in provincial France, Critical Craft presents thirteen ethnographies which examine what defines and makes 'craft' in a wide variety of practices from around the world. Challenging the conventional understanding of craft as a survival, a revival, or something that resists capitalism, the book turns instead to the designers, DIY enthusiasts, traditional artisans, and technical programmers who consider their labor to be craft, in order to comprehend how they make sense of it. The authors' ethnographic studies focus on the individuals and communities who claim a practice as their own, bypassing the question of craft survival to ask how and why activities termed craft are mobilized and reproduced. Moving beyond regional studies of heritage artisanship, the authors suggest that ideas of craft are by definition part of a larger cosmopolitan dialogue of power and identity. By paying careful attention to these sometimes conflicting voices, this collection shows that there is great flexibility in terms of which activities are labelled 'craft'. In fact, there are many related ideas of craft and these shape distinct engagements with materials, people, and the economy. Case studies from countries including Mexico, Nigeria, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, and France draw together evidence based on linguistics, microsociology, and participant observation to explore the shifting terrain on which those engaged in craft are operating. What emerges is a fascinating picture which shows how claims about craft are an integral part of contemporary global change.

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Introduction

Taking Stock of Craft in Anthropology

Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

Why study craft? Perhaps more pointedly, how does one attempt such a thing in a globalizing, urbanizing world of technology and the fast-paced movement of people, things, and ideas? There is ample evidence that the non-industrialized, the local, the particular, and the handmade still intrigue us, but it is less clear why an academic study of the apparently old-fashioned might be anything but quaint. We intend this book to put the study of craft front and center in anthropology and the wider social sciences by arguing that craft is a vital and fertile means to understand relationships between places, people, and time. Craft, like history, is a tool that people use to negotiate their roles and places within the material and social environment. The labor of craft work, the translation of craft export and design, and the material value of consumption all help those involved to “tell themselves” (Pucket 2000; Hensel 1996) in very different but often related and overlapping contexts. Fully contemporary, craft and its underlying “tellings” transcend the colloquial, the mundane, and the local, though perhaps our perceiving it as such is part of its significance as a meaningful trope.

This “telling,” then, is what we are centrally interested in in Critical Craft. We are less interested in defining craft (or even defining a subfield around the study of craft) and more interested in the ways that craft as a discourse and praxis help people tell themselves, their communities, their connections, and their classes. We maintain that the study of artisanship and craft must push back against traditionalizing and marginalizing discourses. Especially in its role as “foil” for cosmopolitan modernity, we believe that research on craft and artisanship has the potential to open up new and evocative questions about the ways that we construct some of anthropology’s most critical contemporary concerns: technology; access to markets, means of production, and control over work practices; tradition and innovation; urban and rural spaces; human rights and the environment to name just a few. We set out to unpack the category of crafts without being reductionist; to probe problems of authorship, access and value; and to critique the notions of craft as either relic or revival, situating crafts inside shifting social and historical contexts.

A collaborative project

The seeds of this book lie in a series of exchanges between the editors, both scholars of South Asia, long before the idea of bringing together scholars to debate the theme of craft occurred to us. We (Wilkinson-Weber and DeNicola) first met in 2002 when DeNicola was starting work on hand-block printing in Rajasthan, and Wilkinson was beginning a new project on the culture of film production. We had both been thinking about how craft in the ethnographic contexts we were familiar with raised troubling questions to do with labor, identity, and ideology. In order to contextualize the questions that vexed us, we began by reflecting on the place of craft in the discipline of anthropology and the range of ethnographic investigations into craft that had been made. In early anthropology, craft objects and activities were of interest as putative cognates of the older practices of “civilized” societies, whose traces might still be captured by field techniques of collection and description, and scientific procedures of classification and analysis. In America, Franz Boas’s interest in art helped stimulate studies of craft as the purposeful products of motivated, skilled individuals, but the likelihood of their disappearance in an adverse “modern” world was very much taken for granted (Boas 1955; Bunzel 1972; Reichard 1934).

Craft did not, as it turned out, vanish, but as anthropology matured as a discipline and began to focus on problems of social and political organization, cognition, and symbolism, or environment and ecology, interest in craft diffused into specialist sub-fields like museum anthropology, visual anthropology, the anthropology of art, and the anthropology of work. Anthropological examinations of craft and art production were often comfortably housed in region-specific literatures, notably West Africa (e.g. Ottenberg 1971; Thompson 1979), and the Pacific (e.g. Forge 1973; Munn 1986) where the investigation of indigenous aesthetics and symbolism tested existing definitions of both art and craft.

