Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism 9781472594860, 9781472594853, 9781474224055, 9781472594877

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Critical Craft

Critical Craft Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism

EDITED BY CLARE M. WILKINSON-WEBER AND ALICIA ORY DENICOLA

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Selection and Editorial Material: Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola, 2016 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2016 Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-9486-0 PB: 978-1-4725-9485-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9487-7 ePub: 978-1-4725-9488-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents List of Figures  ix List of Contributors  xi Acknowledgments  xv

1 Introduction: Taking Stock of Craft in Anthropology  1



Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

PART ONE Contentions 17 2 Who Authors Crafts? Producing Woodcarvings and Authorship



in Oaxaca, Mexico  19 Alanna Cant

3 Forging Source: Considering the Craft of Computer



Programming  35 Lane DeNicola

4 American Beauty: The Middle Class Arts and Crafts Revival in



the United States  57 Frances E. Mascia-Lees

5 Designs on Craft: Negotiating Artisanal Knowledge and Identity



in India  79 Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

vi Contents

6 Nomadic Artisans in Central America: Building Plurilocal



Communities through Craft  99 Millaray Villalobos

PART TWO Conundrums 113 7 Number in Craft: Situated Numbering Practices in Do-It-Yourself



Sensor Systems  115 Dawn Nafus and Richard Beckwith

8 Visions of Excess: Crafting Good Chocolate in France and the



United States  135 Susan Terrio

9 Creativity and Tradition: Keeping Craft Alive among Moroccan



Carpet Weavers and French Organic Farmers  153 Myriem Naji

10 Refashioning a Global Craft Commodity Flow from Aklan,



Central Philippines  169 B. Lynne Milgram

PART THREE Conflicts 187 11 Conflicting Ideologies of the Digital Hand: Locating the Material



in a Digital Age  189 Daniela Rosner

12 Materials, the Nation and the Self: Division of Labor in a



Taiwanese Craft  199 Geoffrey Gowlland

Contents

13 Craft, Memory, and Loss: Babban riga robes, politics, and the



quest for “bigness” in Zaria City, Nigeria  217 Elisha P. Renne

14 Crafting Muslim Artisans: Agency and Exclusion in India’s



Urban Crafts Communities  239 Mira Mohsini

Notes  259 References  271 Index  295

vii

List of Figures   1 A fully functional computer keyboard made from an old IBM

model M keyboard and parts from an old Continental Typewriter

50

  2 Handmade Craftsman Lantern and Stickley Reproduction Table

and Chairs

66

  3 Arts and Crafts Objects, Handmade by GPI Craftspeople

69

  4 Traditional hand printing in Bagru

83

  5 Tailors working under the direction of the master cutter in a

workshop making film costumes in Mumbai   6 Colombian nomadic artisan parche, Tamarindo, Costa Rica

95 105

  7 Global popular culture: iconic Argentinian Che Guevara on a

tagua pipe from Ecuador, sold in Bocas del Toro, Panama

108

  8 DIY home energy monitoring hub

127

  9 Example of home energy readouts

131

10 A retail craft store in Manila, Philippines, displays a range

of home décor products made from nito reeds along with accompanying documentation

170

11 Kalibo area artisans construct nito reed trays and container

forms177 12 In a Kalibo workshop an artisan polishes and trims loose ends

from square nito reed place mats

180

13 Spyn system associates digital records with locations on knit

fabric using computer vision

190

14 Iterative development of Spyn software; infrared-enabled

camera images of knit yarn (left), Spyn screenshot (right) 15 Old-fashioned pickle jar, freshly made on the kick-wheel

192 208

16 Jimi Magajiya drawing patterns on cotton damask (shedda) in

his home in Anguwar Magajiya

218

x

List of Figures 17 Isyaku Shittu with textiles for sale in his stall at Sheikh Ladan

Sharehu Central Market, Zaria City

225

18 Danladi Yusuf Maikanwa at his stall in Sheikh Ladan Sharehu

Central Market where he sells a range of embroidery thread and associated materials, Zaria City

226

19 Two wooden frames in Shafiq’s workshop located in Seelampur

240

20 The view from a workshop of Old Delhi’s busy market

243

List of Contributors Richard Beckwith is a Research Psychologist in Intel Labs. Beckwith has been with Intel since 1996. He publishes primarily on language, education, sensors, and privacy. Recent work has focused on service development for community-based sensing schemes. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1986. Alanna Cant is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Her research in Mexico addresses actors’ intersecting aesthetic practices in art production, and more recently, restorations of historic Catholic churches. She completed her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 2012. Alicia Ory DeNicola is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oxford College of Emory University. Her research explores the ideas and practices of craft, design, and education as it pertains to North India. Her M.A. is in Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Syracuse University. Lane DeNicola was trained as an ethnographer and cultural historian of digital media and information technology. He was the inaugural coordinator of the master’s program in Digital Anthropology at University College London and is currently the Director of Institutional Research for the College of Arts & Sciences at Emory University. Geoffrey Gowlland earned his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and is currently based at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. He has conducted research on crafts and apprenticeship in China and Taiwan, and more recently has been investigating the revival of crafts among the indigenous people of Taiwan. Frances Mascia-Lees is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on politics and aesthetics, especially as related to

xii

List of Contributors

embodiment and commodity capitalism. She has published numerous articles across a range of fields, and authored and edited seven books including A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment (2011). She served as Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist from 2001 to 2006. B. Lynne Milgram is Professor of Anthropology at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. Her research in the northern Philippines analyzes the political economy of women’s work in crafts, the Philippine–Hong Kong secondhand clothing trade, transformations of urban public space, and legal/illegal work in street vending and public market redevelopment. Milgram’s recent co-edited book is (with K.T. Hansen and  W. E. Little) Street Economies in the Urban Global South (2013). Mira Mohsini is Visiting Assistant Professor at Kalamazoo College in the departments of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies. She focuses on Muslim working-class experiences in India. She has published on colonialism, nationalism, craft, and heritage. Her other work examines the confluence of religion, piety, and labor. Dawn Nafus is a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs, where she conducts anthropological research to inspire new product development. She is also the editor of Quantified: Biosensors Technologies in Everyday Life (2016). Her Ph.D. is from the University of Cambridge. Myriem Naji is a research associate at the Department of Anthropology at University College London, UK where she got her Ph.D. She curated an exhibition related to her research on weaving in Morocco, titled “Weaving the threads of livelihood: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Berber Weavers” at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS in 2011. Elisha P. Renne is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of MichiganAnn Arbor. Her current research focuses on Islamic reform and textile history in Nigeria. Recent publications include Veiling in Africa and The Politics of Polio in Northern Nigeria as well as articles in Africa, Anthropology Today, Islamic Africa, and Textile History. Daniela K. Rosner is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, co-directing the Tactile and



List of Contributors

xiii

Tactical Design Lab (TAT lab). Through fieldwork and design, her research reveals surprising connections between technology development and handwork. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Susan Terrio is Professor of Anthropology and French Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Her specific research interests center on social class and educational systems, craft production and consumption in late capitalism, race and ethnicity, migration, law, and juvenile and immigration courts in France and the United States. Her books include Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate (2000), and Whose Child am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children in U.S. Immigration Custody (2015). Millaray Villalobos works at Dirección de Integración y Desarrollo Humano, the government agency in charge of designing and implementing multistakeholder strategies for the integration of migrant and refugee populations into Costa Rican society. She has had an interest in artisanal jewelry and experienced migration first hand from an early age. The investigation presented in this volume, combining these two interests, is a product of her research at Universidad de Costa Rica. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University Vancouver. Her research focuses on the social organization of art and media production in India. She is the author of Embroidering Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Lucknow Embroidery Industry (1999) and Fashioning Bollywood: Making and Meaning in Hindi Film Costume (2014).

Acknowledgments C

ritical Craft is the result of an impromptu meeting between the editors in 2009 at a small departmental talk at University College London, and is thus a nod toward the importance of informal and serendipitous academic conversation. We have been working together (and shortly afterward alongside an amazing group of authors) since that time. To each other and the group that allowed us to continue, enrich, and ultimately publish this conversation we owe a great debt. But we also owe many others: we thank Leslie C. Aiello, Laurie Obbink and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropology for their generous workshop grant that allowed us the time and space to meet with our authors and integrate this book in valuable ways. To our Bloomsbury support team—Louise Butler, who brought us into the fold; Jennifer Schmidt, who took over from Louise with nary a bump; to Molly Beck and Abbie Sharman, editorial assistant and designer—our thanks for your patience and professionalism. Numerous reviewers, including the two anonymous reviewers of our manuscript not only gave of their time but provided us with extremely helpful suggestions and gratifyingly positive support more than once along the way. Both of our universities were very generous in their support. Washington State University Vancouver was gracious enough to provide us with space and logistical support for the two-day seminar that allowed us all to meet and integrate our work more fully. We especially thank Dene Grigar and the Creative Media and Digital Culture Program at WSU Vancouver for supporting the symposium, hosting its website, and helping us welcome the attendees. Linda Campbell was invaluable for her work on the practical details of the event. In the later stages of preparing the manuscript we benefited enormously from a short stay at the Whiteley Center at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories on a writing retreat. Oxford College of Emory University provided generous travel grants over a two-year span of time as well as financial assistance for administration, and we especially thank Patricia Owen-Smith and Kenneth Anderson for their ongoing support. There are numerous others who have helped and encouraged us in the long passage from concept to publication. Daniel Miller deserves a call out for re-introducing us at that fateful department talk at UCL. Holly Tavel and Dale Strouse were instrumental in helping us finalize the text and some of the images, and Janice Cole was responsible for one of the photographs

xvi Acknowledgments

on the cover. Others who cannot be forgotten for their on-going conversation, suggestions, and support over the years include Arjun Appadurai, Susan Wadley, Ann Gold, Sudipta Sen, Sarah Lamb, Hans Buechler, Chaise LaDousa, Kerry Fosher, Francesca Gaiba, Carl Maida, Trevor Marchand, Laura Bear, Veena Poonacha, Richard Parmentier, Geert DeNeve, Andrew Sanchez (for his introduction to the Labor and South Asia group at the London School of Economics), Emma Tarlo, Sharad Chari, Amanda Pendleton, Ricardo Conceição, Renata Pereira, Susan Ashmore, Bridgette Gunnels, Jack Hardy, Kenneth Carter, Eve Mullen, Florien Pohl, Jasminka Ninkovic, Frank Maddox, Aaron May, Nicholas Schiller, Gustav Milne and Stacy Bell McQuaid. And of course we thank our families: for Clare’s part, Steve Weber above all, and also Ceri and Evan Weber; for Alicia, Dorrit Ory, Kenneth Ory, Christina Ory, Laurena Nichols, and my nieces and nephews who do not get to see nearly enough of me and Lane DeNicola who literally was with this book every step of the way.

1 Introduction Taking Stock of Craft in Anthropology Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

W

hy study craft? Perhaps more pointedly, how does one attempt such a thing in a globalizing, urbanizing world of technology and the fastpaced 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

2

CRITICAL CRAFT

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;

Introduction

3

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

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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

Introduction

5

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

6

CRITICAL CRAFT

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

Introduction

7

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

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CRITICAL CRAFT

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 crafts movement. Avoiding the ephemeral and the coarse, lovers of arts and crafts integrate an aesthetic taste with ethical practice, seeking out those goods that are made by craftspeople who are fully immersed, intellectually and sensuously, in their work. Making claims about craft is itself a contentious business, given the prevalence of moral and analytic paradigms in which craft is contrasted with industry, with the processed and artificial, and with newness and systematic obsolescence. Querying the boundary-making processes that develop around craft is one of the key goals of this volume, and in the realm of digital media, as Lane DeNicola writes, this means demolishing the false wall that divides the material from the virtual. DeNicola reminds us that new media manifests itself in material forms; more critically, he proposes that the composition of computer code is inextricably wound up with actual tools and machines. As he goes on to enumerate the sensory and proprioceptive elements of computer engineering, it becomes apparent that the normative boundaries of material and non-material in relation to material and electronic crafting are porous, even arguably false. In another example of contentiousness, in our own contribution to the volume, we explore how a claim in one place, framed in a particular way,

Introduction

9

has entailments for the social relations and identities of others in the craft “artworld” (Becker 1982). We survey the integration of craft into a dynamic process of social differentiation and distinction in three industries in North India. We term this a “marshaling” of material and rhetorical resources, a tactical move of which most craftspeople are aware but which is most often used by designers who sit largely outside the actual production of craft. Craftspeople too make contentions about craft but not on equal terms with designers: indeed, scholarship on craft and industry has largely drawn on the selected discourses of middle and upper class consumers and “developers” of craft, not those of the makers. Taken as a whole, the section suggests that contentions form in different arenas of practice, some of which belong to better-known rhetorics of craft (the work of the hand, the evocations of the thing made) and others which remain marginalized (keyboarding and code), working on craft while not “doing” craft, not to speak of embedded contradictions like alienated labor in craft workshops and deracinated workers selling place-redolent “souvenirs.”

Conundrums The section on conundrums takes on activities and professions in which claims are either implicit or run parallel to each other. Like Lane DeNicola, Nafus and Beckwith identify craft in mundane technological practices but in contrast to his examples, there are no counter narratives (to do with the “art” of code, for example) to support claims of any kind. In their chapter, Nafus and Beckwith destabilize the relegation of calculation and number output to the category of abstract knowledge distinct from the contingent and “rule-of-thumb” reckoning associated with craft. Paying close attention to how “tinkerers” build and modify heat sensors as opposed to the use of off-the-shelf sensors, Nafus and Beckwith propose that number may be used heuristically, not just hermeneutically. Number to the tinkerer makes their environment tangible, material even, as they work with the sensor to balance a variety of “ingredients” just as other artisans, like fiber artists or potters do. Yet tinkerers make no direct claim to craft, and possess few of the attributes commonly assigned to crafters, even as their practice exemplifies many “crafty” components. Similarly, the French organic farmers studied by Naji profess no great affinity to crafters or artisans, yet when set against the Moroccan carpet weavers of Naji’s earlier work, obvious parallels emerge. Specifically, Naji argues that at stake in the work of farming or weaving is the construction of a moral self, defined by what one does (the gendered production of carpets in Morocco) as well as how one does it (the mindful choice of

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organic procedures and elements in farming). In both, the difficulties and the hardships of the work are instrumental in forming distinct subjectivities; but while working-class weavers would abandon weaving for a life without toil if they could, middle-class farmers eschew the conveniences of “modern” farming in a deliberate quest for what is hard and demanding. Milgram’s chapter ventures into the highly complex world of nito reed basketry in the Philippines, posing the conundrum of how we can slot such an apparently simple, handmade product (indeed this is a key component of its marketability) into a commodity chain without taking note of what she terms the “horizontal” contingencies that so fundamentally shape production. Milgram describes a multistranded industry, populated by traders, “team leaders” and workers, each with access to varieties of economic and social capital that facilitate their actions within the business of nito weaving itself. Uncertainty and risk at the upper levels of the production hierarchy combined with a paucity of capital resources at the lowest ones lead in turn to another conundrum as to how efficacious craft truly is as a development strategy. Rounding out the section is Terrio’s comparison of French and American makers and consumers of high-quality chocolate, where a convergence in taste masks distinct histories of how chocolate is made, consumed, and used. The terminologies of chocolate connoisseurship, as well as the imperative to cultivate and educate consumer taste, illustrate the influence of transnational trends to do with shifting sites of production, international trade policies, and anti-industrial discourses about food. Yet in France, an appeal to national culinary and gustatory traditions contrasts with American preferences for the natural and unadulterated, at least among the primarily middle-class makers and consumers of fine chocolate. Similarly, the French notion of chocolate as a rare delicacy most often associated with gift-giving and hedonistic power contrasts with long-established American inclinations toward chocolate as a juvenile indulgence, enjoyed and (over)-consumed alone. In this case as with others in the section, conundrums pose lingering questions to do with moral choice in concert with, or sometimes in conflict with judgments of effectiveness. How important is process versus outcome? Should one be accorded greater significance than the other, and to what extent is craft a quest to dissolve the question entirely?

Conflicts The chapters in this section illustrate how discrepant visions of craftspeople and craft meanings encounter or develop in opposition to each other. Gowlland situates contemporary Taiwanese ceramic production within the history and politics of Chinese and Taiwanese hostilities, layering his discussion (much

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as decoration is layered on the body of the ceramic vessel) to reveal a set of nested contrasts whose terms have oscillated in surprising and significant ways. As the veneer conferred both literally and figuratively by glazing has lost its association with the mainland in the wake of Chinese economic transformation, so what was industry has become craft in Taiwan, and the subordinated values of the potter found new resonance as the countries continue to adjust their relationship. Political differences and dissonances also animate the course of embroidery production in Nigeria, where, as described by Renne, power is materialized in forms of dress. Using a metaphor of weight to illuminate power, Nigerians have literally endorsed the clothing of men in power with dense, hand-embroidered robes. Competitive regimes originating in the state and the city have their own sartorial code in kaftans, also embroidered, but without the productive structure and activities associated with baba riggan robes. Changes in embroidery stem in part from economic circumstances, but they cannot be divorced from political realities: now baba riggan epitomizes a “tradition” of incorporative politics from which the state is at once distinct, but upon which it still relies. Our last two chapters immerse us back in the everyday of craft activity. Rosner’s exploration of the integration of digital technologies into knitting illustrates the tension between what may be seen by some as a re-invigoration of a craft form with the conviction of established practitioners that it is an illegitimate intrusion. Notwithstanding the fact that knitwear emerges from code, making its relationship to digital design and programming apparent, the knitting guild members with whom Rosner worked were reluctant to trade in its customary gender and low-technology implications. Mohsini explores another facet of distinction and differentiation in the world of craft labor, explaining how north Indian embroidery (zardozi) workers articulate and substantiate a contrast between artisan and laborer. Training and skill form part of the self-definition of a “true artisan” but so also does the ability to direct the labor of other embroiderers as the master of a workshop or a subcontractor of work. As real as the divide between the artisan and the mere laborer appears, it is in fact one that is crossed by embroiderers not just as they work their way up the labor hierarchy, but repeatedly as economic, social and familial circumstances allow. Far from craft workers forming a homogeneous category, a kind of solidary index of Indian artisanal heritage, the world of zardozi is dynamic and diverse, and an embroiderer may expect to do many kinds of work in his or her productive lifetime. Once again we see craft feature as both figure and ground inside larger social and political debates. In fact, could it be that craft’s apparent affinity for the creation and elaboration of binary oppositions is less to do with its intrinsic nature than its productivity (literally and figuratively) for more far-reaching agendas?

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Craft as work, craft as meaning As the citing of other chapters by each author shows, our discussions suggested several crosscutting themes and interests that threaded various papers together across the sections delineated above. We finish this introduction with a brief review of those we regard as most significant.

Class, labor, and production In the historical accounts which are by now familiar, “craft” as the skilled production of sometimes complex artifacts gave way to industrial manufacture and machino-facture with the rise of capitalism, which depended upon the availability of a market in labor and the ability of capital owners to invest in that labor as well as productive resources (Marx 1976: 588–92; Goody 1982). Development literature struggled with the theorization of capitalism outside North America and Europe, where production did not conform to the models of manufacture and machino-facture laid out in capitalist critiques in the West. The existence of different forms of production (workshops with labor discipline enforced by senior kin, for example) that yet participated in a larger capitalist mode of production came to be seen as more or less permanent components of a late capitalist landscape in which a variety of forms of extraction of labor power co-exist. In short, crafts should not be regarded as “alternatives” or “deviations” or even “resistance” in global capitalism, since despite repeated talk about revival and revitalization, craft as small scale, dispersed, hand-powered labor, never goes away. The variability of organizational forms that seem entirely at home in capitalism has clouded the certainty of labor classifications, and at the same time, craft ideologies play important roles in constructing and defending boundaries between artisans and traders, employers, and designers. The existence of small workshops, dispersed labor forces, and a lack of machinery allows for craft to be deemed a plucky survival, a kind of pre-capitalist relic whose enervated practitioners can be assisted in their efforts to stay vital even as the rest of the modern world has passed them by. If the recourse to craft takes on the status of a salvage mission for designers in India or the Philippines, in France and the US the movement towards craft is an escape from the unrelenting grind of modern living, a reconciliation of the self with materials, with nature, with patience, with time. In Nigeria, craft connects the present to the past via the sartorial distinctions offered by a choice in embroidered robes. In Central and South America, itinerant artisans too seek to slip out from under the onerous demands of capitalist living, choosing to

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live without encumbrances, even for a short time, and to connect buyers with diversely sourced handicrafts as a way to generate some income. Realizing that a variety of forms is normative in contemporary capitalism allows for a more robust appreciation of the place craft occupies in contemporary labor organization and commerce. Craft’s lasting contribution to economic anthropology is affirmed by chapters that bear out the necessity of careful ethnographic attention to local economic relationships, control, ownership and decision-making. Cant’s work on the politics of authorship (who gets the credit, who doesn’t) in a Oaxacan ceramic workshop, or Milgram’s study of the complex web of obligations and dependences that sustain the nito reed industry in the Philippines disrupt any expectation that the small scale is analytically simple, or lacking a real potential for adversarial relationships. But in even the most dispassionate analysis of craft economy, morality and value are never far away. Value is the more complicated partner in the association, since, as has been pointed out since Marx, one of the hallmarks of capitalism is to dissolve use value in the quantitative currencies of exchange value. A fair wage for fair work is an acceptable (if rarely honored) demand in this context, but proponents of craft rarely leave moral arguments at that. Instead, morality is built into the practice, or dueling claims are made as to where the true moral weight or “worth” of work resides—is it creating the shape or the glaze of the pottery (as in Taiwan, see Gowlland this volume)? Is it the discipline evidenced in pain and fatigue? Is it the openness, transparency (in Lane DeNicola’s terms) of the thing worked on? Craft often therefore takes a moral stance against the unfeeling directions of capitalism, a stance that can take on the veneer of a kind of conservatism that favors the preferred values of the past. Such convictions, however, ignore both the iniquities of pre-capitalist production, and the fact that the systematic production of objects cannot help but make use of quasi-industrial relationships. For example, the Taiwanese and Chinese factories that turn out bowls and pots are descended from forms of manufacture that have a very deep history in East Asia. Besides, if more consumers are to derive the pleasures and benefits of the crafted object (surely a worthy moral goal), can this even be done without some admixture of machine and handmade processes? These questions remain as relevant and pressing today as they were for William Morris in the nineteenth century.

Senses and images Another set of connections touches upon the senses and sensory imagery in making sense of craft production, interpretation, and consumption. Metaphors of “transparency” (read honesty?) and visibility permeate many of the chapters,

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including the value placed upon face-to-face dealings and transactions—as with Cant and Mascia-Lees’s craft buyers brought into the presence not just of crafters but of the things themselves. Nafus and Beckwith’s heat sensor “tinkerers” even make apparent and usable the relationships within a home environment that would otherwise be not just invisible but even unthinkable. Alongside ocular imagery runs tactile, emotive language, in which immediacy is associated not just with a close and knowledgeable bond between buyer and maker but the engagement of maker and material. Imaginative and kinesthetic play (or struggle) with the stuff (clay, wool, reeds, numbers) of craft lies at the core of the artisan identity, and anthropologists have a good track record of pinpointing its subtleties and intricacy, at least among those who can and want to do the finest work. For that, one needs time, and the management of time is perhaps one of the most compelling contingencies of the various crafts described here—whether it takes the form of digitized memories inserted as an interface in knitted garments, the anticipation of the glazed pot coming from the kiln, the correlation of heat sensor numbers with the cycles of nature and with human activity. Time can be directly correlated with both the quality and character of craft, from piece workers who adjust their work according to their wage (DeNicola and Wilkinson-Weber), to Naji’s organic farmers who submit to longer durations both for work and for the output of their farms than do their commercial, agribusiness counterparts. In all these ways, we see evidence of the mutual co-construction of artisans and the things they make, use, and the variables they must either exploit or be bound by. Several chapters directly deal with issues of embodiment. In seeking to understand craft through the eyes, so to speak, of arts and crafts enthusiasts, Mascia-Lees turns to Merleau-Ponty (1962) to suggest that embodiment can inform not just the maker’s way of working, but a buyer and user’s enjoyment of beautiful things. By finding and describing a craft aesthetic, she contributes to a small but critical literature that seeks to explore the connections between embodiment, knowledge, and the senses beyond touch (see Grasseni 2007; Herzfeld 2004; Kondo 1990; Marchand 2009). To Rosner, the entanglement of the body in textile practice (here knitting) seems to lead both logically and expressively to the assimilation of digital technology. This is not, as some may say, an instance of the supersession of the concrete by the insubstantial but rather the opening up of an established practice to different orientations toward tactility and memory. In a similar vein, Lane DeNicola’s chapter on the fundamental materiality of the digital, and the habitual postures and movements of the body in the production of code reverses a commonplace dualism in which craft and technology stand opposed. To these Naji adds the compelling rhetoric of toil in craft, the lingering marks on the body of craft as moral practice, whether they are willingly borne by French farmers or reluctantly endured by female carpet weavers in Morocco.

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Histories and ideologies A diffuse interest among many of us in discourses about craft as heritage or as a spur to nation-building clearly speaks to a contemporary moment in which the construction and performance of regional and national identities play out on a global stage. By the 1980s, cross-fertilization between anthropological and historical perspectives produced complex analyses of craft’s role in the generation of national ideologies at a time of global economic and political transformation (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Weiner and Schneider 1989; Stocking 1988). Thereafter, a revived interest in consumption as the touchstone of contemporary life fueled the production of several monographs and volumes “returning our attention to the things themselves” (e.g., Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987). Installing consumption at the center of social and cultural analysis enlivened anthropological studies of the uses of craft items, encouraging a broadened perspective that incorporated several stages of the “commodity career” (Kopytoff 1986) from production to marketing to use. From Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s 1998 critical analysis of the construction of heritage in Canada to descriptive and prescriptive writings embedded in craft as a way of encouraging cultural survival, to the study of the “traffic in culture” (Marcus and Myers 1995) writings on the intersection of heritage and craft form one of the key cornerstones of craft literature (e.g. Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Greenough 1995; Guss 2000; Terrio 1999; Phillips and Steiner 1999). The two chapters in the volume that come out of India (DeNicola and Wilkinson-Weber, Mohsini), with its rich heritage of crafts that are embedded in the very charters of the state cannot help but to be in conversation with this literature. Similarly, Gowlland’s study of Taiwanese ceramics charts the swings of an economic and evaluative pendulum whose tos and fros mirror the shifting and contrastive relationship between the two Chinas (PRC and TOC). Renne explores the close connection between forms of dress and embroidery and expectations regarding the operation of state versus local power. With the state commandeering more domains to define and administer, baba riggan and their makers offer a visual and tactile connection to the past. Starting from the premise that chocolate is not just good to eat but good to think with, Terrio sees a divide in the ways in which Americans and French evaluate chocolate, with French makers and consumers increasingly invoking the integrity of French culinary culture as a prop to cultivating the proper “tastes.” The tight web of associations and resonances that exists in this book should, by itself, persuade the reader that craft is an extraordinarily fertile idea for contemporary anthropology. Many questions remain, which will no doubt come from more juxtapositions of forms of craft in parts of the

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world we did not cover. While acknowledging that there is an evident place for region-based studies of craft within specific social formations, without the range of craft activities, values, and relationships described in these chapters, some of them familiar and some of them unexpected, we would not be able to explore as thoroughly the way in which craft is invoked as an idea, as a vocation, or as a livelihood. The capacity of craft to link a variety of argumentative and theoretical domains together is a reflection of its contemporary power.

PART ONE

Contentions

2 Who Authors Crafts? Producing Woodcarvings and Authorship in Oaxaca, Mexico Alanna Cant

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel. DAMIEN HIRST

O

ne hot summer afternoon in 2008, a group of tourists from the United States arrived at the household-workshop of Miguel and Catalina García, located at the end of a dusty road on the edge of the small village of San Martín Tilcajete in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.1 Their tour guide had brought them there in order to see a demonstration of the intricate carving and painting techniques that have made the Garcías successful artisans within the competitive world of Mexican crafts and folk-art. Throughout the demonstration, Miguel introduced by name many of the artisans who work in his workshop, carving, painting, and sanding the soft copal wood into their fine finished forms. After the demonstration was over, I spoke for some time with a number of the women in the group, while the others perused the small shop where carvings were for sale. As we stood under the shady awning in the courtyard of Miguel and Catalina’s home, one of the women mentioned that she had appreciated visiting their workshop because, as she put it, she was “more interested in ethnic art than crafts.” I asked her what was it about their work that made it art, and she described how it showed “real creativity

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and passion” and that “there was something unique in each piece [and] … you could see how Miguel and Catalina put themselves into the work.” A few weeks later, a different group of American tourists visited the Garcías’ workshop. As Miguel’s explanation of the painting finished, and the group moved towards the carving area, I noticed one young woman had hung back and was looking closely at the piece Citlali, a painter in her early twenties, was just finishing. Although the woman seemed interested in the piece, she was asking Citlali in Spanish how long she had worked there for. Citlali answered “two years,” and looked up, smiling. Dropping her voice, she then asked, “and do you ever get to sign your own work, or is it always signed by the jefes (bosses)?” Citlali’s smile flickered for a moment, and then she answered, “We are all people of this workshop, and this is the name of the workshop, so that is our signature.” While we may speculate on the dispositions or motivations of these two women whose interpretations of the Garcías’ workshop were in such disagreement, it was my own reactions to these events that allowed me to glimpse the central problem they posed. From my “in the field” perspective, I was surprised by both: I had been shocked that the first woman was able to feel that Miguel and Catalina had “put themselves into the work” when she had just met a number of the Garcías’ employees who spend their days painting and carving in their workshop. At the same time, I was also surprised that the second woman did not understand that the signature applied to the bottom of the Garcías’ carvings represented something more than just the labor put into the piece; that it stood in for the creative work of the Garcías themselves, which was expressed through the workshop’s general style. That these observations did not seem inherently contradictory from a perspective situated within workshops in Oaxaca points to the conceptual conflicts inherent in the production of craftwork by named individuals, a conflict that is both about definitions of “art” and “craft” and, at the same time, about authorship itself. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett claims that one of the ways art and craft can be sociologically distinguished is by the relative roles that agency and originality are considered to play in their production, citing Cellini’s salt cellars as an example of craft-like objects that were ideologically made into works of art (2008: 68–73). That this transformation could take place, Sennett suggests, was due to the emergence of a new kind of authority founded on the Renaissance ideals of originality and creativity, which imbued art objects with public value because they “exposed and expressed the inner character of [their] maker,” a belief that continues to inform popular common sense understandings of art production today (Sennett 2008: 69; cf. Soussloff 1997: 19, 34; Errington 1998: 140–1). In contrast, the public value of craft objects has come to be based on the idea of socially or communally produced productive skills and abilities, often thought to reflect localized place-based traditions or cultural identity, rather than being the result of the internal creative processes of individuals (Metcalf 1997:



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70–1; Hickey 1997: 91–3). Thus, one of the ways that craft has been historically distinguished from art is through definitions of authorship. The objective attribution of pure creative genius to artists has, of course, been challenged by art historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, who have observed that while artists have been discursively and culturally constructed as individualized originators of aesthetic forms, in reality they produce art objects within communities of knowledge where ideas, symbols, and aesthetic positions constantly circulate. Charting the nature of the relationships within these “art worlds” has subsequently come to be a standard method within sociological and anthropological studies of art and art production (e.g., Becker 1982; Bourdieu 1993; Myers 2005). A similar deconstruction of the myth that crafts are traditional objects produced by relatively unalienated labor has also resulted in new theoretical developments concerning the relationship between artisanship and class, skill transmission, and relations of production (e.g., Ory DeNicola 2005; Wood 2008; Venkatesan 2010; Marchand 2010). Despite these developments, the specific question of how authorship is produced in the production and circulation of craftwork has not yet received the same amount of critical attention. While anthropologists working on art and intellectual property have indeed shown that the production and assignation of authorship are highly variable and inherently political processes (Myers 2002: 39–43; 323–32; 2005; Coombe 1998), the specificities of “craft” (i.e., those ideologies and associated physical and material processes that are commonly used to distinguish crafts from other objects), are likely to impact on these processes in unique and important ways. In this chapter, I examine the production of the authorship of Oaxacan woodcarvings which are made in small rural villages for the tourist and ethnic art markets of Mexico and the United States. Oaxacan woodcarvings provide a particularly useful case in which to explore the emergence and production of authorship within craft contexts because—as the vignette at the beginning of the chapter illustrates—they are often ambiguously positioned between the categories of “art” and “craft,” and their classification frequently depends on the ways that authorship is or is not recognized within a given context. While the woodcarvings are not strictly “traditional” Oaxacan crafts, a point I return to below, they are generally understood by producers, consumers, state representatives and others as quintessential artesanías.2 In Mexico, artesanías, the aesthetic and material culture of the popular and rural classes, have been central to the ideological and historical consolidation of the Mexican nation since the early twentieth century (Novelo 1976; López 2010). As such, unlike the products of the travelling artisans described by Villalobos (this volume), the ideological weight that “Mexican artesanías” carries as a category roots them to specific places of production, so that craft objects are frequently understood as being “from places” rather than “by people;” the

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geography of Mexican artesanías is therefore simultaneously the geography of the Mexican nation (Cant 2012: 49–59). Additionally, craft production and promotion remains a key mode of economic development and planning by the Mexican and Oaxacan states, especially in under-developed rural areas (López 2010: 151–74). Government agencies, such as the National Fund for the Development of Artesanías (FONART) and the Oaxacan Institute of Artesanías, invest considerable time and resources into the promotion of craft products as a central component of Oaxaca’s tourism and development programs. Given this historical and economic configuration, it is clear that the question “who authors crafts?” is of great importance within the everyday experiences of craft producers and consumers in the Mexican case. I suggest, however, that this question is also fundamental to the anthropology of art and craft, and the discipline more generally, as authorship—in its many configurations—is at the heart of current processes of privatization, neo-liberalization and the consolidation of formal property regimes at national and global levels (Coombe 1998; May and Sell 2006; Thomas 2013). Exploring processes of authorship in contexts of craft production, where it has not conventionally been considered an essential feature, will provide valuable insights into the development and variable nature of authorship and cultural property more generally, thus throwing light onto key contemporary issues in anthropology. While the variability of authorship in terms of definitions and usage has made it adaptable to a wide range of social contexts and conditions (Coombe 1998), this variability has also made its anthropological definition problematic. Applying Annette Weiner’s “inalienable possessions” concept to art (Weiner 1992), James Leach (2002) and Fred Myers (2004) have argued that certain artistic objects cannot be wholly separated from their producers, as they retain an essence of their maker long after they have been exchanged. Following their lead, I start from the position that authorship can be understood as an ongoing, inalienable connection between an object and its producer, despite its being sold or given away. However, while authorship itself may be helpfully conceived as inalienable attachment, I argue that only charting inalienable connections between objects and producers is not sufficient for fully understanding the production of authorship in contexts where more than one person may be involved in their making. Instead, I suggest that along with processes of attachment, equal attention must be paid to the processes of detachment that take place between objects and people. By charting the processes by which inalienability and alienability are produced in a given context, the nature of authorship, and therefore its social and political implications, can be more fully appreciated. In the next section, I explore how detachment relates to the production of craftwork before addressing how these processes unfold in the woodcarving workshops of San Martín Tilcajete.



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Attachment and detachment in the practice of craftwork If authorship can be understood as the perceived ongoing attachment between an object and its producer(s), the variable recognition of authorship indicates that there is something important about the nature of production of different kinds of objects. To give a brief example, the products of the “creative industries” of the visual arts and literature are generally perceived by their publics as retaining a strong ongoing connection to those who made them, while the authors of computer software, jewelry and craftwork are often publicly invisible.3 The bond of authorship—as Cellini’s salt cellars show—appears to be established when something extraordinary is believed to occur during the production process; analyses of authorship therefore require the careful unpacking of ideologies and practices of production. Recently, anthropologists working on craft have argued that presenting production as successive steps within coherent and linear processes naturalizes and generalizes the experiences of craftspeople and diminishes our ability to fully comprehend the making of objects (Wood 2008: 142; Venkatesan 2010: 168). Instead, new theories of production have been developed through two interrelated streams of research which focus on “practice.” The first explores the “embodiment” of manual skills and techniques necessary for production through learning and apprenticeship (e.g., O’Connor 2005; Marchand 2010; Portisch 2009). The second, based firmly in phenomenological anthropology, focuses on the material practices of craftspeople and seeks to parse the observable steps of production in order to grasp what is happening in terms of experience, perception, emotions, and the senses (e.g., Keller 2001; Ingold 2001; see Gowlland, this volume). A key theme that has emerged from this practice-oriented research is “material engagement” or “engaged material consciousness” (Ingold 2001: 7; Sennett 2008: 119–46). This idea suggests that what distinguishes the special kind of embodied knowledge of artisanal and creative production from other kinds of material knowledge is the dynamic way that the artisan feels connected to the objects and tools as she works. This connection is understood to be created through the enactment of complex systems of tacit knowledge that have been incorporated into the body through practice and repetition, rather than through the mental comprehension of explicit instructions. Artisans frequently report that it feels as if the materials themselves have an independent agency (Ingold 2001: 21–5; O’Connor 2005). While the complex interactions between artisans and their tools and materials have been helpfully brought into view through the attention paid to material engagement, Thomas Yarrow and Siân Jones suggest that the over-emphasis

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on engagement per se has had a tendency to perpetuate popular notions of craftwork as an antidote to the alienation that is supposed to inhere in modernity and capitalist modes of production (2014). When framed in this way, an ideological continuity appears between the basic premises of “material engagement” and the mythology of craftwork, most importantly, that it is produced through unalienated labor. The implicit link made between craftsmanship and unalienated labor within the literature may be seen as a result of the incorporation of Marxist principles into the very definitions of “craft,” as it was articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as William Morris and John Ruskin (Greenhalgh 1997: 32–6; Mascia-Lees, this volume). Indeed for Marx, artisans represented unalienated labor par excellence, especially in contrast to the exploitative experiences of factory workers (1976: [1867] 460). Marx argued that factory workers’ alienation was not only evident in their estrangement from the products of their labor, but also from the act of production itself, which he described as “self-estrangement [through the worker’s experience of] his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him” (Marx 1970 [1844]): 111). In contrast, Marx and the Arts and Crafts thinkers assumed craftspeople avoided this selfestrangement through their control of the work process and their apparent heightened sensuous experience of the process, materials, and forms. This belief subtly continues to influence craft studies today, and terms like “material engagement” and even “craftsmanship” are often implicitly taken to be antitheses of alienation from the act of production (e.g., Sennett 2008). While this may be the case for some artisans some of the time, as Yarrow and Jones observe, this emphasis on the “redemptive possibilities” of craft may distract from other processes that are also involved in artisanal work. Based on their research with stonemasons at Glasgow Cathedral, they instead suggest that artisanal practice is made up of jointly emerging conditions of both engagement and detachment, where detachment is understood not in opposition to engagement, but rather as a different kind of material participation within the overall production process. Yarrow and Jones report, for example, that stonemasons work to intentionally detach themselves from the specific stones they have carved in order to subsume their own work into the greater, unified identity of the cathedral as a whole (2014: 270–1). While Yarrow and Jones direct their analysis toward the practical and experiential processes involved in the work of Glasgow’s stonemasons, I argue that their configuration of attachment-and-detachment can fruitfully be extended beyond the specific material relations involved in production in order to consider the processes by which the authorship of craft objects is constructed. By extending attachment-and-detachment in this way, light can be shed not only on the inalienable bond perceived between the



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woodcarvings and their recognized authors, but also on the deeply alienable relations between woodcarvings and other artisans who are intimately involved in their production. I suggest that these processes of attachmentand-detachment play out in different ways depending on the structure of the workshop in which they take place. I also argue, therefore, that questions of authorship necessarily must take into account local configurations of power, an argument that intersects with Marx’s theoretical concerns about the nature of alienation in production, but advances towards a consideration of aesthetics and style. In the following sections, I describe the contours of authorship in Oaxacan woodcarving and how attachment-and-detachment materializes in San Martín’s workshops.

Authorship and “having a name” in Oaxacan woodcarving At first glance, Oaxacan woodcarvings appear to be prototypical crafts; autochthonous aesthetic expressions grounded in the traditional peasant lifeways of rural Oaxaca. As they are produced in small picturesque villages in householdworkshops where both men and women contribute to their production, the woodcarvings appear to reaffirm popular notions that craftwork is less alienated, and more personal than mass-produced, industrialized goods (Hickey 1997: 84–6; Greenhalgh 1997: 105–12). Despite their current status as authentic Oaxacan cultural products, the woodcarvings produced today are not traditional in the usual sense of the word; they have a comparatively short history and the aesthetic styles in which they are executed cannot be straightforwardly described as uniquely Oaxacan. In the 1950s, sometime-mason and peasant farmer Manuel Jimenez from the village of Arrazola began selling carved masks and small sculptures to market stall vendors in Oaxaca City’s market. By the 1960s, with the help of investment and guidance from craft wholesalers, he developed a particular style, taking inspiration from picture books of Mexican folktales and other traditional crafts (Chibnik 2003: 23–6; Brulotte 2012: 28–50). The woodcarvings began to be produced in my field site, San Martín Tilcajete, as recently as the late 1970s when FONART encouraged their production through purchasing schemes and woodcarving competitions (Chibnik 2003: 27–30; 32–4). By 2008, the production of woodcarvings contributed to the income of 68 percent of San Martín’s households, although most artisans combine woodcarving production with other kinds of incomegenerating or subsistence activities. A sizeable minority of San Martín’s workshops hire at least one employee, normally a close relative or godchild,

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and two large workshops hire more than five employees, corresponding to what Michael Chibnik describes as “factory-like” workshops (2003: 115–19). The Garcías and many others in San Martín also utilize putting-out systems, where materials and designs are provided to piece workers, usually younger women with small children, who work at home (cf. Waterbury 1991; Carrier 1992: 543–4; Milgram this volume). Other artisans also frequently purchase unpainted carvings from more remote villages, which they paint, sign, and sell alongside their own carvings (see Chibnik 2003: 50–1; 83–6). This practice was something that artisans avoided talking about in any great detail, as it was acknowledged that it did not conform to the image artisans and others provide to tourists and collectors about the woodcarvings’ origins. Some expressed scorn towards those they believed to be painting the carvings of others; one well-established carver I knew frequently referred to them as “decoradores” (decorators), rather than artisans. Others, however, expressed sympathy, as they observed that some of these “decorators” were women whose husbands had migrated to the United States, and so were economically more precarious than other households. Authorship is a central feature of the woodcarvings’ authenticity for many customers who view them as material representations of (an essentialized) Oaxacan or Zapotec culture (but also see Cant (2012: 125–42) on other formulations of woodcarvings’ desirability). That their authenticity for tourists and collectors is closely tied to their production by rural Oaxacans was rather forcefully demonstrated to me one day as I was helping an artisan paint her carvings during the busy lead-up to Christmas. When a collector discovered with shock that I, a Canadian güera, was painting carvings, she loudly insisted in front of other customers that she not be sold any pieces that I had painted.4 Although perhaps extreme, her reaction demonstrates both the perceived inalienability of authorship and the fact that in this context only certain kinds of authors are appropriate: my work threatened to create an attachment between the carving and myself rather than a “true” Oaxacan artisan, and this bond undermined its status as an authentic cultural object, since, as described above, the authenticity of artesanías depends on the connection to the place of Oaxaca via their production by autochthonous authors. As I was clearly not an autochthonous author, my involvement in the woodcarvings’ production appeared to damage their connection to Oaxaca, and hence, their authenticity itself (cf. Cant 2015; Terrio 1999: 128–9; Wood 2008: 105–14; but contrast with Villalobos, this volume). Production within family workshops is also an important feature for the carvings’ appearance of authenticity. While the Western fine art tradition idealizes the individual genius as the agent of artistic creation, vernacular understandings of Mexican artesanías tie them to assumed features of



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peasant lifeways, in which “the family” is taken as the most significant social unit alongside “the village.” Household-workshops are therefore an important space where public value is created. For many tourists I interviewed, seeing woodcarvings being made in the household-workshop environment made them more desirable than only seeing finished pieces in shops and galleries. This is because of a presumed relationship present in popular discourses about the nature of work within the household; household-workshops are read as spaces of unalienated and collective family labor in which “honest work,” removed from the commercialization of the market, takes place (Dilley 2004: 803–5; Wherry 2006; Wood 2008: 46). While “authentic” woodcarvings appear to consumers to straightforwardly index their production in San Martín’s workshops, artisans know that not everyone produces equally desirable carvings. Despite the fact that everyone in San Martín in theory should be able to produce equally authentic pieces, their highly variable successes raise concerns about what tourists and collectors are really looking for when they purchase crafts, a question that crystallizes into conflicts about competition and the copying of styles amongst artisans (Cant 2015). These debates are conditioned by the local view of authorship, which is constituted through the idioms of nombres (names) and estilos (styles). In the art world of Oaxacan woodcarvings, which includes state actors, wholesalers, collectors and journalists, a specific understanding of authorship is promoted that is firstly articulated through the concept of “names.” “A tener su nombre” (to have a name for one’s self) is an important factor for success; buyers often seek out already-known artisans whose work has been documented in collectors’ guides, magazines and books, and artisans require certifications from state-run organizations and competitions in order to secure invitations and visas to show their work outside Oaxaca. The power of nombres must not be underestimated: as in other art markets, many collectors are especially concerned to have pieces by already-established artisans, while their unknown neighbors may not even warrant a visit. In February 2009, I travelled to a craft show in Tucson, Arizona, with Miguel García and two other artisans from San Martín. The show opened at ten o’clock on a Friday morning, and at ten minutes to ten, I was very surprised to see a large queue of desperate-looking people, mostly in their sixties and seventies, waiting outside the glass doors. As soon as the doors opened, these collectors rushed to Miguel’s stall, and within twenty minutes they had bought more than ten of his expensive pieces. While the aesthetics and quality of the Garcías’ work is of course also important to their desirability, it was their nombre that generated the excitement at the show. When I spoke with a woman who had acquired one of Miguel’s pieces, she said she felt relieved that she had managed to purchase one before they all were

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sold, as her sister had bought a piece from him last year, and ever since her own collection of “Indian art” had felt incomplete. While the connection between value and renown might be apparent from the collectors’ point of view, for artisans, the ability to develop a nombre is not a clear process, and often appears to be out of their own control. Because of this uncertainty, the content and rights to styles were frequently a source of discussion and concern amongst artisans.