By the 1960 and 1970s, as development literature struggled with the theorization of capitalism outside of North America and Europe, anthropological studies of enculturation were replaced by Marxist-inspired analyses of the peasantry in colonial and post-colonial societies, and a heightened concern for the impact and progress of economic “development” (e.g. Diamond 1979; Mintz 1974; Wolf 1966). Meanwhile in a break with the conventional focus of art historians and anthropologists of art, Nelson Graburn (1976, 1984) began to describe and theorize tourist arts. Curiosity about labor in rapidly changing urban and rural settings produced ethnographies ranging from the incorporation of craftspeople into manufacturing operations (Cooper 1988), the contradiction between ideologies of craft and actual facts of production (Mies 1982), and the development of craft markets and persistence of “archaic” productive forms (Nash 1993).

From the 1980s onwards, two theoretical trends had an impact on writing about craft. The rise of practice theory led anthropologists to view social life as, in essence, a set of structured improvisations (Bourdieu 1977, 1993). This approach opened the door for some memorable work on the constitutive nature of craft, in other words, the ways in which it constructs a category of makers at the same time as they make the objects with which they are associated (see Greenough 1995; Kondo 1990 and Herzfeld as late as 2004). Meanwhile, exciting initiatives in the study of material culture (see Appadurai 1988; Buchli et al. 2002; Miller 1987) opened up new vistas on the use as well as the making of objects. Yet in spite of many compelling ethnographies coming out in subsequent decades that touched centrally upon craft (e.g. Adams 2006; Buechler and Buechler 1992; Hendrickson 1995), the centrality of these studies for the discipline was infrequently acknowledged. Might it be that “craft” as a subject broke under the weight of anthropology’s need in the 1990s onwards to speak to the contemporary, urban, and cosmopolitan? Is the baggage inherited from early anthropology still weighing down craft’s potential to illuminate the present moment? Those of us working on craft knew there were important issues yet to be articulated, and connections to the wider field to be made. As one of our generous anonymous reviewers stated, ‘craft’ is not so much under-studied as under-published.” It wasn’t until 2009, and another meeting, that the two of us decided to issue a call for papers to see whether like-minded academics agreed with us there was something about craft that spoke eloquently to the larger project of social and cultural anthropology. The response was both robust and eclectic and we found ourselves in the (un)enviable position of having to turn excellent papers away. All the papers were circulated and later discussed in a two-day symposium in 2012, where our agenda was to question the utility of certain categorizations, and draw attention to the contradictions within the arena of labor and value that craft is seen to inhabit. Now three years after our initial probing into the dilemmas that craft posed in our symposium, craft is being energized by a crop of interdisciplinary studies in design, technology, and digital domains. After years of wondering where our work fit, we find that this volume comes at a particularly auspicious moment.

A number of books have come out in recent years all arguing robustly for the continuing relevance of craft in the contemporary world (Sennett 2008; Adamson 2010, Alfondy 2008 and so on). Also striking are the ethnographic studies of artisanal and fine food production, in which body techniques and the minutiae of craft practice take center stage, whether bread (Buechler 1999), handmade chocolate (Terrio 1999), cheese-mongering (Paxson 2008), or foie gras (Heath and Meneley 2007). As valuable as these studies are, they deal mostly with craft practice and a renewed interest in the artisan in the Western world, the same world in which cable television programming features DIY projects for “handy” or “crafty” people, next to shows that familiarize viewers with the diversity (and price) of crafted objects in their environment. Even mathematicians and technology workers have begun to refer to their labor as craft. In fact, almost in anticipation of these latest trends, from the outset, we opted not to define “craft” too narrowly, or even to define it at all; instead, we wanted to be open to a variety of forms of “fabricating” in which craft might be more or less obvious, or perhaps a source of contention, even contradiction. Additionally, and crucially, we felt it was important to draw upon an eclectic sample of studies from a variety of geographical locations. Now that craft could plainly be seen in a variety of settings, we thought it important to ask why craft is so ubiquitous, so sought after, and yet so varied?