Attachment, detachment, and the register of style in San Martín Tilcajete Given the plasticity of wood and the wide variety of ways in which carvings potentially may be painted, there is a surprisingly strong consistency in the types of carvings that are produced in San Martín. The pieces made there almost always conform to the general aesthetic characteristics established in the early years of Oaxacan woodcarving: they represent animals or traditional Mexican folk characters and are painted in the bold, bright hues that are common in other Mexican art and craftwork. While this consistency is maintained, to no small degree, by the expectations of consumers, guides, and state actors, individual artisans are also understood to have personal styles in which they execute their work. These distinctions are explained through the local idiom of estilo, or “style,” which expresses that while an artisan’s products should be consistent with the overall genre of Oaxacan woodcarvings, they ideally also carry something distinguishable from the work of others. Although they are never explicitly articulated as such, estilos are locally understood as the property of named individuals, rather than being traits of carvings alone, and it is estilo that allows the authorship of some carvings to be instantly recognizable to artisans as well as collectors.5 However, as with nombres, not all artisans manage to develop a recognizable estilo, and those that have, are understood to have achieved some level of success that accords them respect, and may guarantee them financial security. Although the popular and academic literatures about Oaxacan woodcarvings, as well as artisans themselves, discursively frame estilos as belonging to named individuals, I argue that styles actually adhere to workshops as spatio-social entities that themselves are owned. In most cases, those who work in the same workshop produce the same style of carving and painting. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule: one artisan in his late fifties and his adult son work together in their household compound, where both live with their families. Their work, however, is quite distinct, and the son



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sells his work under his own name. However, a significant number of pieces in San Martín are at least partially made by people who are not considered the authors of the carvings they produce. Pieces by Tomás Castillo, for example, which are sold in his workshop in San Martín, in galleries and online, are not only made by him. Although Tomás has developed his own carving style, and carves the pieces himself, his wife Lupe has a hand in their production. She paints almost all of the pieces her husband carves, and has worked to develop her own painting style, which has become characteristic of their work together. Yet, the pieces are always signed “Tomás Castillo” and they are considered to be quite collectible, as Tomás has made his name over the years and he is also the son of one of the original carvers in San Martín. In cases where workshops carry the name of the family (e.g. “workshop of the Salazar Pérez family”), the surnames used are always that of the adult man, not his wife or older children of the household who participate in production.6 The division of tasks within production processes serves to reinforce the detachment of women and children from authorial connections to their work. Carving and painting are frequently undertaken by different members of the workshop, as carving is generally only done by men and older boys.7 Although it is sometimes reported in the popular press that the woodcarvings are produced through a clear gendered division of labor where women do most of the painting, many of the male carvers I knew also painted their own work. However, in almost all of these cases, the carvings the men painted carried their own signatures, and only in one case was a woman painter’s authorship recognized in lieu of her brothers who carved. Despite the fact that it is in the painting where style is most visibly recognizable, authorship attaches in most cases to the author of the form. The elevation of creation over decoration is therefore a significant factor within these processes, and is underscored by the fact that artisans often call their products tallados de madera (“wood carvings”) or figuras (figures), emphasizing the three-dimensional form of the objects, rather than their colors and surface designs.8 This division is also reinforced through some artisans’ discourses that describe women and children’s work as “helping,” rather than work in its own right. Thus, the notion that unique styles of carvings are the creations of adult male woodcarvers works to detach authorship from the women and children who frequently participate in their production. The register of estilo works even more dramatically to condition the processes of attachment-and-detachment at work in large workshops like the one owned by Miguel and Catalina García. As the piece formed by a carver is completed, he relinquishes aesthetic control to the painter who then takes it forward. I asked carvers in both of the larger workshops if they ever made suggestions about the way a piece should be painted, but no one said that they did; most said that they rarely thought about colors or surface designs,

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since after it left their hands, it became someone else’s piece to work. While this does not constitute a complete detachment from the object, as carvers continue to acknowledge and point out which carvings they have made, they no longer consider them objects with which they can materially engage. This suggests to me that the inalienable connection that Weiner and others have observed between people and objects may be one of degrees; that different kinds of alienability and inalienability may co-exist, depending on the nature of the relations that are involved within production and circulation. The ability to work on a piece or have decision-making power about its form or color, however, does not necessarily translate to a full recognition of authorship. As illustrated by the conversation between Citlali and the tourist at the beginning of the chapter, despite the fact that up to four different individuals might work on a single piece in the Garcías’ workshop, the signature is always “Miguel and Catalina García.”9 In fact, Miguel and Catalina themselves frequently do not work at all on the pieces that bear their names. These interconnected processes of detachment and attachment are conceptually reinforced through the idiom of estilo, which is produced and reproduced—but not necessarily recognized—at the level of the workshop. Despite the fact that many talented artisans work for them, Miguel and Catalina are considered the true authors of the woodcarvings by virtue of the fact that they are regarded as the authors and owners of the estilo in which the carvings are made. Their style of carving was initially developed by Miguel over a period of approximately three years in the early 2000s as he and Catalina worked to develop their nombre. Today, Miguel very rarely carves pieces himself, and yet the creative work of authorship is still considered to have been done by him, even when employees produce specific forms that he has never made. Similarly, Catalina is the person who is understood to have developed the painting repertoire of the workshop, including their unique color combinations and their specific patterns and designs; through their forms and decoration, the Garcías’ carvings are easily distinguished from the work of their neighbors. However, it is not just the products of the workshop that are seen as specifically belonging to Miguel and Catalina, but the style itself. David, one of the painters, also helps his own parents paint their carvings in the evenings after he has finished work. He explained to me that he would never paint his father’s carvings in the style that he worked in at Miguel and Catalina’s, even though they sell for higher prices. He said that this would not be fair, because it would be like stealing, and I never saw pieces at his parents’ workshop that were at all similar to Catalina’s painting style. He did admit that sometimes ideas come to him during his work day, and that they are probably influenced by the Garcías’ estilo, but that was as far as one should go.



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While the nature of authorship in Miguel and Catalina’s workshop is such that the pieces always remain firmly attached to themselves, the detachment of woodcarvings from the employed artisans who make them is not always complete. Jaime, who is the son of another well-known artisan and has worked for Miguel and Catalina for over three years, is considered one of the most talented painters in their workshop. While the pieces he paints in general match Catalina’s stylistic repertoire, he often incorporates flourishes that are recognized by everyone—including the Garcías—as distinctly Jaime’s. For example, he will often insert a space within the usual geometric lines in which he might paint a scene, such as women making tortillas, or ancient Mexicans building pyramids. Other times, he produces new iconography within Catalina’s standard geometric patterns, and plays with differences in scale or color to produce pieces with a distinct difference. Because of the uniqueness of his pieces, which is paired with very high technical execution, they not only earn more money for Miguel and Catalina, but they also have won Jaime a great deal of respect throughout San Martín. Two of his own pieces (carved and painted at home in the evening) were featured in a special exhibition in the State Museum of Popular Art and many of the other artisans in San Martín recognize that Jaime is one of the most talented painters in the community. Although he is able to exercise some aesthetic agency and maintain some authorial attachment to the pieces he produces at Miguel and Catalina’s, members of Jaime’s family were at the same time concerned that his estilo was being appropriated into the general style of the Garcías’ workshop; they thought that he would be better off working on his own to develop his nombre. For his part, Jaime explained to me that he preferred working at Miguel and Catalina’s because he had enough freedom to try out new painting techniques and ideas, while at the same time he earned a steady income of cash—something very desirable to a young man planning on marrying in the next few years. He also said it was more fun working in the large workshop with others his own age than at home with his small family. Although Jaime’s relationship to the work he produces at Miguel and Catalina’s manages to retain some kind of bond of authorship, it is in many ways the exception that proves the rule. Of the twenty-five or so painters who work for the Garcías, only Jaime’s work is thought to be somehow exceptional within the general repertoire. Further, this authorship, while acknowledged amongst San Martín’s artisans themselves, is not publicized to the tourists and collectors who purchase Jaime’s work at Miguel and Catalina’s—they are never told which painter or carver has produced the pieces they purchase. Although the Garcías encourage some of their more talented employees to begin to build nombres for themselves, this work is not to be done during work hours; pieces actually produced in the Garcías’

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workshop must remain firmly attached to them, and it is expected that pieces produced by employees outside work will be stylistically distinct from the Garcías’ estilo.

“Detachment” as analytical concept The ethnography presented here highlights the need to address both the processes of attachment and detachment that necessarily take place when authorship is assigned. The aesthetic understandings of Oaxacan woodcarvers and other members of their art world work to maintain the authorial and inalienable connection between named artisans and the woodcarvings that are produced in their workshops, while at the same time work to detach the carvings from others who are also intimately involved in their production. In San Martín, these issues of authorship and power are connected to certain artisans’ ability to participate directly in the market for their goods. Given currently circulating notions of cultural authenticity in Oaxaca, in principle, all artisans in San Martín should be able to produce equally desirable woodcarvings. In reality, however, the conditions of the market mean that some named artisans are more successful than others, and that many artisans are not recognized by names at all. These complex processes of attachment-and-detachment are made most visible in moments of uncertain authorship, such as when artisans paint and sign carvings made by others in remote villages. However, these processes are equally present in the more commonplace practices within workshops, which are promoted by the art world itself, where the ownership of styles subsumes the authorship of women, children, and employed laborers. Although theoretical approaches to art and craft within anthropology have focused for very good reasons on the socially creative and productive aspects of material production, my data suggests that we must also pay equal attention to the associated processes of social deconstruction—what I have called here “detachment.” By only charting the inalienable connections that Weiner and others have observed between objects and producers, we miss a rich opportunity for insight into the nature of the status of “author,” a social condition that lies at the heart of many significant legal, political, and social conflicts today. My data suggests the possibility that inalienable connections may be of degrees and that different kinds of alienability and inalienability may co-exist, indicating rich opportunities for future research by craft scholars. The concept of “detachment” may also prove to be a useful tool for craft analysis beyond questions of authorship. Many of the other chapters in this volume provide vivid ethnographic accounts of processes that can be usefully



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read through an attachment-and-detachment lens. Mira Mohsini’s analysis of the political-economic structures that divide “labor” from “skill” in the work of Old Delhi’s weavers shows how the status of artisan has become attached to particular, officially recognized, classes of people, while it has been detached from the actual artisanal practices of weaving and embroidery. As Mohsini shows, however, while the artisan category now is intimately connected to a recognized group, individuals themselves may be detached from that group, losing their artisan status, and returning to the pool of “labor.” Geoffrey Gowlland’s chapter likewise shows how these processes are constituted through divisions of labor between potters and glazers in rural Taiwan. Like Yarrow and Jones, Gowlland observes that the practices of artisans constitute material attachments and detachments between objects and producers. At the same time, he suggests that discourses of skill and value work to elevate those who work with glaze, while simultaneously demote those who work with clay. These discourses also intersect with complex understandings of the nation, as the history of Taiwanese ceramics is inexorably linked to China, creating an historical (and highly political) dissonance with Taiwanese nationalism. The chapters by Fran Mascia-Lees and Millaray Villalobos provide thoughtprovoking examples of how detachment may not always be imposed onto unwilling subjects, but may also provide actors with opportunities and means through which to create meaningful experience. Mascia-Lees’s chapter in particular shows the complicated intertwining of attachment and detachment. Arts and Crafts enthusiasts in the United States constitute their “aesthetically embodied” experiences through connections between minds, bodies, individuals, and community, while at the same time use these experiences of attachment to detach themselves from what they consider to be undesirable aspects of modern capitalist lifestyles. One might ask whether detachment itself may be therefore considered one of the dimensions of “aesthetic embodiment” explored by Mascia-Lees and desired by her research participants. Detachment may also be seen at the heart of Villalobos’ chapter about Latin American travelling artisans. Like the Arts and Crafts enthusiasts, these artisans see craft as a way to detach themselves from undesirable aspects of modern life, to “escape the system,” as they say. At the same time, their practices also detach their products from some of the ideologies of craft I described above; their intentional impermanence in places challenges the often-held notions that crafts are grounded in places and cultures, and that artisans necessarily form coherent social classes. The material practices of travelling artisans, such as the ways they use found materials or recycle the work of others, challenge current configurations of the relationship between artisans and materials, and these material practices also may detach these

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objects from their original intended uses. Finally, Villalobos shows how travelling artisans’ intentional detachments in turn constitute other productive connections to one another and to the ideals of the lifestyle they have chosen. Although these studies show that detachment need not necessarily be experienced as alienation, my own work with Oaxacan woodcarvers indicates that it may be a means through which certain kinds of disempowerment may be established. While previous studies have considered how alienation and exploitation may be created through relations of power between smallscale producers and other actors within the global economy (e.g., Carrier 1992), my analysis suggests that versions of these processes may also take place between producers, in this case within the aesthetic micro-processes involved in the production and promotion of craftwork. This suggests that it is crucial for anthropologists of craft to pay attention not only to the moments in production and marketing practices where power is overtly enacted, such as in piecework and wholesaling activities, but also within more subtle contexts of material and aesthetic practice, so that we can more fully address the nature of power that is produced through the relationships between material objects and people.

3 Forging Source Considering the Craft of Computer Programming Lane DeNicola

Introduction

S

hortly after returning from dissertation fieldwork in India in 2005, I’d flown to California to attend the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. There I experienced a profound shift, a tremor in the academic bedrock of that venerable craft known as book publishing, and it would be the first of many under the tectonic forces of digital technology. A workshop on “getting your first book published” was standing-room-only, filled with young anthropologists looking to ignite their research profiles with the spark of publication, and the speaker—a senior editor from a large, state university press—was candidly asked what kinds of projects his press was currently “on the lookout for.” His response was surprising to most, shocking to some. He explained first that he’d been approached recently about a monograph on hackers, and without much explanation he said he knew five minutes into the conversation that this was a proposal that merited a quick move to review. But, the speaker continued, “if you come to me with, you know, ‘Sex, Power, and whatever in an Ethiopian Village …’” and this he let trail off into a non-committal shrug of the shoulders. Now, this was quite possibly explained in part as the reflections of one idiosyncratic editor’s framing in the context of major challenges throughout the academic publishing industry. Given my own profile—a graduate student

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not specifically in anthropology but in science and technology studies, with research interests specifically in information systems and digital technology— this seemed “good news” at some fundamentally naive level. Yet I couldn’t ignore the tension it seemed to imply, that such a statement could be voiced so unequivocally at the annual conference of the preeminent North American professional association for anthropologists. This was reinforced, I hasten to add, by the reaction of the other attendees, many of whom looked back at their programs as if to double-check that this was in fact the annual meeting of the AAA. Surely academic publishing, right in the midst of a digital onslaught against its own craft (and business model), would recognize the continued value of critical inquiry into traditional media, “small places,” and valleys other than the one carved in silicon. More to the point, was it just the modernist fascination with “the new,” the effervescent discourse of “the Information Revolution” that was shaping this calculus? If the “whatever” in that Ethiopian Village was a cellphone or a discarded PC, were the embedded semiconductors enough to merit attention? If not, what were we left blinded to? This observation took on a particular irony in light of computer programmers’ veneration of “craft,” their tapping of “craft” as a discursive reservoir. Prior to my graduate training in the social sciences, between 1994 and 2000 I was employed as an analyst and computer programmer at large, federally funded research and development centers in the US. The academic profile and public funding of these institutions ensured that (in contrast with most commercial software firms) prototype software developed in-house was often exchanged freely with peers and in some cases projects were formally “open source.” Few if any of my co-workers would have characterized themselves as “hackers”—a term which even then connoted a distinct set of practices and/or political allegiances—but like most hackers, their passion for information systems was cast less in the terms of science or industry than in terms derived directly from craft. This aspect of the computer programming is apparent in many cultural contexts and has changed little over the years, a repeated observation during my work on “culturally-situated design tools” as a graduate research assistant in 2001, doctoral fieldwork in 2005 with geoinformatics specialists in India, and most recently in the curricular design of a master’s program in “digital anthropology” at University College London beginning in 2009. These experiences—my long-term participation in software development and observation of other programmers, online perusal or interaction via Slashdot and other programming-related venues, participation in Perl Mongers meet-ups and other face-to-face events centered around programming, and the collection of trade literature advertisements, t-shirts, and other material ephemera—form the empirical basis of this chapter, which opens by asking why scholarly interest in “craft” would have ebbed in many

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quarters in an era of popular “craft Renaissance” within digital culture, the preeminent domain of our time. A central objective in this chapter is to order and present these observations along three axes with clear relevance to craft: materiality, aesthetics, and embodiment. Programming as a practice and vocation is conventionally relegated to an extreme corner of the conceptual space articulated in these themes, at once steeped in the immaterial (e.g., “data” and “code”), generally unconcerned with aesthetics (except perhaps peripherally in the design of user interfaces), and as disembodied as Thomas Anderson, the programmer protagonist of the popular Matrix films at the turn of the millennium (later known by his hacker pseudonym, “Neo”). Here I will attend in turn to the details of the materiality of “plain text” and source code, the aesthetic considerations of the most common tools of the programmer (in particular the text editor), and the bodily praxis indexed by the programmer’s primary physical interface: the keyboard. Sustaining a now mature critique within the expanding critical literature on digital culture (see, for example, Horst and Miller 2012), I will further argue that in applying the label of “craft” to their activity, programmers are expressing a sublimated tension, one created by a pervasive shift in how humans relate to “the built environment” and (as a corollary) to the political configurations within which that environment is produced. A crucial first step in this endeavor, however, is the disambiguation of “digital artisans” from similar figures that, for a variety of reasons, have garnered substantially greater attention in academic discourse and popular media alike.

IT entrepreneurs, hackers, and digital artisans One of the most captivating figures introduced early on in my undergraduate education was Donald Knuth. A professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford, Knuth is known for a variety of achievements, including most famously his multi-volume magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming (hereafter, AoCP). While most “programming” titles focus on a specific tool, system, or programming language—generally in a format conducive to rapid digestion and reference by working programmers—Knuth’s discussion dwells within a higher order of abstraction, a discursive regime more familiar to “computer scientists” than “programmers.” Somewhere between the “pure” abstraction of discrete mathematics and the “working code examples” of the majority of books on the programming shelves, AoCP mingles mathematical notation with “pseudo-code,” engaging such core programming topics as algorithms, sorting, information structures, random

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numbers and so on. Unparalleled in its breadth and detail, many consider it the “bible” of computer programming theory. In situating the work, Knuth himself explained: computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. (Knuth 1974: 673) Knuth is known not just for his accomplishments explicitly within the purview of the computer scientist, but as a “figure,” the programmers’ programmer, someone whose entire oeuvre and extra-professional passions seem to reflect a coherent archetype. The construction of Knuth as a figure by programmers, computer scientists, and others certainly bears some important similarities to that of the recently popularized “geek” stereotype. A derivative of the Romantic genius of the Victorian era (Galison 1998), the geek is a socially inept savant, possessing arcane knowledge and sequestered away, poring through obscure tomes (or in the millennial incarnation, through lines of code), physically anemic as a result of an inordinately sedentary lifestyle. On his Stanford-hosted website, Knuth confesses: “What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study” (Knuth 1999). Yet his relevance to the present discussion is in his contrast with other archetypal figures of the Digital Era. For example, compare the celebrity figures of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Gates, who wrenched computing away from military-industrial exclusivity and the esoteric cloisters of IBM in the 1970s and thrust it into the micro-level of the “personal computer,” was the quintessential genius-dropout-entrepreneur. In the 1980s he first encountered his putative antithesis in Jobs, whose industrial design sensibilities and background in art yielded a personal computer “for the rest of us.” Popularly revered and reviled, Gates and Jobs bear striking similarities as figures, their entrepreneurial energy radically exceeding the stultifying conventions of formal education and the existing business landscape, yet they are often popularly treated as polar opposites. Even Apple’s own “Get a Mac” campaign, which ran from 2006 to 2009, reduced the products of Apple and Microsoft to two allegorical males, one a slim late-twenty-something in jeans and a dress shirt, the other a slightly pudgy character in spectacles and a business suit pushing forty. While strong arguments have been made regarding the “revolutions” in consumer electronics effected by both Gates and Jobs, two observations are key to my

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purposes here. First, as commercial entities both Apple and Microsoft have sustained the same “black box” or intensely proprietary model of computer consumption throughout their histories. Like so much else in the modern built environment, computers are simply to be used, they are not to be maintained or deeply altered by the consumer, nor are they to be durable beyond a certain industry-determined horizon of obsolescence (roughly 3–5 years in the early 2010s). Arguably this poses no intrinsic contradiction for “digital natives,” who have often been immersed since birth not only in digital technology but in commercial advertising, commodity fetishism, and virtuous consumption.1 For the “digital artisan,” however, even for those who see the black box model as a benign convenience to the user, that user is an “other.” The model is anathema to their vocation, the craft of programming, where “peeking under the hood” is often expressed almost as a moral good. More concretely, even as working programmers adopt or conform to the design guidelines, “platforms,” “software development kits,” or other tools of Apple or Microsoft, Gates and Jobs themselves are typically recognized less as virtuoso practitioners of their own craft than as popular figureheads, the charismatic talking heads of an industry in which programmers often (but not always) find their livelihoods. In the extreme Gates and Jobs are seen as Janus-faced twins, the numbing “democratic/republican ticket” of consumer computing.2 This overly simplistic (but analytically reasonable) conceptual dichotomy— computer use versus computer appropriation—is crucial in understanding not only the distinction between the “digital native” and the less-vigorously theorized “digital artisan,” but also in understanding what is at stake in programmers’ claims to craft status. The dichotomy is the very same as that described by Turkle (1997) in analyzing the gradual shift over the late twentieth century in the meaning conventionally attributed to the term “transparency.” The new opaque interfaces—the first popular one on the mass market was the 1984 Macintosh—represented more than a technical change. The Macintosh “desktop” introduced a way of thinking about the computer that put a premium on the manipulation of a surface simulation. In 1980, most computer users who spoke of transparency were referring to a transparency analogous to that of traditional machines, an ability to “open the hood” and poke around. But when users of the Macintosh talked about its transparency, they were talking about seeing their documents and programs represented by attractive and easy-to-interpret icons. They were referring to an ability to make things work without needing to go below the screen surface. Today, the word “transparency” has taken on its Macintosh meaning in both computer talk and colloquial language. In a culture of simulation, when people say that something is transparent, they mean that they can see how to make it work, not that they know how it works (Turkle 1997).

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As I attempt to illustrate in later sections, computer programmers (“digital artisans” in the framing adopted here) avoid and eschew these “surfaces” in myriad ways, less in a modernist attempt at the erasure of aesthetics or sensual engagement than in a reconfiguration of the same via their own lived experience. On the other hand, Knuth and AoCP need also to be distinguished from another discursive figure, already mentioned and conspicuous within digital lore: the hacker. Technology journalists and internet scholars alike have dissected the etymology of that term, which has variously been used to refer to sloppy programmers, mischievous network trespassers, file-sharing advocates and “information liberators” (both legal and illegal), technically savvy activists in general, and a unique brand of performance artist at MIT. Of specific relevance here is the variation most typically employed by working programmers, according to which the term “hacker” implies a programmer or technician of at least moderate skill, engaged in projects not underwritten by any formal company or institution, often with a specifically political motivation but occasionally with only personal gain, vandalism, or anarchistic foment in mind (Coleman 2009; Levy 1984; Himanen 2001). An eminent example of a programmer routinely ascribed with hacker status is Richard Stallman, MIT Media Lab denizen and founder of the GNU Free Software project. While clearly a practitioner of the craft, his unflinching politicization of free software and the open source movement is perceived by many working programmers as a superfluous sullying of that craft, akin to the way some working carpenters (for example) see sustainably harvested lumber, the avoidance of polluting vendors, or a predilection for humanpowered tools as the luxuries or ideological identifications of middle-class hobbyists, elite consumers, or religious zealots. The (apparent) political neutrality and commercial agnosticism of Knuth, meanwhile, make him widely palatable to anyone invested “in the craft itself.” Two further considerations of relevance to the analysis of programming as “craft” bear mention. The first is the variety of “digital artisans” involved within a typical mid- to large-size software development firm. While “techies” or “developers” may well seem a sound encapsulation of the principal contributors involved, the empirical analysis of materiality, practice, and experience suffers under such a gloss. Even within a single organization there is a material and phenomenological diversity apparent among programmers, information architects, interface designers, 3D modelers, network or database administrators, test or release engineers and so on. Notably, this is true even without considering IT-related identifications such as “electrical engineer,” “circuit board assembler,” “technical writer,” or “hacker,” and certainly without considering the legal, financial, marketing, or other organs of such a company. Any of the individuals filling these roles may have some political or intellectual interest in knowing or sustaining their activities as “a tradition,” or they may

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be entirely ambivalent about any such construction. With this in mind, my intention in this analysis is to remain cognizant of the overlap between craft as a livelihood, a political enunciation, a vehicle for identity construction, and a mode of engagement with the world.3 Finally, the kind of analytic differentiation required in the consideration of digital artisans is also complicated by the contemporary shift away from the Industrial Era dichotomization of work and play. Popular technology writer Julian Dibbell (2007) has provided one of the clearest examples of this in the form of the “gold farmer,” Chinese youth (in the stereotype) who spend long hours in networked facilities playing online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, tediously accruing gold and other virtual loot (or even whole characters) to be sold for “real” money, usually to Western players looking to begin game play as already-successful characters. As the accounts of Dibbell and others make clear, despite the dramatic shaping influence of videogame play on their lives this activity is neither wholly “play” nor “labor,” and the degree to which such analysis also circumscribes game aficionados who “code up” extensions to games or even to game developers themselves further muddies any clear division between coding as “hobby” or as “livelihood.” As with craft in general it would seem the most salient question is how digital craft is articulated by various groups as play or labor, as continuous with a valued tradition or as a pragmatic means-to-an-end.

Plain text as raw material An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth (Bringhurst 2004: 118). A conventional tenet of the Digital Era is immateriality, both as an intrinsic virtue and as characteristic of the present historical moment.4 The evaporation of media inscribed in vinyl or celluloid, the projected demise of physical books, and the postmodern nirvana of “the paperless office” have discursively been framed as incontrovertible signs of a coming utopia. At once derivative of the ephemerality of light, the transparency of glass, and the animate qualities attributed to electricity and televisual media, digital culture is a source of redemption partly through its putative liberation from our dependence on physical substance. As I will show, for the computer programmer this immateriality manifests most conspicuously in the symbolic abstractions with which they are routinely concerned, in particular the numbers and texts that

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are data and source code.5 However, the relevance of this popular conceptualization to the present discussion of craft lies in the importance of materiality to craft in general. It is tempting to ask: if materiality is indeed absent—for the computer programmer specifically and digital artisans in general—what are the implications for their activities as “craft.” The analysis here, in contrast, is predicated on an understanding of materiality as something more than “physical substance.” The “hardness” of hardware or software is undeniably an implicit index of their physicality, but as “wares” both are “goods,” manufactured things or objects of care with material aspects. At the risk of over-indulgence in a postmodern irony this section presents “text” as the raw material of the computer programmer, arguing that those aspects of materiality central to the analysis of craft are robustly sustained among digital artisans. Anthropological inquiry into material culture proceeds from the idea that the relations between people and artifacts are reciprocal. Just as people make things, things make people in the sense that things can shape or mediate social relations, act as powerful vehicles of meaning, and reify human values through their production, exchange, display, and curation (Tilley et al. 2006). The appearance, texture, heft, smell and other sensorial properties of things become (for example) the material basis for a Bourdieuian stratification of taste, to the extent that automobile engineers will modify otherwise functional car doors to create a “solid sound” when swung shut and “new car smell” is sold in tiny spray bottles. Phenomenological approaches to material culture seek to fully account for the sensorial nuances of everyday experience with objects and the built environment. In the case of craft it is often the perception of imperfection or contingency—the fluid grain in a wooden surface, the slight misalignment of hand-printed patterns, the tiny variations in an embroidered motif—that defines the consumption of “handicrafts” as qualitatively distinct from the consumption of similar but industrially produced artifacts. “It’s all ones and zeros” may be an aphorism of our age, but it captures little of the daily experience of computer programmers. It’s true enough that the data of the 1950s was encoded as holes punched in cardboard (or their absence), and in many cases this was a direct materialization of the on/off that is the basis of all binary storage schemes. Yet even then, “data” is for the computer programmer what human skin is for the traditional weaver: a medium of obvious relevance to the craft (insofar as the feel and insulating properties of woven materials are key), but not one that is “worked with” day in and day out. Only in the rarest cases do the programmers of today view or manipulate “machine code,” software at a level of abstraction that the hardware itself is capable of reading and acting upon. The vast majority of the time programmers interact with software in the form of plain text files written

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in higher-level “human-readable” programming languages (contemporary examples would include C++, Python, and Java). These files—generically referred to as “source code” are then translated and cross-indexed (or more formally: “compiled” into “object files” which are then “linked” to produce an executable program). The text that is source code, along with the various tools required to collaboratively generate, document, search, compile, and manage it, occupies the bulk of the attentions of working computer programmers. It would be easy at this point to push the analysis ahead from there, insofar as we have a common understanding of “text” that appears to suit. Most would agree, for instance, that word processors such as Microsoft Word essentially produce “text” files, though they may also include embedded images and aspects of layout (such as margins and justification). For the programmer, however, the ubiquitous “.doc” file is at some remove from a “plain text” file. Even the term “text” is ambiguous, referring to a broad, multi-layered envelope of possible abstractions. Any text stored digitally can only be meaningful in the context of a particular “character encoding,” that is an assumed mapping from sequences of bits to the letters of a “script” or “alphabet” (e.g., Latin or Arabic). Early users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, for example, were by default creating plain text files in the “Windows-1252” encoding, while contemporary Apple MacOS users were using “Mac OS Roman” by default. The bit sequence “0000 0000 1100 0101” represents an Å (“A-ring”) if we assume the latter encoding, but has no valid meaning in the former, so text files in languages that employ the A-ring symbol (including several dominant Scandinavian languages) cannot accurately be represented using the Windows-1252 encoding. Attempting to view or process such files using a tool that assumes the wrong encoding can cause crashes or (worse) “silent failures,” situations where apparently valid output contains latent errors. Further, while a character encoding defines an alphabet—little more than an ordered sequence of abstract characters or “points”—in order for text to be displayed visually a “font” must be employed, another mapping of all possible characters in an alphabet to their 2-dimensional graphic representation (e.g., “Times New Roman” or “Courier New”). Far from simply being matters of digital arcana, the distinctions of text, encodings, and fonts help us to differentiate the “material” of the computer programmer from conventional understandings of digital text. It may go without saying—given that high-level programming languages are by definition “human-readable” that such languages resemble “natural” (written) languages, at least to a degree. I’ve already noted that the alphabets or scripts employed are typically those of natural languages, but beyond this the words of source code often resemble those of natural languages, more so than mathematical equations, for example. The “keywords” employed (“for,” “while,” “switch,” etc.) and the names of functions and variables are of necessity

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derived or taken wholesale from the words of natural languages (though syntactically the differences are more dramatic), and this textual promiscuity is self-consciously acknowledged by programmers themselves. Among those versed in the language known as Perl, for example, the construction of haiku or poetry that is also syntactically valid Perl code is an often-mentioned sort of gonzo leisure activity (Hopkins Rauenzahn 2009).6 Embedded comments (documentation written by programmers for the benefit of programmers) and certain elements of the software’s user interface (e.g., labels on buttons or other controls, error messages) often appear in source code as phrases or even full sentences or passages written in a natural language (and we should keep in mind that the natural language at issue is not necessarily English). As with natural languages themselves, source code must often be translated. The activity commonly referred to as “software localization” is the modification of an existing piece of software written within one cultural context for use within another, and this typically involves not only the translation of terms or prose but the translation of visual forms such as icons (Keniston 1998). These intersections with written language bear two implications of relevance here. First, to put it in the literary terms of Kristeva (1980), source code is intertextual. That is, its meaning resides not exclusively in the text itself nor in the syntactic rules to which it must conform as source code, but rather aspects of its meaning are produced by the reader—the programmer—both in relation to the source code and in relation to a complex network of other texts. This is not to say, however, that computer programmers can or should essentially be understood in the orthodox terms of readers and writers, for the “texts” at issue here are simultaneously communicative and algorithmic. The idioms, inflections, references, and resistances which they employ and are subject to are ineluctably hybrid, both expression and machine, and this points to a second implication: source code—like any “inscription” or textual form we juxtapose with verbal communication—is never “immaterial.” Even when we look beyond the punch cards and ferromagnetic tape of the early era of computing, and setting aside those instances where “hardcopy print-outs” are simply easier to interact with, in order to qualify as such a “text” demands a material basis. The arrangement of magnetic domains in the grains on a hard disk platter, the tiny microvoltages sustained in a computer chip, and the luminescent pixels of a computer display are impossible without precisely manufactured semiconductors, optical quality glass, flowing electrons, and the raw materials and vast infrastructure that make such things possible. More to the point, the form of source code (rather than its physical substance) “pushes back,” profoundly shaping programmers’ postures, aesthetics, and attributions of skill. For example, “SourceForge” is the name of one of the largest web-based source code repositories online, hosting 300,000 free and open source software projects for over 3 million users. The name’s allusion to blacksmithing,

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glassblowing, and similar forge-based trades are specifically relevant here from the perspective of materiality, source code being equated with iron or glass as the material under work. In the following sections I consider two levels of apparatus phenomenologically closest to the programmer him- or herself so as to reveal the ordering of programming as craft: the text editor and the keyboard.

The text editor: What you see is what you want Sitting around a nondescript conference table with a number of my co-workers in the mid-1990s, waiting for some other staff to arrive for a scheduled meeting, the topic of some proposed changes to our local network came up in conversation. The network was “heterogeneous,” consisting of perhaps twenty workstations from various manufacturers—Sun, Silicon Graphics, Convex—but all were running some variant of the UNIX operating system (Solaris, Irix, and HPP-UX respectively) and so had a great deal in common. One of the mid-level management staff (whose background was primarily in network hardware and architecture) mentioned that among the proposed changes was the adoption of a flashy new IDE or “integrated development environment,” a sort of programming workbench with a graphical user interface intended to bind the various tools of the programmer smoothly and tightly to the flow of their work. IDEs were (and are) quite common in software development, even de rigeur within some work environments, but precisely what constitutes an “IDE” is a matter of debate among programmers. In addition to myself, two other working programmers were within earshot of the conversation and when the proposal was mentioned again (it had been floated some weeks earlier) it received a lukewarm reception. The manager pressed one co-worker in particular (whose technical erudition was generally renowned) about his reaction. Why would he choose “Emacs”—the “simple text editor” that so many of the programmers within our group employed—over the latest, visually arresting system on the market? His initial response—“I live inside that text editor, man!” belies the concept of digital craftwork as fundamentally disembodied, and is a common sentiment: Unlike most other editors … Emacs is a complete working environment. No matter what you do, you can start Emacs in the morning, work all day and all night, and never leave it … Before windowing systems like X and Microsoft Windows became popular, Emacs often served as a complete windowing system of its own. All you needed was a terminal, and you could live within Emacs forever. (Cameron et al. 2004: ix)

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In his ethnography of an open source software development community, Kelty (2008) qualifies Emacs not only as a text editor but “something like a religion … EMACS is more than just a tool for writing text; for many programmers, it was (and still is) the principal interface to the operating system … it allows a programmer not only to write a program but also to debug it, to compile it, to run it, and to e-mail it to another user, all from within the same interface” (183–4). This is, however, I hasten to note, more than a matter of simple integrated functionality. As I’ve said, all IDEs are by design intended to bring all the relevant tools a programmer typically relies upon within a uniform interface. Some might argue that what distinguishes Emacs is its politics, intertwined as it is with the establishment of the Free Software Foundation and open source software. Yet quite apart from such considerations, Emacs (and similar editors) differ from word processors, “desktop publishing” software, or conventional IDEs in that text—rather than layout or graphics—is the focal abstraction around which they are built. This can be a rather diaphanous distinction, but one that has pronounced implications in terms of actual practice. As for many artisans, programmers often describe themselves as “in the zone,” working steadily in a liminal state between attention and distraction. At any one moment they may have some tens of text files open, some source code, others configuration files. Each may be from a few lines to several thousand in length, typically replete with cross-references and many levels of nesting. Numerous other tools may be in some intermediate state of activity in the background—compilers, debuggers, performance analyzers, version control software—and the programmer strives to establish a variable but rhythmic flow: modify, compile, execute, debug, repeat. Switching from the source code itself to the analysis of output and back again demands the ability not simply to scroll rapidly through source code but to jump instantly between “function calls” and other references, turning the jarring cognitive gaps and incongruities of a linear text into a specialized form of hypertextual “browsing.” Whatever the revolutionary rhetoric of the joystick and the mouse as a newly liberating input device, for working programmers the reach for the mouse (and away from the keyboard) is not unlike the reach of the weaver for a dropped shuttle or that of the concert pianist to turn the page of sheet music: a somatic interruption that requires at least some small measure of negotiation. I still find Emacs preferable to most “modern” window systems because I don’t have to use a mouse. If I want to create another window, I just type CTRL-x 2 (which splits the current window, whatever it is, into two); if I want to work in another window, I just type CTRL-x o; if I want to delete

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a window, I type CTRL-x 0. Is this faster than reaching for my mouse and moving it around? You bet. (Powers et al. 2002: 355) Yet I would argue this is as much a matter of embodiment as of speed. The reliance on obscure keys (“Ctrl,” “Alt,” function keys, etc.) and especially on arcane key combinations are less of a burden than they might seem. As programmers gain experience they expend no more effort—in terms of conscious recollection—on such digital (!) manipulations than does the knitter in purling or the concert pianist, who after much practice allows her body to float through a performance, even an improvised one. One reasonable distinction between software typically referred to as a “word processor” and that more conventionally understood as a “text editor” lies in the fact that the latter more strictly segregates textual content or structure from document form or appearance. While this was a direct emulation of earlier professional practice (where manuscripts were typewritten first, with layout and typesetting handled later), for many casual users this presents a considerable disadvantage. Rather than the comparatively fluid flow of a typewriter, early word processors introduced a disjuncture between the hand and the eye, between typewriting practice and the visual result. Such users found some relief in a later generation of word processors such as Microsoft Word which were qualified by the acronym WYSIWYG (typically pronounced WHIZ-ee-wig). Short for “what you see is what you get,” the term referred to the fact that not just a document’s content but its layout and graphical elements were displayed, ideally just as they would appear if printed to hard copy. Any tags or codes that specified formatting were kept invisible to user. As long as the software was bug-free and re-rendered documents quickly and correctly when changed this was a major advantage. However, a common adage among programmers has it that only the most trivial program is “bug-free” and in practice few casual users will happily accept even a delay of a few seconds in the flow of an interface if such a delay occurs more than every few minutes. In a sardonic twist some programmers will characterize “text editors” as “WYSIWYW—what you see is what you want” to suggest the finer degree of control and reduced propensity for file corruption they allegedly offer. More to the point, WYSIWYG word processors couple content with visual format, mimicking the typewritten page. Text editors, on the other hand, sustain text as an abstraction independent of layout, embedded images, or other visual elements. Arguably this represents a closer fit with the perspective of the programmer, for whom abstract text is machinic rather than exclusively communicative. This said, it is equally important to acknowledge that few text editors are wholly devoid of visual considerations, and whatever they may say no programmer is entirely unconcerned with

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them. It is rather that their aesthetic sensibilities are more closely entangled with what Suchman referred to long ago as “situated action” (Suchman 1987), less to do with reproducing a likeness of a material form than with the rapid understanding, navigation, and modification of an algorithmic structure. One example, for instance, is “syntactic coloring,” a feature of most text editors designed to support programming. By color-coding keywords, comments, the names of functions and variables, and other elements of syntactic significance, the text editor eases the cognitive fatigue that can result from hours of poring over a textual display. Further examples might include the automatic numbering of lines (of source code), the “folding” or temporary hiding of large syntactic units such as functions or subroutines, or the presentation of a hierarchical “tree” of such routines that are then treated like hyperlinks, allowing the reader to jump directly to the routine of interest. Many text editors offer a “prettify” function that optimally adds or eliminates “white space” the tabs, spaces, line breaks etc. within a source code file—in order to emphasize or make more visually transparent its syntactic structure (without changing the actual operations performed by that structure, of course). Consider a separate vein of the question of aesthetics, one that intersects our discussion of materiality and is drawn not from “programming” per se but from a distinct field of digital craft known variously as user interface design, human–computer interaction, or user experience design. These artisans must draw heavily from a variegated terrain of cultural associations with physical materials in an effort to make digital culture somehow familiar (and so apprehensible). One example I articulate in some detail elsewhere is drawn from a paragon of contemporary industrial design: the Apple company, in particular the three primary material references of the interface to their Macintosh operating system. These references—which I label brushed metal, glass (especially obsidian), and chromatic gel—are elements conspicuous throughout not only the interface’s design but in the company’s website, the interfaces of its other products (especially the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), in Apple’s packaging, and even in the interior design of Apple’s popular retail outlets. In step with Apple’s famously intuitive interface design, these materials are distinguishable and have strong connotations. Brushed metal is used liberally as a “framing” material, its smooth matte finish, rigidity, and inertness connoting structural integrity and uniformity … The deep reflective black of volcanic glass or obsidian, on the other hand, is prominent not only as the powered-down face of liquid crystal displays but as the default virtual surface across which images noiselessly slide … Chromatic gel was conspicuous as a surface in Apple’s line of translucent two-tone computer hardware (e.g. the “bondi blue”

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iMac sold in 1998–2003), but today it is most apparent as an element of its interfaces: the controls, icons, and progress bars of Mac OS X and iOS, for example, replicated thematically throughout Apple’s various websites. Prismatic, pulsating, and internally illuminated, the brightlycolored droplets connote action, fluidity, even vitality. All three of these materials are “cool” and “laminar,” smooth and uniform, free of baroque embellishments, “hygienic” if not “sterile” (we could contrast them, for example, with warmer, more “organic” materials such as stone, wood, or leather). Each flows easily and seamlessly into the others as easily as they flow between the physical and the virtual, a nested lava-lamp of “blobjects” in which we float. (DeNicola 2010b) If Apple’s stylistic branding represents the apotheosis of industrial design, its counter-point might be found in the aesthetics of hacker culture and related phenomena such as steampunk. In the waning years of the Cold War a popular visual and literary genre emerged that alloyed elements drawn from various historical imaginaries (Victorian Britain, the American West) with longstanding themes drawn from science fiction and fantasy. In many ways a reprise of the “Amazing Stories” of Jules Verne or Victor Hugo, it narratively marries baroque style, colonial pomp, and pre- or early industrial technology with advanced telecommunications, space flight, and other chronologically subsequent historical developments. The stylistic conventions of steampunk have since “bled” beyond their literary and filmic origins and been taken up elsewhere, in particular by many of those who also self-identify as hackers or craftivists. In venues ranging from metropolitan “cosplay” fan gatherings to specialty fashion websites to amateur do-it-yourself videos on YouTube, clothing, outfits, devices, weapons, and other props and accouterments are prominently displayed by steampunk enthusiasts, and a key criterion in the “taste” often accorded such items is the degree to which they were fabricated by hand rather than industrially.7 A “Flash Gordon” style raygun that was clearly soldered together from various metallic bric-a-brac, for example, bears significantly greater social capital than the same thing purchased as a unit from a retailer. The practice of heavily customizing mass-produced technologies (especially digital technologies), embellishing them in congruence with the steampunk aesthetic, is of special relevance here, and we would be hard-pressed to find a more striking example than the “steampunk computer keyboard,” a popular DIY project illustrated by the elaborate instance below:

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FIGURE 1   A fully functional computer keyboard made from an old IBM model M keyboard and parts from an old Continental typewriter © Alexander Schlesier.

Of mice and keyboards The typewriter cannot conjure up anything imaginary, as can cinema; it cannot simulate the real, as can sound recording; it only inverts the gender of writing. In so doing, however, it inverts the material basis of literature (Kittler 1999: 183) The computer keyboard provides a useful segue into the third dimension in which I wish to consider digital craft: embodiment. A time-honored bit of (digital) material culture is the Model M keyboard, originally developed and manufactured by IBM in the mid-1980s. Though visually austere and utilitarian, the Model M was distinguished by its durability and its auditory and tactile feedback. Key presses required comparatively strong pressure and produced a pronounced sound.8 This was an intended feature designed to aid typists trained on typewriters who had become used to that level of feedback, particularly important when typing without actually looking at the keyboard. Its durability has allowed the Model M to enjoy a long life as a rare and highly sought resale item via online auction sites, particularly by programmers and hackers who often specifically eschew graphical user interfaces and mice for text-based interfaces and keyboards. Many such keyboard aficionados note that the “qwerty” keyboard layout itself was designed not

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with the human body in mind but to reduce the probability of jammed keys in the age of mechanical typewriters. Today the byproduct of carpal tunnel and other repetitive stress syndromes is an avoidable side-effect, and some have advocated alternative keyboard layouts (e.g. the Dvorak keyboard) that reduce the hand-motion required given the frequency of the various characters in the English alphabet. While the widespread adoption of such alternatives have largely failed due to the almost universal institutionalization of the “qwerty” standard, the fields of ergonomics and human factors engineering have expanded dramatically alongside the cultural assimilation of digital devices. The characterization of digital culture and “the virtual” as disembodied is just as common as the aforementioned claim of immateriality. Digital technology is overwhelmingly televisual and passive, the thinking goes, with the luminous raster display and the keyboard + mouse the universal physical interface. Such an image is amorphously in conformance with the bodily absence often associated with telecommunications and the internet. That image has been disrupted a bit with the introduction of various computer game controllers and especially with smartphones, whose mobility contrasts sharply with the image of transfixed sedentarization so long associated with computer use. Yet even putting these recent developments aside, the characterization of digital culture as disembodied is dubious. Spinners or weavers seated for hours at their wheels or looms are well within the conventional framework of “handicraft” despite the sedentary quality of such activities and the predominance of eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills. Their activity is patently “embodied,” knowledge and skill produced via repeated experience through posture, physiology, and sensual apprehension of materials and the environment. Yet similarly docile and manually dexterous computer programmers are not typically perceived that way. My primary objective in making these observations is to support the broad critique of “digital culture” as fundamentally disembodied. Campbell’s (2004) ethnographic study of three gay male communities built around Internet Relay Chat (IRC), for example, showed how—even when the communicative interface was constrained largely to teletype-like “plain text” the fact of participants’ corporeality deeply inflected their interaction and the meaning they drew from it.9 More deeply, Campbell observes that such modulations are never “one way.” Just as our own bodies shape our communications, we unavoidably infer an embodied subject on the other end. In a similarly ethnographic account of the virtual world known as Second Life, Tom Boellstorf discusses: an incident of “afk” or “away from keyboard” … This state of affairs, where a person leaves their computer without logging off, so that their

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avatar remains, was commonplace in Second Life and other virtual worlds during my fieldwork. In many actual-world cultures, to have someone stare at you blankly for two minutes when you approach them would be interpreted as rudeness or intoxication … Afk and lag are both apparently banal aspects of cybersociality with important theoretical implications for questions of place and time … While it has often been thought that emerging technologies will lead to inauthentic forms of placelessness … it is clear that virtual worlds come into existence through a social field constituted by practices of place and time … even phenomena like lag and afk that are forms of breakdown in the thrownness of virtual place and time. These practices, even afk, are all forms of techne. (Boellstorff 2010: sec. 1560) Both these examples are taken from a specific domain of digital culture at some remove from the lifeworld of the programmer (or digital artisan) as construed here, but in that context their salience lies in their mutual observation that, far from erasing embodiment as a consideration, the funneling of human interaction through the visual/display and the tactile/keyboard foregrounds embodiment in constraining its articulation. A second and more abstract thread to be drawn from these observations can be summarized in a paraphrase of media theorist Friedrich Kittler: the emergence of “software” or more precisely the differentiation of machines into hardware and software—inverted the gender of technology, and in so doing inverted the material basis of production. Kittler (1999) brilliantly illuminated how the development of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century transformed the “craft” of writing from an intimate practice expressed “in the hand” of a creative (male) author to a semi-automated clerical process divorced from the body and deemed more appropriate to women. Kittler also alludes to the fact that in the previous century, automation of textile production had been optimized when the physical mechanism of the loom was segregated from the “instructions” for weaving, enabling a single loom to produce a wide variety of materials and patterns. What is clear is that in both cases industrialization destabilized an entrenched and deeply gendered materiality, but it is also true that both domains anticipated the era of machinic writing. To say, in fact, that the newly industrialized process of textile production was the site at which “software” first emerged is more a matter of materiality than of metaphor: the “punch cards” that would ultimately become ubiquitous in the early days of computing were derived directly from those used to control textile production in eighteenth-century France (Essinger 2004). What relevance to the present discussion of craft can we discern in the distinction between, on the one hand, the typewriter-derived computer keyboard and, on the other hand, the mouse (or trackpad) and other more

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contemporary interfaces? More specifically, to what system of value can we ascribe programmers’ apparent fascination with or even fetishization of the keyboard? Kittler proposed that the typewriter decoupled the author from “his” product, the text. No longer were the embodied “traces” of the author’s hand legible in the manuscript itself, the “plain text” had been materially purified of its subject. The alienated uniformity of typescript was nonetheless in conformance with the virtues of the industrial era, whose ideal artifacts bore no trace of an embodied human inscribed in their production. Yet consider now the differentiation or abstraction of machines into physical mechanism and algorithmic instruction, “hardware” and “software.” Such a bifurcation would seem to extend a new surface onto which such traces would unavoidably be inscribed. The source code that was the subject of an earlier section, for example, is of course a text, written in a fragmentary derivative of one or more natural languages. It bears the visual layout, proper names, commentary asides, and all the other various traces of an embodied and culturally situated programmer working not with a stylus/mouse but with a keyboard whose layout was shaped by the limitations of nineteenthcentury mechanics. “Plain text” and the institution of typewriting—what for industrial era writing was an erasure of the embodied subject from textual production—might well provide (in the post-industrial era) an irruption of embodied subjectivity back into the domain of material production. Attempts at the routinization of computer programming have been documented; while strategies such as “structured programming,” software modularization, and “canned programs” did articulate a differentiation of the field and educational institutions into hierarchically ordered specialties, the industrial ideal of “automated programming” has at best enjoyed only very modest success (Kraft 1979).

Conclusion In her analysis of Americans who consume products associated with fin de siècle Arts and Crafts (this volume), Mascia-Lees explains that—as it was for the movement’s earliest proponents—what was important was not merely or even primarily the particular look of an object but the mode in which it was crafted, the sensuous and intellectual labor that went into making it. “The Arts & Crafts aesthetic,” she argues, “is therefore better understood as an approach to the making and dissemination of objects based on socialist principles than as a unified style based on specific design principles.” She develops the concept of “aesthetic embodiment” in order to clarify how craft operates or “performs” as a term, whether for her informants or more

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generally, and this is especially relevant here in that aesthetic embodiment signals a conscious attempt at an engagement (or re-engagement) with production via a honed, reinvigorated sensory receptivity. My previous observations regarding the online code repository called “SourceForge” are more elaborately apparent in an advertisement from The Perl Journal, a programming trade journal of the late 1990s. An ad for ActiveState, a prominent Canadian software company specializing in tools and systems for open source developers, it draws on the visual vocabulary of the Arts and Crafts Movement not only in its allusion to the woodcut but in its strong lines, limited colors, and simple graphic forms. While some of the visual elements are suggestive of industrialization in the abstract—an urban skyline, gears, welding—the composition is arguably quite socialist in its prominent depiction of human workers, most of whom appear to be engaged in an abstract trade of one variety or another. Women and men in aprons and thick gloves wield arc-welders and hand-tools, or buttress the stairway on which other workers tread. In the center, a typesetter seems to be inspecting copy, providing not only a “brand placement” opportunity for the advertised firm, but also a symbolic suturing of the printing trade to programming, type to source code, a free press to open source software. The bold-face headline reads “Programming for the People,” crystallizing the socialist overtones of the ad, rendering software development as contiguous with the pre-industrial artisans, workers and production made visible in a smooth deployment of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. I want to conclude by suggesting that programmers’ adoption of “craft” and “craftsmanship” as discursive qualifiers “makes sense” on two levels. First, as I have argued above (and contrary to conventional depiction), digital culture in general and programming more specifically are shaped by material considerations, demand a sensitivity to aesthetics, and entail patently embodied practice. Insofar as modern industrial production relies on the homogenization or erasure of material particularities, the eschewal of aesthetics in favor of utility, and an absence of the body or its traces from production, it is hardly remarkable that programming would fall more easily under the aegis of industrialization’s opposite: craft. This is particularly relevant when we acknowledge the emergence of “ubiquitous” or “pervasive” computing, the trend for software and network connectivity to less and less be qualities of specialized appliances (e.g., “computers,” “cellphones”) and in a growing variety of cases simply aspects of artifacts in general (DeNicola 2010a). On a deeper level, however, it may well be that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century programming and the ubiquity of software marks a politically salient “tipping point” for craft. Up through the industrial era, the human traces inscribed in the production of artifacts had grown toward extinction. In their material substance we commonly perceive artifacts to

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exist independently of humans, but the expansion of a “software stratum” within all things, potentially connecting all things, has destabilized that metaphysic. Though inscrutable to most, software-laden objects bear the traces of human production by definition, since the distinction between software and hardware is itself predicated on the need for ongoing human intervention and reconfiguration. As I argued earlier, “data” (including textual representations) unavoidably entail materiality just as artifacts do, but in contrast to material forms information has no existence independent of an interpreting human subject. By extension, in comparison with the products of industrialized capitalism the products of the Information Age harbor a certain radical potential—a potential that has generally been sublimated through the use of the term craft—the possibility that there are limits to automation, and the traces of human labor can never be wholly eliminated. If “craft” was what human manufacture became when not reconfigured by industrialization, in the context of programming “craft” is neither a romantic metaphor nor a nebulous reference to a “hand-made aesthetic,” but the only discursive field that makes sense given the “manifold sensory experience” of programming: its materiality, aesthetics, and embodied practice. Perhaps, like Ong’s “secondary orality” in the Electronic Age (1982), software and the artisans who make it are the most visible signs of the renaissance of craft, a “secondary artisanship” that has been nascent in the Information Age all along.

4 American Beauty The Middle Class Arts and Crafts Revival in the United States Frances E. Mascia-Lees

The US middle class1

A

merican Beauty, the 1999 Oscar-winning film directed by Sam Mendes, which critiques the narcissistic conformity of the American suburban middle class, begins with a voice over: Lester Burnham, the central character undergoing a mid-life crisis (Kevin Spacey) narrates his day: it begins with him waking up in his suburban home, putting on his slippers, and experiencing the highlight of his day—masturbating in the shower—before leaving for his monotonous, dead-end job as a corporate consultant at Media Monthly magazine. In a deadpan voice, Lester informs us that his wife and daughter think of him as “this gigantic loser,” and, he doesn’t disagree. Lester is no less critical of his wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), a highly ambitious real estate broker who enjoys listening to what her daughter calls “elevator music,” fussing over her furniture, and growing roses. As she snips her American Beauties out in her rose garden, Lester asks, “See the way the handle on those pruning shears matches her gardening clogs?” then sneers, “That’s not an accident.” The underlying message of the film is a typical one: there is a hollow space behind the “American Dream,” a lack of genuine meaning and depth of experience, a dissatisfaction that leads men like the

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middle-aged Lester Burnham to lust—in Humbert-Humbert-like fashion— after his teenaged daughter’s beautiful friend, Angela (Mena Suvari). The middle class, and its supposed superficiality, has long been the bête noire of Hollywood. Many have come to expect and perhaps even believe such depictions. Whether in The Ice Storm, The Stepford Wives, Revolutionary Road, or The Graduate, we know that frustrations and repressed desires seethe under the perfectly mannered surface of middle-class life, like the weeds lurking beneath perfectly manicured suburban lawns, waiting to erupt. American Beauty is an exemplar of suburban exposé. However, it is not just a critique of the vacuousness and pretensions of US middle-class life; it is also, as its title suggests, an indictment of middle-class aesthetics. The film goes to great pains to warn us that beauty cannot be found in conformity, coordinated outfits, or neatly furnished houses bordered by the well-tended rose beds and white picket fences it portrays. Hollywood’s rejection of US middle-class suburban life and taste echoes a long tradition of similar indictments by US writers and public intellectuals ranging from Sinclair Lewis to Lewis Mumford to Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, before the middle class became the privileged object of attention in recent US political discourse,2 it had long been, as Lee Siegel puts it, “a chief rite of passage for liberal American intellectuals” to depict middle-class life as the “physical correlative to spiritual and mental death” and the suburbs as “non-communities signifying ugly moral choices” (2008). John Stilgoe points out that from its earliest use, “suburban” connoted inferiority: a suburb “lay low, in the shadow of” walled municipalities positioned on a hilltop above them (1988: 1) although he notes that it was not until the 1920s that the suburbs “unnerved US intellectuals,” condemning them for their perceived “conservatism, pettiness, and tackiness” (1988: 4). Academic historians were not exempt from perpetuating such characterizations. In The New Suburban History, Kevin Kruse and Thomas Segru point out that a first generation of historians of the US suburbs tended to accept the popular stereotype of suburbs promulgated by social, cultural, and architectural critics, describing them as “homogeneous, conformist, and bourgeois” (2006: 2) and “accepting and overemphasizing the suburban uniformity of race and class” (2006: 4).3 Although there have been some notable exceptions,4 anthropologists have traditionally followed suit, if not quite demonizing the middle class for its inanity, at best ignoring it as the “unmarked reference group” or “taken-for-granted” subject, at worst, discounting it as “bourgeois.” Carla Freeman attributes this to anthropology’s traditional privileging of the study of the oppressed as a more morally engaged ethnographic practice (Freeman 2012: 6). However, in a recent volume on the global middle classes, Freeman and her co-authors Rachel Heiman and Mark Liechty point out why studying the middle classes matters for anthropology: “cross-class coalitions … are



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essential to undermining exploitation relations,” they suggest, requiring “an understanding of the middle classes,” which can “broaden the parameters of who may qualify as a subject for a morally engaged anthropology” (2012: 11).5 The general disregard among anthropologists of US middle-class aesthetics also stems partly from a long-held suspicion of the category of the aesthetic itself within the academy. In the eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten (1714–62) appropriated the word from the Greek aisthētikós, meaning “perceptive by feeling,” for the name of his new science of sense experience. Not long after, and due to the complex socioeconomic and political context in which the discourse of the aesthetic was deployed, Kant (1724–1804) transformed it to mean almost its opposite: a disinterested, distanced, contemplative, and objectifying act of consciousness (see Buck-Morss 1992 and Eagleton 1991). It thus came to be a term applied to the rational act of good judgment (i.e. taste) about art and the beauties of nature, and then ultimately to a theory of art and beauty. Kant’s argument—that perceiving an aesthetic object is an end in itself that is suspended from particular interests—led him to conclude that the judgment of beauty is removed from normal needs and desires and is therefore a universal, acultural, ahistorical act. It is the Kantian notion that Bourdieu (1984) and others famously critiqued in the 1980s, exposing Kant’s notion of aesthetic appreciation as a form of cultural capital that constructs class identity and maintains class privilege through distinctions in “taste.”6 This dismissal of the aesthetic in the academy has been compounded by the widespread notion that beauty is itself superficial and that our concern with it distracts us from issues of greater political and ethical import (Scarry 2001). Yet, even as serious critics allow, the aesthetic is capable of producing multiple effects. Terry Eagleton (1991) has suggested the aesthetic has the power to affect lived experience in emancipatory ways. Thus characterizing middle-class aesthetic taste as self-evidently vacuous, ignoring it as unmarked, or reading it solely as hegemonic may obscure the liberatory potential of everyday aesthetic choices in the United States, homogenizing a wide range of cultural practices that might reflect actual meaningful differences across groups. To counter this, we need fine-grained ethnographic analyses of the role aesthetics and “beauty” play in the everyday lives of particular groups within the United States, even if gathered under the term “middle-class.”

Aesthetics as embodied practice This chapter is such an ethnography. It focuses on a segment of the US middle class today that self-consciously consumes a particular aesthetic

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known as Arts and Crafts. What makes Arts and Crafts particularly interesting in this regard is that it is as much about politics as it is about beauty, as much celebrated in museums around the world as in middle-class US homes across the country. The original Arts and Crafts Movement developed in Britain in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and was grounded in Marxist principles, which tied the political to the aesthetic by linking respect for others with an aesthetic sensibility. It sought to resist the oppressive relations of industrial production by valuing craftsmanship and locating beauty in non-exploitative labor. It also sought to bring beauty into the lives of the masses through the production of affordable, handcrafted objects of high quality. The Movement was both widespread and influential, associated in Europe with everything from socialist tracts to Art Nouveau and in the United States from Jane Addams’ Hull House for poor immigrants to the successful architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. However, the First World War brought the Arts and Crafts Movement to an end as the demand for consumer goods dropped drastically and companies that had produced Arts and Crafts furnishings and objects focused on war production. In the United States, as new ideologies of domesticity and changing political commitments emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic lost its appeal. And, yet, fifty years later, in the 1970s, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic witnessed an explosive revival now spanning over four decades, making the current movement three times longer-lasting than the original. Since that time, the appeal of this aesthetic has been immense in the United States: a dizzying array of Arts and Crafts objects can be purchased today and it can be explored and consumed at tourist sites across the country, at conferences and art shows drawing thousands of attendees, and through popular magazines and books devoted to it. Although the original Arts and Crafts Movement has been explored in hundreds of books, academic journals, and conferences, with new work published monthly in such fields as material studies, design history, and cultural science studies, its current revival goes largely unexplored and unexplained. Popular magazines and coffee table books showcase it but little serious scholarly work has been conducted, whether in cultural studies, consumer studies, sociology, or anthropology. Although a large number of people in the United States consume artifacts of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic today, my analysis of it is based on fieldwork conducted over a three-year period among a particular segment of the Arts and Crafts Revival: people who attend the annual Grove Park Inn (GPI) Arts and Crafts Conference in Asheville, North Carolina to both study the Arts and Crafts Movement and to purchase handcrafted objects for their homes from skilled craftspeople. Established in the 1980s, the GPI Arts and Crafts Conference is the most important event of the year for enthusiasts. As with



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most craft consumers in the United States, the majority of attendees of the GPI Conference are white and middle class—many solidly middle-middle class—and range in age from their early twenties well into their eighties, with the largest portion of attendees over thirty-five. Both men and women fill the Grove Park Inn in large numbers: over 1,300 people registered for the 2010 conference while another 3,000 came as walk-ins, mostly individuals living within three to four hours’ driving distance from Asheville. However, registered attendees came from all over, including outside of the United States, but tended to be from the mid-West, upstate New York, and, to a lesser extent, the West. By focusing on this group of consumers, as well as some of the craftspeople from whom they buy Arts and Crafts objects, I hope to nuance our understanding of US middle-class aesthetic choices. To do so, I propose a phenomenological understanding of the appeal of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic to this population, one that treats the aesthetic as sensory perception and a form of embodiment, a way of being in the world. In approaching the aesthetic in this way, I take my lead from Merleau-Ponty’s insight that the aesthetic is “a way of encountering the world through which humans respond to forms, shapes, and colors in ways that take on a life of their own and open themselves up to metaphoric meaning” (quoted in Crowther 1993: 65) and style a way of inhabiting the world, a coherent orientation toward the world and a way of expressively appropriating it (see Singer 1993).7 I ask the following questions: how among consumers for whom the Arts and Crafts aesthetic operates as a meaningful category do certain commodities come to be seen as beautiful? How and why do GPI consumers respond to the A&C aesthetic? What role does beauty—its creation, presence, and assessment—play in the fabric of their experiences of everyday life? In asking these questions, I am arguing that beauty can be a key site for ethnographic investigation that opens up important critical perspectives on everyday life. In answering them, I hope to show that middle-class aesthetics can be far from vacuous and middle-class life anything but sterile. Within the framework I employ, beauty is understood neither as a Kantian set of transcendent, universal, acultural, and ahistorical qualities that reside within an object nor a Bourdieuian political construction that merely maintains class privilege. For the GPI Arts and Crafts consumers whom I study beauty resides neither completely within an object nor in the eye of the beholder, but is constituted through experiences connecting mind, body, object, individuals, and community. Beauty, for them, is at once phenomenological and social.

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The original Arts and Crafts Movement The original Arts and Crafts Movement was an artistic, political, social, and philosophical movement that developed in Europe and the United States to counter burgeoning economic materialism and the harsh realities of industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century (Fariello 2004: 11; Kaplan 2004: 11). In Britain, in particular, the Movement was driven “by the desire to secure the value of skilled workmanship in the machine age” (Owen 2004) and improve the working conditions of the working class (Kaplan 2004: 11). Whether in England, where the Movement began, or Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, France or the United States where it rapidly spread, adherents criticized the mass production of material goods, which they saw as resulting in cheap and poorly made commodities. Combining the Marxist critique of alienated labor with the art critic, John Ruskin’s belief in the redemptive value of art, adherents to the Arts and Crafts Movement suggested that art could serve as a counter to the ills of modernity; Ruskin believed that medieval craftsmen and builders had worked with freedom of expression (http://everything2.com/title/John%2520Ruskin). Drawing on the model of the medieval guild to critique the alienation of the modern world, Arts and Crafts adherents, following Ruskin, extolled the virtues of handicraft, turning to craftsmanship as a site from which to reunite art and labor, mental effort and manual achievement, and work and play (Owen 2004: 25–6). The Arts and Crafts Movement turned specifically to the decorative arts and thus to craft production within the domestic sphere, thereby attempting to also break down the Victorian separation of the public and the private, the factory and the home, the workplace and the family. William Morris, the leading figure of the nineteenth-century British Arts and Crafts Movement, sought to efface the hierarchical boundary between high art and craft, seeking to change the status of the decorative arts from “trade” to that of “art” (Crawford 2004: 23). The movement’s name reflected this commitment: it was coined in 1887 by a group of British designers who founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society as a place where applied art would be equally valued with fine art (Crawford 2004: 36). Morris is considered by some to be one of the greatest revolutionary figures in British labor history. But Morris was not only a socialist activist: he was also a poet, novelist, bibliophile, translator, and architectural preservationist. He designed and made furniture, textiles, stained glass, tiles, carpets, murals, wallpapers, books, type, and more. According to his biographer E. P. Thompson, Morris was the “first creative artist of major stature in the world to take his political stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the



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revolutionary working class” (1955/76: 727). Andrew Hemmingway argues that it was Morris’s very “vocational location in the art world that gave him a particular opportunity to articulate … the aesthetic positions that could be said to be inherent in Marxist Theory” (2006: 17). Coming to the Movement as artists,8 Morris and other major figures of the British Movement were committed to the unity of all arts and to the integration of art into everyday life (Crawford 2004: 23, Kaplan 2004: 11). They thus applied their aesthetic principles to the production of a wide range of objects, some considered traditional art, such as painting and sculpture, but most others considered decorative. The latter were personal and functional and thus part of people’s everyday life: wallpaper, for example, furniture, textiles, jewelry, embroidery, books, pottery, lace, metalwork, and houses themselves. The Movement’s focus on useful and necessary domestic objects enabled the belief that art could be democratized and made available to all: by locating beauty in a chair, for example, or in a water pitcher, they believed art and the everyday could be integrated into the life of not just elites but also the working classes. Indeed, the ideal was for life to be a total work of art (a Gesamtkunstwerk) and for a building, its furnishings and its setting to form an environmental whole (Kaplan 2004: 18), an ideal especially evidenced later in the philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School. Arts and Crafts social reformers envisioned a classless society in which craft taught the viewer and consumer about social values, such as the beauty of manual labor and moral virtues (Myzelev 2007: 191) and in which beauty permeated every sphere of life: labor, leisure, the home, and one’s surroundings (Solomon 1979: 82). Movement leaders spread their philosophy through public lectures and the establishment of periodicals while, at the same time, putting theory into practice through a range of political projects: they found employment for the impoverished, fought for improved working conditions for the working classes, and developed institutions to train unskilled and increasingly deskilled workers in craft production, many of them immigrants and women who swelled the ranks of the poor (Kaplan 2004: 17).9 Experimental art communities were also created, most notably the Guild of Handicraft established by C. R. Ashbee in 1888 in London’s East End slums to bring “pleasure in work to the poor.” In the United States, Elbert Hubbard established the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York, which, at its peak employed 500 workers employed in craft production, who would otherwise have worked in the dirty factories of Buffalo, New York (Crawford 2004: 31). Morris consistently identified daily life as the domain in which beauty, pleasure, and happiness could be freely available to all and believed that the everyday is the measure of everything (Perkins 2010: 30), constructing what Peter Stansky (1999) has called an ideology of “the radical domestic.”

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Because everyday life, for Morris, was the site of sensory, embodied experiences and the domain of work, he contended it was “meaningless to consider revolutionary change in class relations, the means of production, or the distribution of wealth without taking this into account” if work was not “part of the pleasure of our lives” then the revolution would remain incomplete (Perkins 2010: 3–4). Beyond the realm of work, Morris argued for paying attention to, and taking a pleasurable interest in, the details of daily life, which included an awareness of everyday objects and places, an aspect that Morris emphasized in his essays on design, architecture, and interior decoration (Perkins 2010). The “true secret of happiness,” he argued “lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life” (Morris 1887: 94, emphasis in the original). Morris called for attention to, and interest in, mundane details and the familiar, whether in work or home decoration (Perkins 2010: 6). For him, everyday encounters with material spaces and objects always have an affective potential with power to “express the kind of life which [we] live” (quoted in Perkins 2010: 8) and, as Perkins points out, to spark a desire for a different kind of life (2010: 8). Morris’s call to “beautify the familiar” was linked to his “radical belief in a profound transformation of everyday life that would free work from alienation and institute equitable and pleasurable forms of social life” (Perkins 2010: 18). Yet, Morris was no naive socialist; he warned against faith in partial reforms. He argued that the transformation of social conditions required nothing less than a takeover by open revolution of all the means of production. The Movement’s slogan, “Joy in Labor,” reflected Morris’s conceptualization of work as naturally pleasurable if carried out under the right conditions, linking his socialism to his aesthetic principles. Morris is credited as the first social thinker to apply the Marxist theory of labor to art, drawing on Marx’s dictum that the free and unrestricted exercise of the labor process is manifest in creation “in accordance with the laws of beauty” (quoted in Solomon 1979: 80).10 For Marx, art mediated between the senses and the intellect, cognition and feeling and was a means to transcend the present, with the ability to transform the latent into the actual (Solomon 1979: 82). Recognizing the transcendent and revolutionary potential of Marx’s aesthetic dialectics, Morris envisioned a non-repressive social order founded on the reintroduction of the aesthetic into the labor process leading him to a radical redefinition of the aesthetic (see Solomon 1979: 79). For Morris, all work done with pleasure is art: as he put it, “real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labor.” By situating beauty in labor, Morris’s Movement expanded the category of the aesthetic to include not only craft, but work as well. Thus, what was important to the Movement was not the particular look of an object but the mode in which it was crafted and its integration into everyday life of



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all classes (Crawford 2004: 59). The Arts and Crafts aesthetic is therefore better understood as an approach to the making and dissemination of objects than as a design or style (Kaplan 2004: 11), and this may be the reason for its widespread appeal: Morris, and his followers, exalted beauty, quality, and usefulness, not a particular “look,” enabling multiple stylistic interpretations. The Arts and Crafts Movement thus was never monolithic: the shared set of ideals that defined it were adapted to particular economic, political, and cultural conditions (see Kaplan 2004). For example, in those European countries seeking liberation at the time—Norway, Finland, Ireland, and Hungary—the Arts and Crafts idealization of the pre-industrial past and its commitment to fidelity to place preserved traditional craft techniques and reinvigorated local rural handicrafts helping to create national identity and competitively position these countries in an increasingly globalizing economy (Kaplan 2004: 11).11 Regardless of its particular manifestation, the Arts and Crafts Movement imbued vernacular craft production with a moral imperative, creating a moral aesthetic (Kaplan 2004: 17). In the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement was associated less with socialism than with the democratization of consumption. Its design ideals that became synonymous with the aesthetic included solidity in construction, simplicity, honesty to materials, and adaptability to place (Crawford 2004: 59–61). These ideals were largely driven by the work and products of Gustav Stickley who extolled and widely disseminated the basic principles of the British Arts and Crafts Movement through his monthly magazine, The Craftsman, a primary forum for the Movement from 1901 through 1916. Functionality was also a key ideal for Movement adherents; consequently numerous items used in daily life were produced by Arts and Crafts manufacturers and craftspeople using a simple design and solid materials: quarter-sawn white oak furniture for every room, porcelain vases, earthen bowls, copper lamps, embroidered textiles, stained glass windows, lighting fixtures, and hand-loomed rugs. Ironically, the US embrace of the British ideals of simplicity and integrity in design enabled US manufacturers to standardize designs and streamline the manufacturing process. Much of their furniture, for example, was machine manufactured, although it continued to be painstakingly assembled, finished, and detailed by hand, at least in the shops of its leading proponents. This allowed the production of affordable furnishings for both the middle and working classes, democratizing design and thereby attaining an ideal that ultimately eluded Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement whose products tended to be out of affordable range for many consumers. Stickley not only believed in the democratization of design but also that “the root of all reform lies in the individual and that the life of the individual is shaped mainly by home surroundings” (quoted in Mayer 1992: 9). He

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FIGURE 2   Handmade Craftsman Lantern and Stickley Reproduction Table and Chairs © Francis C. Lees. was far from alone in these beliefs. In the United States social reformers with a commitment to social justice calling for change by way of housing were widespread: social workers, labor unionists, feminists, architects, and artisans called for “a beautiful home with a beautiful heart” and elected officials introduced policies encouraging home ownership to increase political and economic stability (Maddex and Vertikoff 2003: 12). This focus on the home led Stickley to design not only relatively inexpensive furniture, but affordable houses as well. Stickley’s Craftsmen homes, as they were called, were to a large extent modeled on the bungalow, originally an Anglo-Indian construction used for summer housing and were built to create an interior space consistent with living a life of Arts and Crafts principles: as Stickley wrote in The Craftsman, bungalows were built on the fundamental principles of “honesty,” “simplicity,” and “usefulness.”12 They were part of the rejection of ornate Victorian designs, the desire for the simpler life of an Arcadian past and a return to nature. They also brought “style” to the working and middle classes, providing them with what had traditionally been the purview of the wealthy. Stickley promulgated the virtues of the bungalow so widely that for many it became synonymous with the Craftsman style and the Arts and Crafts philosophy. At the turn of the twentieth century, bungalows were the preferred house type in the United States, especially among the working and aspiring middle classes.13 They were suited particularly well to social changes occurring in US



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cities after the First World War: large numbers of young, single women entered the labor force as office workers in cities14 and more and more young men returned from the War looking for new opportunities in urban areas (Curtis and Ford 1988). At the same time, the construction of mass transit enabled people to move to the outskirts of the city, creating “streetcar suburbs.” As families increasingly sought the American Dream, bungalows were built by the hundreds of thousands and were constructed through multiple means reflecting a cross-class appeal: some were expensive and architect-designed homes, others were built from plans found in catalogues of house designs (planbooks), and others were prefabricated, constructed as “kit” houses and sold by such merchandisers as Sears Roebuck. They also had cross-gender appeal. Although US notions of home have long been deeply gendered (see Di Leonardo 2004: 135–51), both men and women were central to the Arts and Crafts Movement, attracting male interest in the structure, contents, and interior design of homes while, at the same time, providing women with professional opportunities, many of whom overcame gender obstacles to found businesses, invent technology, and build economic markets (see Zipf 2007). Given the link between the bungalow and Stickley’s craftsman idea, in the United States, the Arts and Crafts aesthetic is associated not only with the democratization of consumption, but also with the “American Dream” and the growth of the suburbs.

The arts and crafts revival in the United States The roots of the US Revival of the Arts and Crafts Movement are not well documented, but it appears to have been initiated in 1966 with a book by John Crosby Freeman entitled The Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and his Craftsman Mission Furniture. But it was not until the early 1970s that the rediscovery of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic began to clearly emerge and did so in response to two exhibits mounted in 1972: Princeton University’s “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America” and the Pasadena Art Museum’s “California Design 1910 Exhibition.”15 Two years later one of the original Stickley companies in upstate New York was bought and began to reproduce original designs. Early consumers of the Revival were primarily collectors with significant purchasing power, although less wealthy buyers sought objects that were affordably priced. As antique items became increasingly scarce and expensive in the 1990s, a few craftspeople began to reproduce earlier designs while many more began to produce original work that interpreted the vocabulary and philosophy of the original Arts and Crafts Movement, often creating fresh, contemporary designs (Ewald 1999: 8), even as tradition was

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venerated: Arts and Crafts artisans are extremely knowledgeable about their predecessors, educated in both their philosophy and techniques (Ewald 1999: xii, 15). Aided by the internet, the sale of Arts and Crafts handmade crafts has expanded significantly in the last decade. The US Arts and Crafts Revival came on the tail of the craft revivalism and back-to-the-land movement associated with the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, which itself drew on ideas deeply embedded in Arts and Crafts ideology, especially its commitment to organizing communities of workers to protest and circumvent consumer capitalism. It was a reaction against the exploding consumerism and heightened sensory overstimulation of the period, and like many craft revival movements, it turned to an idea of a simpler past as the site of amelioration. The major spread in the popularity of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic was concurrent with a surge in the domestic Do-ItYourself movement focused on home renovation, which spread through the United States in the 1970s. Although magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated had for decades offered various projects for home improvements and advice on repairs, DIY home improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s and by 1979, a DIY television revolution focused on home renovation was spurred by the PBS television series This Old House. The late 1970s/early 1980s, when the Revival began to grow, were also coincident with the rise of a post-Fordist economy; it was part of this larger context in which culture became a primary site of identity creation and commodity culture a primary source for the raw materials for constructing notions of self. The desire to look back to an idealized past was also, of course, part and parcel of this moment in which authenticity, the past, and tradition were on sale everywhere, whether at tourist sites, museum shops, or theme parks. Thus, like the original Movement, the Revival was both a reaction against contemporary forms of capitalist excess and simultaneously deeply embedded within consumer capitalism. But as Bruce Metcalf points out, “if craft and capitalism have always been in bed together,” it should be noted that craft revivals have advocated capitalism on a very small scale, with modest investments and face-to-face marketplaces. This is small-money, small footprint, intimate capitalism, designed to solve one of the most urgent questions posed by industrial society: How does one find dignified labor? This was a question posed by Ruskin in 1853, and it’s still relevant today. At its best, craft is work with dignity, work that allows the worker to call the shots. In that sense, craft is inherently anti-corporate. (2008)



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FIGURE 3   Arts and Crafts Objects, Handmade by GPI Craftspeople © Francis

C. Lees.

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Contesting capitalism through craft: The GPI Arts and Crafts consumer These sentiments provide an important motivation for many Arts and Crafts consumers to visit the Grove Park Inn each year. For them, the purpose of attending the Arts and Crafts Conference is the opportunity it provides them to buy crafts directly from the person who makes them, thus participating in an exchange they see as non-exploitative and circumventing the depersonalized sphere of consumer capitalism. Many GPI consumers explicitly state that buying a product from its maker provides them with an alternative to buying mass-produced items, affording them an ethical position that allows them to navigate at least some aspects of consumer culture, even as they know they cannot escape it. It also offers them a defense against massproduced anonymity and provides them with a way of being in the world that is embedded in humanistic values and human relations. Consumers often return to buy objects from the same producers year after year or stop by to talk with them, even if not making a new purchase. It is not unusual for consumers to describe to the craftsperson in detail the placement of a particular object in their house and the repeated pleasure they receive from it. The internet facilitates easy maintenance of the connection between a producer and consumer. One furniture maker alerts previous customers to the making of each new object, providing them with a link to upload photographs of the entire productive process from the selection of the wood to the final application of stain. Selling directly to consumers offers the producer an experience of non-alienated labor and it provides both consumer and producer with an experience of authenticity and intimacy. As one furniture maker put it, “I derive great pleasure from making something for someone else: it is very personal, very intimate, very satisfying.” The intimacy of the connection between consumer and producer is, however, not only social, but phenomenological as well. The making of a craft object involves a transformation of perception into objects, ideas, and practices and demands specialized knowledge of materials and their properties and a high degree of motor/muscle skills (Risatti 2007). At the height of their careers, skilled craftspeople are able to bring all this together performing in a way that is often described as “effortless.” Their mind is necessarily engaged with intellectual, abstract, and conceptual problems concerning form and expression as their skilled “thinking hands” execute the object’s physical construction (Risatti 2007: 191). As the craftspeople with whom I work attest, craftmaking is a process of mind and hand working seamlessly together; it is itself a phenomenological investigation, or as Merleau-Ponty might put it “a philosophical inquiry,” one in which the laboring body of the craftsperson comprises his/her being-in-the-world (1964: 169).



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During the creative process, the craftsperson is passionately devoted to the world’s objectivity, experiencing, as Sobchack describes it, both “a sensual and sensible expansion” of one’s subjectivity and “an enhanced awareness of what it means to be material” oneself (2004: 290, emphases in original). This complementary co-constitutive experience we have of ourselves and of others as material objects is a corporeal form of engagement Sobchack calls “interobjectivity” (2004: 296). She suggests that it provides the material foundation of our aesthetic behavior: “it allows us to understand in a primordial way the general pervasion in existence of material sense-ability” (Sobchack 2004: 290). Handicraft also constitutes a way of being in the world for some GPI Arts and Crafts consumers. The physical processes left by craftspeople’s hands in their “phenomenological investigation” provide consumers access to the embodied act of making, and seems to invest the object with a vitality capable of countering commodity fetishism. Unlike the manufactured commodity, the craft object does not appear falsely as an active agent capable of commanding attention and determining desire, while, simultaneously, blinding the consumer to the suffering and exploitation actually embedded in the commodity’s production (Bennett 2001). Indeed, Arts and Crafts artisans refer explicitly to their “joy in labor,” reiterating the central philosophy of the Movement. As the motto on one craftsman’s business card reads: “My life’s work is also my life’s passion.” Thus, the Arts and Crafts object attracts attention precisely because the labor of the craftsperson is evident in it. It is not a de-socialized and singular material entity, a thing whose physical substance is purely self-contained; instead it is part of a nexus of relationships to both the social and material world (Cerni 2007: 3). When GPI Arts and Crafts consumers purchase a craft object and enfold it, they enfold the craftsperson whose body and subjectivity are already enfolded in the object. Their experience of the beauty of a handicraft thus emerges from a process that fundamentally intersubjective and deeply embedded in ethical commitments. A human rights attorney at the GPI Conference voiced this clearly: “the politics is central; beauty is in the philosophy of non-exploitation.” Buying a handicraft is not only a way to resist mass production and establish ethical relationships, but also to rein in capitalist excesses. As Howard Risatti suggests, with the sheer quantity, quality, and size of mass-produced objects that exist today, “there is little to give an absolute perspective and value to things, to anchor them except their comparative size or price” (2007: 200). This, he argues, can feel limitless and unsatisfying. But with a craft object, its scale, size, and shape are a reflection of the properties of materials as they can be worked by the hand and used by the body (Risatti 2007: 200). This is a significant component of the appeal of Arts and Crafts objects for many GPI Conference consumers who seek to “bring living down to livable

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range,” a sentiment also expressed as a desire to “downsize” and create a home, rather than a show house, where “family comes to relax and enjoy.” In this regard, the appeal of the Arts and Crafts philosophy to many GPI consumers today parallels its attractiveness to original movement adherents who opposed the excesses of cheap goods and mass production, as is evident in this statement made by Stickley in 1901: We need to straighten out our standards and to get rid of a lot of rubbish that we have accumulated along with our wealth and commercial supremacy. In many ways we have wasted and misused so many of our wonderful natural resources. All we really need is a change in our point of view toward life and a keener perception regarding the things that count and the things that really burden us. (quoted in Vesely 1986: 44) A scaled-down life is a meaningful one for many Arts and Crafts consumers who connect their appreciation of the Arts and Crafts Movement and its aesthetic with an ethical commitment not just to non-exploitative labor but also to the larger world in which they live. This is reflected in many of their backgrounds as teachers, social workers, psychologists, and counselors. It is not unusual to find among GPI Conference participants individuals who have spent a good part of their life involved in what they feel is meaningful service, whether a human rights lawyer, a retired teacher who has spent a lifetime in schools in underprivileged areas, an older woman who recently “adopted” a sixteen-year-old ex-drug addict to give her “a second chance at life”; or a man who had come of age in the late 1960s when a return to nature, land, and working with one’s hands was tied not only to a desire to escape rampant consumerism but also to a progressive politics to which he remains committed. For him, Arts and Crafts is a praxis and way of being that “transforms surroundings and builds community.” The GPI conference is an interesting hybrid, combining lectures, small group discussions, an antique show and an artisan craft show with as many as 125 exhibitors. The conference format underscores the centrality of intellectual pursuit as another appeal of Arts and Crafts consumption. For some individuals, the Arts and Craft aesthetic has become meaningful only through study. The attendees with whom I work—both craftspeople and consumers— are not only conversant with the history of the Arts and Crafts Movement, especially the ideas of Morris and Stickley, but are also nothing less than passionate about it, often eclectically merging ideas from both the British and US Movements into their craft designs and consumer choices. The importance of education for Arts and Crafts consumers is consistent with US middle-class values, and might also be taken to support Bourdieu’s



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claim that aesthetic consumption is really about cultural capital; some Arts and Crafts consumers certainly gain status and prestige based on their knowledge of a “tasteful” aesthetic. This is especially so for collectors of rare and antique pieces, but less significant for many others. Knowledge of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic as a source of symbolic capital is compromised somewhat for them: although the style is widespread, it is not part of mainstream understandings of art and beauty, making it at best an ambiguous signifier of taste and class. Indeed, some consumers who attend the Grove Park Inn Conference note that the majority of people they know have very little understanding of what the Arts and Crafts aesthetic is “really about.” As one attendee put it, “my friends think it involves making potholders or containers out of Popsicle sticks.” “Beautiful” is the key word used by GPI Arts and Crafts Conference craftspeople and consumers to describe Arts and Crafts objects. As we have seen, this notion of beauty is grounded in Movement ideas about the relationship of beauty to labor and social justice. Because form, function, political ideas, and ethical commitments are imbricated in this notion of beauty, it is not possible to extract any simple idea of “the beautiful” related only to the materiality of an Arts and Crafts object. Nonetheless, when asked to characterize a particular object’s sensual and physical appeal, consumers use a range of qualities, including visual form, tactile sensation, weight, balance, and dimensionality: for example, they have identified the solidity of a bookcase, the smooth feeling of the matte surface of a vase, the texture and concreteness of a ceramic tile, the exquisite handwork of an embroidered table runner, the durability of a table, the erectness of the straight lines of a chair, and the radiant ray flakes of a quarter-sawn oak buffet. Because Arts and Crafts objects are, for the most part, domestic items to be used not merely displayed, it is not surprising that the haptic senses figure so centrally in these descriptions along with the visual. Fisher notes the significance of haptic engagement with an object: “the haptic sense, comprising the tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses … renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin’s surface, and in external space” (Fisher 1997). Because the haptic senses are central for GPI consumers, they are prevented from keeping “a distance from the subjective character of the experience” of an Arts and Crafts object (Marks 2000: 211). As Classen (2005) points out, this tactile quality is a characteristic of textile handicrafts that are made for use, such as clothing, cushions, and carpets, which have traditionally been in the realm of women’s work. Embroidery, a central handicraft of the Arts and Crafts Movement, adds a further tactile dimension to textiles, she suggests, by creating designs in relief (Classen 2005: 230). The physical contact and intimacy of the experience of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic

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through the haptic senses produces what Mădălina Diaconu has called an “aesthetic of immersion.” Interestingly, although touch has historically been contrasted with vision, which is associated with the male and distanced engagement and touch with the female and close engagement, some scholars have suggested that the haptic mode of apprehension need not be in direct opposition to the visual. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have argued, haptic space may be as much visual or auditory as tactile. Thus, the haptic and visual may slide into one another, producing a form of perception that recent film critics have recognized as “haptic visuality.”16 This is elicited by intimate details that encourage a small, caressing gaze which, as Laura Marks (2002) suggests, is a characteristic of such crafts as weaving, embroidery, and decoration, each of which figures prominently in the Arts and Crafts tradition. It is also the defining characteristic of any page of Morris’s illustrated Chaucer, or other publications from his Kelmscott Press, or his and his colleagues’ wallpaper designs, composed of crisp, abundant, and densely repeating patterns influenced by natural forms with no vague or indeterminate elements or lines. For some GPI Conference attendees, the overall experience of beauty also involves the faculty of interoception, the process through which we gain awareness of our own bodies and locate our own experiences. This is vivid in this description by a consumer who had a chance encounter with an Arts and Crafts object that moved her: As I came around the corner, my body responded to a beautifully shaped vase whose being there I don’t think I had even consciously registered. It seemed instantaneous and I felt an intense rush through my body. I felt off-kilter, almost stopped in my tracks as I just stood there and soaked it in. This description is reminiscent of Elaine’s Scarry’s generalized characterization of the experience of beauty: “beauty,” she asserts, “quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living” (2001: 24). Of course, not all Arts and Crafts lovers experience beauty in this way, but this consumer’s description of her engagement with the vase above suggests that some of these sensations are involved; it also suggests that her experience of an object of beauty is capable of drawing her into the world by decentering her. Sobchack (2004) suggests one possible implication: as her embodiment is extended in the moment in which her responses take place, before they are registered by conscious thought, she cedes her subjectivity to the object in a Deleuzian moment in which affect is capable of producing creativity, novelty, and transformation (Zembylas 2006: 311). This is significant if we follow the claim of many recent theorists that there can be no ethics without affect. For example, Jane Bennett, following



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Foucault, argues that ethics is a complex interplay of moral code (moral ideals and metaphysical assumptions condensed into principles and rules) and sensibility, an orchestrated arrangement of affect. The enactment of the code requires a sensibility that generates the impetus to enact it. It is, thus, within this suspended moment of affect where political potentiality lies, a moment allowing intuitions to emerge that cut across the grain of cultural norms (Herzog 2001). The Arts and Crafts aesthetic is not only about objects, but also about practices of decorating and furnishing that construct interior spaces. Multiple elements combine to produce what various consumers think of as a “beautiful Arts and Crafts home,” which they often described in terms of physical sensations that create an overall feeling, whether “soothing,” “tranquil,” “harmonious,” or “warm.” This atmosphere is produced through the qualities of Arts and Crafts objects themselves: simple geometric lines; plain and unadorned surfaces; a preponderance of wood with deep, rich finishes; an emphasis on horizontal lines; the use of subdued earth tone colors; and a preference for soft lighting, produced by mica or stained glass shades. As one person put it, the “the best way I can describe my Arts and Crafts living room is that it has soothing simplicity.” Also crucial to the beauty of an Arts and Crafts home for many consumers are the spatial arrangements they create which, in turn, produce embodied and multisensory experiences. Home tours with consumers suggest how, within the spaces of their houses, Arts and Crafts consumers feel and use the dimensionality of the spatial context, the demands of the particular layout, the arrangement of furnishings on them, and the impact of ambience. To create interior spaces, Arts and Crafts consumers engage in the skillful process of constructing recognizable assemblages that are more than the sum of their parts (Watson and Shove 2008: 71). In answer to my question about the timing of the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Revival, one interviewee pointed to the appeal of creating a totality in the face of the fragmentation characteristic of life in the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century: The Arts and Crafts Revival was a response to the atomization of everyday life in the 1950s and 60s. To get women back into the home after World War II, they were offered convenience. Everything could be broken down into a task that there was an appliance for. And the trend in science was to know about the smallest parts of things. Arts and Crafts brought the whole back in. Various consumers remarked on the careful choices and decisions entailed in purchasing, grouping, and arranging objects to create a space that produces and elicits qualities of the lived experience they desire. As Bruce Johnson, organizer of the GPI Conference, says of the assembling of his possessions:

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Our Arts and Crafts collection is a combination of refinished antiques, a few precious pieces with their original finish, a dining room table and a floor lamp I made in my workshop, and works by contemporary craftsfirms. I made a decision years ago that has since defined our collection: we could only buy those pieces we could actually use while raising two sons and several dogs and cats in, as it turns out, five different houses over the course of thirty years. As some conference attendees attested, the conscious and deliberate juxtaposition and contiguity of objects enables a heightened awareness of their central values and of the everyday, which, for many of them, they suggest, helps counter the inattentiveness to the familiarity and routine of the domestic environment that characterizes daily life for many people in the United States today. Taking a genuine interest in details, paying attention to the familiar, and looking at everyday objects differently are crucial dimensions of the Arts and Crafts philosophy that are clearly of real significance to consumers. That an immersion into the everyday lies at the center of the Arts and Crafts experience of beauty is clear in the following statements of GPI Conference attendees: one stated, “You don’t just design a house and fill it with stuff. Art and design and day to day have to merge.” Another describes the overall experience of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic this way: We are able to touch and feel the stuff and embrace the philosophy even if we don’t live it entirely. Today part of it is also about having a personal aesthetic; you can mix reproductions with originals, but everything has to be beautiful. It makes you be aware of every aspect of daily life. Thus, for many of the people with whom I work, Arts and Crafts is an “aesthetic of attending,” a way of living that immerses them in their surroundings, grounded in what Sobchack would describe as a “corporeal and affective adherence” to the objective world, one which expresses their desire to enfold objects (2004: 288). For these GPI attendees the desire to enfold objects and be enfolded by them is multi-layered and stems from a combination of the nature of craftsmanship itself and the Arts and Crafts philosophy.