Anthropology is potentially well equipped to help answer these questions, since it provides us with studies of great ethnographic depth among particular communities, while recognizing that the movement of geographically specific, heritage-imbued crafts and the appearance of crafting in unexpected contexts spans the globe. Clifford Geertz wrote that “If you want to know what something means you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners do” (Geertz 1973: 5). We agree entirely on the last point, since to direct attention seriously and respectfully towards the practitioner is at the heart of the anthropological commitment to grasp the meanings of the everyday and the ordinary. Unlike Geertz, however, we are also interested in what apologists both inside and outside craft practice have to say. Producers, designers, consumers, and policy makers use descriptors like tradition, authenticity, the handmade, integrity and so on to negotiate value in the marketplace, but the connection between discourse and actual relations and practices is typically a great deal more complex than what is implied. Who claims the right to speak about craft? In so doing do they suppress other voices? How do they seek to represent or dictate practice? How is effort and skill distributed according to both private and public rhetoric about craft? And how does this emerge from or even contradict habitual practice? In short, a “thick description” of what artisans do ought not simply cover the making—of things, art, identities, and so on—they engage in, but also include all the social and cultural work entailed in securing a defendable position within what Bourdieu has termed a “field of practice.” Aside from being open to a variety of forms of craft and crafting in our project we were intent on looking for disparity, fluidity and social differentiation. Our experience is that knowledge of the full range of work on craft is uneven, particularly between different geographic settings. By drawing anthropologists with expertise in different places and different crafting types into conversation with each other, we hoped to leverage the power of regional discourses to cast light on problems both particular and general. We included scholars in the academically traditional realm of labor production with interests in the “handmade” alongside researchers in the technical sector, and those studying taste and consumption. All of us had noted the significance of traffic in objects and meanings into and out of the places we studied, and were struck by how the use of different regional and topical lenses brought into focus similarities and differences between practices that might otherwise never be compared. The sum total of our ethnographic experiences examining all kinds of making and fabricating was used to unravel and then remake our assumptions about what it means to say that something is crafted, or that someone is a craftsperson.

Claiming craft, claiming culture

Ultimately, what holds the chapters in this volume together is a larger sense of “claims” about craft, whether elaborated in discourse by artisans or traders or critics, expressed via materials and body hexis, or elicited from the social relationships and shifting practices of practitioners and traders. We contend, in fact, that craft can act, importantly and critically, as an empty signifier (Barthes 1982), “represent[ing] an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning, and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all” (Levi-Strauss 1987: 55). As such, then, it marks—perhaps as it also tries to hide—cultural ruptures. If anthropology is, in part, a study of such ruptures, then our task is to track the dynamic infusions of meaning that go on in and across space. It is true that we are primarily concerned with the discursive use of craft and its ancillary terms and practices in an emic sense (or the structure of meaning for the people we write about), but we also try to be aware of the ways in which we, as writers and ethnographers, also claim and negotiate academic understandings of craft. When craft, or one of its synonyms (for instance, artisan, handmade, maker, or whatever these may be in the language in question) is evoked in the literature, what is being claimed, by whom, and for whom? And how can reflexive and careful ethnography add texture and depth to the understanding of discourses as they emerge from and interpenetrate daily practice?

To be clear, we were not looking to create new universalizing concepts. Rather we are attempting to point out that craft as a phenomenon gets marshaled repeatedly across time and geography and we often speak and act as if meaning translates easily among all these nodes. If we borrow from Barthes’ understanding of myth, the claim to craft becomes itself a social appropriation of meaning, a message in itself (1995: 96). It is a semiotic vehicle that allows us to identify a claim as a signifier as it also necessitates an exploration of the local and particular contexts of each signified. Our argument, in a nutshell, is that crafting bodies, the material culture of craft, the ideas of what it means to make, sell, buy and use craft—all of these set out on their conceptual and actual travels loaded with significance and import, but recognition and understanding in the places they may be subtly or even vastly misplaced.