Conclusion Focusing on Arts and Crafts as an embodied aesthetic draws attention to the lived experience of beauty in the everyday lives of middle-class consumers



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and reveals the aesthetic to be a complex encounter with the world that has sensuous, intellectual, social, and political dimensions. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic is one that involves multiple sensory experiences and is simultaneously pre-reflective and highly self-reflexive, perceptual and conceptual, affective and cognitive, intersubjective and interobjective. For GPI Conference attendees Arts and Crafts is an aesthetics of attending, of soothing simplicity, and of meaning. Rather than shallow, unthinking conformists like Lester and Carolyn Burnham living empty, meaningless lives, many GPI consumers are making careful choices about the consumer objects that surround them and, through their commitment to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, cultivating a mode of attention to everyday detail that hones sensory receptivity to the specificity of things, the immersion William Morris saw as the secret to happiness. They find beauty within an aesthetic that valorizes authenticity and human connection and they seek to circumvent exploitative connections in at least some spheres of their lives. Although this may grow out of a romanticism about craftwork and the past that offers them a respite from a consumer culture they can never really escape, it clearly provides them with an ethics that enables them to navigate its anonymity and excesses in humanistic ways. This is a far cry from the portrait served up by Hollywood and generations of public intellectuals and scholars of the US white middle class.

5 Designs on Craft Negotiating Artisanal Knowledge and Identity in India Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber

Introduction

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he practice of craft, and the ideas and discourses it engenders, is an especially salient vehicle for contemporary anthropologists to study not only tradition and labor, but also shifting structures of value and identification. Craft’s elasticity as an idea means that it can do its work at different levels as well, encompassing alternative means and ends at points that manifest themselves internationally, nationally, and locally with the means to translate across and between particular arenas. This is because craft as a term, even as an idea, and the practices it refers to, emerges out of everyday socio-economic interactions where authorship, expertise, purpose, and history are negotiated. Calling a thing a craft, or a practice handicraft, or a person a “traditional” craftsperson without further scrutiny, doesn’t simply miss the extent to which terms of naming are woven into productive and circulatory networks; it misses how naming strategies and particular claims to distinction weigh down the ideological conception of labor.

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In this chapter we propose that strategies of naming, claiming, and visualizing are key to our understanding of craft in the north Indian context. We draw on our own ethnographic studies to elucidate the practices that justify and accentuate class differentiation in different spatial and cultural contexts. This can take the form of occupational or status boundary protection, or efforts to commandeer newly emerging and contested forms of influence and authority. In keeping with Bourdieu’s observations on praxis and the habitus (1977), we are also concerned with how repetition of the practices of affirming distinction and consolidating difference is a condition of their effectiveness at the same time as effectiveness is gauged by how self-evident the claims they underwrite are seen to be. The marshaling of meaning and value that is the substance of the work of naturalization must appear to be transparent and disinterested; but in reality it is an index of the contradictions and social fissures that must be denied and defused. That discourses need to be repeated (while the history of such affirmations is denied) tells us that the social conflicts and discrepancies they address are remarkably persistent. We use research from three distinct geographic areas and three very different experiences of craft. DeNicola’s work has focused on the interactions of middle-class designers and rural working-class traditional textile printers in Rajasthan (DeNicola 2003, 2005, 2009, 2012). Wilkinson-Weber has studied the urban, female embroidering labor force of Lucknow chikan embroidery, the nature of creativity within it and the role of agents and contractors (Wilkinson-Weber 1999, 2004). More recently, Wilkinson-Weber has examined some of the craft and design labor employed in the Hindi film industry of Mumbai, including dyers, tailors, embroiderers, and dress designers (Wilkinson-Weber 2014). The parallels we see in the first two contexts are echoed in the third, but film has a distinct moral and ideological foundation that offers some suggestive contrasts in how to subvert the boundaries that constrain talk about craft in the present day. Ethnography reveals incongruities between the discourses of knowledge, work, and creativity of those that seek to speak for artisans, and the artisans themselves (Hallam and Ingold 2007). This discourse crystallizes in a reflexive and well-articulated narrative of innovation and tradition. Since the 1990s, and a shift in India towards a more congenial economic environment for the growth of capitalism, this narrative shows no signs of weakening. Notwithstanding that the language of cooperatives and grass-roots mobilization has receded in favor of talk about marketing, business models, and entrepreneurship, the essentials of the relationship between designer, developer, and craftsperson remain very much the same. In fact, the management of access to markets, the communication of ideas, and the delegation of decision making reveal a growing assertion among designers to intervene in ever more fundamental ways in the processes of making.



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Repetitive discourse about craft helps reinforce class and power differences between designers (as well as critics, NGOs and so on) and craftspeople. In part it does this by downplaying the considerable complexity of Indian craft production. In our own work we have encountered makers who span the range of class positions from proletarian laborers to petty commodity producers, from agents to middleman, from managers to entrepreneurs who own the means of production, and finally to the educators who take on the role of “teaching” craft in institutional settings. Sometimes individuals move from one category into another in the course of a single working career (see Mohsini, this volume). Some of this variety is captured in development literature, but almost none features in the principal literature on craft. Instead, a simplification of the persons and working relationships in craft production engenders a perception of craftspeople as largely socially and occupationally undifferentiated. Conveniently, the construct of the generic, tradition-bound crafts worker facilitates a contrast with a designer or development worker whose knowledge and capacity for creativity is presented as uncontroversially superior in everyday talk about crafts across different arenas. Assuredly, both workers and designers trade in tropes of the “other” at the same time as they work around the constraints that each impose (see for example Kuldova 2013). In addition, if anthropologists realize that workers and makers exhibit an incisive view of the productive context in which they find themselves, it is not hard to imagine that designers do not, in fact, perceive the same complex social relationships that we have sought to analyze. Yet designer rhetoric, for reasons we give below, blocks certain realizations and confessions, more so than does that of the craftsperson, whose voice is habitually muted in the forums in which designers operate. Finally, there are significant structural similarities in designer discourses of craft. Designers, as elite and cosmopolitan persons, institutionally contribute to what Michael Herzfeld terms a “global hierarchy of value” in which an “increasingly homogeneous language of culture and ethics” (Herzfeld 2004: 2) has become pervasive and commonsensical. This process entails the sharpening of class differentiations, and the perpetuation of geographically located discourses that dichotomize the traditional and the contemporary alongside labor and creativity. In the next section we go on to lay out some of the particular ways that craft discourses index entrenched social differentiation, and disclose a contemporary, cosmopolitan move that renders visible middle-class set of values and identifications (Hall 1996). But before we proceed, we stress that we do not believe that the critical analysis we offer necessarily means that all forms of designer assistance and outreach are negative or to be eliminated. In the cases we illustrate below the presence of designers provides a number of positive opportunities, and designers are themselves diverse, with some cultivating closer and more

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collaborative relationships with artisans than others. Rather our point is that the existing larger discourse of difference in which designers are often legitimized limits the practical possibilities for “traditional” bodies to speak for and indeed construct their own identity outside of the local arena. In some instances, the input from “experts” even limits the practical possibilities for those marked traditional to become “modern” and “cosmopolitan” in terms of their own design and innovation (DeNicola 2005: 215–18).

Necessitating design and designers The figure of the designer emerged distinctly in a post-Independence discourse in which the marketing of persons, place, and vocation as traditional affected the negotiation of meaning and identity (see DeNicola and DeNicola 2012; Venkatesan 2009; Wilkinson-Weber 2004). The authors’ combined work suggests that designers, located solidly within the middle and upper classes, rhetorically position themselves on the fulcrum of a compelling opposition between tradition and innovation. Designers seek to mediate, and in so doing reproduce, the presumed tension between innovation and tradition via a recognizable discourse of “design” that speaks on one hand to their (equally worldly) class equals and on the other to the lower-class artisans to whom their efforts are directed. Initially this discourse reflected politics in the post-colonial era in which swathes of government bureaucracy and professions were dominated by an “old” middle class wedded to the moral superiority of the state and a somewhat ascetic nationalism (Dwyer 2000). By the 1980s, a “new” middle class, buoyed by the introduction of neo-liberalism and committed to private enterprise and consumer capitalism, began to supersede their predecessors. Like the old middle classes, the new middle classes, from which designers are overwhelmingly drawn, continue to mobilize evocative dualisms of the cosmopolitan versus the provincial. Such distinctions work to naturalize power among those who can distinguish themselves as the creative elites and experts who are uniquely able to span the divide between makers and consumers (see Fischer 2000). The innovation versus tradition discourse is one of self and other that carves out spaces for those who are to “be traditional” and those who are to protect and maintain that tradition, while deciding how best (and profitably) to present that image to a national and global market desirous of authenticity. As Venkatesan (2009) argues, what has emerged is a kind of “heterotopia,” or idealized space in which craft, defined by the middle and upper middle classes, resides. Craft makers and practitioners are conceived as either



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exponents of “timeless” crafts or enablers of low-quality work that responds to the lowest common denominator in the marketplace (see also Greenough 1995). In the Indian context, as Akhil Gupta (1998: 36–7) reminds us, the “fact of difference itself is a constitutive moment that structures the experience of modernity.” Within this discursive moment, the association of designers with modernity is so taken for granted it is understood as a right and responsibility for designers, as modern (and model) citizens, to be both benefactor and protector of the “unmodern” maker (printer, tailor, embroiderer). The simultaneous construction of the kind of modernity this alterity allows can escape notice (as the global hierarchy of value is supposed to operate). Here then, the population in need of development (the “unmodern”) is constrained and captured through statistical evidence such as income, employment, education, trade, output, and access to travel. Tapping into these “objective” forms of data, the “developed” within the post-colonial landscape distance and distinguish themselves from the underdeveloped by cultivating projects to assist them. Designer advantage in terms of knowledge (about beauty, about markets, about rational business conduct) is largely presumed, based largely on class membership; but the ideological edifice contains this dualism alongside

FIGURE 4   Traditional hand printing in Bagru © Alicia Ory DeNicola.

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others in the larger opposition of tradition and innovation/modernity. As Escobar (2011) reminds us, discursive practices within organizations—and we would add, within social policy networks—produce social consciousness rather than merely reflect it. As such, discourses provide schemata and methods that transpose local actualities into standardized conceptual and categorical forms. Within these categorical forms, Escobar writes, “labeling plays a significant role—embody(ing) concrete relationships of power and influenc(ing) the categories with which we think and act” (Escobar 1995: 108–9). Certain tropes of difference seem to be especially useful in the pursuit of constructing designer distinction. The first concerns myths of origin and history, which are important to the formulation of “tradition” with respect to artisans. Arising out of the first is the systematic simplification and reduction of the work of craft and the omission of social differentiation among workers.

Patronizing history The textile print and design center of Bagru, where DeNicola has worked, is a particularly interesting example of how the tension between tradition and innovation is revealed in narratives of its history. The quintessential origin myth of textile printing towns in this area begins with narratives of royal patronage. Nearby Sanganer, for example, was once the working karkhana (factory) of the Jaipur Raj and boasts museum quality textiles from centuries past. During her initial fieldwork in 2002, DeNicola learned that printers keep their family’s blocks for generations. Asking for a set of “traditional” prints she was given twelve: four sets of different color schemes (red and white on blue background; red on yellow background; red and white on green background and black on red background) each with a slightly different pattern. These were patterns for women’s ghagra (long Rajasthani full skirt) that until the mid-twentieth century identified caste identities by color. Understanding these particular prints as traditional Bagru prints suggests that Bagru catered, not to Rajputs and priests, but to local farming castes. When printers talked of why their families came to Bagru they mentioned the abundant water source of the Sanjaria River (now dry) and its particular chemical make-up that enhanced the dying process, or their weekly trips to the market in bullock carts to sell their wares at the Jaipur market.1 While extensive patronage relationships were certainly possible, it in fact appears that Bagru was unique among print centers in the area as printers clustered nearby the local market and necessary water resources, largely countering their dependence upon local patronage systems. Rajasthan, as an idealized land of Hindu Kings, holds a special place in the national and nationalist imaginary. Cloth especially, and



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crafts in general, are powerful vehicles for identification of Indianness and cultural belonging. Consider further that these images of kingship and craft are far from independent icons. The two images are ideologically connected in the Indian context through social structures of patronage based on relationships of hierarchy, both ritual and economic. Specifically, I suggest that Bagru’s traditional hand-block printers, by the time they reached Bagru, were likely to have operated parallel to both royal and landholding patronage systems. While admittedly uncertain, the evidence pertaining to Bagru suggests that local printers’ reliance upon royal patronage was unlikely. And, while jajmani relationships are clearly possible, there is little clear evidence, besides normative ideology, that printers relied upon them as a regular means of support. Reflection on the possibility of differential economic systems and heavy reliance on nearby markets for rural craft workers suggests room to explore certain capitalist endeavors in a way that cuts across the grain of monistic ideas of industrial corporate capitalism as well as historic discourses of rural hierarchies based on landownership (DeNicola 2004). The concern of this question, of course, is not to prove or disprove any “truth” insofar as a patronage system in Bagru may have existed. Instead we ask why, in light of such a dearth of evidence, the discourse of patronage and kings remains central to Bagru’s tale. In the chikan embroidery industry in Lucknow, an almost mandatory component of any informational, business or tourist literature is the retelling of the various legends associated with the craft’s beginnings.2 Some are relayed by embroiderers, others by designers, still more by NGO and state personnel. The most prominently featured refer to pioneering royal patronage, most often by the Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, or to a lesser extent the largesse of the Nawabs that ruled Lucknow after the decline of Mughal power. Also cited in some literature (despite being extremely hard to prove and otherwise entirely speculative) is the idea that embroidery came from pre-Islamic times. The most likely account, according to historical records, is that chikan came via embroiderers trained originally in Bengal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This version is included in the list of possible origins, but not necessarily as the most persuasive option. Yet, the proto-industrial character of embroidery in the city emerges plainly in first person accounts written in the nineteenth century, in which we learn that women were making “cheap” piece-work using just one stitch variety (Hoey 1880; Ali 1917; Wilkinson-Weber 1999: 16–17). Workshops housing male embroiderers did the fine work, of which several samples are held at the Uttar Pradesh State Museum. By the 1920s, workshops for chikan were closing down, and instead work shifted to within households, done by women for whom work within workshops among men was forbidden (Ghosal 1923: 22; Wilkinson-Weber 1999: 19). The difference between fine and cheap

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chikan (“asli kam” versus “chalu kam,” see Mohsini this volume for use of comparable terms among zardozi embroiderers) continued, with cheap work being funneled to villages, while fine work was kept within the city. Fine work continued among a select set of urban women, many of them taught by their fathers, side by side with a dramatically inflated commercial market. Fine work, in other words, has not gone, nor has cheap work only recently been “invented.” However, the vigorous market in cheap work has been linked to the increase in female embroiderers in such a way as to lay the blame on them for the craft’s perceived “decline” (Wilkinson-Weber 1999, 2005). To be clear, the truth or otherwise concerning patronage systems or a systematic, quasi-industrial separation of cheap and fine work is of less importance than why, in light of such a dearth of evidence, the discourse of patronage, kings, empresses, saints and a “golden” age of craft work remains central to either Bagru or Lucknow’s craft narratives. Marketing seems an obvious rationale, for talk about royal patrons and the splendors of India’s pre-colonial past add luster and credibility to claims about the centrality of these crafts to an authoritative account of Indian history and identity (see Breckenridge 1989). In this way, crafts can be marked as distinctive while omitting any details that connect their operation to markets, the extraction of surplus labor, or the limited ability of workers to control pay and conditions. In other words, the appeal to a more distant and premodern genesis relegates craft and everything to do with it to an exceptional space in which the kinds of social and economic analysis appropriate to “modern” forms are unsuited. The remarkable tenacity of these narratives testifies to the importance of setting craft apart, while continuing to disguise the political and historical conditions of their operation.

Construing the craftsperson Mediation between the traditional and the modern itself entails a division of manual versus mental labor, where designers are the thinkers in the equation, and craftspeople simply put a preconceived plan into operation, with little to no intellectual or cognitive input whatsoever (see Balaram 1998 and 2005 to see how this enters into design literature and design education). This is not to say that the segregation of “brain-work” from “handwork” means eliding craft with the rote and standardized operations of industry: to do so would undercut the entire rationale behind craft uniqueness. Yet the chikan industry exemplifies the situation when workers find their work parceled into simpler and less skilled parts.3 Now, as in the past, relatively unskilled chikan embroiderers making simple stitches exist side by side with artisans doing complex, highly skilled work. But with the intervention of “revivals” the imaginative



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capacities of even the highly skilled embroiderer are subordinated as the designer in effect subverts and replaces the master or “primus inter pares” of a craft operation, concentrating directional and motivational forces outside the work group. Eliciting and recording procedures and routines, or working to plans, are all instances of consolidating separate and autonomous forms of knowledge.4 This kind of erasure of the craftsperson as problem solver, manager, and strategizer is necessary to portray the artisan as a “backward” figure that is somewhat “out of time.” Simultaneously, the denial of design capacity on the part of the artisan and the downplaying of the maker’s creativity consolidate designer distinction and effects a deskilling all by itself. That “lumping” tendencies in the descriptions of craft workers lose sight of the multiplex relations that undergird craft activity is apparent in the case of Bagru. Like many artisans and artisan clusters in north India, its printblock textile artisans have carried on and even prospered through numerous economic and political upheavals. The printers are similar in many ways to artisans throughout India who have adapted over the centuries to new ways of doing business, teaching younger generations the trade while working to provide those same generations with the skills to innovate and adjust to new challenges. Work in rural textile industries suggests that such traditional artisanal spaces can be unique examples of artisan clusters largely based on access to a thriving market economy and independence from village patronage systems. In the last fifty years, the need to adapt to changing economies and consumer bases has again been the most salient pressure on artisans in rural areas. Because DeNicola worked with artisan families who own their own factories, a conventional Marxist division between proletariat and bourgeoisie seemed inappropriate. In this context, artisans who may be socially identified as lower class in an urban cosmopolitan context may simultaneously be recognized as upper-middle or even high-class in a village context. Such artisans are often the owners of the means of production, notwithstanding the role of debt and credit in securing the use of tools and resources. In more rural areas whole village and small-town economies are often dependent on clusters of artisans who are able to draw substantial export interest based on geographically distinct products. In Lucknow, the challenge for Wilkinson-Weber was in working out how the skilled embroiderer who is a sub-contractor with respect to other embroiderers was to be classified. Embroidery now is almost exclusively a domestic enterprise for women, with several other stages of production carried out by men in print shops, washermen’s stations on the Gomti River, and showrooms throughout the city and beyond. Agents and middlemen (or middlewomen) shuttle the materials in the process of production from one site to the next, and in particular are critical to connecting embroiderers who live in purdah to

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the larger network. The industry as a whole has been, and remains one of the city’s largest employers and income earner, yet it retains its craft label and cachet. When the only non-industrial characteristic of chikan production is the absence of machine power one wonders at the utility of the descriptor “smallscale.” Chikan is small-scale in that its dispersed workplaces are constrained spatially by being located in homes and domestic workshops, and by the dependence upon dyadic relations at all levels of production (De Neve 2005); in terms of its economic impact and the scale of operations taken as a whole, it is quite the opposite. Neither wholly piece-wage proletarian nor mahajans (shopkeepers who provided the materials with which to work), agents (both male and female) extract money from embroiderers in return for the “service” of getting them work. In Wilkinson-Weber’s research, female agents tended to be embroiderers themselves, some of whom took on fine work for piece wages, or did special pieces to order from a private patron. This kind of skilled, sub-contracting embroiderer was distinguishable from the small petty contractor trader who decided to begin a business out of their own house perhaps, getting chikan made and sold in a private enterprise. The complicating factor of gender reinforced the notion that high-skilled embroiderers were not so much adaptable and creative as crafty and manipulative; and with respect to those independent contractors that were women, differences of education, dress, and a vague conviction about personal vision set the women-as-entrepreneurs and the women-as-embroiderers against each other along the same lines described above. In addition, the organizational responsibilities of the female agent were not insignificant. Women inside embroidering neighborhoods tracked the shifting fortunes of women from agent to embroiderer to back again closely, and negotiated with the agent as to what quality work they could do, how fast they could do it, and whether they were able to take any work at all. As a rule, these facets of the maker or craftsperson are downplayed in favor of totalizing discourses that project them into a “present-past” that fits well with their reliance on hand labor, their meager possessions and facilities, and forms of dress and self-presentation (Wilkinson-Weber 2004). The fetishization of craft as tradition tends to make the work of craft so central to the artisan’s daily life that the other responsibilities upon which any craft enterprise depends vanish into the background. Attending to the obstacles and challenges that arise in their lives indeed interfere with doing the job the artisan is “supposed” to be doing. Even without these difficulties however, no one spends all day stitching or printing or painting. Indeed, as mastery increases, work can be delegated and distributed in ways that free up the most senior artisan to engage in the kinds of management operations described above.5 Responsibilities that fall outside actually doing embroidery



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in Lucknow included not just sub-contracting and imposing work discipline but also teaching and enabling—but also sometimes obstructing—the work of learners and apprentices; solving disputes with suppliers and clients; keeping alert to new opportunities for earning income; and passing on information to others about these opportunities, if warranted. All of this suggests the engagement of a strategizing mind that is not entirely compatible with the view of the artisan working methodically and simply under the patronage of elites, or having an easy point of sale for goods that are not a matter of dispute and conflict. The capacity of the artisan to frustrate the designer with shortcuts, workarounds, or straight refusal to follow instructions is seen by designers as issuing from a lower-class stolidity, sometimes mixed with a form of chauvinism directed by male artisans at female designers (also see Milgram this volume). While this can be seen as a form of subaltern “resistance,” perhaps a better interpretation would be to see it as an outcome of the artisan’s confidence in their own praxis and imaginations that are already sensitive and responsive to external determinants. For example, embroiderers in Lucknow were very direct and uninhibited in explaining that they were not concerned to do their best work on many of the pieces they embroidered since there was no point expending a lot of effort for a low wage (thus exhibiting a canny appreciation of the connection between labor time and value). For Bagru printers, the ability to work within the buyer’s deadlines, the skill to work with customers to produce pleasing designs and to create neat, consistent products, was the mark of professionalism. This is acknowledged by Chatterjee as a “crafts” characteristic, but only in its “past” and “pristine” form: The Indian craftsman was [therefore] artist, designer, and technician, working in all three ways to serve his users’ needs. He was a source both of inspiration and problem-solving, functioning always within the core of his society. With the advent of colonialism and industrialism, the integral quality of his role, however, began to disintegrate. Efforts at craft regeneration during India’s freedom movement and in the years after Independence have not yet been able to draw crafts back into the center of national consciousness. (Chatterjee 1988: 3; emphasis added) It is this problem-solving artisan who is so strikingly absent from craft literature, where ethnography shows that such problem-solving is part and parcel of artisanship. The majority of embroiderers in Lucknow are not involved in direct sale, and so have less to do with actual clients than do Bagru printers, but they have their own way of talking about mastery and drive that revolves

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around the concept of shauq (interest, passion for doing something). Other artisans in Lucknow (including print blockmakers, block printers and embroiderers) also use shauq to mean a passion and intelligent committment to mastering and improving one’s abilities in their craft. For Lucknow embroiderers shauq energized and directed the best kind of work, in which mind and body are actively engaged (Wilkinson-Weber 1999).

The creation of design The designer’s very existence is at least partially dependent upon the professed ability to create something that the artisan cannot. That the designer cannot do what the artisan does rarely gets raised as a problem, even though craftspeople themselves are acutely aware of the deficiencies in designer knowledge about the pragmatics of craft production. In part this comes from a different bodily engagement in the work at hand. The tools of the designer’s trade are extensions of the eye, the brain, and perhaps the fingers in assessing the tactile qualities of cloth. There is also, of course, the tool of a specialized, class-specific language for dealing with other clients, buyers, and so on (see Bourdieu 1991). In contrast, craftspeople either do not elaborate verbally on their work (and certainly not in written form) or have no compelling reason to do so. This does not mean they have no language to talk about craft, only that it takes a different form. The artisans in both Bagru and Lucknow did not say much about either tradition or innovation as such. Neither of us judged this to reveal an inability among artisans to engage in abstract reflection but rather indicated a lack of need to talk self-consciously about tradition at all. In Bagru, tradition as a selling point for wares is quite clear and consistently applied to the sales pitch, but rarely moves beyond that. In Lucknow, though, embroiderers were more likely to talk about quality and knowledge of stitches than tradition in the evaluation of work.6 Knowledge for embroiderers is synonymous with the ability to make different stitches, which is made evident in what one does (the stitch itself) and being able to name it. Stitch naming is not uniform, but rather than inquire into this diversity, printed material on chikan prefers to present a distillation of these discrete knowledges as objective reality. The subtle and evocative naming of stitches among the highly skilled, perpetuated in family lines, is eradicated and replaced with schemes that foreground the analytic powers of the observer. What designers see are craftspeople working with tangible, concrete “things” (not so much people) including the portable (needles, thread, scissors, fabric, wooden blocks) and the comparatively immovable (sewing machines, embroidery frames, tables and large boiling ovens). To the extent that workers own, use and become familiar with their own tools and



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materials, they might conceivably counter claims by designers concerning the authorship of both design and product. Even in those cases where the tools are not formally owned, customary use imparts forms of knowledge, both cognitive and vested in the body, that designers rarely possess. Indeed, the shaping of the body to the work is the subject of lore among workers, for whom the calloused fingers, the aching back, the exhausted eyes, and repetitive movement are an unavoidable consequence of dedicated labor (see Naji this volume). Tools and materials aren’t simply factors of production but receptacles and conduits of knowledge. Designers see themselves occupying a role consistent with a modernity they both understand and have some control over in a narrative that serves to differentiate a growing middle-class identity from complex signifiers of tradition. This in turn allows for a romanticized and symbolic version of ethnicity and nationality, contained within certain places, times, and bodies. Rather than having to inhabit the semiotic realm of the traditional, designers as facilitators are tasked with protecting it, using it, selling it.7 Based on an underlying identification with cosmopolitan ideals, elite designers and others build implicit boundaries separating laboring classes (or “masses”) from creative “classes” (Tarlo 1996; DeNicola 2005). Among printers, and also embroiderers in Lucknow, the designer often plays, in essence, the role of middleman—bringing work and sometimes buyers directly to the printers. Because printers have relatively lower incomes and little access to long-distance travel, local connections with buyers provide small businesses in Bagru with a significant advantage. Embroiderers by contrast are restricted as much by their gender as by other social factors that confine them to the locality. The most distinguished and high-skilled embroiderers, recognized by state and central government as exponents of their “art,” attract some clients directly. However, most embroiderers depend upon agents, ranging from designers either big or small (Kuldova 2009) to male petty agents, to these self-same skilled women, to bring them work. Designers though rarely conceive of their significance in such restricted terms as merely “bringing artisans work.” Instead, they draw on discourses of responsibility to mark their own difference from artisans. This has meant policing the boundaries of tradition, as when a designer regrets an unfortunate “hodge-podge” between Bagru designs and that of the nearby print center of Sanganer, or she chides irresponsible designers for being too lazy to maintain these distinctions (“So on a conscious level,” the designer says, “one has tried not to use the Bagru for the Sanganer, or the Sanganer for the Jaipur prints and to try and keep all these guys separate”. In an apparent paradox, however, designers initiate new applications and design innovations that are supported by an appeal to formal aesthetics and the tastes of consuming elites. Designers may “reinvent” and “give a new

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look to” embroidery that is described as “age-old” but the improvisations of craftspeople are rarely received with such enthusiasm (Bandyopadhyay 2006). Thus, what must remain traditional and what can be innovated, the negotiation of patterns and meaning-making, resides with designers who are equipped and have been educated to handle such issues. Artisans have little with which to counter claims from artisans (although humor is one option, see Kuldova 2013). Design for embroiderers, at least, issues from an imagination and body discipline that lacks the scale and scope of the designers. Instead, after the outlines of a pattern are given by the print, design is an emergent process in which the final composition and look of the piece develop as one goes along. There is some preparatory thinking of course, but the skilled embroiderer must be able to respond to visual and textural accretions in the work at hand. For textile printers the repetitive matching of block to print is a skill that takes both stamina and a desire to do good work, but the real skill comes in managing not only the different skill sets needed to take a blank cloth to a finished product (printing, dyeing, procuring), but also to test particular designs in the market, a process that brings the printer a step closer to his clientele. In both Lucknow and Bagru, artisans clearly see themselves engaged in their work at both a cerebral and somatic, even emotional level. The essence of their creativity is to be carried along in the process of making, negotiating and tackling problems big and small as they arise. But for the designers, creative work belongs exclusively to them. Traditional work, while acknowledged as skillful and beautiful, runs the risk of becoming routine, as the artisans and craftspeople who make them are unaware of contemporary tastes and trends, and how to respond to them. At this point, the critical essence and possession of the artisan, the body of skill and design they possess, bows before the marketing and aesthetic consciousness of the designer. Where artisans can only debase their craft and dilute their knowledge in the satisfaction of crude market forces, designers can modernize and improve their work while conserving what is most Indian about them (National Institute of Design 2015).

Revival and remembering In the years following Independence, the designer was responsible for injecting vitality into crafts as the means of boosting a distinctly Indian aesthetic and supporting economic development. In the aftermath of neo-liberal economic policy being initiated in India, craft revival has, against expectation, continued as a compelling theme, except now it comes via internet sources as well as books, and is articulated most prominently by fashion designers, not



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intellectuals and academics. Just like their predecessors, fashion designers now cast themselves as the necessary means to “translate” global demand in ways the uninformed artisan would understand. The switch towards a business-friendly market environment may easily lie behind the failure to acknowledge past attempts at designer intervention. But a review of manifestos, mission statements and policy documents reveals that there is a lack of institutional or even national memory concerning craft over the past 100 years, so that revival is a project that is never completed, and is restarted anew at least every generation, sometimes, it seems, every year. Feature articles in the press, and website text on designer sites repeat the same tropes of chikan as an “ancient embroidery form” (Bhatt 2001) with designers “reviving forgotten craft” (manjujolota.co.in) or rescuing the “humble, almost lost craft of chikan” (Saran 2012) that one can find in volumes written decades ago (see also Chari 2006 and Zakaria 2015). The repetition and reinvention of the craftsperson, the designer/rescuer and the precarious situation in which craft exists requires a systematic forgetting. As Paul Ricoeur writes: “the best use of forgetting is precisely in the construction of plots, in the elaboration of narratives concerning personal identity or collective identity; that is, we cannot tell a story without eliminating or dropping some important event according to the kind of plot we intend to build” (1999: 9). In order to be compelling, narratives of barely arrested decline and heroic recuperation are predicated on such efforts being new. In a sense, one might say that the craft revivalists continue to live inside a preand post-colonial moment in which streaming more work to rural (and to a lesser extent) urban artisans seemed to be the key to the moral Indian state, particularly as conceived by M. K. Gandhi. From a cynical point of view, the benefits of such pointed forgetting and reinvention are that each effort starts afresh, untainted by the failures of the past. Perhaps it is the specter of failure that endless revival seeks to avoid. But there is something else, and that is avoidance of comparison, the removal of a need to acknowledge or credit the past, or even to criticize it. Revival is always just about to be done, resuscitation is on the verge of being accomplished—for this the artisan (or the practice, or the product) must always be in a condition to require it. Past efforts have either not been enough, or were ineffective, or corrupt.

Film: Echoes and divergences In Mumbai, a subset of tailors, shoe-makers, turban-tiers, hat makers, embroiderers and so on have offered services guaranteeing high quality and on-time

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delivery for costuming in the film industry. From the very beginning, filmmakers have relied upon local craftspeople to redirect their skills and abilities towards the making of sets, props, and costumes. Wilkinson-Weber’s study of costume production revealed a variety of tailoring establishments and set-ups for stitching clothes, at present including tailors working in-house for dress (i.e. or costume) designers, independent, specialist tailoring shops, and stitchers employed ad hoc to make outfits. Embroiderers work closely with tailors to embellish costumes for both contemporary and period films. A common pattern has been for film stars of both sexes to have their own preferred tailor to do all their work for them on the basis that the master tailor was entrusted with crafting the clothes that effectively made the star persona. However, since the 1960s, having a preferred or personal designer to do work for on set and off set appearances became popular among leading actors, and now many of the most prominent celebrities in the film world play a significant role in the promotion of India’s booming fashion industry. Designers now assert themselves as mediators between star and tailor, with an unassailable claim to knowing about fashion and global style. As a result, innovation and creativity have drifted upwards to reside with designers, with tailors as their mere executors (Wilkinson-Weber 2014). At least this is how designers see it. Bollywood tailors in contrast envisage design in a sense more akin to engineering, in that they must imagine the transformation of a two-dimensional pattern to a three-dimensional garment, or even further, a two-dimensional sketch to a two-dimensional pattern to a three-dimensional garment. Making film costume is a little different from making ordinary outfits. The fabric may be out of the ordinary, and maybe a little difficult to work with; the fit has to be tighter and more precise;8 adjustments may need to be made as filming goes on; compensations may need to be made to accommodate and flatter the actor’s figure. Both tailors and embroiderers are engaged in the daily round of problem-solving that to them is the core of creativity—how to mold and shape a fitted, padded outfit to flatter the figure; how to cut fabric to be stitched together so as to recreate a design sketched only in two dimensions on paper; how to create an eye-catching arrangement of spangles and sequins; and ultimately, how to do all these things with only a few hours’ notice. Most tailoring shops are independent, but increasingly artisans are drawn into workshops operating on salary that produce clothes for designers. At the same time, fluctuations in demand mean that tailors and embroiderers may take work wherever they find it in within the film, and non-film areas. The recent crop of designers in film and in the Indian apparel industry with a strong fashion sensibility differentiate themselves from tailors via discourse about design, but also in terms of knowledge about larger trends in global fashion, style, consumption and so forth. Indeed, they even use this knowledge as a source of cultural capital deployed in opposition to



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FIGURE 5   Tailors working under the direction of the master cutter in a workshop making film costumes in Mumbai. © Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber.

older costume designers they feel were insufficiently “fashion conscious.” Costume designer Bhanu Athaiya, who won an Oscar for her work on Gandhi, recently spoke out angrily when a fashion designer argued for tax exemption as an “artist” implying (in her view) that she, as a costume designer, was a “mere tailor” (Dubey 2010). What the young designers have that older ones do not, however, is a sense of the body that comes from their own bodily experience: they themselves wear clothes that are now unfamiliar to the artisans who work for them. Above all, this designer body is a discriminating body. The tailor will make whatever he is asked to make; the designer, however, will attempt to shape and mold the tastes and preferences of the person for whom they design things. There are also signs that the willingness of the designer to intervene more directly in the artisan’s business is intensifying. An embroidery master in 2012 spoke somewhat resignedly about the recent trend among designers to dictate embroidery designs quite minutely, as opposed to allowing the embroidery master to decide these details for himself (Wilkinson-Weber 2014). Whatever the frustrations of the job, however, tailors and embroiderers at least report receiving payment that is considered commensurate with the responsibility they take on, and with the quality they are expected to furnish.

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In this regard, their professionalism is acknowledged. The ability to work with and around the industry’s needs represents a limit on the artisan’s autonomy of course, and tends, at least rhetorically, to lift them out of the conventional domains of handicraft, where tradition, albeit managed and directed by modern brains, is assigned pre-eminent value. Indeed, to the extent that Bollywood costuming fakes tradition (in historical films for example) designers are susceptible to the criticism that they are indifferent to Indian textile history, while artisans toil according to the designer’s dictates with only an attenuated connection to traditional craft. Ironically, however, embroiderers have reported that film allows them the chance to do the very best work that they are capable of (see Mohsini, this volume), when otherwise their job necessitates that they downscale their skills to make more pedestrian, cheap work sold to tourists. Given the disavowal of Indian film as inappropriate to Indian identity by early nationalists, it is striking to see it doing so much to cultivate high craft skills, at the same time as it does this with a knowing adherence to tradition’s facsimile.

Conclusion Even as the discipline of anthropology increases its focus and concentration on multi-sited, global, consumptive, urban locals and ideologies, we cannot ignore the interplay between the other spaces and ideas that discursively construct the identifying boundaries of the cosmopolitan imaginary. In the instances given here tradition becomes linguistically indexical of working classes as peripheral and outside the middle-class norm—a move that both Liechty and Ortner suggest may also become naturalized and self-referencing among working classes themselves. The very act of constructing tradition undermines its political mobilization. As Guss says about festivals and tradition: [At] the heart of all traditionalizing processes is the desire to mask over real issues of power and domination. By classifying popular forms as “traditions,” they are effectively neutralized and removed from real time. (Guss 2000: 15) The connection between traditional labor and festivals is not accidental. Both require an aesthetic mythology based on the reification and subjectification of the state as paternal protector. To be sure this is a role that is being eroded as private capital moves into domains that the state has relinquished; in as much as the state pursues neo-liberal policies that support consumer capitalism, however, it indirectly props up designer rhetoric. Such a traditional and embodied rendering of labor, then, can actually serve, through differentiation



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and marking, to strengthen the normative relationship of bodies as invisible labor in the process of capital extraction. Like any discursive move, however, the very work that serves to naturalize also indexes the rupture it seeks to cover over. What is implicitly at stake in this narrative is a class distinction. In Bagru, it is one that borrows from local caste understandings of patronage and responsibility at the same time that it manages to negotiate the global market system—both exploiting and being exploited by the consistently reconstructed boundaries of occupation and cosmopolitanism. In the particular cases described here it is useful to recognize that boundaries for the right to global knowledge mediation are being drawn in terms of urban cosmopolitan identification. The mediation between global and local, art and vocation can be—and often is—immensely fruitful for both artisans and designers. Yet it is also constricting in its insistence on a différence based symbolically on occupation, but indexical of class and educational divisions. A leading design school in Jaipur, for example, sponsored two Bagru printers’ children in 2001. The students had to pass an artistic aptitude test before they could be considered for sponsorship—something not generally focused on in rural high schools. Their instructor told me, “They are from totally different backgrounds culturally, but they are doing pretty well with the rest of their course work” (interview, October 23, 2002). A student put the same idea less delicately. While everyone “got along” with the artisan students, they seldom socialized with the other students (interview, February 23, 2002). The trope of occupation, and its index of urban cosmopolitan knowledge and dichotomies between vocation and profession, works to justify and naturalize the spatial, economic, and educational distance between communities. The Mumbai example is instructive less because it is generalizable than because, unhitched from tradition, its class dimensions become far clearer (although not necessarily less complicated). While the film industry shows some of the same processes of differentiation that we see in other craft domains, by eschewing tradition as a motif, other facets of the activity and identity of artisans emerge. Interestingly enough, repetition is also a characteristic of film discourse, not in favor of revival so much as a call to reform so that filmmaking can finally become modern. Like the rhetoric of revival, though, reform always seems elusive, and new (and more hopeful) efforts are being made all the time. So far, the craftspeople who are part of the film industry have been exempt from the stated ambitions of directors, producers, actors and other high status people in the industry to “improve” film. Detaching tradition from craft may well allow for it to be usefully compared with other kinds of economic activity from which it has been habitually excluded. The livelihoods and practices of media pirates and recyclers in the post-colonial city described by Sundaram (2011) locate these social actors

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firmly within modern processes; but their stolid refusal to acknowledge and appreciate the niceties of “formal” industry and commerce, the ability to manage with limited resources, the indifference to matters of quality when assessment of effort versus reward are involved, are points at which discourse about artisans and urban recycler/pirates may converge. One could also learn much from seeing the hybrid, skillfully composited products of the recycler and “tinkerers” (see Nafus and Beckwith this volume) as comparable to the craft output of the “traditional” artisan. In sum, it is important to see the ways in which this discourse of old and new points to actual bodies, places, and time elements that are marked as either traditional or innovative, but are seldom marked as both, despite the “mixture” of the end product. It is also important to note that the phenomena we describe above in discrete spaces of north India are not unique. And in fact the melding of the chapters in this book, the tension that exists between meaning-making in the claim of craft, is specifically meant to make visible what the claiming of craft both calls to mind and simultaneously makes invisible. Claiming a traditional identity may, in other words, be a critical source of authentification for the artisan’s work; at the same time, it tends to relegate the artisan to a position from which other kinds of claims—to parity with various brokers that link them with a wider world, to the ability to be creative and innovative in their work—become harder to make. A clear distinction of capital owners and labor sellers remains elusive, and the boundaries that are filled with meaning for those on both sides reflect gender, educational, and taste differences that are constantly being remolded. As repetitive claims to bringing about craft revival pile up, we must ask whether the structural impediments to craft revival are so great and so stubborn that no effort is great enough or cumulative enough to make much difference. If so, then we need to ask why a more serious attempt is not made to reframe the challenge that craft revival poses for itself. Above all, we suggest that no matter how rich and compelling the appeal to tradition is, at some stage of analysis it is important to focus on the varieties of linkage that connect artisans to others, and to understand the linkages in a contemporary class context.

6 Nomadic Artisans in Central America Building Plurilocal Communities through Craft Millaray Villalobos

Introduction

T

he traveling artisans that are the focus of this study share common identity and cultural characteristics which pave the way for the construction of plurilocal, regional communities, and for particular ways of economic survival while traveling. My main
interest
in
working with this population
was their constant
movement or nomadism that has direct consequences on the
mechanisms
used
for the economic and social organization of everyday
life. In terms of methodology, Jociles’ “mirada antropológica” (1999: 6) offers four principles of doing anthropology: leaving aside one’s own preconceptions in order to explore the field in the way that actors see and build it; to see what has become familiar with “foreign” eyes; to observe existing relationships between what is being studied and its context; and to use social theories available to inform observations. This outlook served as the core of the methodological strategy behind this investigation. A multi-sited ethnographical method was used (Marcus 1995), including direct presence in the field in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, and use of tools such as thematic life stories (Aceves 1998: 211, 222–3; Acuña 1989: 237),

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non-structured interview conversations, in-depth interview conversations (McCormack 2004), observation, and craft, photography, and email analysis. I explored geopolitical and economical changes in the Latin American context from 2003 to the present and their manifestations in various traveling artisan cultural practices. Artisans’ relationship to the larger capitalist system was revealed in networks and the making and selling of craftwork as a means of survival while traveling. Artisans adopt a particular type of nomadism, with the consequences for the construction of collective identities and communities that do not need to simultaneously share a physical territory for their reproduction.

Migrations within the Latin American region Like a cycle in which different components influence each other, regional Latin American migrations are network-building processes, and are part of regional integration, strengthening commercial, work, and cultural ties. These intra-regional movements also constitute specific geographical manifestations of global capitalism, which go back further than the more recent transformations in telecommunications. All through human history it has been the relationship between movement and stability that has steered our species towards novel cultural horizons. Though culture as we know it today is the result of settlement, the myriad human adaptations that helped develop cultural diversity are a product of movement. Rosa, a 39-year-old Chilean ex-nomadic artisan, spells out her perspective on the inter-relationship between migrations—as cultural exchanges—and the possibility of regional peace: we are key components in the celebration of diversity … I am a Chilean woman who wants coastline for Bolivia, who knows that Pisco is from Peru. This I learned traveling through my continent. (Sánchez 2012) Geography has an effect on the direction and volume of migration flows, as geopolitics play an important role in the travel arrangements of South American artisans (Solimano 2003: 64–5; Lucas 2004: 26; Ratha and Shaw 2007). War in Colombia and economic crisis in Argentina were major contributors to the emigration practices of citizens from these countries during the first half of the 2000s. (Pellegrino and Macadar 2001; Ruiz 2002; Jachimowicz 2003). Latin American migrations within the region also respond to complex market globalization processes such as the signature and ratification of trade



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agreements that accelerate communications and flows of people across the region and shorten psychological and physical distances (Domenach 1998; Duany 2002; Faist 2000, 2009; García-Canclini 1990; Kivisto 2001; Portes, Landolt, and Guarnizo 2003; Pries 1999; Richmond 2002). Two examples of how the way of life under study is not exempt from the geographical consequences of the movement of capital can be seen in Bocas del Toro, on the Atlantic coast of Panama, and Tamarindo, on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. In Bocas, there are now too many stores that cater to tourism, and nomadic artisans do not find it so welcome anymore. In April 2004, however, this Panamanian island was a hub of nomadic artisan activity and tourism infrastructure was not so developed. Tamarindo, another location that was well known for the presence of Latin American artisans, was in April of 2012 closed to this kind of population, as authorities were going through a period of enforcement of the law pertaining to permits for selling merchandise in the streets. The permits are assigned by and paid for at the local government offices. Tamarindo authorities have periods when they enforce this law, and other periods when they turn a blind eye to the financial transactions going on in the main street of the beach community-turned-small-city by tourism influx.

Traveling Artisans “Man was born to be a lot freer than he currently is. There are people who are not capable of leaving their communities, who have lost their freedom …” Martín, Argentina. “… my mom’s worst nightmare: “a hippie daughter, dear god! What have I done to deserve this?” Ellen, Colombia. “The street is a good school. It has many paths.” Danilo, Colombia. Latin American nomadic artisans are backpackers, their belongings reduced to what can fit into their backpacks. Their budgets are meager, so they normally stay at hostels with affordable prices. This sets them apart from other travelers and tourists. But even within the backpacker category, there are different modalities. Many of the travelers I encountered during research came from contexts where traveling was considered interesting and desirable. Others had had to learn to assume risks and face new and difficult situations since they were small children. All travelers share a characteristic flexibility and adaptability with regards to change. This combination of factors leads to a very particular way of traveling.

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This study focused on Latin American backpackers who survive through the practice of one or more economic activities while they travel, with the ultimate goal of perpetuating their movement from one place to the next. These activities include juggling with or without fire, playing music (in squares or market places), preparation and sale of meals (sometimes from their country of origin, such as Argentinean or Chilean empanadas), painting (such as restaurant murals), street circus and theater, tattooing, community workshop organization on different subjects, the re-sale of crafts bought from other artisans or from retailers, and the production and sale of their own crafts. Identifying themselves as nomads, traveling artisans point to movement as the search for a more “natural and simple” state of being. They feel a special bond (they use terms like “brotherhood” (hermandad) and “solidarity” “exchange” “nomadic friendships”) with people that travel in the same way. They make a clear distinction between “themselves” and “others”: people who do not travel (settled artisans, local craft re-sellers who have lost their “freedom” and are not interested in fleeing “the system”), craft re-sellers that work the same localities at lower prices, and tourists (who travel differently and are their main customers). Their flexibility, adaptability and creativity in terms of procuring the financial means necessary to keep on moving sets these Latin Americans apart from other types of travelers. When they arrive at a place where craft selling is illegal or deemed unprofitable, they resort to other economic activities. For example, Anabelle (from Panama) used fire juggling when she traveled through places where craft selling did not work out; and in Montañita, Ecuador, she made and sold food, because the place is known for its animosity towards foreign crafts people. Luis (from Mexico) started out as a traveling drummer, but on the way found out that craft elaboration and selling was more profitable. One last characteristic that sets nomadic artisans apart from other backpackers is that their trips are carried out in phases, and most do not have set return dates. This was the case with all of the travelers that I met through field work. The nomadic artisans encountered during field work are between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four; they do not belong to any one distinct sector or class in Latin American society, and seem to come from varied walks of life, mostly urban. They also have different levels of schooling. I came across traveling artisans from Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The Costa Ricans I met had traveled either within the country or to bordering Nicaragua or Panama. The Nicaraguan artisans I met traveled only within their country. Mexican, Panamanian and South American artisans had traveled more widely, covering many countries in their region, then heading north or south through Central America, the southerners reaching Mexico, and a few even Europe and Asia. There are at least



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two tendencies among this group: the Colombians I interviewed had not finished high school, and they appreciated stability more than travelers from other countries. They were also more preoccupied with making money. Craftmaking for them was a profession and/or a job. For example, many of them did not judge craft re-sellers so harshly, since procuring financial stability is of the utmost importance. Another group is made up of travelers that have attended college (not all have finished), are not so interested in geographical stability, could return to their home countries any time, have an ambiguous discourse about money, and see craft-making and selling as an economic opportunity for maintaining their traveling lifestyle. These people perceive re-sellers as belonging to a separate group with regards to “true” artisans.

Latin American traveling artisans and contemporary capitalism “… now I know that I can go anywhere and I can survive.” Anabelle, Panama. Clear manifestations of the way Latin American artisans do in fact relate to contemporary capitalism (despite their reiterated discourse on traveling the way they do as an escape from the “system”) are the production and selling of crafts and the construction of multi-local networks as means of reproducing their web of life (Harvey 2006). In fact, as mentioned above, some of the defining elements of a group like Latin American nomadic artisans are their flexibility, adaptability and creativity for procuring the financial means necessary to keep moving. This flexibility is possible, among other factors, due to the adaptability of the capitalist system itself (Harvey 2006: 81. China’s economic system is one iconic example of this). From the traveler point of view “mobility and property are in contradiction … Modesty of material requirements is institutionalized: it becomes a positive cultural fact, expressed in a variety of economic arrangements” (Sahlins 1972: 10). For travelers this observation materializes in the very definition of nomadic artisans as backpackers. However, as conceptualized by Harvey: it is impossible … to sustain the view that capitalism has only a shadowy relation to daily life or that the adjustments and adaptations that occur in daily life are irrelevant for understanding how capital accumulation is working on the global stage. (2006: 80)

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In other words, Latin American travelers cannot truly flee the system: it is the system that allows them to survive on global popular culture (Ortiz 1998). Even so, Rosa Sánchez from Chile clearly made the point in her interview that “… dreams can be accomplished without money. Every time we sell a bracelet, the buyer is a local person who will sell us lunch later or someone who will receive rent payment from us. All the money we make, we spend in the same locality” (2012). This way of contributing to local economies is among the self-recognized elements for collective identity-building processes among Latin American nomadic artisans. Guigui, a 26-year-old Ecuadorian interviewed in 2012, has had to exchange merchandise for a plate of food. In other words, Latin American nomadic artisans have sui generis ways of relating to the larger economy and contemporary capitalism. Latin American artisan movements from one country to the other are sui generis in at least four ways. First, they are intra-regional, with none of the people interviewed showing interest in going further north than Mexico. This is interesting if compared to the fact that the United States has historically been the major destination for most Latin American emigrants (Maguid 2000; Pellegrino and Macadar 2001; Solimano 2003). In 2007, among the 15.6 million individuals born in Latin America who resided in an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Member State, 86 percent lived in the United States (Padilla and Peixoto 2007). Second, the movements in question cannot be categorized as solely economic/labor or political migrations. While Argentineans in the early 2000s had economic reasons to flee and the violence in Colombia has expelled many citizens outside its borders and displaced many within the country since the 1940s, artisans from these two nations do not identify these expulsion factors readily. Instead, they share the general Latin American traveler discourse of migrating to learn from other places and people, to experience other realities first hand, and to free themselves from “system’ demands (including the responsibilities entailed by citizenship in the country of origin). Third, Latin American artisan migrations are not transnational, in the sense that transnational theories imply the existence of settlement countries (Faist 2000, 2009; Fouron and Schiller 2001; Itzigsohn 2000; Kivisto 2001; Levitt 2004; Portes et al. 2003; Pries 1999). Settlement is not part of this group’s migration patterns. It is a practice that is present in their collective identitybuilding processes, but as a source of contrast characterizing the “others” (i.e. “normal people” craft re-sellers) that they encounter in their travels. Settlement is only taken into consideration as a future recourse. Also, while some artisans travel in a circular fashion, not all of them do, and those that do not rarely repeat the same ports of exit or entry during their trips. Latin American travelers maintain bonds, contacts, and relationships while moving, as suggested by the transnational paradigm, but not necessarily or exclusively



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with their communities or countries of origin. Instead, their most meaningful links, according to their own discourse, are with fellow travelers (of the same nationality or not, artisans or not) located throughout the region. Fourth, some traveling artisans engage in re-migration to places where conditions are most favorable or desirable. These conditions include places for lodging, eating, and entertainment that fit their budgets, the presence of tourists (as their major consumers), and a relaxed relationship with local and migration authorities. Craft selling is done through a practice called “parchar” from the Spanish word parche.1 Parche is used as a noun for the place chosen by the artisan to sell; for the corner, square, street or place in general where nomadic artisans tend to gather to sell in a specific community; for the collection of merchandise owned by an artisan; or for a piece of cloth upon which the artisan sets his or her crafts for display. This display is organized taking aesthetic and functional criteria into consideration, so that crafts will both look appealing to potential buyers, as well as fit into the chosen or assigned space. This makes “setting up shop” everyday a slow and mindful process. Due to parche portability, artisans do not need special infrastructure to sell their crafts, so they can work on sidewalks, squares, parks, and streets. The

FIGURE 6   Colombian nomadic artisan parche, Tamarindo, Costa Rica © Millaray Villalobos.

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only condition necessary is that they be in the middle of tourist trajectories within the community because these are their main customers. Nomadic artisans also make use of discarded material to set up makeshift tables on which to place their parche and find rudimentary ways to connect to electricity infrastructure so that they can work during the night. There is little difference in the amount earned by artisans at the same locality. But attitudes toward money tend to be different according to place of origin and settlement intentions. The relationships established by traveling artisans with re-sellers are tolerant in some cases and not so positive in others, as the latter force the lowering of craft prices in some localities. According to nomadic artisans, as of April 2012 the monthly income necessary for surviving in Costa Rica was $300, in Panama $200 and in Ecuador $150. Costa Rica is more expensive, but has a strong influx of US tourism (5 percent of the country’s income in 2012) and many touristic locations that are good selling spots. The money earned is mostly spent on basic services, such as food and lodging.

Networks Nomadism within a global context being one of the main features of the group under study, it is important to point out that migrations in general can be seen as network-building processes (Portes et al. 2003: 1218), with networks playing a major articulating role (Pries 1999: 61). The move from one place to another entails the need for some sort of human capital that makes migrating a viable alternative (Martínez 2001: 342–3; Pellegrino and Macadar 2001: 124), including transnational solidarity (Faist 2000: 189) which is operationalized through different types of networks. For nomadic Latin American artisans, these networks consist of reciprocity, including the sharing and exchange of clothes, tools, raw materials (some types of rocks, seeds, and sea shells can be found only at specific localities, and are not so readily available). There is also an exchange of work techniques, food, drugs, lodging, experiences, knowledge, and crafts when people find themselves in the same locality (sometimes exchanging crafts for food or lodging with the locals that offer these services). Finally email communications with people who are elsewhere include useful information for traveling and petitions for help in stressful or dangerous situations. For Anabelle (Panamanian) the comments of nomadic artisans about India fueled her wish to travel there, and she eventually made her way there in 2006. She also commented on how her relationships with other travelers meant that she could get information, through email or word-of-mouth, on practically



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any place she wanted to go. In addition, she received an email from a fellow traveler, asking about the best way to enter Panama, and the sort of documentation and amount of money needed. Another example was Dario’s (Argentinean) call for help when he and other nomadic artisans were arrested and incarcerated in deplorable conditions in Ecuador, despite having their travel documents in order. Not surprisingly, solidarity, seen by Adler-Lomnitz (1975) as a key element for network solidity, is part of the traveling artisan self-recognition discourse, as will be discussed later. Also part of the identity construction process among Latin American nomadic artisans is the idea of shared needs, likewise mentioned by Adler-Lomnitz (1994: 104) as a key element in network building. Following Mauss, Bourgois and Schonberg (2009: 6) describe the existence of a “moral economy of sharing” among San Francisco homeless heroin addicts, where “gift giving envelops them in a web of mutual obligations but also establishes the boundaries of their community.” With this as a model, one iconic example of how traveler solidarity networks function is Ellen’s entrance into Costa Rica. She first traveled widely with her partner Miguel through their home country, Colombia, before engaging in international travel. They were picked up at the Panama-Costa Rica border (I had first met them in Bocas del Toro, Panama, some months prior) by a Colombian friend who was already settled in Costa Rica; entered without showing papers and made it to the capital, San José. Their friend made arrangements for a visit to UNHCR offices a few days later, where they requested refugee status.

Crafts “… the parche [as the collection of crafts each artisan has on display for selling] is a reflection of the kind of person each artisan is.” Danilo, Colombia As García-Canclini (1990) points out, craft-making and selling processes emerge out of an interplay of factors such as cultural industries, tourism, economic and political relationships with transnational symbolic goods, markets and mass processes of message circulation, as well as the interrelationship between elite and non-elite, urban and rural, local, national, and transnational stake holders. Traveling artisans, while producing and selling their crafts in different types of settings, from the city to the beach and across different Latin American countries, geographically transform what was thought to be the traditional locus of craft-making: rural, peripheral settings. As Ortiz (1998: 18) points out, much of what is considered popular culture

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today (McDonald’s, Brazilian telenovelas (soap operas) and Disney characters) is not produced, from start to finish, within one local space. I would argue that the crafts under study are no different. One paradigmatic example of this are tagua pipes carved with the famous Ché Guevara image taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, that is now ubiquitous on different types of merchandise sold through global market channels.2 The pipes seen during fieldwork were acquired in Ecuador for re-sale, and sold in Bocas del Toro by a Colombian nomadic artisan. Integrated as they are into symbolic goods markets and global popular culture, the pipes are manifestations of the intersection between two phenomena: migrations and globalization. Some of the Latin American traveling crafts that are the focus of this study are produced on a massive scale and are the final products of industrial processes. The working artisans that I met through my work are not from long family or community traditions of craft-making. On the whole they have no history of family craft specialization, with traveling and art playing more important roles in the early history of these artisans than craft-making. They do not belong to any one distinct sector in Latin American society and are mostly of urban extraction but all converge upon an economic tool that

FIGURE 7   Global popular culture: iconic Argentinian Che Guevara on a tagua pipe from Ecuador, sold in Bocas del Toro, Panama © Millaray Villalobos.



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allows them to travel the way they do, and that also allows them to get by on their creativity and communication skills. Latin American artisanal production is critical for sustaining a specific way of life and for identity construction processes. The crafts themselves are utilitarian and/or decorative objects, jewelry or “useful art” (earrings, necklaces, arm and ankle bracelets, and finger and toe rings), clothes and accessories (handbags, hair bands, pipes) that are a final product of processes that function on the margins of mass production and industrialized circuits. The materials used in the elaboration of these crafts vary from wood to different kinds of metal (including silver); alpaca, hemp and waxed thread; beads made of glass; plastics, ceramic or various types of stone, amber and other fossils such as trilobites; molting glass, seeds such as tagua as well as many others; coconut, feathers, seashells, fish bones and dyed scales, and shark teeth.3 These materials can be found at different locations within the Latin American region: stones in Mexico and Peru, silver also in Peru, fossilized trilobites in Bolivia, waxed thread (that is cheaper in Nicaragua) and tagua (that is very common in Ecuador). Experienced nomadic artisans have material-collecting routes and these artisans also acquire finished products and take them apart to elaborate their own crafts. Still others combine self-made crafts with pieces made by other artisans or bought at specialized stores. The main tools for craft-making are the hands, the loom or the needle, drill,4 potter’s wheel, pliers, tweezers, sandpaper, lighters (for burning waxed thread to ensure that knots do not come undone), and blowtorch for soldering. There are also specially designed work tables, built from light metals for ease of transport, with some travelers specifically dedicated to making these tables. Techniques used for craft-making include different types of weaving and knotting, carving and polishing, different kinds of metal work, filigree, stone insetting and molten glass. These crafts are a defining element for identity construction processes among Latin American artisans: highly portable, crafts are a perfect fit for a lifestyle that calls for freedom of movement, and also allow for the reproduction of income-generating strategies while traveling. This specific mode of craft production also permits artisans to be their own “bosses”, a most cherished attribute in the discourse of the Latin American nomads I encountered. In this sense, there was a two-fold perception of crafts: they could be seen by some as a profession or a job; and by others as a hobby, a pastime that makes traveling economically feasible. In reality, craft production becomes one of the only viable ways to earn a living for people traveling within Latin America on tourist visas, along with the other survival mechanisms mentioned before.

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Nomadism: Identity and community “As a community, we always have people who are traveling. The people who crossed from South to Central America all know each other. A woman that I ran into the other day told me about people I had met somewhere else. We all know each other.” Anabelle, Panama. “… the concept of mother country becomes ridiculous, the same as identity imposed through artificial symbols. You stop being from your country, to become a Latin American.” Ernesto, Costa Rica. “Traveling is the best thing you can do in life.” Luis, Mexico. In their discourse, Latin American artisans travel looking for otherness (otredad), alterity and the exotic, much in the same way that romantic nineteenth-century writers did, looking for the picturesque (Ortiz 1998: 1–20). Is this way of traveling possible at all in contemporary times? Ease of communications has made it so that the sensation of estrangement on seeing new places has been replaced with one of familiarity, and crafts, as mentioned before, are part of transnational flows that include cultural industries. The crafts produced and sold travel “… in networks that are not confined to one specific place or another” (Ortiz 1998: 14, 36). This leads towards an important characteristic of this group’s way of life: deterritorialization, or the reproduction of cultural practices and products that are not physically tied to any one single place, that are also simultaneously present in different corners of today’s global society (Ortiz 1998: 37). It also points to the construction of plurilocal communities (Rouse 1989; GarcíaCanclini 1990; Canales and Zlolniski 2000) that exist in different places at the same time and do not need spatial proximity in order to exist (Faist 2000, 2009). Self-recognition and self-contrast/self-assessment are, according to Costa Rican anthropologist Carmen Murillo (1995), the two internal forces that guide processes of collective identity construction. As a self-recognized defining characteristic among traveling artisans, nomadism is a key element in the construction of deterritorialized collective identities that do not need a shared and common physical space to exist (García-Canclini 1990), and clearly points to the implications of constant movement in all spheres of life. Other self-recognition standards among Latin American nomadic artisans are a common philosophy based on shared experiences and lessons learned while traveling in the same manner; a special relationship with time (constant movement compels nomadic artisans to live for the day, for the moment, and to worry about “here and now”); equity in the amount of money earned



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through craft selling in the same locality (though attitudes toward money vary within this population, as pointed out above); drug consumption (alcohol and marihuana being most common); and contribution to local economy reproduction. Latin American artisans travel and consume outside mass tourism circuits: in keeping with their low budgets, they lodge, feed and spend time in cheaper establishments, usually owned by locals or by foreigners with a long history of settlement in the communities. Most believe in the importance of tolerance, world peace, reject racism and xenophobia, and question the “system” in which most people in Latin American urban societies live, characterized by stress, individualism, and anonymity. They disavow work in enclosed spaces or offices; taxes and bills, and the organization of societal life around financial or materialistic priorities. Self-contrast and self-assessment among Latin American artisans includes three well-defined notions of the “other” related to their way of life: craft consumers, non-travelers (“normal people”), and craft re-sellers. Relationships with consumers, mainly backpacking US and European tourists, are primarily economic, and nomadic artisans judge their work through the eyes of buyers, complaining that many people do not understand the kind of labor invested in each craft and worry only about the price. “Normal people” are defined by travelers as those who do not question the “system,” who are not interested in traveling and learning. From the artisans’ point of view, these non-travelers regard the travelers’ way of life negatively, their way of dressing and of keeping their hair, their drug consumption practices, and the type of work they do, considered by some to be “vagrancy.” In contrast to “normal people,” re-sellers are people who buy finished products in specialized stores, sometimes wholesale, and thus re-sell at lower prices than the travelers who make their own crafts. For this reason, travelers generally have a poor opinion of these people. According to their own discourse, nomadic artisans imagine their future as a phase of geographic and economic stability, mostly through the import, commercialization and re-sale of crafts. These elements of their future denote a clear contradiction with regards to their current views about nomadism, re-selling and money. In other words, in their imagined future, traveling artisans encountered through fieldwork will become their “others.”

Conclusions Coming from different socio-economic contexts of origin within the Latin American region, traveling artisans, as part of their collective identity construction processes, recognize themselves as nomads, share a discourse on the importance of travel for learning from other people and cultures, and

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contrast themselves with people who do not travel, with the tourists who consume their crafts, and with craft re-sellers. Interestingly, in their imagined future, they see geographic and economic stability, procuring the financial means to survive through the commercialization and re-sell of crafts. The Latin American nomadic artisan way of life is a manifestation of the interplay between capitalism’s flexibility and adaptability and the creative ways in which these travelers adapt to this system. The elaboration and selling of crafts that are part of global popular culture (Ortiz 1998) takes part in cultural industry flows influenced by tourism, and economic and political relationships. Transnational symbolic goods markets respond to massive processes of message circulation (García-Canclini 1990) and foster the construction of pluri-local solidarity and communication networks. In this sense, mobility is a way of life chosen in response to a need to “escape the system” (according to their own discourse), while it is actually made possible in part because of the flexibility of the capitalist system itself. By the same token, nomadism determines the organization of economic life for nomadic artisans.

PART TWO

Conundrums

7 Number in Craft Situated Numbering Practices in Do-It-Yourself Sensor Systems Dawn Nafus and Richard Beckwith

Introduction

H

ow does the quantitative figure in craft? In many contexts, craft embeds enumerated processes. Kilns have temperatures to be monitored, knitting has knots to be counted, and chemical formulas for dyes are there to be followed or adjusted. Numbers in craft often come into play through technologies. Both digital and analog sensors (thermometers, scales, etc.) are widespread in craft practices. As Rosner’s work shows (this volume), digital technologies can even be deeply integrated in “traditional” crafts like knitting. We can now include in the diversity of craft all the self-described tinkerers who are building do-it-yourself sensor systems. These systems detect various things such as water quality, energy consumption, or the temperature of an outdoor barbeque. People who work with sensors rather than clay or textiles still engage in the same kind of bricolage and embodied knowledges as do other crafters in other places. They bring shape to things with the materials at hand, sometimes elegantly and sometimes less so. As with L. De Nicola’s contribution to this volume, sensors are not the sterile antithesis of craft, but are themselves crafted when people assemble them, alter them, and (re) situate them.

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We are two scholars who spend most of our time thinking about the social side of digital technologies, and we find the anthropological thinking on craft to be an important theoretical framework that helps us understand the significance of the numbers that computers create. In this chapter we explore how sensor data features as a material in craft work, alongside the sensors themselves. We are also interested in what it might mean to think about sensor data as itself crafted—that is, not just constructed, or socially shaped, but crafted. When people work with sensors, numbers come to the foreground in interesting, if problematic, ways. Writing through the lens of craft forces us to pay close attention to how materials speak back to people in the face of the apparent authority of number, and the labor involved in numbers’ assembly. Our central claim is that practices that use sensor numbers invite slippages between two ways to think about number. We have taken to calling them hermeneutic and heuristic. We call them this because sometimes number appears as a deep, yet abstract authority—a hermeneutic—and at other times, numbers look more like a contingent and partial indication that cries out for further situating work (i.e., a heuristic). Indeed, sometimes both aspects are in play at once. Sensor enthusiasts’ relationship to number’s apparent hermeneutics, with its emphasis on mental reckoning and abstraction, and its heuristics, which invite more careful connections between numbers and materials, profoundly affects the kinds of material engagements they have with the world around them. The beliefs concerning numbers’ heuristic or/ and hermeneutic determine people’s relation to the sensor system ultimately crafted, and thus what the object as a whole comes to mean. These uncertainties in how numbers relate to materials unfold even while the participants themselves feel quite certain of the separation between materials and mental reckoning—subject and object—that academic theorizing of materiality likes to trouble. To examine the craft of data, we conducted ethnography with people who build or use home energy monitoring equipment and upload the results onto Pachube.1 Pachube is a website that acts as an open data repository for sensor data of all kinds. It allows people to share their data feeds and create visualizations of them. Pachube and its users are tied to the larger maker movement (Platt 2009), and often the systems used to sense are not commercially made products, but hardware hacks of various kinds.2 In these systems, numbers are what is spat out the other end of the sensor. This automaticity can make numerical output from a sensor appear to require no further engagement, as the technology has provided us with a datum that has already been subjected to an interpretation. The sensor designer has already chosen what kind of electrical pulse, heat, or sound should go through a transducer, and which algorithms would produce the most “sensible”



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number that can circulate separately from what the sensor sensed. If we just consider how sensor numbers are designed, there are significant differences between them and, say, the counting of knots as a basketweaver finds his way through the basket. The counting of knots are heuristic steps on a pathway through movements and gestures that end in a product—the basket. They are enacted and embedded in the object itself. Sensors, on the other hand, are designed to “retrieve” number from the sensing, giving the impression that that number can stand on its own, as if all one needed to know about it were contained within the number itself. In this sense, sensor numbers are very different from the numbers embedded in baskets. This separation suggests the possibility of hermeneuticlike qualities, similar to the self-fulfilling divinations made by lie detectors, oracles (Rapport 1988), and audits (Strathern 2000). For example, in audit cultures, institutions and work practices are governed by measurements such as standardized test scores or indexes of research quality. These measurements are touted as techniques to understand a wider process of teaching or research, where in reality what they do is force teaching or research to become only about what administrators decide to count. They create their own reality, where terms are set by the measurer, often in complete indifference to what is actually happening on the ground. Sensors certainly did proliferate at a time when audit culture was on the rise, and a certain Western faith in the ability to make nearly anything transparent through numerical measurement gained tremendous cultural ground. The hermeneutic qualities of sensor readings is a socio-technical choice made by engineers who largely conceive of number as no more than abstractions from the things they count. However, sensors also complicate the logic of audit culture. As will become clear in the ethnography, they leave room for asking what else someone would need to interpret the numbers they produce. This is a possibility that divination, oracles, and audits foreclose, yet it is a central, practical problem of using sensors. We could easily imagine alternative sensor designs that did enact numbers in ways more easily comparable to the weaving of baskets. Indeed, there are critical design projects that do just that. For example, Leahu (2009) uses sensors measuring the electrical resistance of skin as a heuristic for emotion. This technique is commonplace in some research fields, but he does this in a way that demonstrates the ways in which sensor readings are not “emotion” per se, in all its human richness. Although sensors do abstract numbers from the phenomena they sense, these phenomena are often not identical to the real phenomena of interest as noted by Leahu in the work above. Yet, by virtue of the “reading” being abstracted from the measuring event, the door has been opened for a slippage from a modest heuristic to a more ambitious hermeneutic. The threads that can otherwise situate an “emotion indication” as partial knowledge can be cut by the design choices made.

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In practice, the craft of making sensors actually useful in a home or elsewhere far more resembles the numbers woven into a basket than sensor manufacturers may care to admit. For the people we worked with, to describe sensors as simply spitting out a number in the way their designers intended in no way does justice to what is going on. Those of us who are concerned about the fetishization of number in contemporary life might take heart to learn that in this ethnography, the numbers held to be standalone “facts” establish less social currency than their more modest, more contingent counterparts. Those “facts” require feeling one’s way around the broader context to become meaningful. That is, numbers require just as much bricolage as basket materials do. As we describe below, “feeling your way around” requires careful attention and interaction between sensor readings, the sensors themselves, and the knowledge practices involved in hacking together a system. It is an incremental process. A sensor enthusiast might first look into what might be useful to sense, and then look at what can actually be sensed electronically, and go back and forth like this many times over. Grand plans rarely work well, though “feeling your way around” has its risks, too. Numbers are difficult materials to work with not because people “can’t do math” (in our study, many participants had an engineering background) but because the numbers do not offer themselves up for use in quite the same way as circuit boards and pieces of software code. They offer more contingencies than certainties. In the section that follows, we will address the literature from both studies of craft and studies of technology (an unfortunate distinction with an even more unfortunate gender politics (see Nafus 2012)). We tie these two literatures together through a third—ethnomathematics. We take as our starting point Ingold’s focus on craft as a kind of incremental feeling one’s way through the world, stripped of grand plans, and reflect on how numbers and digital technologies do or do not challenge this incrementalist approach to craft. We then offer three ethnographic vignettes of home energy monitoring systems that show the uneasy heuristic/hermeneutic relationship. Lastly, we discuss the wider cultural frameworks and practices that largely expect numbers to perform hermeneutically, and how this inflects the craft of number.

Getting a feel for numbers Ingold (Ingold 2010; Hallam and Ingold 2007) offers us a way of thinking about craft that is not moored to a distinct set of artifacts against which to contrast “art” or “technology,” but as a wider theorization of how we might think about human engagements in the material world. Drawing on Flusser (1999),



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Ingold contrasts craft with “design.” Design, he argues, is caught up in procedures of modernist plan-making where it is assumed that one can lay out a design and then simply implement it as planned, as if implementation were a matter of brute labor. Design in this sense is a totalizing move—one can assume from the outset that all that is necessary to know is already known. Craft, on the other hand, is a perspective that acknowledges that building and making constitute a material way of knowing, learning, and acting within the world. Knowledge comes not just in the planning, but in the doing. The materials present a particular set of options, and the crafter responds, and back and forth it goes. In other work, Ingold (2004) takes this notion further. He asks about just how much of a difference it would make to not experience the world with our hands and eyes but our feet. What would become of our various knowledges if we more closely attended to the pathways that our feet take us along, the materials underfoot, etc.? This difference highlights how our hands and eyes really do situate us in the material world. They are not simply to be dispensed with through sheer mental reckoning, or easily swapped for feet. In yet other work with Anusas (Anusas et al. 2010) the question centers on how we might subvert environmental design in ways that would make it more craft-like. By defining design and craft in these ways, Ingold’s work intriguingly spans everything from basketry to environmental policymaking and assumes a point of view that seeks redemption in the immediacies of the material as a way of keeping at bay the inhumanities wielded in the name of modernist abstraction. The violence done by such abstractions also has been resoundingly critiqued elsewhere (Strathern 2000; Scott 1998; Ferguson 1990). While we find Ingold’s attention to the incremental responses to materials useful, the contrast he draws with “abstractions,” and the ease with which quantitative representations fill that slot, is an ease that requires caution. While digital technologies and manufactured artifacts are designed for a notion of modernity he finds objectionable, they also do not preclude the incremental back and forth between materials and persons so central to his work. Indeed, communities of “makers”—people who take pleasure in various modes of do-it-yourself production—have proliferated across North America, Europe, and Japan. The home energy monitoring enthusiasts we worked with largely see themselves as part of this proliferation. They very much do identify with the sort of craft that Ingold celebrates. Makers, like their “back to the land” parents and grandparents, seek to “return” to an earlier way of life, yet do so within today’s digitally infused material culture. In Ingoldian ways, they have elevated direct material engagement with artifacts as a specific kind of knowledge-making practice. The maker movement resists the notion that mass manufacture might have the last word on the sorts of objects we must live with (Minahan

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and Cox 2007; Williams, Gibb, and Weekly 2012). Maker communities took matters into their own hands long before David Graeber (2012) complained that technology has yet to deliver our jet packs as promised. Graeber argues that through the privatization and bureaucratization of technical research, technology delivered far more underwhelming, docility-inducing technologies of screen and image. This is a fair complaint, but also is only part of the story. Maker Faires, gatherings of makers that celebrate the work of many makers, represent no such failure of imagination. DIY concept cars, robot petting zoos, and a firebreathing flock of umbrellas built by a women’s welding cooperative were all featured in the San Mateo “flagship” Maker Faire in 2012. Scholars like Ratto (2011) have further turned to material making as a site of critical practice; that is, making can be not just a critique of the limits of capitalist production but also as a way for scholars to call into question the dominance of logocentric knowledge, rather than material and embodied knowledge. In Ratto’s critical making studios, people do not just think with their hands, they “write” with them. The objects they make are a site in which the process of critique takes place, where the materials resist and speak back to the maker. Asking about how measurements from sensor systems might actually be crafted offers a contrary perspective on Ingold’s presumption that the quantitative is synonymous with abstractions and the modernist gaze, as if it were only clay or wire that could present an immediate material experience. Ethnomathematics research (Verran 2001; Guyer 2004; Eglash 1999; Lave 1988; Pryke 2010) shows clearly just how immediate and material people’s experiences with numbers can be. That is, there may or may not be a “pure” mathematics awaiting our comprehension in some Platonic plane, but what matters about math is always in the doing. That doing always has a material component. Prices in a grocery store, lengths of rope, and the near tactile surfaces of financial market volatility visualizations provide the materials that “clot” numbers together (Verran 2001) into both meaning and practice. Materials make it possible to feel one’s way through a math problem in a grocery store—prices are on labels, a pen and paper might be in hand, etc.—in ways not that different from as feeling your way through a clay pot, seeing that the clay is too wet or dry and adjusting accordingly. There are cues, gestures, and components of habitus that make them both numerical and bodily at the same time. Indeed, Pryke’s (2010) work on how financial traders use financial data visualizations as a material prosthetic to gain a feel for the market, and respond with skilled anticipation is hugely similar to O’Connor’s (2005) work on glassblowing, where glassblowing tools become, over time, a prosthetic that allows her to anticipate her next move in blowing the glass. Numbers are not always or inevitably the quantitative scalpel of abstract precision wielded from on high. Instead, we have to be more careful about what kind of numbers they are meant to be and how they are being used in practice.



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The scholarship on information technologies has grappled with analogous issues. In the 1990s and 2000s technology studies spent much time concerned with the question of whether the digital is “real” or a “virtual” simulacrum of that reality (Woolgar 2002). In our case, sensors have material form; they attach to things, they emit waves of various kinds, they contain electronic components, etc. They transform physical substance into numbers. To borrow from Boellstorff (2010), these transformations into numerical form create a virtual experience only in the sense that culture has always been a “virtual” experience. Culture is as real as metal or wood, but also very different from them. These differences do not make culture a simulacrum of life, or an abstraction from life. Although not exceptional, like any other ethnographic object, they also have to be taken on their own terms (Boellstorff 2010). Numbers too are not especially marked as “abstractions from” some other, more real experience. For our project, this means that we can ethnographically trace the transformations that sensors perform, and take those transformations seriously, without resorting to philosophizing about the need to overcome subject/object dualisms to locate the “realness” of numbers. Methodologically, this requires attention to the practices of crafting number and refraining from claiming new theories of materiality. In Miller’s words, “there are plenty of other people who claim to have invented the wheel that rescues anthropology from the simplistic duality of subjects and objects” (Miller 2005: 10). What makes sensors interesting for thinking about number in craft is that, at first glance, sensors appear to make the invisible visible. Sensors render phenomena as various as location, motion, temperature, electricity, gasses, radiation, and small particles visible in some ways, but not others. Through digitization these phenomena, which we otherwise might experience as heat (temperature) or a shock (electricity) or confusion as we head the wrong way down the highway (location), can be reframed and reconceived. What is at stake, then, is not just how sensors force their users to grapple with the mathematical, but also, how we think about the material experience of tinkering with that which we cannot see. This is not a case where electricity, temperature, etc. can be assumed away as epiphenomenal properties of the material we craft. Here, electricity or temperature come close to “touchable” in a new way. In these ways, sensor projects may render manipulable the material world differently than other forms of craft. This sets up an important tension in our fieldwork. On the one hand, people say that they can “really see” their electricity through sensing systems, and at the same time they know full well that they are not “seeing” electricity in some unadulterated, unmediated way. They know they are looking at a number, and that the numerical output they are looking at is by design. While the output of sensors often takes numerical form, they do not have to: a dirty camera lens

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can serve as a pollution sensor. The challenge we face is, on the one hand, to not flatten everything and anything into materials of equal kinds, such that we find craft or enumeration everywhere we choose to look, and on the other hand to steer clear of fetishizing number and measurement as abstract operators on a higher ontological plane. If we are to preserve the Ingoldian attention to the adaptive, incremental feeling-your-way-through, we must look for the numeric, material, and social “clots” where they happen as we trace the transformations.

Sensor systems In this section we begin by ethnographically describing three home energy monitoring systems which in some senses are illuminating outliers. We then discuss how the treatment of number in these examples differs from the bulk of the sensor systems we examined.

The heat loss meter There is a fairly well-known home improvement scam that involves salesmen using a “heat-loss meter.” A salesperson comes to the home and offers to do a heat loss assessment using their measuring instrument. When they get to the home, they remove a handheld meter and walk around a person’s living space. The homeowner is also allowed to wield the instrument. What the meters invariably show is that windows are a primary vector for heat loss and the sensor owner offers to sell new windows, which they claim will pay for themselves quickly. The scam is based on the meter that they use, which itself ensures that windows will always be the primary culprit. They use a photographic light meter. The scam works because there is a large gap between what people think might be involved in home energy efficiency and how complicated it actually is. Home heating is something that was infrastructuralized well before living memory for people in post-industrial countries. The largely unchallenged ubiquity of central heat systems has meant that they only become visible upon breakdown (Bowker and Star 1999). They have become black boxed (Latour 1987). Precisely because infrastructures tend to become visible only when they function contrary to desire, their operations present themselves to most people as ignorable technicalities. Few of us really have any sensibility about what 77-kilowatt hours actually means. Combined with a cultural politics that privileges the visible, particularly when that visualization has been rendered numerically (see Dumit 2004), a certain convincing case emerges. This is so not just for seemingly unsophisticated victims of scams, but is a wider cultural problematic of the convincingness of numbers, and



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data-based visualization. Dumit’s work shows how brain scan imaging creates an overconfidence that one can “really see” what is happening in the brain. What viewers are “really seeing” depends just as much on choices of color contrast and the circumstances of the scan than any underlying pathology. Perhaps more importantly, the scam deliberately muddles different modalities of numbers. It creates confusion between different kinds of proxies to deliver a suspect authoritative measurement. Windows are not an unreasonable proxy for likely heat loss. Light is not heat, although it may in fact indicate a heat source or loss point. In fact there are multiple modes of heat gain and loss, all of which may or may not translate into overall power consumption. It is too easy to allow ourselves to believe that a single device can perform a deep reading of the heat loss profiles of various areas within their home. Sensors, no matter what they do, are only ever a means of building a reasonable approximation, a good guess as to what they want to know. In Peircian terms (Peirce 1932) sensor readings are indexical, in that they point to a phenomenon but never are the phenomenon itself, leaving the door open to a range of complicating factors. In fact, what could be indicated are often just related phenomena. They are co-occurrences, not necessarily the root cause of what one is trying to detect (a distinction that Leahu’s work cleverly brings out). If we look at sensor readings in these terms, they are heuristic rather than hermeneutic devices. They deliver parts for some method of proceeding and do not necessarily contain all the parts for thorough interpretation. In practice, however, the two are easily muddled. This is not a failure of “ordinary people” to be “more scientific.” Instead, certain aspects of material culture and socio-technical knowledge make it difficult to maintain a regard for these two modalities of heuristic and hermeneutic as separate.

“You get geeky quickly when you live on a boat” Martin is a graduate student in his late twenties who lives on a canal boat in North London. Martin lives this way out of concern for the environment. The boat creates an awareness of energy consumption because no energy source is simply on tap. It inspires the sorts of energy saving practices that many of our home energy sensor enthusiasts strive for. Boats exist off the electricity grid, and as a result, in Martin’s words, “you get geeky quickly when you live on a boat.” There are four options for energy—petrol (gasoline), diesel, solar and wind. Martin uses all but wind, for the reason that wind is noisy and incompatible with complaining neighbors. All three sources feed into a battery bank, but the battery bank in turn is a bit of a mystery both to him and his community. These mysteries require developing practices and routines which other boaters have established and have willingly shared with Martin.

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While it is cheap and easy to take voltage readings of the batteries, the real number one would like to know if living on a boat is amp-hours, which is a unit of charge. This is because voltage only tells the potential energy released from the battery at a specific point in time. It doesn’t say much about how much charge it has left. Although voltage does drop precipitously immediately before a full discharge of the battery, its measurement is more or less constant up until it nears the point of full discharge. If you want to know how much energy is left in a battery so you can do something about it, voltage drop may come too late. For people concerned about how much energy is left in a battery, and therefore how much longer it will last, amp-hours are the more significant measurement. To measure amp-hours requires prohibitively expensive equipment. In addition, amp-hours are dependent on temperature, so anything but constant amperage measurement would only yield an estimate, a heuristic perhaps not better than simply knowing how much energy has been drawn since it had a full charge, which is another heuristic for understanding how much energy is left. Further mysteries of the battery bank as understood within this community include the problem that the battery is said to perform best when neither full nor empty. Ideally it should only be between 50 percent and 80 percent of capacity. Rules of thumb have emerged to figure out how to maintain this ideal: when to top up the battery, and with what. Diesel might be miles away or nearby, the day might be cloudy and inhibit solar production, etc. Or, on the consumption side, when a laptop is about to die and there is an impending deadline, Martin knows he has to turn out the lights to crank out that last bit of work. Similarly, his heating system uses a mix of wood and coal: visible materials whose consumption he must carefully calibrate so as not to run out at the wrong time. He must not be so far from a source of either that it would be difficult to access more, but also must not load down his boat with large amounts of heavy heating fuel that would make it expensive to move the boat with his diesel engine. Within the community of canal boat dwellers, there is an extensive system of shaming for consuming the wrong kind of energy. He says in full knowledge of the irony that “the community has a lot of hippie anarchists who police consumption.” Martin emphasized in our interview how living in this way meant he became attuned to the materiality of energy. His thinking centers on the limitations of resources, and the interdependence of technical systems, that would not be possible if the energy was just “on.” Yet at the same time he also “doesn’t want to fetishize this.” His pleasure is one that comes from a material practice, but he made clear to us that he saw data as fully compatible with getting a bodily feel for what is going on. Indeed, the ability to measure amp-hours he believes would be useful, if potentially inaccurate and expensive. What he does disapprove of is reducing energy use



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to cheap sloganeering (“Turn one light off if you turn another on”). These are not rules of thumb but oversimplifications, and what he is doing is deliberately complicating the banalities of such discourses. His concern is that digitized forms of energy monitoring, as currently designed, invite oversimplifications that can be intrusive and manipulative in the wrong hands. Far from a cheap rejection of the modern, boat living gives Martin a reason to care about the difference between measurement of amps and voltage, and the skill to make good use of them. The data is embedded in the doing: computer batteries at 10 percent become an urgent indication to turn off all the lights if boat batteries are also at 10 percent. He finds the constraints of boat life to be a material frame within which to establish a more nuanced practice as well as develop a deeper awareness. He uses the word pleasure to describe this engagement, and at the same time rejects any romanticization of off-grid living as some nostalgia for a premodern existence that never was. Such nostalgia he ascribes to his “hippie anarchist” neighbors. Rather, his marginal position in relation to the grid gives him a different perspective on it and way of engaging with it.

“They just wanted to hear about the sensors and I wanted to talk about the system” Martin is in some ways not that different from Bob, who is an enthusiastic maker of home energy monitoring systems and Pachube user in Berkeley, California. Bob’s practice is equally incremental, if far more reliant on sensors and numbering systems. Bob articulated a very clear path from the generic to the increasingly granular; his practice too was about making material resources more complex, not simplified. He started out using a Kill-A-Watt, an electricity monitor that clamps onto the main electrical feed to the house and gives the reader an indication of overall electricity usage. As an engineer, Bob already understood that there was no one-for-one relationship between an overall house usage number and turning off the television set. “It just doesn’t work like that,” he explained. Yet despite all his training as an engineer, how it did work was as mysterious to him as batteries were to Martin. For this, Bob turned to sensors. He installed a temperature sensor (that is, a thermometer that connected to a computer) in each room in an effort to understand how the airflow in his house was working. This allowed him to tweak the venting system to improve efficiency. Each additional sensor was for him a guidance system, a navigation tool to understand which vent he should look into or draft he should try to stop next. As in the incremental material engagements with the world that Ingold celebrates, he knew there was no totalizing system, no once and for all optimal house configuration.

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Bob both did and did not intellectualize this mystery. He saw home energy monitoring as a matter of (self)education and awareness, and in this sense he saw it as an intellectualizing project. Yet because he had a strong sense of sensors’ connection with the indexical, it remained tightly coupled with practice. Sensors were his prosthesis; he made no attempt at creating some grand algorithm of his TV set as a function of overall energy consumption, for example. The house was the frame for the practice in the way that Martin’s boat was his frame, but here that frame was held together with numbers. Bob’s reliance on numbers did not take the form of a once and for all model that could say or do anything outside the construction of the system itself. Bob is just as uninterested in making trite claims about overall energy saved as Martin is. In this, both Bob and Martin are unusual; it requires a particular kind of motivation to engage in such consuming practices. Like Martin, this frame held together by numbers was a frame that Bob was unwilling to share with power companies. Bob was squarely against smart meters which were, at the time of interview, a source of political contestation. His view was that smart meters were in no way about helping people save energy, they were about helping power companies manage power loads across a grid. He was suspicious of any “discounts” given during off-peak hours as a way to soft-pedal rate increases during on-peak hours. Time-shifting consumption did nothing to lower overall consumption, so as far as Bob was concerned smart meters were a thorough greenwash. He had further concerns that such technology can detect the power signatures of appliances. Such signatures are different not just between refrigerators and microwaves but different between brands. Bob felt that this would create an enormous, easily monetizable database to exploit. These suspicions are connected to Bob’s broader commitments to numbers serving as a heuristic for people to develop their own frames. Bob believes that home energy monitoring should instead truly educate people so that they too know what 77-kilowatt hours means, so they can feel it as viscerally as people feel 56°F. The power companies had no incentives or capacities to do this, and were bandying about “77-kilowatt hours” as a kind of shallow hermeneutic: a way of signifying the “goodness” of energy saving while discouraging ordinary people from looking under the hood at what is really happening. Significantly, this incrementalist practice of feeling his way through in response to numbers only emerged in the middle of our three-hour interview. When we first sat down to talk, he wanted to show us the system hub that he had built and recently showed at Maker Faire. He talked at great length about how he had sourced the various components, what each of them did, the methods of establishing connectivity with the sensors strategically arranged around his house, etc. One could easily get the impression this had



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FIGURE 8   DIY home energy monitoring hub © Dawn Nafus.

nothing to do with energy saving at all. His story did not start out with a desire to reduce an electricity bill or an articulation of his environmental concerns, but with the above equipment, and his longstanding love of tinkering. One explanation could be that the week before he had been called upon to exhibit this equipment at Maker Faire, and so had a well-rehearsed shtick in his back pocket he was ready to perform. This in and of itself was interesting in as much as it is skillful display of repurposed materials, not numbers, that grant participants at Maker Faire social capital. In turn Bob was disappointed by Maker Faire attendees’ questions: “They just wanted to know about the sensors.” Given his time in the technological incrementalist position, Bob knew that throwing a bunch of sensors together and stirring the pot was not how things worked. They were not instantaneously additive but additive only through craft, which for him took the form of systems integration: resolving the technical problem of how to appropriate off-the-shelf sensors, and get them to interoperate such that he could upload “good” data onto the web. Fair attendees wanted to instantly imagine easy, nearly magical indicators in the same way that mass-manufactured home energy monitors represent matters as a single, supposedly tell-all number (see Figure 9 as an example). Bob was removing the black box from the wider

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practice, not just the box that contained his systems integration, and this proved disappointingly difficult to share.