A variety of agents in craft’s cultural field or art world—makers, traders, buyers and so on—assert their own cultural mores, values, and rights upon the things or the persons within it. But this kind of sense-making in both local and global contexts is far from egalitarian. Definitions and discourses are conducted within a framework of power relations in which some, but not others, are able to align their ideas about craft with ideologies of gender and class, as well as claims to and claims against capitalism, industrialism, corporatism, and consumption. Frank Fischer suggests that the expanding complexity of global society means that policy is influenced in no small part by a growing group of experts. Designers and exporters, in their mediating roles between rural/traditional artisans, and urban/cosmopolitan buyers, are perfectly poised to take up this role of knowledge producer and expert (Fischer 2000: 22). These cultural “brokers” (which also may include NGOs and various offices of the state) are not only pivotal to the movement of crafts into the international market, but also in the translation of meaning from one “scape” (see Appadurai 1990) into another as the product itself changes locality. Through them, the material culture of “tradition” is inextricably linked to bodies, places, and emotions in a way that influences people’s understandings of the divisions between their own and other cultures, and the worthiness of certain political ideas associated with the past or the present. Michael Herzfeld’s work on the tension between “claims to permanence and absoluteness” that craft invokes and the fact of very real hierarchies “of shifting signifiers and indices [due to] upheavals in the distribution of power worldwide” (2004: 3) is particularly pertinent to our volume. Arguing that the “sense” of a moral and aesthetic consensus wins out over the disruptions and disagreements that tend to undermine it, Herzfeld points to the “language of universal morality” that routinely dismisses local variants. Within such an authoritative “global hierarchy of value” craft is repeatedly displaced from the specifics of its existence in place and time to conform to generalizing models that are, in their origins, no less “cultural” or particular (Herzfeld 2004: 2–3). For a local form or practice to derive the benefits of conforming to the global hierarchy of value in which craft has its place, it must “seem” or “speak” in the right kinds of terms at the same time as the discrepant and unsettling is sublimated. Just as there are comparable economic and historical forces at work in the formation of crafts in several locations, so their similarities may emerge from alignments in the vocabulary and imaging that discourse in the global hierarchy demands.

The chapters

The chapters in this volume cross-reference each other extensively, and a variety of thematic groupings could be argued for given the overlaps and divergences in the collection. Rather than assign chapters according to their affinities for particular literatures or topics, though, we decided to group them into three sections dealing in some respect with claims. The material in any given section is diverse, whether because of the nature of the “craft” attended to, or the part of the world in which investigation is focused, or the kind of arguments the authors have pursued. The section Contentions focuses on core questions about craft, and explores the vigorous assertions that shore up historical and local instances of craft-making or consuming. Conundrums and Conflicts go further into the practical negotiations of claims, and the kinds of political commitments, values, and negotiations of power they entail. We hope readers will find this organization conducive to noticing similarities and differences in otherwise unexpected and unfamiliar juxtapositions.

Contentions

The contentions collected here all touch upon considerations of value as an economic phenomenon or as ethical practice. Alanna Cant’s examination of Oaxacan wood carvers draws direct attention to how surplus value extraction coincides with habitual authorial detachment. She goes on to argue that crafters of Oaxacan pottery experience alienation processually, not just in the blunt fact of selling their labor power but in consciously conforming to the workshop style and allowing the workshop’s “mark” to replace their own material engagement with each piece. Style, in other words, is not a mere outcome of differential inclination or talent, but is socially managed through a workshop system in which owners take the lead in how claims to authorship are either made or submerged.

At some distance from these makers are the itinerant crafters described by Villalobos, crossing state borders in Central America in search of a fulfilling and un-alienated life, and using craft that they make or resell as a providential item of exchange and barter in the informal economy. The apparent rootedness of the Oaxacan craft, a necessary condition for it to be accorded value as a transportable item of culture, contrasts very dramatically with the jewelry and curios fabricated by mobile travelers. The latter may seem to be exemplars of local “culture” but in fact emerge out of the experience and constraints of an itinerant life that is deliberately deterritorialized.

The middle-class connoisseurs of arts and crafts furniture and decorations that are the focus of Fran Mascia-Lees’s chapter could hardly be more different from itinerant craftspeople, yet their commitment to moral outlooks and actions clearly links the two. Uncontroversial and socially unmarked, the buyers of arts and crafts work profess a respect for a downscaled consumerism that jibes with many of the goals of the nineteenth-century arts and cra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Taking Stock of Craft in Anthropology
• PART ONE Contentions
• PART TWO Conundrums
• PART THREE Conflicts
• Notes
• References
• Index