Useless numbers Bob was an exception in many ways. The bulk of our research suggested that most of the effort and interest happens at the hardware level. Indeed Bob himself is a hardware enthusiast and was disappointed that his audience wanted to know about “the sensors,” since he had built the hub and not the sensors themselves. However, talk of “the sensors” was doing more than querying how the sensors acted physically. For Maker Faire attendees they also acted as a proxy for a self-evident number, a number that would allow its reader to see the world differently, perhaps make it more legible, directly through the properties of the sensors themselves. Yet sensors thought to provide such numbers more often than not fail at their task. The off-the-shelf sensing systems used by many of the home energy monitoring people with whom we spoke can be used to exemplify this problem. Within our interviews, both hardware hackers and non-hardware hackers pointed to their dissatisfaction with systems that reported “just a number.” Users only saw the number when they queried the device. Some devices provided no record of the data, and those that did provided no way of manipulating the data. There was no easy enough way of associating it with other data to make comparisons to understand what might be behind that number. Who knew whether it was a “good number” to have? In one person’s words: “So I can see the proverbial spike when the tea kettle3 goes off, but that still doesn’t help me.” This is very different from Martin’s boat, where energy consumption or production with one device is readily compared to the next. For Martin, without successful comparison, the whole system fails, the boat doesn’t run, and he is cold. Bob, through painstaking incremental development of his system that used numbers as heuristics to constantly reconfigure that system, did not suffer the uselessness of numbers. Both Martin and Bob had the right material configurations to practice energy consumption within a hermeneutic frame much broader than a single sensor number, whether that frame included Martin’s parts of a boat or Bob’s assemblage of multiple numbers and drafts. Off-the-shelf device customers tended not to have such a frame. With those people using those devices, the single sensor and its reading was taken as if it were intended as a hermeneutic reading. For people other than Bob and Martin, this difficulty manifested itself in a few ways. Some participants had been involved in hacking the wireless broadband router sold as part of the broadband connectivity service by a local



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internet service provider (ISP). The hack enabled them to download their data from Pachube more easily.4 This hack was similar to the system that Bob had shown us. Yet their thinking behind this sensor integration effort was for the most part very different from Bob’s. For many, the numbers generated were a display of the existence of the system, not necessarily an investigatory practice. For example, some had developed or used mobile phone apps to display the graph of home energy consumption remotely. There was some marginal utility in this; one person recalled being on holiday during a particularly cold winter and the power had gone out. He could see it on his phone and had a neighbor check for burst pipes. Another person turned to home energy monitoring because the electricity company had gouged him for electricity usage that he believed to be physically impossible for one house to use. A home energy monitoring system would enable him to prove his case should he be gouged again. Yet he too acknowledged that entering into a protracted fight with a large corporation takes more than just data and it might not be a fight he was prepared to enter again. More frequently, the numbers were shared with people who did not have home energy monitoring systems as an indication of what the systems can do. They were also shared with other enthusiasts as a way of discussing what kind of set up the enthusiast had. Some people were enthusiasts spreading the word. For a few in the business of “greening” homes, this practice was a sales tool. Some of these people thought about those numbers as not “yet” useful. They had not abandoned them, but there was a notion that more had to be done. This “more” presented itself as more hardware. Some had added ways of measuring heating oil consumption or gas. Such a “more” would produce more data, but the sensibility was not necessarily about the data collection per se. In fact “more data” could easily be found on the web. Our collaborator Marc Böhlen, a media studies scholar at SUNY Buffalo, had reworked the home energy data our interviewees had uploaded onto Pachube into different kinds of visualizations not available on Pachube. In the process of doing so, Marc had pulled publicly available weather data to compare with the home energy use data that our interviewees had uploaded. The thinking was that perhaps the issue was not simply one of whether the thermostat was “high” or “low,” where high represents consumptive behavior. Looking at energy use relative to outdoor temperature, and next to a graph of overall electricity consumption along the same time series, might give an indication of how hard the system was working. Although this data was readily available on the web, and it is not a large intellectual leap to note that energy consumption rises relative to weather as well as how high the indoor temperature is maintained, this was not something pursued by any of the people with whom we spoke. It seemed to them a good idea, an idea both elegant and obvious once presented. However, it was not an idea that had arisen in the process

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of deploying and using their sensor systems. What was obvious to them was only that more sensors would be needed. What is the difference between Bob, who is using temperature differences between rooms to rework his HVAC systems, and people for whom monitoring the electricity use led to a desire for more sensors monitoring other forms of energy consumption like oil and gas? In part, the instinct is the same. They are both using numbers as heuristics to reveal additional unknowns. There is an implicit acknowledgment in both that total electricity use is not in fact the same thing as “efficiency” or “greenness.” But there is a difference inasmuch as Bob was not attempting to arrive at a grand number inclusive of overall energy consumption. Rather, he was using the sensors to help him move through his house and better understand where and how his house used energy in its various rooms. A contrasting impulse is to combine overall electricity with overall oil or gas consumption to get to something one could call “total energy use” and to consider this an informational goal. This practice seemed particularly emblematic of those using these readings to display the existence of the system rather than adjust the qualities of the house and suggests that these heuristics are, rather than situating, working in the service of a kind of totalization. Even though there was widespread sentiment that total electricity consumption was, on its own, a useless number, here the impulse is to add, not situate. From plots of total electricity use over time (Figure 9), one could in fact infer a rough breakdown of some appliances in use. Interviewees could tell us from graphs when the kettle went on, the cycles of electricity use associated with their refrigerator, but not everything. With improved sensor technology we might expect the legibility of these electricity signatures to improve. Nevertheless, for most of our interviewees such breakdowns were being read as a decomposition of a total figure, not necessarily numbers in action, as Bob’s numbers were. Few people we spoke with had actually gone out and bought a more efficient refrigerator or tweaked their HVAC system. The heuristics used in the service of totalizing calculation were not numbers in action. In addition, the numbers that could have become numbers in action were rarely created. For example, a comparison between energy spikes generated by my refrigerator versus yours could in fact prompt getting a new refrigerator. We did not find any examples of people having crafted such a number. There was a sense amongst Pachube users that numbers ought to be numbers in action, although in practice they were using the numbers to demonstrate the existence of a lovingly crafted hardware hack. Our interviewees liked using Pachube because it provides data storage and visualization tools, both of which made their sensor readings more “live” than the thermostat box on a wall. Nevertheless, they were not turning to Pachube to make comparisons with other home energy monitoring systems,



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FIGURE 9   Example of home energy readouts © Dawn Nafus. or to find other datasets. In part this has to do with the material constraints Pachube posed. The website design at the time made comparisons between data feeds difficult even for this group. There were interfaces that allowed those skilled in software coding to do so, but even for skilled coders this took a good deal of time. Finally, comparisons with others were not embedded within the visualization tools on offer. The inclination to turn to yet more hardware—as opposed to more data that would have helped achieve the stated goal—revealed certain dispositions. The online information sharing that did occur traded more in hardware setup—how to take apart the router, where to source the sensors, etc.—than the procedures of sense making with the numbers that the system produced. Visualization techniques also did not circulate readily in these circles, and the keen curiosity displayed in learning how to repurpose a broadband router seemed elusive when it came to questions of what the data was actually saying. Questions like “could it be that your energy consumption is high/low relative to others because your house is old/new?” were typically answered with a degree of flatness. Our interviewees spent time building systems to collect data but were less inclined to spend time establishing ways to interpret it, perhaps because this would have required bringing in data that they were in no position to identify and access. This suggests that

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hermeneutic possibilities were proving elusive at best—disappointing even. Yet the heuristic qualities were largely ignored. These sensors were not seen as materials with which one might feel their way through iterations on the built system and associated practices. They were just “more.” As Bob’s experience shows, there does not need to be a lot of data to be satisfying, but the disappointments of hermeneutic readings of data did suggest that more was likely to be necessary.

Conclusion Returning to our original question, then, of how it is possible to think about data itself as crafted, we can suggest a few approaches. The quantitative data collected by makers in this ethnography is not the scalpel of inhuman precision Ingold fears—although some sensor enthusiasts would perhaps wish it were! Bob’s sensor system was built with counts of temperature as much as with circuit boards. It made the invisible phenomenon of airflow visible enough, through the proxy of temperature, so that he could redirect it. This practice could be thought of as one of Verran’s “clots,” holding together meaning and practice. Yet at the same time there was surprisingly little crafting of the data that was uploaded onto Pachube, even though the website was there to help people make sense of their energy consumption. The monitoring system would be considered a failure if it did not assemble a number at all, or if it crafted a wildly inconceivable number. In that sense, the numbers on Pachube mattered even if the time and effort spent creating them seemed more the point than the time spent looking at them, contemplating them, or using them. However, the disinterest in doing what Bob or Martin did shows the widespread presumption that measurement acts as a form of totalization. We do not mean that people were literally presuming that numbers were an aggregation of many things, but in the sense that they often treated sensor readings as if they were the total of what is both knowable and worth knowing. We could choose to argue that people were mistaking heuristic for hermeneutic, where, as any good scientist knows, numbers are only mere assistants to a fuller hermeneutic analysis, not to be taken at face value. Few set out to “prove” some property of electricity or conduct some complete analysis, so to argue that so many people are simply mistaken would be to assume people are trying to do science when they are not. We must then remember that our research participants live in a social world where numbers increasingly do serve as totalizations—hermeneutics unto themselves—in multiple spheres of life. They have been enacted and performed in totalizing



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schemes such as agrarian reform (Scott 1998) and growing audit cultures (Strathern 2001). The performative aspects of number have become dominant in economics in the extreme (Callon 1998). The issue is not one of lay people doing “bad science,” then. Rather, their experiences show how these larger trajectories overwhelm a more modest sense of these numbers as “mere” heuristic indexicals. In this wider context, it cannot be coincidence that numbers from sensors struggle to contain the ambitions many people have for them. This context encourages people to see the production of numbers as the production of an answer which already contains within it all the necessary components to both understand and act. Sensor enthusiasts’ failure to produce a useful number show how the dominance of totalizing numbers is incredibly difficult to change, even for people who arguably should “know better,” such as engineers. Those who “know better” are constrained by the social prevalence of totalizing numbers, which gives the impression that the practices around sensing are complete upon producing a reading. Notably, the hardware does not suffer from the impression of false completeness, and so that is what these enthusiasts choose to build upon. The people enthusiastic about the hardware hacks but bored by the numbers they produce readily admit there was very little “practical” about building elaborate sensor hubs. On this count, they were largely in agreement with the people we spoke with who rejected home energy monitoring devices entirely, because they saw little practical purpose. In Pryke’s account of financial visualizations mentioned earlier, those data were every bit the same kind of prosthetic described in O’Connor’s account of embodied knowledge in glassblowing. In sensors, we have numbers that sometimes serve this role, and enabled people like Bob to tinker with that which they could not see directly. Where sensor enthusiasts attended to the craft of number, they created for themselves a fuller “basket” whether a boat or a house—to weave through in embodied ways. When they crafted only the hardware, under the impression that the numbers had only hermeneutic qualities, and didn’t require crafting, the sensor systems largely failed. Their numbers became boring to their makers, not communicating any information at all. In the cultural and gender politics that would situate craft as the material culture of the subaltern, and science as the material culture of the dominant, we should remember how numbers fall into disservice. When engineers effectively act like the subaltern by using numbers in the same way basketweavers count knots, they end up building systems they find useful. Those systems are no god-tricks: what works in Bob’s house likely won’t work in yours. It is a very real commitment to a specific place. The craft of everyday bench science is rife with situated, cautious numbers and still, in popular accounts of science, these very same numbers become

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unmoored from their material context. Both scientific practice and our wider social world are rife with both kinds of numbers, but only one occupies a position of privilege. Only one claims to speak grandly as a stand-alone truth. Sensor projects are more commonly discussed as a form of citizen science rather than a form of craft, as if science were entirely distinguishable from craft. Their connection to grand claims-making is what gives them the same privilege science has. Yet it is precisely this urge to make numbers mean more than they can—to make 77-kilowatt hours into “Greenness”—that makes numbers generated from this position of privilege so rarely useful.

8 Visions of Excess Crafting and Consuming Good Chocolate in France and the United States Susan Terrio

Introduction

D

rawing on ethnographic and archival research on the production, exchange, and consumption of artisanal chocolate in France and the United States, this paper explores the renewed interest in the conditions of craft production and the specialized consumer knowledge of prestige foods that inform the search for distinctive chocolates. It explores the discursive, conceptual and moral claims made about twenty-first century craft as a distinctive type of production. It considers the ways that craft goods such as handcrafted chocolates mark and disrupt boundaries central to anthropology, namely work and labor, autonomy and standardization, tradition and modernity, artisanship and art as well as nature and culture. This paper examines the global gentrification of chocolate taste and the promotion of dark chocolate as the standard of distinction for consumers. This process relies on the terminology and standards borrowed from wine connoisseurship including a focus on climate, terroir (soil), vintages, and varietals. It compares and contrasts the ways that French and American producers, consumers, and taste makers construct knowledge about and assign value to good chocolate.

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Chocolate, craft, and culture in France and the United States In the debates over what counts as dessert cuisine and quality chocolate, the French and American cases are particularly instructive. In both places industrial agriculture has diluted or destroyed regional cuisines, reshaped the structure of meals, and changed eating habits. In both places producers and consumers of handcrafted chocolates share a critique of industrial food production, reject the uniformity of taste, and develop a local commitment to place or terroir. Yet important differences remain. In contrast to the United States, the introduction of genetically modified foods and the use of growth hormones for livestock generate widespread controversy; French food producers have, with state support, used labels to certify the production methods and the provenance of food. Most French consumers have ready access to fresh local foods in farmers’ markets and regularly patronize family entrepreneurs in the food trades. The label, fabrication artisanale, still connotes honest work and quality products produced on site, whether it corresponds to reality or not. Despite reports of a gastronomic crisis, the French culinary arts are central to national identity and remain profitable global exports. Rising obesity rates linked to fast food outlets and processed foods have raised alarms in both nations although French diets are much lower in salt, fats, processed sugars, and sweetened drinks than their American counterparts. In the US, an alternate food economy based on year-round farmers’ markets, local co-ops, sustainable agriculture, and handcrafted foods remains an elite, urban phenomenon.1 Class-based food choices are much more pronounced in the United States than in France. Americans in different classes eat different foods: processed American cheese versus Humboldt Fog Cypress Grove chèvre or Hershey’s milk chocolate versus Green Mountain or Equal Exchange organic chocolates. A national French cuisine, in contrast, signifies a range of commonly recognized foods that people all eat and have strong opinions about. Those at the bottom of the social ladder prize the same foods as those at the top but eat them less frequently and in smaller quantities (Mintz 1996: 98). Different notions of nature and culture also shape food production and consumption. In France good food is understood to be highly mediated by cultural operations that involve technique, skill, and the necessary mastery of forces in nature. Thus, the French debates surrounding chocolate manufacture in the late 1990s centered on the threat of the homogenization of taste and the loss of local craft traditions posed by intensified competition and new European Union production regulations. These regulations permitted manufacturers to substitute specific amounts of the naturally occurring cocoa



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butter in chocolate with vegetable fats that were significantly cheaper and easier to produce industrially. Outraged producers and informed consumers decried such adulterated chocolate. They viewed it less as unnatural than as lacking in the cultural attributes linked to French gastronomy and artisanship. In response to increased competition from mass-produced chocolates, artisans emphasized authentic craft culture and historic patrimony. They celebrated the triumph of culture over nature in the making of refined chocolates. For the French, nature and culture are not opposites but represent two dimensions of a continuous process of development. The essential binary in the production of quality French food exists between culture and non-culture where the latter is associated with global technoscience-driven manufacture and the former connotes a national heritage (Heller 2007: 613).2 In contrast to France where quality foods exemplify culture and civilization, American producers reify the natural qualities of the chocolates they craft. Their origin stories center on the untouched jungles where the cacao trees grow and on the discovery of the wild natural areas that give cacao bean varietals their distinctive properties and taste. Like the artisanal cheese producers studied by Paxson (2012), US chocolatiers emphasize their status as small producers but lack guild traditions so they appropriate European models that emphasize the priority of terroir, tradition, and culture. They also draw on American notions of dynamic entrepreneurship and technical prowess, claiming a tradition of innovation in product creation and marketing design. In the United States when producers and consumers reject bad chocolates they do so because they are unhealthy and unnatural not because they fail to exemplify cultural savoir-faire or are “un-American.” Despite the many differences in the histories of craft, the importance of the culinary arts and gastronomic culture, and the transformations in the manufacture and consumption of chocolate, French and American craft producers and consumers of chocolate now face the same globalized market forces and evolving taste trends.

Contingency, conflict, and claims French and American producers of handcrafted chocolates face constraints and contested claims in the organization and scale of production, the recruitment of skilled labor, the promotion of artisanal goods, and the education of consumer taste. Like the French organic farmers discussed by Naji (this volume), French and American chocolatiers resist producing on a larger scale in order to retain control over their work and businesses. This choice has ideological components as they situate themselves within a moral

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economy of honest work and fair trade against the capitalist drive for profit. At the same time, the intensive self-exploitation and long hours that small businesses require means that crafts people have little time for activities other than work. In the development and marketing of craft skills, artisanal chocolatiers face the same dilemmas as the Sirwa Moroccan weavers studied by Naji (this volume) who are embedded within a local community of practice, dependent on family labor, and ambivalent about the impact of wide recognition in a prestige market economy. Local demand is predicated on the cultivation of personal relations and loyalty among a clientele whereas recognition in a tourist or international market, as in the case of the Oaxacan wood sculptors (Cant, this volume), requires educating consumers on how to evaluate quality workmanship, to identify hierarchies of skill, and to differentiate between art and craft. Claims of authorship are central to the value of handcrafted goods like wood carvings, ceramic pots or chocolate candies. These claims are contingent on market conditions and on competition. They are also subject to challenges and counter claims. Like the Taiwanese potters studied by Gowlland (this volume), French chocolatiers experienced international competition and lost market share forcing them to reinvent themselves as master artisans and their products as luxury goods. The result involved the creation of new hierarchies of skill and the assertion of new claims: glaze artists versus artisan potters in Taiwan and confectionery artists versus artisan chocolatiers in France. The politics of demand and the production of new taste standards involve a very complicated dialogue among producers, middlemen, consumers, and state representatives to determine product design, variety, market niche, and price (see Milgram on the nito reed basket industry in the Philippines, this volume). This dialogue entails a strategic manipulation of the gaps in knowledge that accompany the entry and flow of goods in the marketplace. These gaps intensify as the complexity of flows and the distance from cultivation and consumption sites increase. The creation of demand for commodities like chocolate, baskets, or pots, which can be mass-produced, requires the considerable elaboration and management of the knowledge surrounding consumption. More complex knowledge about consumption in turn demands more detailed knowledge about production as a means to authenticate claims of superior quality. Consumers must be able to authenticate the rare craft version from the common industry one. Artisans must make visible both the human labor embodied in the goods and a particular form of production: craft. Knowledge about specialty goods in the global market requires both quantitative techno-scientific criteria and qualitative techne-derived measures. The claims surrounding distinctive artisanal chocolate in both France and the US



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are legitimated through techno-scientific measures that center on farming and chemistry and techne criteria that draw on craft savoir-faire, heritage, and culture. Techno-scientific claims involve knowledge of tropical botany, fermentation techniques, bean varietals, growing regions, harvest year, and cocoa vintages. They are also concerned with uniform standards of food safety, quality control, and chemical additives. Techne-driven claims focus on skill, living tradition, and the crafting of unique goods linked to particular places and small-scale masters. These claims also involve social distinctions of taste, gastronomic expertise, and the chemistry of flavor, especially as it relates to the percentage of cocoa solids.

Methodology The research for this chapter draws on long-term (from 1988 to 1998; from 2009 to 2012) ethnographic and archival research in Paris and southwest France (Terrio 2000: 269–71), including the analysis of chocolate tastings, training classes, production processes, and retail sales observed in small chocolate businesses as well as interviews I or others conducted with French and US artisanal chocolate producers and consumers and on the results of five focus groups I conducted in Washington, DC, New York, and Camp Hill, Pennsylvania between 2009 and 2011.3 These focus groups were organized around blind chocolate tastings and open-ended questionnaires. Participants were asked to present and explain an image or object that illustrated what chocolate meant to them. In contrast to the numerous chocolate tastings I observed or participated in France, where experts guided novices and it was assumed that dark bittersweet chocolate was best, I took no active role in guiding their ratings. I purchased five or six specialty solid chocolate bars that varied both in the percentage of cocoa solids and in price (from $3.75 to $17.00). I chose a mix of European and American producers and included at least two bars that were labeled as organic/fair-trade products. In each tasting chocolates produced from a single-origin bean varietal made up one half of the total. The tastings followed a progression from sweet milk chocolate with 34 percent cocoa solids to bitter dark chocolate bars with 55, 72, 81 and 100 percent respectively. In addition, at least two of the chocolates in each tasting had “exotic” flavors such as pepper, sea salt, cinnamon or orange or cherry. I provided a rating table with broad categories such as sweetness, bitterness, aroma, texture, astringency, acidity, and aftertaste. I asked participants to rate those attributes on a pleasure scale from 1 to 5 with 5 being the most pleasurable and one the least pleasurable. Two of the five focus groups were comprised of undergraduate students enrolled in anthropology courses taught by colleagues at Georgetown

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University in 2009 and three were held in private homes and included middleaged adults who were working full- or part-time or were retired. There were a total of forty-nine participants who ranged in age from eighteen to seventyfive. Three quarters were women and of that number thirty-three self-identified as white, eleven described themselves with an ethnic or national marker (Greek-American, European-American, Irish-American, Mexican-American, Turkish-American, Latina or Jewish), and five self-identified as Black, African American or Caribbean American. All but three would be classified as middle or upper middle class by virtue of their educational levels, occupation, and income. Highly educated participants were overrepresented in the sample. Only one participant of the forty-nine had a high school education whereas thirty-one had either completed or were enrolled in four-year undergraduate programs and seventeen of the forty-nine had education beyond a B.A. or B.S. degree. The participants were recruited by their professors or by the tasting hosts. They were told that the event was organized for academic purposes by a Georgetown researcher. I did no pre-screening for chocolate aficionados and discovered after the tastings began that eight of the participants rarely eat chocolate. Three participants in the Georgetown focus groups indicated that they do not like chocolate and never eat it. Three participants in the Georgetown groups actually declined to participate in the tasting. Two participants in the New York group and two in the Pennsylvania group stopped tasting the last two samples with high cocoa levels. One of those in the New York tasting admitted that she would have “spit out the last chocolate” with 100 percent cocoa solids if she could have.

The global gentrification of chocolate The story of the gentrification of chocolate begins in France in the 1980s with a nationwide campaign which aimed to educate consumers to appreciate locally produced dark chocolate that is “long on the palate, full-bodied, has the right degree of acidity, a rich, balanced bouquet, and a wonderful finish.” Producers and taste makers collaborated to create new esoteric standards borrowed from wine connoisseurship that differentiated authentic French chocolate handmade in family businesses from the mass-produced foreign fakes that were then flooding the confectionery market (Terrio 2000). Gentrified chocolate taste standards took hold in France and were exported to the United States in the 1990s where a bittersweet dark chocolate vogue has been reshaping the confectionery landscape ever since. Dark chocolate is featured in the style and food sections of newspapers, in cookbooks, print and visual ads, blogs, and new retail outlets.4 Consumer



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Reports recognized its importance in the American market for the first time in 2002 by rating nineteen brands of chocolate. Alluding to new taste standards and to more complicated criteria for evaluating good chocolate, one Washington Post journalist lamented that “once, any kid with a few coins and a sweet tooth could make sense of the chocolate candy counter. Now you need strength in mathematics, geography, and linguistics.”5 In 2002 the owner of a Greenwich Village business, the Chocolate Bar, reported that increasing numbers of American consumers “come in off the street and ask about cocoa solids and couverture.” Five years later a food critic concluded that dark chocolate has become the sign of a discriminating palate (Buford 2007). The choice of a $10.00 beans-to-bar chocolate made by a producer in the United States or the preference for a single-origin, estate-grown chocolate from Hawaii over one from Venezuela or Madagascar has become a serious consumption game. Gentrified dark chocolates in France and the US are, to quote anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, “good to think,” but in different ways.

Contemporary craft production In contrast to many French producers who were from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds, all of the US producers of chocolate that I interviewed were middle or upper class. A gendered division of labor in France marked by the predominance of male producers is less pronounced in the United States where there are many female chocolatiers. Whereas all of the French producers I studied had completed apprenticeships in the food trades or had male relatives who were owners of craft businesses, those in the United States who created businesses did so after training for or working in other professions such as fashion, design, law, philanthropy, or corporate finance. Some left voluntarily or lost their jobs when firms and foundations downsized. A number of the producers retrained at formal cooking schools in the United States, France, and Canada or used tutorials to learn how to make chocolate. All loved to cook, drew inspiration from European models, and defined their work as contributing to a chocolate haute cuisine for the US market. They stressed the importance of technical prowess, intimate knowledge of the raw material, and positioned themselves as innovators dedicated to designing gourmet flavor combinations. On the one hand, they described an ethical commitment to small-scale production—staying small to assure quality—and personalized relations with sophisticated customers who valued distinctive craft goods. On the other, they recognized the need to educate American consumers on how to differentiate products based on provenance and terroir and how to consume dark chocolate as a prestige food

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suitable for tastings, wine pairings, and elegant gifts, not as a mere massproduced snack. In urban centers French consumers have a choice of small producers of chocolate that they can patronize. They were deeply concerned with the provenance, purity, and freshness of dipped chocolates. The French consumers were particularly attuned to shelf life and watchful for the presence of chemical additives or artificial substitutes such as vegetable fats for cocoa butter. Americans, on the other hand, shared little to no concern for these factors. French consumers selected chocolates by both brand and local producers, evaluating them by the skill of the artisan, the reputation of the family business owners, and the aesthetic presentation of the goods. Whereas the French purchased the goods by particular artisans, Americans focused almost exclusively on the product. Most indicated that the taste, presentation, and cost of chocolate were more important than how or where it was made. Only 15 percent of the US focus group participants spontaneously mentioned the importance of purchasing organic or fair-trade chocolates.6 They evaluated chocolates by brand and availability in particular retail outlets and focused on mouth feel noting their preference for chocolates that were creamy and melted in the mouth. Both US consumers and producers associated artisanal chocolates with a tradition of invention. In their view, handcrafted products bore the individual stamp of the producer’s creativity and skill as evident in the type of dipped candies made and the innovative flavor combinations used in chocolate centers. Only a few consumers spoke of the valued mark of craftsmanship such as a lack of uniformity in the size and shape of candies. One Pennsylvania participant raved about the individualized creations of a San Francisco chocolatier that resembled art. For their part, producers linked the conception of the product to its execution by moving aspects of production such as handdipping chocolates into the retail store or by inviting journalists and critics into the workshop. At the same time, participants in the Georgetown and Pennsylvania groups noted the dishonesty of fake producers who bought wholesale chocolates, made few or no substantive changes, marked up the price, repackaged them as handmade goods, and then re-sold them at a profit.

French consumption Until the 1980s what counted as French taste in chocolate was not at all clear. French customers patronized only family confectionery businesses, purchased both dark and milk chocolate candies, chose from fewer house



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specialties, saw virtually no confectionery art, and had no specialized guides with which to rate the best chocolates. The French ate locally produced chocolates on ritualized social occasions at widely spaced intervals and chocolate consumption was constrained by prescriptive rules and taboos. For this reason, there existed comparatively little knowledge, discourse or taste standards to evaluate quality chocolate. In the 1980s French chocolate producers faced the challenge of intensified international competition from products mass-produced by Swiss, American, and Belgian firms. Worse, foreign franchise outlets targeted the market for confectionery gifts by selling industrial candies in storefronts that closely resembled French craft boutiques. Franchise outlets cost a fraction of a fully equipped workshop and adjoining boutique and retailed their candies for one half to one third the price of French candies. Franchises appropriated French merchandising and sales techniques by using aesthetic packaging and assigning evocative names to individual candies. Between 1983 and 1989 these outlets captured 48 percent of the confectionery gift market; 79 percent of the franchises were Belgian. The success of mass-produced chocolates, marketed as handmade, was particularly threatening to the French because it represented an incursion into sensitive cultural terrain. The Belgians, like the Swiss, have long-standing, internationally recognized traditions of excellence producing high quality chocolate. That they chose France, land of gastronomic renown, for launching franchises selling inexpensive, mass-produced candies was galling. That the franchises rapidly gained market share was intolerable. The challenge was to define new criteria of connoisseurship and to provide French consumers with the specialized vocabulary they would need in order to distinguish between authentic [French] chocolates and fake [foreign] substitutes. Together with state representatives and members of the French culinary establishment, producers codified and promoted a new taste standard in ads, packaging, guides, tastings, cooking demonstrations, food shows, and state-sponsored craft contests. It was promoted at home and exported globally. One guide published by the Paris chocolatier, Robert Linxe, owner of the La Maison du Chocolat and Legion of Honor recipient, provided a detailed chocolate vocabulary that ran to twenty pages and included finely differentiated terms for the look, feel, taste, sound and smell of chocolate (1992). In published guides, chocolate tastings, and window displays, experts emphasized bean varietals, estate growths, climate, terroir and exceptional vintages: les grands crus du chocolat. They also promoted a chocolate haute cuisine based on the fresh products from local regions such as cream from Normandy, butter from the Charentes and almonds from Provence, novel flavorings such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon and fennel, unique pairings such as wine and chocolate, and bittersweet chocolate with high percentages of cocoa solids and less sugar.

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Since 1988 French chocolate has been transformed from a traditional product sold primarily as a gift at special occasions to a good newly reinvested with gourmet cachet and cultural authenticity. Chocolate now appears in new culturally relevant categories for personal consumption (as opposed to gifts), ranking in connoisseur tastings, and purchase as expensive confectionery art that is commissioned for private sale and designed for entry into prestigious national craft contests. Every year new events are organized in which chocolate is exuberantly displayed as an object of fetishized spectacle, artistic prowess and culinary refinement. In the 1990s one of the newest additions to the Parisian exhibits of consumer goods known as the Salons, was the Salon du Chocolat. When it opened in 1995, the Salon drew 40,000 visitors and since then the number had more than doubled. Visitors can witness the spectacle of chocolate being melted, tempered, handdipped, sculpted, molded, even modeled in an haute couture fashion review. In 1990 craft leaders successfully staged the first Best Craftsman of France contest (Meilleur Ouvrier de France) for chocolate and sugar candy producers. This is the most selective and prestigious state award for artisans. Since then six contests have produced only nineteen Best Craftsmen of France. The signature candies and intricate artistic pieces that are the centerpiece of the contest must transcend the standards of the artisanal craft to enter the rarified domain of the fine arts. The challenge is to prioritize form and aesthetics over function and pragmatics, on the one hand. On the other hand, original art and candy specialties must balance respect for tradition and the mastery of technique with the spirit of innovation. In 1998 craft leaders created the Académie française du chocolat et de la confiserie, an association of powerful producers, scientists, agronomists, academics, and gastronomes. Explicitly modeled on the literary institution inaugurated in the seventeenth century, the forty chocolate immortals have undertaken the weighty task of writing the first official confectionery dictionary. Ten years after its creation, in early 2008, members of the Académie Française du Chocolat et de la Confiserie, were asked to produce a definitive definition of chocolats à la française. Their goal was to have chocolate registered as part of the French gastronomic meal on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage forms. They emphasized techne-derived criteria in the definition of French chocolates as “rich in cocoa solids, made with pure cocoa butter, and as products that exemplify a culture of excellence, creativity, and innovation as well as the brilliance of French artisans” (Urban 2008: 21). The creation of consumer associations and the establishment of esoteric criteria are now central to claims of craft and connoisseurship. Such criteria serve to categorize chocolates, objectively and authoritatively, separating them into a hierarchy of growths, like vintage wines. Yet the codification



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of objective taste standards is contingent and contested for a number of reasons. Most French and American artisans no longer make chocolate from the raw material of fermented cacao beans. They purchase blocks of chocolate, couverture, which are mass-produced from blends of different bean varietals. Some master chocolatiers, by virtue of their training and travel, do have direct experience with beans and knowledge of different vintages. Many others do not have this empirical knowledge and learn secondhand about the raw material and cacao plantations largely from marketing brochures, product labels, and organized tastings. Claims surrounding estate growths and vintage beans are problematic because no official classification of cacao plantations exists and cultivation standards vary widely in the developing world. The search for cheaper and more abundant yields led to the seeding of cacao plantations around the world and the creation of new varieties of bean varietals that have higher yields and are resistant to disease. The earliest cacao-producing nations in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, which provide the source of many of the names used by European manufacturers of couverture and specialty bars, such as Guayaquil in Ecuador, were gradually displaced as cultivation spread steadily eastward to the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast in the nineteenth century. It is supremely ironic that the West African nations that provided much of the slave labor for early European cacao plantations have become the world’s leading producers of cacao. In the twenty-first century French consumption of chocolate is still marked by contradictory associations and culturally specific notions about the health and status and equilibrium of the consumer. On the one hand, chocolate encompasses meanings of pleasure, strength, and celebration. It is a source of vitamins and energy. As a sign for seasonal celebrations and familial rites of passage, chocolate is perceived as a constituent element of the social order. Chocolate gifts express and affirm existing social relations in good and bad times. Chocolate is associated with high-status images and a long tradition of gastronomic excellence and artisanship. Consumed in moderation, it is a sign for passion, love, and playful eroticism. On the other hand, persistent debates continue to rage, concerning chocolate as a drug, stimulant, and source of myriad ailments from migraine headaches, weight gain, and high cholesterol to indigestion in its peculiarly French form of crise de foie or liver complaint. Contemporary debates center on suspect additives which are decried as a lowering of craft and taste standards (Terrio 2000: 278). Chocolate, therefore, also connotes illness, overindulgence, and can be a symbol of deceit, betrayal, and sexual exploitation. Consumed in excess, it is thought to pose the threat of social disruption.

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Gentrifying chocolate taste in the United States In 1998 the French organizers of the Salon du Chocolat brought it to New York where it drew over 10,000 visitors in its first year. Since then chocolate connoisseurship has taken many forms:  1 New boutique chocolatiers (both European and American) who sell

freshly made candies flavored with chili, cardamom, curry, lavender, jasmine, thyme, wasabi.  2 The arrival of specialty chocolate bars that sell flights of chocolate for

tastings.7  3 The production of chocolate bars identified by a vintage year and

beans grown in a single region.  4 The proliferation of web sites devoted to chocophiles.  5 Consumer associations like Chantal Coady’s Campaign for Real

Chocolate.  6 Ads, cookbooks, cable TV shows and producer newsletters featuring

chocolate.  7 Culinary and wine publications that rate high-end specialty chocolates.  8 Museum exhibits devoted to chocolate, including the Chicago Field

Museum.  9 The arrival of well-known French craft brands in New York such as La

Maison du Chocolat. 10 The creation of a new community of practice that includes talented

newcomers, many of whom left other professions before starting their own businesses and were either self-taught or trained in culinary schools. Critic Bill Buford described a new breed of producers whose “compulsive, insistent focus” is on the origin of beans and on the uniqueness of tropical terroir. They are “uniformly earnest, tell no jokes, and seem to have no interest in selling … what they made” (2007). The first decade of the twentyfirst century saw scores of chocolate businesses specializing in high-end products open in metropolitan areas. Their devotion to creating and selling intense dark chocolate is driving an increase in sales that are expected to reach five and a half billion dollars annually by the end of 2012. Whereas the French consumers I studied were learning to discuss cacao bean varietals, estate terroir, even when they were wrong or had



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incomplete information, and specific taste attributes, the American consumers I questioned relished a holistic, multisensory taste experience giving little attention to the origin of the raw material. In contrast to the French who eat much less chocolate per capita than other Europeans and Americans but who embrace it as an important and pleasurable part of seasonal celebrations, Americans eat chocolate in many different forms and describe it as irresistible but also tend to judge it an unhealthy food. Only eight people in all the groups noted that dark chocolate is good for you. Americans are ambivalent about consuming chocolate and have culturally specific notions about its physical properties and symbolic importance. In contrast to the French consumers who emphasized the erotic power of chocolate and enthusiastically shared consumption stories that celebrated the loss of willpower, Americans were much more circumspect about the power of chocolate to tempt and to seduce them. On the one hand, they associated chocolate with happiness, comfort, warmth, nurturance, and pleasure. They shared pictures of children swaddled in cotton sheets, women lounging in satin bed covers, huggable dolls, steaming hot cocoa, chocolatesmeared faces, melted chocolate or chocolate desserts. An overwhelming majority linked chocolate to childhood and shared their memories of eating chocolate in birthday cakes, cookies, candy bars or ice cream at holidays. They overwhelmingly associated childhood with milk chocolate or baker’s chocolate. One woman recited from memory the Nestlé recipe for chocolate chip cookies that she first made with her mother. Others mentioned cheap mass-produced treats such as Kit Kat, Mounds or M&Ms. One New Yorker specified that these treats were “primitive and unsophisticated but luscious.” Many described tasting chocolate for the first time in brownies, molded Easter bunnies, the chocolate chunks in Neapolitan ice cream, or the dark coating of an orange peel. One native-born Australian in the Pennsylvania group placed one Hershey kiss on the table and described the candy that he received from American soldiers during the Second World War. A childhood treat at the holidays in the late 1940s involved just one Hershey kiss purchased from the corner store. Although the vast majority of US participants spontaneously associated chocolate with pleasure, only a few viewed pleasure in sensual or sexual terms. This was a stark contrast to French consumers who delighted in sharing stories of the aphrodisiac properties of chocolate and of the sexual misadventures that resulted from excess consumption among Aztec and French royals. Rather, the pleasures that Americans derived from chocolate were individual enhancements—more energy, less stress, happier moods, soothing calm—gleaned from eating chocolate when they were alone. Most American participants justified chocolate as a reward that they had earned and tied it to a moral calculus grounded in work, ethics, and good

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living. Those who ate chocolate more than two times per week described it as an individual habit that did not require sharing. This view differed considerably from French consumption patterns that were closely tied to social occasions and the exchange of gifts. Only two of the forty-nine US participants described eating dark chocolates every day and when others expressed surprise or openly sniggered at these admissions, the participants hastened to justify their consuming habits by noting the health benefits. They noted that dark chocolate has lower fat, less sugar, fewer additives, antioxidants, and a caffeine-like substance and it could “lower blood pressure,” provide “natural energy,” and was “guilt-free.” In contrast, those who ate it occasionally told chocolate stories in which the taste experience was closely tied to social context such as a dinner with friends at a special restaurant, a holiday celebration with family or spontaneous outings after a final exam. One Georgetown student recounted at length the intensely dark, velvety molten lava cake dessert she first shared with friends at a restaurant and then made at home for her family. Although most of the participants readily admitted to liking or loving chocolate, American consumers were more apt than their French counterparts to transform its positive attributes into powerful negative effects. They associated chocolate with guilt, gluttony, drug addiction, and obesity. They tended to cast its risks in moral terms linking them to individual failings such as a shameful loss of self-control or even social pretension. Whereas French consumers welcomed expensive gifts of chocolates, Americans were ambivalent about and resisted gifts that presented them with a temptation that might be impossible to resist. Many participants in the focus groups mentioned cravings for chocolate that were extreme and induced guilt because it caused them or those they loved to cave in and gorge themselves with whatever was available from cheap drugstore chocolate bars, supermarket cookies, and stale brownies to expensive specialty chocolates. This reminded me of a Christmas gift I offered my dissertation adviser. I sent him a kilo box of handmade French chocolates and he shared them with six dinner guests. They initially resisted “such a rich dessert” but ended up finishing the entire box that evening. In this vein, a number of Georgetown students visualized their cravings as inner beasts and one cookie lover evoked the “cookie monster” to describe her inability to resist “wolfing down” freshly baked cupcakes or cookies. One Pennsylvania participant depicted herself as a crazy woman who needed a chocolate “fix” whenever she was stressed and illustrated this with a wild-eyed figurine. Middle-aged adults in all groups described chocolate as a guilty indulgence better hidden from friends and family. One New Yorker “confessed” that on the return flight home from Europe she ate an entire box of handmade Belgian chocolates that were intended as a gift for the hostess of our tasting. Others shared guilty



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testimonials to their chocolatiers: “Don’t tell my husband I bought these!” “If I bought those for my wife for Valentine’s Day she would kill me” or “I love your chocolate more than my boyfriend!”8

Chocolate as gift All the French consumers in this study associated chocolate closely with gifts made on special occasions whereas only half of the US participants said that they offered expensive handcrafted chocolates as gifts. In contrast to the French consumers who used chocolate gifts to affirm a wide web of social ties in situations marked by celebration, gratitude, loss, or political patronage, most of the Americans I questioned gave chocolate gifts much less readily, prioritized cost and presentation, relied on known brands rather than local producers, and used them as social currency somewhat restrictively to mark relations among close family and social intimates at holidays or important social occasions. Those who did demonstrate knowledge of local producers in metropolitan areas including New York, Washington, and San Francisco never identified them as skilled craftspeople but rather appreciated their talent as innovative cooks or confectionery artists.9 At the same time a number emphasized that handmade goods, that they or others made, were the best gifts for loved ones. Americans were hesitant to offer expensive designer chocolates as a gift because they didn’t “know enough,” their friends or family members “were watching their weight,” or they feared that the cost/quality ratio would not be understood or appreciated. A New York chocophile described two unsettling gift experiences. At a workplace gift exchange where the cost per gift was limited, she chose a four-piece box of specialty chocolates and was mortified when the recipient complained loudly: “What’s this?? Is this all I get!?” She also related spending an exorbitant sum on a large box of dipped chocolates for her sister’s birthday because, although her sister loved fine chocolate, she “would never spend that amount on herself.” Again, the chocophile was angry to learn that instead of keeping and eating the chocolate, her sister gave it all away at the law firm where she worked. The giver viewed this as a selfless offering that was not intended to call attention to its economic value. Rather, it affirmed the family ties and intimate knowledge of a sibling’s personality and buying habits. But a gesture offered for an unusual individual indulgence was redistributed and misused as a social resource for a professional benefit, an act that for the giver diminished its value as a gift. If Americans were hesitant about purchasing expensive confections, some participants in all the focus groups described the baked goods they made

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with chocolate and gave as gifts. They recounted the special care and time they invested in the choice of costly, high quality ingredients in order to make gifts for parents, siblings or lovers. Six different female participants described spending far more on costly ingredients—specifically expensive European chocolate—than they would have on prepared chocolates. Handcrafted goods like five-layer chocolate cake, peppermint bark candy, chocolate-coated strawberries made at home do significant cultural work because they move the mass-produced baking chocolate or cocoa powder from the realm of the standardized, impersonal commodity into the realm of personalized gift relations. They make visible the human labor and time invested in the product.

Is dark chocolate better? Interestingly, none of the US focus group members had participated in an organized chocolate tasting or used a rating scale that asked them to isolate specific properties. Nonetheless, the New York and Pennsylvania groups were particularly adept at using the tasting categories to differentiate among the smell, bite, mouth feel, bitterness, sweetness, and aftertaste of the bars they sampled. In October 2011 for the first time I organized two tastings that included two beans-to-bar chocolates with 72 and 81 percent cocoa solids and a distinctly different mouth feel as well as a French brand made with 100 percent cocoa solids. After tasting these three bars, participants in the New York and Pennsylvania groups made graphic comparisons to register their dislike for chocolate that tasted like “blood,” “iron filings,” had a texture like “shattered shale” or smelled like “the fumes from a Nascar engine.” Some even intimated that the samples tasted cheap and one participant was certain that they “came from Wal Mart.” Until very recently Americans have shown a marked preference for sweet milk chocolates and the US market has been dominated by large industrialized producers such as Hershey and Mars. A majority of the middle-aged adults in the three focus groups held in private homes knew that they should like dark chocolate and associated it with good taste and social distinction. They claimed to have always liked dark chocolate or to have learned to like it as adults. Nevertheless, their actual ratings of the three darkest chocolate bars belied these claims. Their highest ratings went to the 55 percent bar with hints of orange and the 63 percent bar flavored with chocolate nibs and sea salt and their lowest ratings to the expensive, bitter bars with the largest percentage of cocoa solids. Those participants also demonstrated a marked preference for chocolates that were blended with flavors such as salt, pepper, spices, or fruits such as orange or cherries. As one New Yorker put it, “Dark chocolate



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should be blended with stuff.” The tasting did not change established preferences. Participants who came as long-standing consumers of sweet candy bars and milk chocolate had their opinions confirmed. In contrast, before the Georgetown tastings nine out of twenty-four participants expressed a preference for milk chocolate or spontaneously associated it with the category of chocolate. They told chocolate tales that centered on cheap, mass-produced candies. After tasting the chocolates, fourteen of the twenty-one who participated in the tasting gave the highest marks to the darkest chocolates. I participated in a number of chocolate tastings in France, notably one in the southwest city of Pau in 1991 attended by 250 people. The tasting was organized and presided over by a well-known local chocolatier who explained that he wanted “to communicate the message about vintage cacao bean growths and the essential difference between handcrafted and mass-produced chocolate.” He had the audience taste four different chocolates ranging from a milk chocolate to a bittersweet dark chocolate with 35 and 70 percent cocoa solids respectively. The audience responded with a loud chorus of appreciative comments after they tasted the first and second chocolates but their positive reactions were noticeably subdued by the time they sampled the third chocolate with sixty-two cocoa solids. Undaunted the chocolatier pressed on. To prepare his audience for “ecstasy,” a chocolate with over 70 percent cocoa solids he instructed them to block and unblock their noses. He told them that this was “a little insider’s trick to allow the initial bitterness to give way to the sublime aftertaste.” When asked to vote for their taste preferences, the vast majority raised their hands for the first and second chocolates, an outcome the organizer did not report in an article he wrote for the national trade journal, La Confiserie.

Conclusion This research suggests that French and American consumers exhibited roughly the same preferences for dark chocolates with no more than half of cocoa solids. These tastings illustrate how taste is created for foods newly invested with esoteric cachet and cultural authenticity. Since the 1990s more French and American consumers have embraced the standard of handcrafted dark chocolate blended with distinctive local flavors and products. This research also suggests that younger consumers in France and the United States may acquire a taste for products that exhibit the powerful subtleties of the cacao bean, innovative flavors, and the symbolic value of place. Like the French artisans who cling to small batch production and personalized goods, the new founders and owners of boutique chocolate shops in

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the United States engage in satisfying work rather than mere labor through the production and sale of prestige goods that bear their personal stamp. In the creation of highly individualized goods using distinctly American flavors such as pumpkin, cranberries or bourbon, they work backward from European models that emphasize the priority of techne-derived criteria and technique as well as techno-scientific measures such as tropical botany, crop yields, and sustainable agriculture. Drawing on American notions of dynamic entrepreneurship and technical prowess, they deliver goods that exemplify a tradition of innovation in product design and marketing. At the same time, they seek to renew a tradition of personalized customer relations that links their work in small businesses to a moral economy of small-scale producers and an ethical commitment to quality. Their new dialogue with consumers regarding the authenticity and cachet of American couture chocolates challenges the divide between artisanship and art as well as autonomy and standardization. Like the French, consumers of prestige chocolates handmade in the US are invited to prioritize form over function, originality over tradition, and aesthetics over pragmatics. It remains to be seen if they will forego the sweet, milk chocolates that have dominated confectionery sales here in favor of what one New York chocolatier described as her “uniquely complex flavors” and the luscious experience which highlights both provenance and taste “within each beautiful work of original art.”10

9 Creativity and Tradition Keeping Craft Alive among Moroccan Carpet Weavers and French Organic Farmers Myriem Naji

T

his chapter compares two instances of craft in two contexts with the aim of showing how variable the status of craft can be in different historical circumstances. More specifically it explores contrasted accessibility of agency for craftspeople. The first ethnography focuses on female weavers in the Sirwa, southern Morocco, one of the main regions of carpet production for the international market. It is based on seventeen months of participant observation fieldwork in producers’ households and marketplaces in 2003–5. The second case study involves some thirty organic food producers in the south-west of France whom I have been interviewing since 2010 in their workplace. This chapter is divided into two parts, each focusing on one of the communities. Each part starts with a brief introduction of the setting, and then moves on to describe how the subjectivities of these craftsmen are shaped by their practice and the socio-political context in which they evolve. A significant feature of craft is its embodied and “processual” dimension. I argue that these material and physical aspects of making affect craftspeople and transforms them morally. By repetitively manipulating and transforming materiality, practitioners do not just acquire specific skills, they transform their emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and sense of moral self. Craft is labor intensive and time

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consuming, it involves not only a mastery over materials, but also a control over one’s own body and mind, over one’s own resistances to pain and fatigue. Foucault (in his later works) has described this working on the self as “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1987; see also Warnier 2001) that are always associated with techniques of power, and involve multiple forms of domination: one acts on the self, but also on others and the world, and may be acted upon.

Part I. Getting out of craft: Carpet weavers in the Sirwa Before describing the power relations in which the Moroccan Sirwa producers are involved I explore how the older positive values associated with craft are becoming challenged by negative perceptions of craft as linked with poverty. In the Sirwa, an arid Berber region to the south-east of Marrakech, almost every household is involved in the industry of carpet making. This industry constitutes a major source of income which complements subsistence agriculture. The production of saffron and remittances from family members living in urban areas or abroad also contribute to the livelihood of Sirwa dwellers. The entry of the Sirwa weavers into the global economy can be traced back to the colonial period (1912–56) when the commodification of carpets was planned as part of a larger economic scheme in which the tourist industry was to play a central role.1 Since the 1980s carpet production for the international market has intensified under the impetus of the large carpet dealers based in tourist cities.

Weaving, femininity, and morality Women’s subjectivity is tied up in a highly complicated way with weaving and other domestic and agricultural activities. Carpet production in the Sirwa is characterized by a gendered division of labor between production and trade where women weave and men are employed in the finishing, transportation, and distribution of carpets for the international market. With the intensification of production, women’s workload has increased and they now work at the loom all year round, sometimes for more than eight hours a day. Weaving is a very constraining technology characterized by a slow pace and requiring a prolonged sitting position as well as high levels of energy. As they struggle with controlling this materiality and as it acts back upon them, weavers endure the pain of producing an object, but also learn to overcome



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the resistance of their own body and mind. The process of making because it affects the body also deeply transforms the self physically and psychologically. This action upon the body creates specific investments, desires, and emotions and shapes specific subjectivities. As they learn to weave with other women (mother, aunts, sisters, cousins, or neighbors) they acquire familial and cultural but also moral ways of practicing their craft. In this gendered community of practice, the acquisition of these domestic technical skills is associated with the development of embodied and cognitive dispositions such as patience, concentration, stamina, steadfastness, and tenacity. Weaving for the household demonstrates one’s will to adopt female qualities of industriousness, commitment to labor for the household, and control of oneself (including sexually). The efficacy of gestures and skilled practice ensures successful material results, but also social efficacy (Naji 2009). Effective control of materiality corresponds to an effective construction and maintenance of a moral and valued self. In addition, this morality is given to be seen publicly, in the way women occupy their time (at the loom rather than in idle occupations), the quality of their work and the object they weave, and in the goods that their families are able to buy as a result of their labor.

Development, marriage, and poverty Weavers do not come to craft by choice. They learn to weave because it is what women of their age are supposed to do to support their families. This disciplining or constraining activity is lived as a toilsome activity inherent in conditions of poverty and rurality. Most unmarried women nourish the hope that the production of carpets is a temporary stage in their life trajectory. If they marry well, weaving will be relegated to an enjoyable pastime or even abandoned. The value of industriousness is now competing with the modern and urban model of a “housewife” stereotype whose responsibilities do not include productive work other than running a household and caring for its members. The life of a wealthy woman in their eyes is one of leisure and comfort, in a house with all amenities including electricity, tap water, and modern appliances. Yet the same women would favorably consider the option of weaving for the market if they could gain a relatively good financial return from it as was the case in the 1990s. Then, the money that could be gained from carpet production was equivalent to a government officer’s monthly wage. Craft shifted from being merely a tool of survival to constitute a source of capital accumulation and an increase in living standards. But for the vast majority of rural women today, marriage options still carry connotations of hard agricultural work and weaving for little cash.

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The difficult issue of commercialization Due to their geographical location weavers’ households have little access to the end buyers. These are often tourists prepared to pay an acceptable price for these hand-woven carpets. Instead, their work is entirely controlled by large traders who are based in more cosmopolitan cities and particularly in Marrakech, the prime market linking rural production with international consumption. These large traders belong to the Arab-speaking urban bourgeoisie and master European languages and culture. They use Berber middlemen to coordinate production and entrap the middlemen into a credit relationship to secure their regular provision of carpets from the Sirwa region: they only pay for some of the carpets delivered and promise to pay the remaining money the next time, ad infinitum. Berber middlemen because of their ethnic origin, their rural background and their lack of financial and cultural capital are subordinate in their relations to city traders. On the other hand, they are in an unequal relationship of power to productive families and play a dominant role in encouraging competition between different suppliers of carpets from the same locale. Large traders, who know perfectly well that carpets are the product of the work of subordinate female household members, play on the devaluation of women’s status and labor in their transactions with the male kin of weavers. By living on credit at the expense of the middlemen, the large traders further increase the tendency of these to squeeze the weak chain links, that is the weavers and their families. In some cases, middlemen have a hold on the weavers who become trapped in a debt relationship with them. Unlike Milgram’s Philippine entrepreneurs who do not have such an exploitative relationship with the craftswomen, it can be argued that Moroccan large traders, by reducing the payment for their work, contribute to lowering the status and power of women in their community and household. The geographical position of large traders and their social and cultural capital also give them the means to obscure and mystify the production process and allow them to conceal their own role in shaping the conditions of production and the form and value of carpets. The invisibility of contemporary weavers (Dilley 2004) allows them to redefine the regimes of value in which the carpets are represented as authentic and antique. But most of all, these constructions allow traders to exploit existing gender, ethnic, and social hierarchies for their own profit. On the other hand and paradoxically, women in the Sirwa find agency in their economic contribution to the livelihood of their household, and through their productive and reproductive labor: in a context of high unemployment and very little job options, women also provide the male head of household,



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their husbands or brothers, with an economic opportunity to occupy a relatively important and “honorable” position as carpet traders. In addition, Sirwan women have managed to keep their men present through this trade, whereas in other areas in Morocco women find themselves running the household on their own, because men have escaped the drudgery of agricultural work by emigrating to the city. Women maintain their family honor and status by contributing to their family’s material quality of life. Thus women shape themselves and their society through the crafting of carpets. In the face of precarious socio-economic changes, women go an extra length to keep the patriarchal order going. This is because they believe that the possibility of escaping poverty is in the hands of men.

Fair trade The limited autonomy of weaving households in selling their production is mainly due to their geographical distance from the marketplaces (see Dilley 2004; Spooner 1986; Steiner 1993; Wilkinson-Weber 1999, 2004). One way to counter the exploitation and invisibilization of these craftswomen by global capitalism would be for them to gain better access to the ultimate buyer, either by direct sale or through the internet (Davis 2004). Proponents of the “Fair trade” approach make the claim that cutting out the middlemen guarantees a better share of profit for the craftspeople. This would also rebound on consumers, who given the possibility of exerting power as a “social actor” or responsible consumer, would get a reasonable rate for the crafts they buy. This seems true when applied to the large international traders who at the top of the chain make by far the highest margin. On the other hand, this argument needs to be examined more critically on other levels. The organization of the carpet trade in the Sirwa supports a whole social and economic structure that benefits entire families. If we consider that in each village in the mountains there are three to five middlemen and that all of them work with several families on a contractual basis, it becomes clear that breaking the network of middlemen would have a negative impact on the livelihood of most families. “Fair trade” does not necessarily solve the problem of lack of access to buyers, which constitutes the fundamental basis of inequality between weavers and large traders. In addition, the geographical mobility of women is still frowned upon in the Sirwa, where women’s status is related to their confinement and most women do not leave their village before marriage. Another issue is the empowerment of female weavers and the sustainability of such development initiatives: none of the local development projects transformed these women into politicized craftswomen able to take on the marketing and commercial responsibilities of an

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economic activity. These projects cannot carry on without the initiators on whom they depend for marketing, networking, and sales. In the cases when they are initiated by local men and women, they seem to reinforce clientalistic relations rather than collaborative and egalitarian relationships between instigator(s) of initiative and producers.

Aesthetic knowledge and agency We have seen how the market affects the workload of weavers; I now want to show how it also challenges older notions of communal labor and shared knowledge, in ways that afford agency to those craftswomen who are closely linked with the commercial realm. Although basic technical knowledge is shared by all women, through the influence of Marrakech traders (and their international clients) aesthetic knowledge and more elaborate technical knowledge have become a resource that can be transformed into economic capital. Aesthetic knowledge is the object of fierce competition between the daughters and kin of carpet traders, who often work on commission and invariably constitute the economic elite in their village. Their contact with the market, through the knowledge gained by their fathers in Marrakech, or through examining carpets brought home by them, exposes them to a wider range of designs and to new aesthetic trends. They are also more likely to use better quality wool and dyes or to experiment with less conservative color schemes. These weavers are both designers and craftswomen: they do not work from a model but from a vague description provided by traders in the form of a small photograph or a verbal description. Apart from occasional directions about size, type of carpet, and color scheme, weavers are given total freedom as to the motifs, composition, and linking designs. In addition, traders encourage the weavers to hide their carpet designs or new carpet styles from other women in order to keep other competitors at bay for as long as possible. This is particularly true of weavers who work on commission, whether they are daughters of carpet dealers or not. In the mountain area, the most creative weavers are often related by lineage and they tend to visit each other in their respective houses where they can get a glimpse at the carpet the household women are working on. Because adult married women are less free to move between houses, it is their unmarried daughters who perform this form of “craft spying.” They deliberately exclude others from this knowledge, sometimes not allowing them in the room where they weave. This “espionage” is an important part of the “work” and skill of weaving. Few weavers are able to reproduce designs from visual memory and they gain great pride and respect from honing this skill. After a visit to a household, the weavers will discuss what they saw with the other



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members of the family, including the male head. They might plan the design of their next carpet on this information. Within this exclusive circle of families, weavers not only pride themselves in their weaving skills but they also gain material proof of their significance in their household, through the clothes they receive and in other domestic amenities that make their daily life easier and more enjoyable. For instance, in most of these households, women have a tiled kitchen and tap water whereas poorer women still prepare meals crouched down on an unpaved flooring and are compelled to get their water from the village fountain. In my host family, the young women were involved in the decision to build a modern kitchen and they chose its layout and decorations. This kitchen, in showing their status as modern and “hygienic” women, also helped them convey the message to potential prospective husbands of their expectations for a good marriage. These young women exerted agency not only as they projected status through their weaving skills but also in the specific local connotations through which their craft knowledge was translated into symbolic and economic capital. To sum up, Sirwa craftswomen’s subjectivities are intertwined with notions of femininity and morality and entangled in complex power relations connected with access to capital and the market. The market significantly affects the knowledge, the working conditions and practices, the identities of craftswomen and the meaning they give to their work and life. Sirwan weavers may own and control the mode and tools of production, they may gain some agency and value through their craft but they do not control the distribution, sale and publicity of their craft products. Because of their invisibility, weavers are condemned to be misunderstood by buyers and denied the possibility of controlling the authenticity of their craft, which is constructed by traders in terms of exoticism and symbolism. More importantly, because of the very way their subjectivitity and morality is forged, only a few women show interest in taking charge of the commercialization of their craft and would happily abandon this economic activity in favor of the position of “housewife” for its economic security and “modernity.” Weavers’ agency takes on the form of conservative strategies where they support the patriarchal order which they associate with better chances of making a livelihood. In this light, craft is merely the lot of poor people, it is associated with marginality and exemplifies what weavers seek to escape. If it guarantees some kind of livelihood for their households and a gendered value for women, it is not a livelihood path that one chooses freely. In a context of poverty and insecurity, weavers yearn for wealth, status, consumption, and leisure.

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Part II. Lifestyle and livelihood choice: Tarn’s organic food artisans This second part focuses on another type of craftsmen, those of the Tarn district of the Midi-Pyrénées region in the southwest of France. It explores the factors that allow these craftsmen to valorize their craft more successfully than the Moroccan weavers. As will become apparent, the fact that they live in a welfare state (the very state incidentally that controlled Morocco during the colonial period) partly explains this but their own initiatives and principles also contribute to their adoption of alternative ways of producing, consuming, and selling. The Tarn small-scale organic producers and artisans occupy the hilly and less fertile land that is not suitable for the intensive monoculture agriculture that is practiced in the valleys of Agoût (corn, sunflower, soya, wheat, garlic). Although some may come from a farming background, most of the ones I have interviewed are “Neorurals” (néoruraux): they have chosen to leave their jobs in cities for a simpler life in the countryside away from capitalism, industrialization and the consumption/disposable society. “Neorurals” are heirs to the countercultural movement that swept France in the late 1960s (Mai 1968). They often are members of the Confédération Paysanne (the “Conf” or/and Nature et Progrès (N&P )). The former is the most radical farmers’ union in France. It is famous for its leader José Bové, who has positioned the “Conf” as a global peasant movement against neo-liberal globalization (Williams 2008). It critiques the excesses of the agri-food system and the state agricultural policy which have hindered the livelihood of small producers and led consumers to expect food prices that bear little relation to the real cost of farming. Nature et Progrès is the earliest French organic association for producers and consumers. It advocates for a return to authentic organic farming practices and contests the conventionalization (Guthman 2004a, 2004b) of their original movement by the food industry with the backing of the state, at both national and European levels.

Crafting the environment: New (and older) ways of producing Although they do not state it in such terms, craft is at the core of the Tarn organic producers’ identity and ethics. Like the organic and local farmers of Sussex, England (Avanzino 2014: 150) and those studied by Pratt and Luetchdord in Italy and Spain respectively, they have chosen to be farmers for the satisfaction which comes from a kind of production “closer to



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craftsmanship” (Avanzino 2014: 150), a way of producing that allows for creativity, experimentation, and autonomy (Pratt and Luetchford 2014: 187). In their search for good quality food, some producers can go to great expense: Christian refused to go in his father’s footsteps towards a more industrial form of baking and went as far as Brittany to learn about sourdough bread making. Instead of investing in highly technical machinery that stops and starts the fermentation and the cooking processes automatically, he works through the night. This commitment to the principle of care and this sacrifice of time are driven by a search for quality materials (organic, fresh, local, and unadulterated) and taste: he makes his bread with real sourdough, uses local cereals, some of which he has grown himself, and bakes it in a wood oven. In contrast, in order to compensate for the loss in quality of materials and the loss of skills, conventional bakers use ready-made flours and many additives, at the expense of the nutritional values and the taste of bread. But there is more to craft than just skills and a search for quality. Many like Philippe think that “wealth is elsewhere.” These “craftsmen of the living” (or “the vegetal”)—to use their terms—are motivated by political, ethical, and social commitments. They came from a critique of mainstream society’s adherence to the market economy and a concern that growth led to ecological and social wreckage. They have adopted a simpler lifestyle, they own second-hand vehicles, dress cheaply and consume frugally. They sought a profession allowing for an integral relationship between what one practices in work and daily life and one’s guiding philosophy. As Martine notes it is their way of contributing to society, of being good citizens: “after many years of criticizing the government’s policies, at long last, I am able to act on my ideas and do something about it.” This reflexivity about the way they live their life and the way they work is a continuous work on the self. Having had to learn the craft from scratch, they keep questioning their practice and re-inventing it. This continual problem-solving and openness to learning is fostered by contact with other farmers. They meet at markets and in a variety of venues, as they are often part of the same network of political activists. These play an important role in sharing information about farming practices or new economic initiatives. Some might have started as conventional farmers, and have found that their practice clashed with their conception of work. Several farmers explain their decision to turn to organic farming as stemming from a dissatisfaction about their relationship to animals. Daniel resents the way intensive agriculture affects the welfare of animals and leads to “the commodification of the living.” As he explains, there is more to his sheep than just money: they are living beings who go through the hardship of giving birth. Today he breeds lambs and a small herd of cattle for their meat. He knows each animal individually. But there was a time when he used to breed more than

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700 lambs a year for a cooperative. Several events triggered a reflexive turn. One of these events was when Daniel and his companion realized that their farm was only one small link in the big meat retailing industry after having not been able to deliver their lambs to the cooperative because of a truck strike. He had to carry on feeding the lambs, which eventually were sold at a loss. Similarly Michel and Annie who were running a very successful goat cheese business with another couple of farmers with whom they had bought their land, decided to abandon the business to practice mixed agriculture. Because of the large number of animals and the increased working hours, they felt they had lost the closeness to animals that they were initially seeking. It is no coincidence that many of these small organic producers have gone back to the traditional modes of farming that existed up until the 1960s. A return to a mixed farming system is one way of avoiding dependence on expensive industrial inputs: as Michel observes, apart from the fuel for his tractors and salt for the cows, he buys nothing and works a system whereby waste is transformed into produce: he grows cereals with long stalks that he uses as straw for his cows, which in turn provide the manures for the land on which he grows the cereals. Crop rotation and the use of legumes and alfalfa for nitrogen also help build up soil fertility. In comparison to conventional farmers, the labor time and workload of organic farmers increases: instead of herbicides they weed by hand. They use slow and labor-intensive machinery more respectful to the soil. In contrast, the use by conventional farmers of machines and chemicals reduces the production time, but also limits their power to produce meaning and value in their work. Michele Salmona (1994) has analyzed the suffering French (conventional) farmers have experienced as a result of adopting the productivist practices advised by government technicians: they lost the original models and the process inherited from their parents; their organizational skills or tools; the ability to think independently; their decisional autonomy and the meaning of their trade. What organic farmers lose in time and toil, they gain in their personal engagement and emotional connection with the environment, animals, and the reality on the ground. I argue that it is the strenuous physical labor, the time spent in these disciplinary techniques that shape the knowledge of craftsmen and reinforces their ideas and convictions. Through the manipulation of materials and bodily forces they craft values. Practice reinforces craftsmen’s principles, when it does not break them. Organic producers who carry on their work are those who are still experimenting, who are creative, who hone their skills and who find enjoyment in shaping natural processes and responding to animals. They are also those who have opted out of scaling up.



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De-development In their search for autonomy, some organic farmers are revisiting the ethos of peasant culture and mode of farming that Gudeman and Rivera have described as the “house economy” (1990: 52). It is characterized by an “institutionalized distanciation from markets” whereby the purpose of exchange is to meet the needs of survival rather than to accumulate money. Although this “house economy” is more an ideal than a reality, many of the Tarn organic farmers seek to produce differently by minimizing cost and input and adopting strategies to reduce their dependence on a chain of supplies over which they have no control as Daniel did with his lambs. Similarly, organic bakers and pâtissiers often produce some of the wheat they use in their bread and cakes. Most of these producers often save money by building their own tools, equipment, and buildings. Their methods are environmentally friendly because they are less costly and require recycling. Vegetable growers and cheese makers who have to find an outlet for their vegetal and milk waste, breed pigs who feed on them. Higher transformation, that is jam, juice, sausages rather than raw fruit and meat is another way of adding value to the craft. Often good craftsmanship for these producers means downscaling, as quality requires time and care: if Lucien made more ewe cheese than his current sixty liters of milk a day allows, he would not have time to turn them every fifteen minutes and this would impact on the quality of the cheese. Christian produces bread only three nights a week and apart from the bookkeeping duties, he has time for gardening and yoga. It is for taste’s sake, that some vegetable growers prefer to produce salads or tomatoes with smaller yield. These pro-biodiversity producers tend to favor local and hardier seeds to the hybrid ones that have better yield. Among the Tarn “neorurals,” the most radical ones go beyond the “house economy” tradition to advocate for de-growth (décroissance), the downscaling of production and consumption. Applied to farming practices, de-growth implies restrictive and critically chosen practices: growing vegetables with the seasons, not using heated greenhouses, reducing the use of plastic in packaging and in production, and not driving long distances to sell products. As Patrick, a consumer states, “it is choosing not to live the easy life of irresponsible production and consumption.” Pierre, a vegetable producer explains: “Because we are in a society that needs redoing. This does not mean abandoning progress, far from it. We need to develop research to allow de-growth.” De-growth taken to an extreme also implies making little money out of one’s craft. The practice of the craft is a source of reflexivity on one’s aims and motivations, on the impact of one’s action on the environment and society,

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and on the meaning of what one does. Many of the Tarn organic producers described above chose to work less days and to reduce the size of their farm or workshop, and thus their income. For example, Nathanael, 28, refuses to produce wine on a larger scale, because this would imply employing another person, and a greater involvement in financial and marketing activities at the expense of farming work itself. Instead he prefers to spend his time in his vineyard or in his cellar, or else with his friends. Some organic artisans, including wine makers, make it a principle to sell their products to match local wages. As a result, they may live a marginal kind of existence, which could be described as an instance of de-development. In 2010, Remy, fifty-five, a wine maker, remarked that after more than a decade as a farmer he and his partner have only recently earned €900 a month, which is below minimum wage. This desire to run their economic activity outside the economic mentality applies also to other domains of their life and social relations. This is part of a utopian search for a better society where principles of reciprocity, cooperation, and gift-giving, challenge calculative market relations, and notions of selfinterest and profit-seeking. This leads some to experiment with exchanging labor and knowledge, equipment and food. This swapping of produce and services extends to other members of the public (a piano lesson for a couple of bottles of wine, a car repair for some cheese). A tradition of cooperation (both in N&P and the “Conf”) allows them to gather large working groups at short notice, for seasonal picking or in cases of a pest or disease attack on the crop. The exchange of labor also applies to commercialization and can be regular. For example, Jeremy, a vegetable grower, keeps the stand of two of his friends (who respectively produce flour and dairy products) on Saturday markets, thus saving the latter petrol expenses and labor time. His friends return the favor on another market. He also plans his crop cultivation with another vegetable producer in order to offer a wider range of products to their common customers.

Autonomy in marketing and commercialization Many of the organic farmers in the Tarn are aware of the constraints and limits to selling to large retailers and supermarkets; they consider that to realize values and keep their autonomy, they need to sell outside the mainstream commercial sphere, in what Pratt and Luechford (2014) call a “closed economy.” In order to cut out the middlemen (supermarkets, large distributors) and increase the financial reward for their labor, they sell direct. These producers can reclaim their right to earn a reasonable income for their hard and quality work, because they live in a region, Midi-Pyrénées, that is characterized by a low population density and a high number of small farms,



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where there is a high market demand for local organic products. In the Tarn the association N&P is very active and it is its members who decided to create a weekly market specializing in organic food (Noctambio) in several Tarn towns. They open late to cater for professionals who can shop after work. In order to compete with the supermarkets Noctambio markets offer as much and varied foodstuffs as possible in a one-stop space. They sell direct on weekly markets or through box schemes. In doing so they get to know their customers personally and to educate them (as in Terrio’s chocolatiers) about the production and reality of craft production. Each encounter with their rootless “hydroponic” consumers is an opportunity to teach them about nature, farming life and production processes. Buyers have become so alienated from farming they are unaware of how dependent on producers they are for their food. One recurrent issue that was discussed in 2012–14 among farmers and their consumers was that of a petrol shortage: how would consumers cope if they could no longer rely on imported food? In 2015 honey makers are warning their customers about the halving of the bee population in the past year. Through monthly newsletters, yearly visits to their farms, or other events producers keep their customers informed about the seasonality of products and activities on the farm, the difficulty of farming organically, the absurdities of state regulations, and the value of their own labor in producing quality food. Thus, in addition to controlling to some extent their own visibility, Tarn organic producers control the marketing rhetoric around issues of productive and working practices. They construct an authenticity based on the locality, taste, freshness, and nutritious properties of their produce. They sell their ideas and ideals, their own personality and ethos in a way that establishes personalized, mutual, loyal and long-term relationships. Some organic producers go one step further by seeking to break the producer/consumer divide. As part of their idealist social vision of the egalitarian relationship between human beings, some farmers actively create and cultivate relations of solidarity and friendship with their customers. Some seek to make citizens out of their clients by emphasizing the role they could play in supporting farmers: financially, through buying direct and legally through supporting them in legal battles; for example when the state attempted to impose vaccination against bluetongue disease (a non-contagious, insectborn viral disease that affects ruminants and is not transmissible to humans). In the region, such alternative relationships between consumers and producers take many forms and even consumers may initiate them. The AMAP (Association pour le maintien de l’agriculture paysanne) is a sort of box scheme or Community Supported Agriculture project (CSA) organized by consumers interested in supporting local small-scale sustainable agriculture on a short supply chain. Consumers commit to support producers, including when the latter are not able to deliver (i.e., because of a bad harvest due to

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a storm or insect attack). The AMAP consumers could be seen as “activist” or “fair trade” consumers concerned with encouraging production with a “humane dimension” and respectful of the environment. The AMAP charter, originally inspired by the Conf’s Charter of Agriculture paysanne (Peasant agriculture), emphasizes transparency in all actions of purchasing, production, processing and sale of agricultural produce and geographical proximity between producers and consumers. Many of the farmers who believe in those values have re-appropriated the name of “peasant” for themselves. By drawing consumers into the realm of production and challenging the current boundaries between production and consumption, they seek to redefine the current regime of value around food production. By bringing production out into the light, they demystify it; or else re-mystify it as a marketing tool. Thus, organic producers have a higher access to agency than the Moroccan weavers. They managed to re-appropriate the right to sell directly and thus to define their own prices. This is due to the fact that they live in a welfare society, which affords the luxury of thinking the de-development of economies and choosing a radical agency. Many of these organic farmers are from a middle-class background and they have experienced a certain level of comfort and status to be able to challenge these values and envisage a simpler life enriched not so much by material possessions but by idealist ethical principles and actions (see also Mascia-Lees this volume). This agency or autonomy is however challenged regularly by the market economy and state policies: small producers are constantly in danger of seeing their ideas and practices taken on by mainstream agriculture and stripped of their original social and environmental content (Guthman 2004a, 2004b). Many of the European laws impose structural and administrative requirements designed for large farms that smaller producers cannot afford and of which they should be exempted because of their size. Those who seek to add value to their organic produce through certification cannot use their own seeds (kept from the previous year) or those of friends as seeds need to be traceable to a certified producer. In a region where younger generations struggle with unemployment, farming is not the easiest choice to take, but the state offers subsidies for starting farmers. These, however, come with inevitable constraints: for example, starting farmers receive subsidies on the condition that they invest in brand new materials and equipment (such as polytunnels) rather than cheaper second-hand ones.



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Conclusion Although we start with two communities of craftsmen who live on the margins of dominant society and economy, and struggle for livelihood, their conception and experience of craft are very different. In one case, the persistence of craft is a matter of enforced necessity, in the other it is a matter of willingly assumed strategy. Weavers seek to escape their marginality, and yearn for wealth and comfort, away from the toils of craftwork. Against this understanding of wellbeing and quality of life as capital or status accumulation, many of the French organic producers choose toil and marginality; they celebrate peasant identity; some seek de-growth. It is no coincidence that in a country that once was under French colonial domination, craft has become devalued because it is associated with toil and poverty whereas in a welfare society such as France, because it has become a scarce commodity, it is revalorized and re-adopted as a worthy profession. Comparing such contrasted instances of craft allows us to show the relation between the status of craft and the accessibility to agency. Unlike weavers who have no control over the commercialization of their products and suffer from traders obscuring the production process, Tarn organic producers exercise political agency by selling direct and re-appropriating the right to define their productive practices as authentic, thus increasing the value of their produce. They benefit, in addition to living in a welfare state, from a close proximity to buyers with whom they have managed to establish a personal and loyal rapport. The post-1968 movement and the relatively secure economic context in France has made possible the radical thinking of the de-development of economy by a relatively educated middle-class population of craftsmen. The contrasts and oppositions of the two cases, by emphasizing how craft is culturally embedded and historically constituted, challenges broad assumptions about what development or growth means and reconsiders the opposition between the “developed” versus “undeveloped” world.

10 Refashioning a Global Craft Commodity Flow from Aklan, Central Philippines B. Lynne Milgram

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n 2001 and 2002, the first Canadian branches of the popular upscale kitchenware store, Williams-Sonoma opened in Toronto, Canada. Located in key downtown locations and keeping company with the world’s leading design retailers, Williams-Sonoma promises consumers the most up-to-date designs in all kitchenware and household goods (Williams-Sonoma, 2012, 2013, 2015). On my visits to these stores I am always looking to see if our Toronto outlets feature the Philippine nito reed home décor products (e.g., place mats, coasters, baskets, trays) with which I am familiar from my ongoing research on the piña (pineapple) textile industry in Kalibo, Aklan province, central Philippines where nito reed goods are also produced (Milgram 2005, 2011). And I am not disappointed. A wide range of functional nito reed products are prominently featured in displays throughout the stores surrounded by other high-end household goods (e.g., table linens and cookware) all of which convince shoppers of the prestige these items can bring to one’s home. In my yearly research trips to the Philippines, I have periodically returned to Kalibo, Aklan to explore the ongoing developments in this global trade—the cross-sector networks that have brought such Philippine artisanal goods to my Toronto front door.1 The transnational journey of nito reed products began in the late 1990s when the Aklan provincial government initiated development projects that could assist rural households to earn income additional to that from fishing and agriculture. Following the country’s reestablishment of democratic government in 1986 and renewed national support for local economic

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FIGURE 10   A retail craft store in Manila, Philippines, displays a range of home décor products made from nito reed along with accompanying documentation © Lynne Milgram. development, entrepreneurs with expertise in craft production, for example, were encouraged to establish operations that could take advantage of the rising global demand for local artisanal goods (Bankoff and Weekly 2002: 20–8; DTI 1992). Entrepreneurs working in Kalibo’s nito reed industry, in particular, have activated this government policy as evidenced in their current monthly shipments of thousands of products to high-end design stores in Manila and across North America and northern Europe. Such south–north and south–south commodity flows, however, are not monolithic or static entities. Rather, they continually evolve depending upon their relationships with other local-to-global flows and on the priorities of the market players driving commodity systems (e.g., Bestor 2004; Haugerud, Stone and Little 2000; Grimes and Milgram 2000; Jackson 1999; Nash 1993). To understand the nuanced strategies small-to-larger-scale producers and entrepreneurs use to best operationalize their industry means investigating not only the key players who may control macro-operations at each network node (Gereffi 1994), but also the actions of all industry players who exercise varying degrees of power to craft interactions to their advantage. In this chapter, I use the nito reed industry of Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines to analyze the extent to which artisans and entrepreneurs working at each



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node of production and trade can access work opportunities and negotiate marketing constraints given the changing global forces that preclude singularly directed flows. I argue that to understand the dynamics of transnational trade networks especially with regard to more specialized production such as that of nito reed crafts, means seeing such networks, not in isolation, but rather as cross-cut by other relevant commodity flows and by socioeconomic relations. While investigating the patterns of nito reed production, distribution and consumption, for example, I could not ignore the effect on this industry of overlapping articulations with global fashion trends, local supplies of raw materials and socioeconomic and power relations between producers and traders. Philippine women, building upon their historic roles as household financial managers and as the country’s foremost public market traders are the main players at all industry levels. This work pattern is consistent with women’s prominence in informal sector labor throughout Southeast Asia (Lloyd-Evans 2008; Scrase 2003; Swain 1993). In what emerges as a putting-out system, large-scale Kalibo entrepreneurs who function as the linchpin in this localto-global flow appoint local middle people—or group leaders—to distribute orders to household-based artisans, collect the latter’s completed products, and pay producers by the piece for their labor. Given this structure of trade, I suggest that entrepreneurs and smaller-scale middle people, rather than having free rein to exploit artisans’ labor and this commodity flow to their benefit, are in fact squeezed from two sides. On the one hand, entrepreneurs and group leaders need to continually negotiate trade-offs with producers to ensure they receive the quantity of high quality products they order; on the other hand, shifting global fashion trends mean that entrepreneurs, in particular, must work with transnational buyers to continually develop new goods that can fulfill northern consumers’ changing tastes while maintaining the integrity, techné, and terroir of local Philippine production—the character that gives nito reed its indigenous caché (Milgram 2010; Trubeck 2008). Building upon a commodity chain and a system of provision approach (Fine and Leopold 1993), I demonstrate, then, that within the nito reed industry ongoing economic shifts yield constraints as well as opportunities for artisans, middle people and entrepreneurs across levels of operation depending upon the strength of different actors’ social capital networks and economic resources. Most large-scale nito reed entrepreneurs have the capital resources to best weather business disjunctures when, for example, their export orders decline. Group leaders often maintain the economic cushion of a second income in addition to nito reed production (e.g., grocery store) to protect them from commodity flow disruptions while less capitalized home-based artisans rely on “everyday politics” (e.g., withholding deliveries) (Kerkvliet 2009) to mitigate livelihood threats.

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Although the growth of the nito reed industry has given artisans and traders the power to sustain and diversify their livelihoods, some market players have been more effective than others in materializing this business potential. I thus suggest that we consider both the nature of artisan-trader transactions and the uneven political landscape within which they operate. Not romanticizing the actions each market player can exercise within industry parameters reveals insights about the different forms of power specific people command and their points of intersection—the power among artisans, middle people and entrepreneurs and that between entrepreneurs and their global buyers (Abu-Lughod 1990). To contextualize the circumstances of Kalibo’s nito reed industry, I first review the literature on commodity chains, livelihoods and social capital as well as that on the construction of meaning for crafts. I then analyze the channels through which nito reed actors across production, circulation and consumption can ensure the sustainability of their trade.

Craft livelihoods and commodity chains repositioned2 Commodity chain studies have long been interested in understanding networks whose end result is to move a finished commodity through a series of phases from production to distribution to consumption. Earlier analyses, however, tended to prioritize and generalize the details of internal chain governance and territoriality—how flows are controlled by only a few key actors in top positions—thereby neglecting to consider fine-grain connections between labor and consumption (e.g., Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). The system of provision approach introduced by Fine and Leopold (1993; see also Narotzky 2005) moves beyond questioning simply whether any one site drives the flow of a specific commodity. Instead, a provisioning approach investigates how differently empowered actors assign meaning to goods and control network configurations at each node along the chain within the broader context of external state policies and international trade regulations. It allows one to delve into the on-the-ground relations among actors and how specific chains operate for a range of distribution scales (Guthman 2002; Jackson 1999; Leslie and Reimer 2003). To this end, I consider both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of commodity flows (Fine and Leopold 1993). A vertical analysis follows each step through the chain of a specific commodity examining the negotiations required to move a product from producer to the end consumer. In comparison, a horizontal analysis traces “consumption practices that occur



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similarly across different networks or between commodity chains” (Bush 2004: 39; see also Fine and Leopold 1993: 33). This reveals how processes differ in alternative commodity chains for the same goods when different actors are involved (e.g., artisans selling products directly to buyers rather than through middle people) or how the trade in one vertical flow horizontally affects the trade in another vertical flow (e.g., trade of raw materials affects production). Highlighting the spatial and temporal paths of products draws attention to how power and class relations vary across chains and the resultant implications for labor relations and product innovation (Leslie and Reimer 2003: 428–9). It reveals the “leakiness” of commodity chains and how multi-stranded interactions can generate new effects not traceable to any one system of provisioning (Leslie and Reimer 2003: 428; see also Hughes 2000: 181). Indeed, by varying the channels through which they activate their livelihoods, both artisans and entrepreneurs ultimately alter the commodity chain flows in which they are engaged. Drawing on livelihood scholarship, especially that analyzing Global South contexts, thus facilitates understanding how assets and vulnerabilities (the existence or lack of human, physical, financial, and social capitals), strategies (how people use these assets or resources to pursue particular economic activities) and the broader socioeconomic and political processes mediating access to these resources, coalesce to determine the different ways people make a living and how resultant livelihood quality varies across classes (Ellis 2000; Scoones 2009; Scrase 2003). As noted earlier and as I argue for the nito reed industry, large-scale entrepreneurs are best positioned to capitalize on the success of the commodity flows in which they work (albeit experiencing some constraints). Scholarship analyzing entrepreneurship argues that no single set of traits distinguishes entrepreneurial behavior. Rather entrepreneurs make a wide range of decisions and choices within the complex yet specific socioeconomic and political matrixes within which they function. By mobilizing whatever resources are at their disposal across financial, socioeconomic and political sectors, entrepreneurs leverage opportunities to best utilize production and marketing processes (DeHart 2010: 59; Greenfield and Strickland 1986: 11). Through innovative resource organization and calculative risk taking for profit, entrepreneurs link multiple social and economic fields not previously linked or they connect them in new ways. Entrepreneurs emerge then as “savvy agents” with the power to “construct collective social change” as clearly evidenced in Kalibo’s nito reed industry (DeHart 2010: 59; Greenfield and Strickland 1986: 12). I also draw on the notion of social capital to understand how artisans and entrepreneurs use social relationships to navigate unstable economic

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circumstances. Social capital broadly integrates key aspects of social organization such as “trust, norms, and networks” (Putnam 1993: 167). More specifically, “social capital focuses on the resources embedded in one’s social network and how access to and use of such resources benefit the individual’s actions” (Lin 2001: 55). While “bonding social capital”—links among kin or close community members—helps one to “get by” on a daily basis, “bridging social capital”—connections among people affiliated with broader heterogeneous networks—helps one “get ahead” and enables more leverage to secure one’s livelihood (Turner and Nguyen 2005: 1694–6). Such social capital relations are especially relevant in the Philippines. As William Davis (1973: 211) notes in his work on Philippine public markets, only by forming personal networks of “obligatory relationships” can those in business overcome the barriers posed by weaknesses in institutional credit and legal facilities. One criticism of the earlier social capital scholarship, however, is its focus on positive outcomes with inadequate attention to the “dark side” of social capital (e.g. Durlauf 2002; Putnam 1993). Portes and Landolt (2000: 532) have identified four such negative consequences, namely “exclusion of outsiders, excess claims on group members, restrictions on individual freedoms, and downward levelling norms” (see also Foley and Edwards 1999; Turner and Nguyen 2005: 1704–5). As evident in relations among nito reed producers and entrepreneurs, artisans may leverage their social capital with entrepreneurs to gain concessions when difficult economic situations arise (e.g. illness) only later to betray the latter’s trust by selling pre-ordered pieces to another trader for additional income. Analyses thus need to consider how issues of power, exploitation and the potential for “everyday politics”—supporting, complying with, evading, and/or resisting authority—impact the dynamics of social capital relations (Kerkvliet 2009: 232).

Craft identity, value, meaning Since the 1980s, in particular, craft and material culture theorists have explored issues of value and meaning in objects (e.g. Adamson 2010, 2013; Chibnik 2003; Hamilton and Milgram 2007; Milgram 2007; Nash 1993; Scrase 2003; Wood 2008; Tilley 2013; Zhang 2012). This scholarship challenges us to rethink how the changing global circumstances of contemporary craft production, distribution and consumption relate to questions of modernity, tradition and authenticity, nationalism and ethnicity, gender, class and identity. Craft historian, Paul Greenhalgh (2002: 1), for example, sees craft as a “fluid set of practices, propositions and positions that shift and develop,” an argument echoed by archaeologist Christopher Tilley (2013: 17) who agrees



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that, “each object has its own material properties … that are processual and in flux.” Rather than seeing a craft’s value rooted in how well it duplicates an “authentic” tradition, Greehalgh (2002: 2) encourages, instead, a focus on the “integrity of practice, the vitality of the object, and the ideas [and needs] of makers and consumers.” In this light Bruce Metcalf (2007: 19–20) suggests understanding craft as a “contingent” object—seeing the ways in which craft is integrally enmeshed in the multiple processes of everyday living, not separated from it by some abstract aesthetic distance. For Metcalf (2007: 19–20), craft functions along a continuum by providing a reference to past practice, value and meaning while simultaneously evidencing ongoing innovation within broader changing socioeconomic contexts. That nito reed products trace their origin to geographically diverse techniques and are produced in high volume, but are marketed as local, individualized and “unique” crafts, illustrates the variable meanings these goods hold for producers, entrepreneurs and consumers. To understand craft’s chameleon character then, means dissolving essentialisms among craft-artifact-commodity categories to emphasize instead how these arenas inform one another depending upon different actors’ intent and specific socioeconomic contexts.

Making and marketing nito reed crafts Throughout the rural Philippines farming and fishing continue as the mainstay of peoples’ livelihoods. Men and women living outside the urban center of Kalibo, the capital of Aklan province, cultivate rice, fruit and market vegetables and fish to provide a household’s basic subsistence needs. To augment their agricultural income, men and women produce and sell crafts and maintain part-time jobs, for example, in construction, house cleaning and retail sales. Although Philippine government policies continue to put forward anti-poverty programs for urban and rural renewal, many initiatives have fallen short of realizing long-term economic and political reforms that effectively benefit other-than-well-off Filipinos working at local-to-regional levels (Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2012: 98–9; Balisacan 1995). Within this context, in the late 1990s the national government’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Aklan provincial branch, launched one of its more effective programs to develop income-generating work for rural Kalibo area cultivators by introducing nito reed production. Before DTI’s initiatives, some women in Kalibo were already making baskets, but from different local materials such as pliable buri leaves. After locating local sources of nito reed, DTI workers identified women already skilled in basket making, trained these

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artisans in nito reed construction and subsequently sponsored community workshops in which skilled artisans taught this craft technique to other women. During my earlier research on Kalibo’s piña weaving industry, I had met DTI staff and Canadian international development consultants hired by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) who were collaborating to foster different types of craft projects throughout Aklan province (Milgram 2005). In order to develop distinctive nito reed crafts, DTI fieldworkers combined the coiled and plaited basketry techniques used by artisans in northern and central Philippine provinces while adopting design ideas from local and international sources. The nito reed industry thus yields everyday functional household products that, at first glance, speak of locality and “tradition”—local women artisans working in their homes using regional raw materials in timeless, low-technology basketry techniques. One is then abruptly taken aback when entering a Kalibo warehouse housing floor-to-ceiling stacks of similarly fashioned nito reed items waiting to adorn the interiors of Global North and Filipino upscale homes. Indeed, because this practice has been externally introduced and, in fact, invented, nito reed crafts do not have a rooted role in local secular or sacred practices thereby freeing artisans and entrepreneurs to continually revise the character of these goods. By conflating skills, materials, designs and technology from across the northern and central Philippines as well as from global fashion trends, artisans and entrepreneurs, in effect, render this craft’s position as “contingent” (Metcalf 2007: 18; see also Field 2009; Handler 1986).

Nito reed artisans As in most local-resource-based enterprises where production is channeled for global trade a series of actors facilitate this flow from artisans, to middle people to a few entrepreneurs who act as the primary exporters. This overall structure is characteristic of Kalibo’s nito reed industry in which only four large-scale entrepreneurs coordinate production for global export markets while a few smaller-scale traders supply domestic venues. Entrepreneurs in Kalibo work with appointed group leaders, most of whom are also artisans, to organize the production of over one thousand household-based makers. Nito reed artisans are primarily women, but with the success of the industry more men are now engaged in production (Figure 11). Artisans work at home combining craft piece-work with domestic responsibilities and the aforementioned part-time jobs. The steep increase in demand for nito reed products augmented by the environmental destruction of repeated typhoons



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FIGURE 11   Kalibo area artisans construct nito reed trays and container forms © Lynne Milgram. has meant that local sources of this raw material within Aklan province have dramatically declined forcing producers and traders to source their materials in the forested areas of other Panay Island provinces such as Capiz, Iloilo and Antique. As Susan Batton,3 the export-focused entrepreneur I discuss later, explains, “Because nito reed is a forest product, it naturally reproduces through self-seeding. But after the 2013 devastation of typhoon Yolanda, it took over one year for Aklan’s reed to regenerate when it normally takes only three to six months for new vines to mature after a harvest.” Although a pilot study conducted by Aklan State University has successfully propagated nito reed, to date this technology is not available for broader dissemination leaving the nito reed industry reliant on naturally occurring forest growth. Entrepreneurs and middle people coordinating nito reed production use varied strategies to deal with the fluctuating availability and cost of nito reed. As Susan Batton explains, My business purchases all available raw material at the price dictated by suppliers, but we sell the reed to our group leaders at what was previously a consistent and lower going rate. We are prepared to absorb the loss from increasing raw materials costs to maintain the price we pay artisans for their products, knowing this decision reduces our immediate profit.

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While keeping the cost of raw materials low benefits artisans in the short term, this strategy also potentially facilitates entrepreneurs’ future profits. Entrepreneurs are gambling that when raw material costs decline, their profit margin will increase because their purchase price for artisans’ goods will have remained stable. In order to maintain secure networks for her nito reed supplies, Patricia Tayad, one of Susan’s key artisan group leaders, similarly straddles opportunity and risk in deciding the best strategy for sourcing her raw materials. To this end, Patricia varies from whom she makes her purchases each week and always pays in full and in cash. By distributing her business among different suppliers and by promptly paying a supplier’s price, Patricia explains, “I build relations of trust while ensuring my collectors’ allegiance to me.” The uninterrupted supply of raw materials to artisans—a horizontal flow affecting the vertical movement of nito reed products from producer to consumer—is the lifeline sustaining this industry. Given the expense that artisans would incur if they personally sourced nito reed in other Panay Island provinces, most producers pay a small mark-up to buy their raw materials from group leaders who have the capital to buy in volume if they do not purchase supplies directly from the entrepreneurs for whom they work. Artisans take pride in their skill cleaning the reed to maximize its use and their investment. As one artisan, Cecille Montano explains, “Cleaning the reed involves scraping the outer layer to remove any bumps such that the finished surface is flat and smooth. We always find a purpose for every part of the reed, otherwise we would never make a profit.” To preclude their pieces being rejected by buyers due to incorrect sizing artisans hone their skills by working with a ruler taking measurements throughout the construction process. As artisan Carole Fortino reflects about the fluidity or contingent nature of craft meaning, “I am the first one in my family to be trained to make nito reed products. Although we did not use these types of goods in the past, knowing how to make them now means they are part of our artisan knowledge and we can contribute to determining their changing character.” Artisans are paid a set fee per piece for their part-time work earning an approximate monthly income of between 1,700 to 2,000 pesos (US$38.00– US$45.00)4—income that significantly contributes to artisan-cultivators’ overall household earnings within a rural context. Artisans explain that within one week they can finish, for example, three 35 cm × 51 cm place mats at 150 pesos (US$3.30) each, two oval trays measuring 38 cm × 31 cm at 240 pesos (US$5.30) each, and four to five 30 cm round plate chargers at 100 pesos (US$2.10) each. When artisans need additional income such as in June for school tuition fees, some may work overtime to produce popular items such as place mats and coasters. As entrepreneurs understand the



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importance of this extra income to artisans and in order to maintain artisans’ allegiance, entrepreneurs usually incorporate these extra products into their inventory although this gesture constrains their capital on hand. While nito reed production has clearly increased household incomes for artisan-cultivators, the broader structure of the industry has remained fairly stable. Given that artisans require some accumulated capital as well as widespread social networks to assume any of the few middle people positions that arise, few producers have been able to sufficiently leverage enough industry potential to transform their status to that of artisan group leader.

Positioning entrepreneurs’ key roles Susan Batton, in her mid fifties with a college education and two collegeeducated children, is one of Kalibo’s four nito reed entrepreneurs exporting products to markets in North America and northern Europe. Susan started her business—Filipino Home Design—in the late 1990s to diversify her family’s long-established piña (pineapple) weaving business. While her sister assumed control of the family’s textile enterprise, Susan initially worked as a livelihood consultant with Aklan province’s Department of Trade and Industry and periodically continued in this role after starting her own business. Working in DTI’s start-up nito reed initiative, Susan organized workshops to train artisans in nito reed construction, designed new products and arranged product exhibits in national and international trade shows. A particular boost for Susan’s personal business occurred in 2000 when she met representatives from the American design store Williams-Sonoma at a Hong Kong trade show and started to work with this corporation soon afterward. Susan’s orders from Williams-Sonoma currently account for the largest proportion of her sales with the remainder coming from high-end Philippine design centers such as Kultura—the Filipino craft and arts department of the well-known Shoe Mart (SM) department store chain—and from European orders (Philippine Daily Inquirer 2011: C1 and 6; Philippine Star 2008: K2–3). Filipino Home Design currently contracts part-time production work to approximately one thousand rural artisans living across Kalibo’s municipalities. In addition, thirty artisans, men and women, work on-site in the company’s workshop finishing the products artisans deliver (Figure 12). Workshop artisans trim loose ends, polish the product surface with a cloth, varnish the pieces and pack orders for shipping. Other in-house artisans repair the problematic pieces while still others work as designers to develop new prototypes. Susan pays health, vacation, pension, and other employment benefits

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FIGURE 12   In a Kalibo workshop an artisan polishes and trims loose ends from square nito reed place mats © Lynne Milgram.

to her thirty full-time workshop artisans. These benefits, however, are not available to part-time household-based artisan-cultivators highlighting the differential opportunities open across artisan sectors. Filipino Home Design produces over twenty different types of products and in 2013 was manufacturing approximately 12,500–14,000 pieces per month for both local and international buyers. In order to efficiently move such a high volume of goods to global markets—meeting delivery deadlines and achieving consistent quality—Susan has organized a putting-out system in which twenty-five appointed group leaders each coordinate an artisan group of about thirty to forty members while appointing their own subgroup leaders to work with additional producers. Group leaders, many of whom also work in production, distribute orders to artisans, ensure producers have the raw materials they need, supervise production quality and deliver the finished products to the Filipino Home Design warehouse according to Susan’s predetermined schedule of deliveries—three to four deliveries a day, six days a week. Upon receiving new pieces, Susan’s in-house workers inspect each item for product quality. If the piece is substandard, Susan exercises one of four options. Poorly woven and incorrectly sized pieces are rejected. If the piece



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is incorrectly sized, but well-constructed, workshop artisans will rework the piece into a larger singular serving piece, for example, and Susan pays the artisan the full fee for her labor. If pieces are not well constructed but contain substantial materials, Susan returns the items to the makers enabling them to reuse the reed and thus maintain their material investment losing only their labor time. Susan pays the full purchase price for such flawed products but considers this payment as an advance for future and comparable pieces. Lastly, if the quality of the piece is good, but it is incorrectly sized and cannot be adapted, Susan purchases it at a discounted price to sell in local markets. Mindful of the positive social capital she wants to retain with producers, Susan explains, “I need to give artisans the benefit of the doubt when they deliver substandard pieces to ensure they continue to bring their products to me rather than take them to another trader.” In this light, Susan outlines that when her buyers reduce the volume of their orders, as they did from 2007 to 2009 during the economic recession, she does not lay off artisans. Instead, in times of low demand, to ensure artisans have a minimum of work to sustain their families, Susan asks producers to construct the most popular pieces that she then uses for last-minute orders. Susan continues that, “This is the best time to ask artisans to weave the pieces they may not like to make as they need to earn income.” Although Susan’s efforts indeed facilitate equitable work opportunities for artisans, such situations also make visible the dark side of social capital. Entrepreneurs’ strategies may appear beneficent in their concern for producers’ well-being, but their actions may simultaneously exploit artisans’ more precarious economic positions if artisans feel they have little choice but to produce items that yield low economic returns. Entrepreneurs such as Susan must secure not only consistent product deliveries from artisans, but also widespread and diverse markets for these goods. Given that the majority of nito reed items are destined for upscale design stores, Susan explains that, “To remain competitive, we consistently work on product development by consulting home design and fashion magazines.” Consumption trends in design thus affect nito production as horizontal influences across commodity chains similar to the cross-pollination Leslie and Reimer (2003) note between North American furniture and fashion styles. Susan thus works closely with artisan-designers to send innovative prototypes to her buyers such as Williams-Sonoma; if buyers express interest in further developing a new design, both parties continue the production process through digital exchanges. Buyers may also identify specific types of products they require based on emergent design trends. In 2011, for example, Filipino Home Design collaborated with a North American buyer to launch a line of variously sized nito reed trays each designed to hold different types of white ceramic serving dishes made in China—mixed-media artisanal goods that continue to be one of Susan’s best-selling items (see Figure10).

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Although Filipino Home Design’s export sales comprise the majority of the company’s business as noted earlier, Susan has also established a national presence by wholesaling her products to well-known Philippine craft stores such as Tesoros, Balikbayan, and particularly SM Kultura. Because Kultura places large volume orders to supply its many SM stores nationwide and markets its goods as sustainably and ethically produced, Susan is redirecting more business to this outlet where her nito items, as she explains, “can keep company with similarly-fashioned and well-documented Filipino artisanal products” (see also Philippine Daily Inquirer 2011: C1 and C6). Selling through large-scale retailers such as Williams-Sonoma and SM Kultura, however, means that Susan’s products do not display her business name, but instead bear the name of the retailer. At Susan’s request, in order to inform consumers of the products’ origin, Williams-Sonoma adds a label to each nito reed item identifying that the piece has been made by Philippine artisans using indigenous materials (see also Milgram 2010: 76 and 81). “If we want clients to know who manufactured these products,” Susan outlines, “we would need to rent a retail space in larger stores and this is too costly for the size of our operation. Regardless of this marketing-recognition constraint, it is more viable for us to remain wholesalers rather than retailers.” When Susan expanded her Kalibo showroom in 2009, she attached product labels bearing her business name to all showroom pieices explaining that, “In this way, unlike some of our competitors who only export, we are nurturing a south–south as well as a south–north flow of goods.”

Artisan-coordinator group leaders As a window through which to explore the key middle node in the nito reed provisioning network, I turn to analyze the business practice of Patricia Tayad, one of Susan Batton’s primary artisan group leaders whose business is typical of other such middle people. Patricia Tayad, 48 years old, with four children, taught herself how to make baskets from local buri leaf fibers and in the late 1990s was trained by DTI in nito reed construction. With the financial support of her husband’s remittances earned from his work in the Middle East, Patricia operates a small grocery store in the front room of her main street house and this business provides her with extra income. In 2002 Patricia started to produce nito reed products for Susan Battan and since then she has leveraged her position as an artisan into that of an artisan group leader while also working as one of Susan’s product designers. Patricia coordinates her own group of about thirty-five makers and oversees three appointed subgroup leaders each of whom organize a similar size group under Patricia’s direction.



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When Patricia makes her weekly Friday afternoon delivery to Susan Batton, she receives payment for the number of acceptable-quality items she has assembled and collects the following week’s orders. Patricia designates Sunday afternoon for her own subgroup leaders and artisans to receive the income they have earned from the previous week’s production, collect new orders and purchase the raw materials they will need for the next week’s work. As group leaders earn a commission on every acceptable-quality piece they deliver to entrepreneurs, leaders such as Patricia continually seek to add more artisans to their cohort in order to increase their income. Increasing artisan numbers, however, without providing sufficient supervision for production can challenge group leaders’ ability to maintain the consistent product quality entrepreneurs demand and thus limitations often accompany such potential opportunities. Although Patricia’s position as a group leader with the asset of her husband’s remittances and a second income from her grocery store enables her to determine, in most instances, how she conducts her trade, her business remains vulnerable, dependent upon timely deliveries of both raw materials and finished goods. As noted earlier, to ensure ongoing supplies of raw materials, Patricia fosters trusted relationships with differently located nito reed collectors paying them their requested price, in full and upon receipt of their goods. To similarly nurture bridging social capital with artisans, Patricia tries to be equitable when distributing weekly orders by varying artisans’ production assignments regarding the complexity of construction and the profit margin. Patricia explains, however, that conflicts still arise over the category of goods artisans are asked to complete because makers prefer to work on pieces that are easy to construct, consume the least materials, and thus may yield the highest profits. Some artisans then, overproduce certain types of pieces based on the criteria above thereby failing to complete their orders as assigned. In such cases, Patricia asks Susan to accept these extra products, but in so doing, Susan may find herself lacking the specific pieces she needs to fill her buyers’ orders unless she has the type of non-delivered items already in stock. The relationship between middle people and artisans can be similarly tested when artisans need cash advances to pay for hardships such as illness, crop failure and education costs. To access such loans, producers first approach their group leader who usually agrees to grant these interest-free advances. To enable artisans to repay the loan, Patricia, for example, organizes a repayment schedule in which she deducts a portion of the amount an artisan owes from that producer’s weekly payment for her delivered goods. Some artisans who accumulate large outstanding loans to their group leader may feel they cannot move from the community as their debt constrains their mobility and work options. On the other hand, such debts may be the

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reason why other artisans engage “everyday politics” (Kerkvliet 2009: 232) of “evasion” by, for example, selling the products ordered by one leader to a different leader who will not deduct a loan repayment. Group leaders usually welcome the additional pieces they are offered as they can earn a commission on the extra products they deliver to the entrepreneur for whom they work. When artisans fail to deliver the specific type of items their group leader has ordered or if artisans do not deliver the expected quantity of products, group leaders have little formal recourse except to appeal to the social obligation artisans owe them based on past practice and on the potential for obtaining future work. In such instances, artisans’ actions, their “everyday politics” of “evading” and “modifying” expected trade channels, comprise one of the few avenues through which they can challenge constraints on their livelihood. Ben Kerkvliet’s (2009: 232) concept of “everyday politics” provides a framework within which to analyze how marginalized individuals such as nito reed artisans assert their right to work as well as to highlight the relationships between artisans, traders, and the wider political system within which they function. For Kerkvliet (2009: 232): everyday politics involves, people embracing, complying with, adjusting, and contesting norms and rules regarding authority over, production of, or allocation of resources and doing so in quiet, mundane, and subtle expressions and acts that are rarely organised or direct. Key to everyday politics’ differences from official and advocacy politics is it involves little or no organisation, is usually low profile and private behaviour, and is done by people who probably do not regard their actions as political. Such everyday politics also arise in situations where group leaders’ seemingly beneficent gestures regarding how artisans are paid for their labor elicit variable responses from producers. Patricia, for example, may give artisans credit at her grocery store rather than cash for their requested loans as well as for the nito reed products they deliver. The widespread practice of this exchange of groceries for craft goods is evidenced in the fact that artisans know exactly how the value of their items translates into an equivalent value in groceries. For example, one small nito tray for which an artisan receives 180 pesos ($US4.00) purchases approximately 2 kilos of rice, 50 grams of coffee and ¼ kilo of sugar; and a “chip and dip” nito tray at 250 pesos (US$5.55) buys 3 kilos of rice, three packages of bread and two bars of soap. In such instances, Patricia earns a profit on artisans’ loans and on the nito pieces they deliver because Patricia purchases the groceries wholesale, but sells these goods to artisans at retail prices. While some artisans object to Patricia’s wellintended strategy that potentially exploits artisans’ more vulnerable economic



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positions, the fact that the majority of artisans continue to participate in this system of exchange, in effect, politically supports and “reinforce[s] class and status differences and help[s] to perpetuate a political [and commodity trade] system in which inequalities, personal relationships, and dependencies are endemic” (Kerkvliet 2009: 236). Such push-pull actions percolate throughout the nito reed industry. Artisans thus use everyday politics at different commodity chain nodes causing group leaders and entrepreneurs to balance maintaining their profit margins with fostering good social capital relations to secure a smooth-running nito industry.

Conclusion The transnational demand for Kalibo’s nito reed products positions the industry in an uneasy frontier of practice. As noted earlier, on one hand, nito reed production has indeed provided artisans with more regular and reliable income to augment their earnings from agriculture. Yet to ensure efficient operation amidst the changing demands of global clients and high-end craft stores, enterprises have predictably been organized hierarchically. While some artisans have been able to move into positions of group or subgroup leader, their vertical mobility is limited due to the few opportunities available at this level and the need for private capital to operationalize the required horizontal commodity flows (e.g., raw material supplies, income for cash loans to artisans). Not surprisingly, those with capital from other sources, such as Patricia Tayad who operates a grocery store and receives overseas remittances from her husband, emerge as best positioned to take advantage of this industry’s potential. In addition, the locational constraint of reliably obtaining ongoing sources of raw materials and the fluctuating demand for products given shifts in the global economy and in consumer tastes, mean that even successful entrepreneurs such as Susan Batton may lack the assurance of predictable future sales. Consequentially many entrepreneurs do not feel confident enough to regularly pass on benefits (e.g., higher wages, social welfare programs) to artisans in trickle-down actions. In such situations, not only do the relations of commodity production and exchange reinforce class differences but they can potentially reproduce them. In order to maintain and diversify their livelihoods within this socioeconomic and political context of trade, artisans may exercise everyday politics by selling their products to leaders other than those from whom they received their orders and by producing the items they find most profitable whether or

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not these products have been specifically requested. Entrepreneurs such as Susan Batton thus find themselves in situations where they must gauge the advantage of building good-will with artisans by accepting their unordered items and thus straining their capital on hand, with the risk of alienating makers and jeopardizing future deliveries if they refuse artisans’ additional items. Part of the challenge of the global market for local “indigenous” crafts, moreover, lies in the need for ongoing product innovation. In order to maintain their competitive edge, nito reed entrepreneurs like Susan Batton thus negotiate complex and culturally mediated design processes across borders to develop new products that can still speak of their locale or terroir. As artisans and entrepreneurs transform local materials into middle- and high-end household goods, they reassess, redraw and at times overturn past practice. Nito reed products thus metamorphose via intersections with other influences—personal preferences and broader global fashion trends—to call into question any discrete identification of such goods as “traditional” or “authentic.” The nito reed industry’s multi-stranded dynamics evidence the intra-and inter-enterprise relations at each node across horizontal and vertical commodity chains—the roles of external governance and relations among global clients, entrepreneurs and artisans with regard to the flexibility of labor, networks and trust, and shifts in consumption and craft innovation. The diverse driving forces fashioning this system’s ongoing reshaping and perseverance thus expose the messiness of provisioning systems—the “futility of thinking in terms of orderly sequences and [singular] directional flows” (Leslie and Reimer 2003: 435). In this light, artisans, middle people and entrepreneurs have been able to realize variable degrees of industry advantage. By resituating a place-based production and trade within wider negotiations of meaning and agency, nito reed market players navigate a range of constraints to recraft global commodity networks more on their own terms.

PART THREE

Conflicts

11 Conflicting Ideologies of the Digital Hand Locating the Material in a Digital Age Daniela Rosner

Introduction

I

n 2005, the computer book publishing company O’Reilly Media launched Craft, a project-based magazine celebrating a renewed interest in handmade goods. From knitted iPod cozies to hand-stitched robots, the magazine blended digital technology with a bohemian ethos of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) design. Impressing on readers a break from a bygone era—asserted by their tagline “transforming traditional craft”—the magazine dedicated their project “to the renaissance that’s occurring within the world of crafts”:1 knitters joining social networking websites to share resources, jewelers welding charm necklaces with Facebook icons, and IKEA hackers reworking massproduced furniture like Lego sets—making guitar amps out of alarm clocks and lamp shades out of salad bowls. Though Craft magazine only lasted a few years, its legacy continued. Websites for craft touted the phrase “this is not your grandmother’s X,” where the X stood for one of many manual arts, from knitting to scrap booking. Sites for collective electronic tinkering such as maker and hackerspaces rejoiced in the merging of electronics and textile artifacts. Digital metaphors rose from the screen in startup-lofts, bedrooms and garages. In the industrial trenches

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of Silicon Valley local sites of needlework became global sites of making. A new form of craft was on the rise—or was it? This chapter digs into questions of craft and technological production through the lens of those participating in a decade-old knitting guild located in San Francisco, California. I draw on eighteen months of interventionalist ethnographic research to explore questions of belonging in and through claims to technological progress. In describing the guild, I consider how people already doing craft, those participating in an established community of practice (Lave 1991), respond to the emergence of digital technology. In particular, I examine responses to Spyn, a system I developed for annotating knit artifacts with digital records (Rosner and Ryokai 2008, 2009).2 In addition to documentation, Spyn enables knitters to share digital records with others, allowing the knit artifact to hold narratives of its making. Within technology studies, knitting has brokered the legitimacy of scholarship on craft in a couple ways (Gauntlett 2011; Humphreys 2008: McCullough1998: Orton-Johnson 2012: Rosner and Ryokai 2008: Turney 2009). Firstly, scholars have recognized knitting as an early site of blog activity, particularly in the USA and the UK (Humphreys 2008: Orton-Johnson 2012: Turney 2009). By sharing stories around projects, knitters produce locally and globally contingent artifacts. Secondly, knit material links up with

FIGURE 13   Spyn system associates digital records with locations on knit fabric using computer vision © James Jordan.



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computational form in surprising ways (Haring 2006: Rosner and Ryokai 2008). Knitting creates stitches in long columns that, by way of their stacking, form three-dimensional fabric. This enables aspects of the knitter’s process to be indexed: making mistakes and chronology readable from the final form. Lastly, as a set of sequential interlocking loops of yarn or thread, knitting suggests analogies to the digital. Like the zeros and ones of Morse code (Haring 2006), basic knitting involves a process of interweaving knit and purl stitches, one stitch the reverse of the other. In the design of Spyn, I leveraged this binary relation to design patterns of infrared ink on un-knit yarn, invisible to the eye but visible to an infrared camera. I printed varied dot-patterns on yarn, knit up the yarn of different fibers and widths with needles of different thickness. The resulting fabric revealed varying degrees of coincidence across infrared dots. Through trials of knitting and programming, coding fabric and coding software, I developed edge-detection algorithms designed to locate positions on fabric. The pattern of the knit and that of the software, therefore, evolved in relation. In this way, knitting speaks to the dual meaning of the term “digital,” referring to both the hands (fingers as digits) and the binary (zeros and ones). Before entering the guild, I had given the software to twelve techsavvy knitters based in the San Francisco Bay area. Observing their use of the tool over a few weeks, I found symbolic transformations of their knit artifacts: gloves turned into travel journals, hats turned into mix tapes, and vests turned into puzzles. By documenting the location of knitting activity, the software distributed the knit artifact across a range of geographic and temporal locations. Knitters and their recipients interpreted the digital content as lasting messages rather than ephemeral communication, equating the objects to a “hand-written letter” or “time capsule.” Within the setting of the guild, however, these same possibilities took new form. While geographically close to the technology hub of Silicon Valley, the guild sat some distance from this so-called “renaissance” of craft. The guild met one evening a month in the recreation room of a local police station on the south end of San Francisco, several miles from the nearest BART train stop. The setting provided access to a quiet, curated space with movable furniture and bright fluorescent lighting. A steady stream of young on-duty police officers, mostly male, passed through the space during meetings, contrasting with the mostly retirement age women of the guild.3 The officers opened the front door to the cold evening air, sometimes accompanied by detainees. In bringing my project to the guild, I explore boundaries of digital production vis-à-vis claims to craft: how knitters selectively take up and defy technological production to reaffirm craft values. Here knitting provides a means of tackling a highly gendered activity that is challenged by a shifting

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discourse around handwork practice. Through my interventions in the guild, members marked technological production as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2003 [1984]).

The machine-knit sweater To consider the role of technology in the practices of knitting guild members we first turn to the story of a machine-made sweater. Marla, a long-time guild member and former president, had received a commission to replicate a beloved pink sweater, now loose and misshapen after many years of wear.4 When Marla inspected the sweater she saw a machine-knit made up of a simple combination of two knit and two purl stitches. As she began knitting, however, the pattern failed to match exactly. Marla spent the month of December getting advice from various yarn stores on the color, fiber, and stitch. The color was neither pink nor beige. The fiber was neither wool nor acrylic. A clerk at a yarn store deemed it acrylic with a bit of wool. He recommended that Marla upgrade the quality of yarn. After some trial and error, Marla decided on a combination of two alpaca silk-weight yarns and size 2 needles. Marla retold this story during multiple guild meetings, referring to the machine-knit pink sweater as a “horrid acrylic beast.” Hundreds of dollars and two months of continuous knitting left the front side of the new sweater only half complete. The money Marla would be making from the commission added up to a fraction of her time and expenses. Marla’s husband was a chair seat weaver and once confronted a similar challenge while weaving the back of a large seat. Like her pink sweater, the seat required immense effort, but produced very little, she told the group.

FIGURE 14   Iterative development of Spyn software; infrared-enabled camera images of knit yarn (left), Spyn screenshot (right) © Daniela Rosner.



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The mood shifted as Marla passed her sweater around the room: the familiar sound of oohs and ahhs, expressions of awe and empathy. “Is that a cheer or challenge?” someone asked. “It’s both,” the guild president responded, “she deserves a cheer.” While the machine-knit sweater frustrated Marla, her replica represented something entirely different: a relic of handwork. “It takes 12 rows to make an inch,” she said proudly. “Are you charging by the stitch?” a member responded. For the customer with whom Marla dealt, the handmade artifact—and the seeming simplicity of its stitch work—foiled attempts to grasp its elaborate form. On its own, the stitch could not reveal the thoughtful selection of color and fiber: two lace-weight strands of angora. The stitch could not comment on her even stitch work: tightly bound strands intentionally indistinguishable from the machine-made knit. The softness of a yarn, the size and tension of the needles, the pale color of a used sweater, each of these qualities featured prominently in Marla’s work but remained obscured on the machine-made knit, even for Marla herself. While drawing together the work of the hand and the machine, this project exposed firm boundaries that remained.

Setting up a mailing list Like the reluctance of guild members to embrace machine production, I learned of some resistance to social media within guild life. One explanation for this resistance concerned guild organization. Most members had little idea what other members did outside the guild. In the first hour of each meeting the guild president led the group through agenda items, the secretary took minutes, and officers delivered updates. In the meeting’s second hour, a segment called cheers and challenges invited stories of mistaken stitches and intricate lace patterns, each relived by passing knit fabrics around the table. A weekly program enabled members to take turns delivering short presentations: reflections on knitting history, lessons on techniques such as weaving in ends, or introductions to genres such as Orenburg lace. This enthusiasm for sharing techniques continued in annual classes taught by expert knitters. The classes augmented the monthly programs by offering daylong events for sharing techniques among professional teachers and non-members. Providing mechanisms for recognizing technical skill and length of membership remained central for most guild members. Identifying these qualities became a matter of establishing social status. However, these relations became difficult to reproduce online. Alongside organizational concerns, guild members expressed a range of personal reservations. Three years back, the president brought the question

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of online presence to the group. He had no intention of creating a website to publicize the Knitting Bridge “but more of a place where we could post announcements, where we could share our stuff,” he explained. Members might sign up for classes, share ideas, and so on. But within minutes the topic became volatile. Members were appalled at the suggestion of an online presence, afraid that an online group would require them to publicly expose their personal information. The web would provide access to their address or social security number. Their privacy would be threatened and their security would be breached. “There was tremendous resistance. Like it was shot down, like I was really shot down, big time,” he said. When social networking sites entered the guild a year later, they were met with additional cynicism, a few tears, and lost members. Two new members— “IT people,” one member explained—had created a guild Facebook page and Ravelry.com group. One of them had yet to attend a meeting or meet the other members of the guild. When guild members discovered the new page, a few “charter” members among them demanded that the sites be taken down. The junior members never returned to the guild. With each passing week, the possibility of producing an online presence for the guild grew ever more unlikely. The group had taken more than five years to begin using a Yahoo! Group, and the mailing list remained inactive one year after I joined. A string of more than twenty-five carbon-copied email addresses accompanied each email to the group. One member without email access preferred correspondence via phone or the post, requiring members to print out important mailings such as the annual dues or December holiday photo. After joining the guild, members recruited me to the technology group. Despite my role in the technology group, I had trouble pinpointing the nature of this resistance to technology. The technology group never met in person due to these hard feelings in years past. Did guild members primarily worry for identity theft? Did they want new organizational features in social networking tools? Did they want more control? What, for that matter, did they recognize as resistance? The questions were multiple, and the explanations were difficult to parse, particularly given that many of these same members regularly used information technology while knitting. Some sought out new patterns and techniques via online knitting magazines and YouTube video tutorials. Others frequented Ravelry.com (a social network for knitters) to store their knitting projects and keep tabs on projects. One member engaged in a “knit-along” wherein she tackled the same knitting pattern with other people across the globe—sharing her activity through blogs or other social media. My most rewarding fieldwork experiences included a fieldtrip to a steel yard with 80-year-old Ellen, where, together, we scavenged for malleable metals with which to crochet electronic-luminescent necklaces. Ellen frequently crocheted with electronic-luminescent yarn and collaborated



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with a mathematician to create unusual patterns. Another “charter” member had worked as one of the first female computer programmers for nearly thirty years. In her retirement, she maintained databases for her knitting as well as a non-profit organization. Indeed, it was my appearance in O’Reilly Media’s Craft magazine that first connected me with the guild. A member of a local knitting guild had read an article on Spyn and asked me to visit. Computational tools were off-putting but also intriguing. It seemed that fear of identity theft, though likely important, remained an easy explanation for a more complicated and ambiguous relationship to technology culture.

Presenting Spyn to the guild It was not until my program at the guild that I learned of a more profound purpose for resisting online tools. With the lights turned off and the projector on, I tried to make out faces in the audience, noticing a range of emotions as I delivered my talk. I introduced vignettes from my research such as images of conductive textiles and examples of “yarn-bombing” (graffiti inspired knitting for outdoor and urban spaces). I told stories of Spyn, the technology I had developed around storytelling. These images catalyzed a range of emotions during the course of my presentation. A long-time member called the work “scary,” and later explained, “I was getting anxious and I got a little paranoid … I was sort of like, why are people doing this? Why are they invading?” The guild president asked, “What is your goal for it? What do you want to have happen?” The guild member without an email account unintentionally began to snore ten minutes into the presentation. Members seemed unsure how new technologies could or should become relevant to their practice. It was in this moment of intervention, seven months into my membership in the guild, that my research turned on its head. Interactions with members around Spyn helped me make sense of this reaction. I learned that it was not the online tools themselves that prompted anxiety, but the developments of a technology culture of which they were a part. Six-year guild member Wanda described this sense during an afternoon trading needlecraft skills in her studio: I’m becoming invisible. It’s kind of hard to explain. Because people don’t respond to me the same way that they used to … When you have a young person doing really innovative, interesting things, or something that’s really, really complicated, or whatever, that’s great. But when you have an older person who’s doing really innovative things, or really complicated, it’s

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like: “oh well, of course they’re doing that, so what?” … It’s like, “there isn’t that much point in teaching an older person; they’re not going to be around that long.” Wanda was not referring to a simple distrust of the digital medium, but a prejudice perpetuated by the worlds that bring those media into being. Perceptions of undesirability related to age and ability came early to Wanda. At thirty-five she began carrying a walking stick after a complicated knee surgery. With a cane in hand, she noticed men no longer, in her words, “ogling” her. After spending her youth rebelling against such treatment, she resented what her walking stick had come to represent. After losing her job in theatrical lighting, a profession she had pursued for over thirty years, Wanda sought to gain income through needlework. She didn’t want to put her business or the guild online, but also worried the group would lose “young” membership without online representation. Though she expressed hostility toward the digital medium, the hostility was less an admission of fear than a reclaiming of territory. For Wanda and other guild members, my work imparted a view of knitting resolutely removed from guild life. I referenced a set of preferences propagated by Maker Faires, Indi-craft festivals and myriad online resources— people participating in surrounding “maker culture” oriented toward youth. This infusion of digital technology in craft techniques contributed to a sense of loss. Victorian lace techniques and particular histories of Orenburg lace, for example—the longstanding concerns integral to needlecraft practice— became overshadowed by concerns for novelty. Digital “enhancements” to the knitting project, such as Spyn, blurred important distinctions between digital and material instantiations of craft. Catch phrases such as “this is not your grandmother’s knitting” held new meaning. Engaging with Spyn—a tool oriented toward augmenting social communication around knitting—involved a form of boundary-crossing that undermined guild members’ personal and collective values. Bringing this project to the guild began to expose these boundaries. Knitters selectively took up and resisted new digitally mediated means of production. Their responses revealed something about the technology itself: it could be used to amplify the symbolic work of needlecraft. However, it also showed us something about the knitting worlds I had entered: members saw themselves as outsiders to an engineering culture that increasingly rendered their work invisible.



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Knitting and digitality: Coding in fabric and software With these stories of resistance and invisibility as a backdrop, my introduction to the guild seems rather unlikely. By the time I presented my project, Spyn comprised out-of-date Java software on un-locked Android phones. The digital files had persisted but their containers had inevitably degraded. What’s more, the algorithm depended on existing open-source libraries for computer vision and required regular adjustment, enrolling resources beyond my project. The software was not simply or easily located in the materiality of the guild. Instead it involved translations between two seemingly complementary cultures of code and knitting. By bringing this software to the guild, I found that resistance to technology has little to do with “technophobia,” or how this group may seem “set in their ways” by fearing change. Rather, the hostility stemmed from perceptions of irreverence within a surrounding technology culture. Through performing and perpetuating a celebration of craft, technologists came to articulate an easy separation between them and what came before: “smart” material versus “traditional” material, “low”-tech versus “high”-tech, and “virtual” versus “real.” These terms, and the claims they perpetuate, affect the values imbued in and the engagements described by knitting practice. In this way, my project animates debates on the nature of craft digitality— taken up elsewhere in this volume by Nafus and Beckwith—by exploring the conflicting ideologies Spyn’s integration of algorithmic practices and knitting engendered. This recognition of reasserted boundaries within knitting practice challenges DeNicola’s dismissal of the digital-analogue distinction. Today digital posts and knit artifacts often develop in parallel as aspects of the same project. Yet, as unique objects, knitters bind these projects loosely: producing various parts, digital and otherwise, that can be split apart and undone. Blogs post multiple knit artifacts, and images of knit artifacts appear on multiple knitting blogs. It can be hard to grasp the craft objects in these settings, particularly as those objects become both digital and material. Through rejecting our interventions, Spyn enabled knitters to get a hold of these digital-material assemblages and make claims to the territory of needlecraft. As a result of my participation, I became acutely aware of the different legacies of code and craft. On the one hand, my presentation challenged various politico-spatial orders around knitting through projects such as yarnbombing. Knitters saw these practices as disrupting or, as one member said, “invading” the social values of guild members. On the other hand, the use of digital “enhancements” to the knitting project also troubled existing

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engagements. These enhancements, such as the Spyn application, blurred digital and material instantiations—and challenged knitters’ moral claims to craft. By embracing a history of feminized manual labor, and by selectively framing the visibility of their bodies and practices in relation to a surrounding group of tech-savvy makers, the guild members sought to rigidify otherwise permeable physical-digital boundaries to maintain their hold on a particular practice. The unease felt at the intrusion of the digital in a familiar manual craft may expose important categorical understandings of technology often overlooked in everyday life. As “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’s (1984) words, my unfamiliar interventions took the guild members by surprise. In Somaliland, Douglas shows how the separation of spiritual and secular power vests spiritual power in the physically weak and, thus, disrupts ideas of social authority (2003: 111–13). In the knitting guild, distinctions between IT and material became equally useful for understanding members’ relationship to craft. Like classifications of dirt, Spyn suggests a system of significance in which technology unfolds as part of a celebration of often male and often youth-oriented practitioners. Building on entrenched categories, guild members saw Spyn as “other”: a culture of innovation that—while geographically near—remained far from a guild life made up of (mostly women) knitters with an appreciation for craft histories. That guild members initially resisted implanting digital devices in material objects (old and new) reveals not just a semiotic purpose to their opposition but an aesthetic and political one as well. It points to the new stakes of digital components that outlast their substantive frames. As one guild member commented, “this whole, not your grandmother’s blank, you know what? My grandmother did unbelievably beautiful needlepoint.” These craft histories reinforce a lack of belonging in a surrounding technoculture. They highlight what happens when a social world that has not yet authorized the rejection of existing ideals is forced to build new categories around craft.

12 Materials, the Nation and the Self Division of Labor in a Taiwanese Craft Geoffrey Gowlland

Introduction1

T

he argument for this chapter was triggered by a moment during fieldwork in the town of Yingge, the main center of craft and industrial ceramics production in Taiwan. An artisan I had only recently met (I will call him Mr Tu), was showing me around his workshop, and at some point brought out a vase from its protective case to show me. The vase was porcelain, perhaps half a meter tall with an elongated neck, and finely decorated with motifs of cranes and water lilies. I was immediately struck, not so much by the vase itself, but by the visual contrast the vase presented with the environment of the workshop I was standing in. All around me were dozens of pots of various sizes (mostly larger items) at different stages of drying and ranging from medium to pale gray—the color of unfired porcelain. Only a handful of finished (glazed and fired) products could be found in that workshop since Tu does not himself carry out the glazing and firing of the pots he shapes on the wheel. As he was showing me this vase, Tu himself had his hands and clothes caked in dry gray clay. The vividly colored vase that Tu was holding contrasted strongly with the monochromatic surroundings it was in.

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Mr Tu is one of the last still active representatives of a generation that grew up in poverty, learning to make pots on a kick-wheel (a wheel turned by foot and kept turning by its own inertia) in the “nanmin” (south Chinese) tradition of pottery. He is one of the few artisans who makes larger pots in Yingge— such as large containers used in temples to burn incense—or decorative pots of up to 80 centimeters in diameter found in hotels and restaurants— which require particular strength and hard work; Tu blames young people for lacking the dedication to make anything else than small and pretty bowls and cups that will grace the tables of Taiwan’s middle classes. Tu is also an expert at making complex shapes such as the vase he showed me the thin and elongated neck is particularly difficult to achieve since the pot can easily collapse under its own weight as it is being worked on. Tu might be one of the few potters, if not the only potter, in Taiwan to be capable of such a feat. The glazing and decorating of the vase is not his own work; Tu only works at the wheel in his own private workshop. He is not responsible for selling the final product, but rather sells the unfired wares to “bosses” (laoban) who will fire and finish the product, according to a widespread division of labor in Yingge between artisans working in their privately owned workshops echoing the division of labor between laoban, shifu (“masters,” understood as people possessing a set of skills), and gongren (common workers) in the larger factories, many of which have been disbanded in recent decades. The name seal (commonly used instead of a signature) that Tu stamps on his pots usually does not contain his own name, but the name of the laoban who will glaze, paint, and take credit for the object. The object Mr Tu was holding was a rare exception: it was signed also by himself, as it was commissioned as a gift from the Yingge Museum of Ceramics to a Korean museum that had invited Mr Tu to demonstrate the making of Chinese traditional—and quite humble—pickle jars. As is common in Yingge, the potter/thrower usually goes uncredited for his/her work.2 The object Mr Tu was holding was valuable in more than one way: it was glazed and painted by a recognized master, the golden decorative elements that adorned it were pure gold, and the motifs and style resonated strongly with Chinese traditional (high) culture. Tu is a modest person, and when asked whether he minds that his work rarely gets credit in the final object, he tells me that he is not interested in fame, but rather in doing his work well and with heart (xin). The division of labor between potter and glaze artisan/artist in Yingge, and some of its implications and significance for artisans, is the theme of this chapter. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how the different materials and different techniques employed in these distinct specializations—clay and glaze and the way they are transformed through the work of artisans—come to shape relationships between persons. In so doing, I want to explore ways in which two concerns of the anthropology of craft and



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material culture can be brought together, namely the interest in the embodied dimensions of making craft with skill, and in the way craft objects are agentive in the definition of meanings linked to work, means of production, and nationhood. These two aspects are usually treated separately in the literature, yet come together in the daily lives of artisans. In the object that Tu was holding, different materials but also the work of different artisans are combined. In such an object, I argue, different ideas about persons, class, the past, and Taiwanese nationhood come together. Ceramics production in Taiwan does not have the long and prestigious history of centers such as Jingdezhen (porcelain) or Yixing (stoneware) in mainland China. If we exclude the pottery production of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, and ceramic tile production at the time when Taiwan was a Spanish colony in the 1600s, the current ceramics tradition can be traced back barely over two centuries. Since these beginnings in the 1800s, ceramics production has been of daily use objects. Production until the late nineteenth century was restricted to roughly made utensils covered with “slip-glazes,” in other words, glazes with high clay content that remain matte after firing. The Japanese, during the time Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945, are credited with providing the necessary technical and financial input into ceramic production to transform it into a modern industry. Still at that time, ceramics production had no artistic or fine-craft ambitions, and were slipglazed (although using glazes of higher quality). One of the main purposes of developing the industry, for the Japanese, was to produce items of daily use for export to Japan. After the war, and because of the tensions between the Communist government in mainland China and the Kuomintang government of Taiwan as of 1949, Taiwan could no longer rely on imports from either Japan or mainland China. The local ceramics industry was crucial in meeting the domestic demand for daily use utensils. The main production method at that time was the jiggering and jollying method, associated today with industrial mass production, which enables the mechanical production of objects, notably rice bowls, using a plaster mold rotating on a lathe. The Taiwanese ceramics tradition is thus “industrial” (this is my own characterization; as I will explain, no clear distinctions are made in Yingge between “industry” and “craft”), meeting the domestic (and earlier on, Japanese) demand for cheap, simple and functional wares. The profile of the industry has, however, been changing in recent decades, and has been increasingly geared towards the production of labor-intensive, higher-quality, and decorated items ever since mainland China took over the role of ceramics “factory of the world” that Taiwan previously held in its economic boom years (1970s–80s). Since the early 1990s, due to competition from China,3 many Taiwanese ceramics factories have had to close down, or made a portion of their workers redundant. Workers also left of their own volition, knowing

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that work in a factory was not stable, or wanting to start an independent activity. Many of those workers have reinvented themselves as “artisans”: they have set up their own private workshop, acquired knowledge of glazing or handmade ceramics, and explored new designs and styles to appeal to the tastes of Taiwan’s growing middle class. Many of the ceramics producers I talked to in Yingge had a past of factory worker, or were the sons and daughters of factory owners, and were introducing innovations in glazes, techniques and designs, putting to use some of the techniques they had originally acquired in the context of a factory. In Yingge, the boundaries between industry, craft and art are blurred. Rather than trying to define craft in essential terms, and focus the analysis on “craft” ceramics as opposed to other forms of ceramics, I propose to define craft in relational terms. In a Euro-American perspective, crafts tend to be evoked in terms of opposition to mass production and industrialization. In Taiwan, another set of oppositions and distinctions operate. The persons I identify as “artisans” in this chapter are in many cases former factory workers. The set of oppositions that emerge in Yingge draw distinctions between materials, ways of working, and people who work in different ways, with different opportunities for creativity and innovation. The distinction between “craft” and “industry” also takes on specific meaning linked to ways of relating between enterprise owner (laoban), craft master (shifu), and worker (gongren), which to some extent maps onto distinctions between artists, artisans, and workers. I thus use “craft” in this chapter as an etic concept: it identifies activities that Euro-Americans would readily identify as craft, namely the production of ceramics that involve high degrees of manual and skilled work, and fits with David Pye’s (1968) definition of “workmanship of risk” (which, for Pye, encompasses “craft” as usually understood) as activities that are dependent on the care, judgment and dexterity of “workmen.” But the concept of craft can also become a tool for critical analysis, which defines relationships rather than the essence of a given activity, and can be useful in revealing and critically addressing claims and distinctions that are created and maintained as part and parcel of the making of things with skills. I start with a discussion of the division of labor as it operates in Yingge and its implications for relationships between producers. I move on to a reflection on the implications of this division of labor, and how it is negotiated by artisans in Yingge. My final section will bring into the picture broader claims and negotiations in relation to ethnicity and the nation in Taiwan. This enables me to suggest connections and mutual influence between the local, situated environment of workshops, and larger, imagined, issues relating to the nation.



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The raw and the cultured: Division of labor in Yingge In Yingge, with the exception of some studio potters (producing “artistic” or “creative” work), few artisans will produce and fire their work from start to finish. Even among “artistic” potters, unfired wares, especially those of large size or difficult design, are commissioned from artisans who produce pots on the potter’s wheel. There are two main methods to produce clay objects in Yingge: one is throwing on the wheel—a highly skilled activity, and involving years of training—and the other is slip-molding using plaster molds. The latter is a much simpler technique, requiring fewer skills but also introducing a further division of labor between the producer of the plaster mold, and the maker of pots using these molds. These are two very different techniques, one highly skilled, the other not. Whilst the two types of pottery production are usually associated with craft/art production in the first case, and with industrial mass production in the second, this division is blurred in Yingge. Shaping pots on the potter’s wheel is as much associated with industrial production as is slip-molding. For instance, Mr Tu’s father was employed by a factory to produce large vats used in liquor production and commissioned by thousands in that industry. Slip-molding was not suitable for the making of these large vats. The technique of slip-molding, although the most common one in mass production given its efficiency, is also often used in the making of artistic or “craft” products with complex shapes that cannot be shaped on the wheel. Slip-molding is used both in large factories and in household factories around Yingge, with the owner of the workshop often its sole worker. In the workshops of slip-molders, monochrome colors—gray, or brick red depending on the clay employed—dominate, since the process of glazing the objects will usually be carried out in other workshops. The environment of a painter’s studio is strikingly different. One artist (artisan?) I knew well would commission most of his products from other artisans, including his younger brother (who worked in a corner of the workshop). Years ago he quit his job4 as a glaze operator in one of the major factories in Yingge to study arts at the county college, and now decorates pots with Chinese motifs or with designs inspired by Western modern art. The contrast with the workshop environment of Mr Tu, or artisans working with slip-molding—monochromatic and dusty—is visually striking. Combined with differences of work environments, this division of labor between artisans informs ideas about the relative value of the work of different artisans. The paint and glazes are more highly valued than the clay object that supports it, to the point where the name of the artisan who produced the unfired pot is unacknowledged. In discussions with potters in Yingge, the practice of signing

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pots only by the glaze paint artist was justified to me in two ways. Firstly, I was told that the consumer is really interested in the glaze, in the surface of the object, its decorations and colors, and much less in the shape of pots. There are few innovations in form: the objects are meant to be utilitarian, or are meant to look “classic,” especially if they are covered in traditional motifs. An American potter, educated in the US and who now lives in Yingge, explained to me that he at first continued to make the kind of “arty” objects he made in America, but realized that customers were really interested in the objects that had use value, especially cups for drinking tea that hosts might use to demonstrate their good taste. This did not hinder his creativity too much, he told me, insofar as he could experiment with glazes and surface designs. Degrees of innovation might exist in terms of form insofar as the pot presents interesting surfaces for paintings. Mr Tu, for instance, would explain to me his more adventurous designs of pots by pointing out the surfaces that could be used for decoration (by the glaze or paint artist who would eventually buy such objects). Another justification for the fact that the name stamped on the base of pots is usually that of the glaze artist and not the potter is perhaps more striking. Mr Ming, a ceramicist in his fifties, had worked in a ceramics factory, eventually quitting his job (or perhaps made redundant, though he did not say so) to set up his own workshop. Although Ming was known for the quality of his glazes and innovations in glaze formula, he had also spent years learning to throw pots on the wheel. Throwing pots is relatively easy, he told me: it is about practicing, over and over the same gestures until one gets it right. Glazing, however, is different (still according to Ming): first one needs to have some knowledge of chemistry, something that cannot be learned simply through practice, but rather is learned at school, college, or from books. Ming, at the same time as he was working in a ceramics factory, had taken up an evening course on ceramics at the county college, eventually setting up a home factory on the ground floor of his house, employing four to five workers to produce his designs. Ming also taught glazing and glaze chemistry at the local vocational school on a part-time basis. Ming was contrasting two different kinds of knowledge: the manual—in his discourse, an almost mindless act of shaping clay on the wheel; and the intellectual—sophisticated work involved in glazing that had become his specialty. The two processes of shaping clay and glazing it are of course very different, and imply different ways of relating to materials. In contrast to the immediacy of working with clay, in which every subtle movement of the hands transforms in real time the clay, the process of glazing is one of problem-solving. The result is distant in time from the work of the artisan, as it is only when an object comes out of the kiln that it can be judged. Given the slow process involved in developing new glazes, it can take months to try



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different combinations of chemical compounds to achieve a desired effect. Every new trial needs to be fired. Once out of the kiln the result is evaluated, and intellectual work is necessary in order to solve problems and think of ways of improving the glaze or achieving a desired effect by modifying chemical composition or temperature of the kiln. Glazing also enables a very different kind of relationship between the product and the person who is originator of this product: a glaze formula can be patented. Ming had obtained a patent for a “crystal” glaze that develops distinctive patterns and oil spots on the surface when it is fired. The patent was for a glaze that was particularly well suited for using as wine vessels, as the glaze lets the alcohol “breathe” due to its microporosity. Ming demonstrated this effect to me by pouring some whisky into one of those glazed cups, and in an ordinary cup; I had to agree that the whisky served in his patented glaze cup tasted better. The intellectual work involved in glazing is thus recognized in the form of patents. Ming, who started his career as a factory worker, would insist on the education he acquired through his strong motivation to learn. This enabled him to handle this complicated material, glaze, that can only be manipulated effectively with specialized knowledge. A certain mystery is involved in glaze production. Recipes can be kept secret, and even when a glaze recipe is published, it can be difficult to reproduce a given effect. Mr Hong, an artisan who had inherited his father’s factory but now remained its only “worker,” told me about the glaze recipe for use with wood-fired pottery that had brought him fame. He had taken the bold step of publishing his recipe on the internet, yet was fully confident that no one could ever get the exact effect he achieved in his work. The many variables involved—kiln temperatures, type of kiln, etc.—mean that a simple glaze recipe is not enough knowledge for another artisan to reproduce similar effects. In Ming’s discourse, education is evoked in relation to social mobility. It was by educating himself, in college and through books, that he was able to leave his factory job and eventually set up his workshop and become a “boss,” a laoban. Being one’s own boss is an ideal and something that many workers strive for, in Yingge and Taiwan in general, as discussed by anthropologists of Taiwan (Stites 1982; Stites 1985; Harrell 1985; Simon 2005). Having an education, but also learning by oneself, are keys to achieve advancement from worker to boss. During fieldwork, I collected stories of people who made the transition from factory to private workshop, or home factory: how they learned ceramics in the evenings after work, and why they decided to leave the factory environment. I was many times told that it is important to constantly improve oneself, and that learning continues throughout one’s life. I heard a very similar discourse during my previous research on ceramics production in mainland China (Yixing), and the scholarly literature on China

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has repeatedly singled out this ethics of self-improvement as a characteristic of Chinese culture (e.g. Li 2001; Tu 1972), whilst also noticing ambiguities in these discourses which also include references to fate and luck (Harrell 1985; Harrell 1987; Oxfeld 1993; Simon 2005). The idea of self-improvement in Chinese culture is strongly expressed in the work of an anthropologist, Yen Yuehping (2005), who investigated the practice of calligraphy in China. In a passage of her book, Yen discusses the multiple meanings of the word wen, usually translated as “culture,” but in the most literal meaning refers to literary composition or writing: From this state of polished or cultivated delicacy [the original meaning of the word wen], the character [or word wen, “culture”] later acquired yet another layer of meaning—to paint over or to veneer over the authentic and raw material of one’s given nature (zhi). Naivety is coated with layers of sophistication. What lies at the semantic core of the character wen is precisely this slow process of polishing, carving, refining, waxing and glazing of self. To be more precise, wen means to transform the natural or raw self into the social and cultural self that glistens with the gloss of accumulated heritage. (46) Learning to be literate, learning calligraphy, is a transformation of the self, a coating of the raw natural self with culture—culture here understood in terms of “high culture,” being cultivated. Learning, as seen in this and other scholarly works (Stafford 1995; Li 2001) is central to Chinese conceptions of what it is to be a person. I relate this argument to the discourses I heard in China (Gowlland 2012) and in Taiwan about the importance of learning. For artisans, it was important to constantly improve oneself after an apprenticeship that could only teach basic skills. It was crucial to seek knowledge, to find out about new designs, new tricks, new techniques, throughout one’s life. During my fieldwork in China, I found that networks between friends, former classmates and former colleagues, exchanges identified as laiwang (coming and going, exchanges between friends), were important avenues for exchanging, gaining information, and even finding an appropriate master for one’s child to learn the craft (Gowlland 2012). Most of the artisans I had talked to in China had carried out an apprenticeship, yet in Taiwan I was surprised that few of my informants had learned through a process recognizable as an apprenticeship. I wondered why apprenticeship was so rare in Taiwan. Some artisans told me that they had learned the basics from their parents, but would quickly point out that their parents were managing a factory, and most of the techniques related to “craft” (as opposed to “industrial”) ceramics they had learned “by



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themselves” (zixue, literally “self-learning”). Most of what they knew, they had obtained from their own motivation to learn and practice their craft, their own initiative in seeking information and knowledge. Artisans had perhaps used the potter’s wheel of a friend, or invested in one of their own to practice at home, and asking for feedback and advice when possible by exploiting a network of contacts. In many cases, this period of learning had taken place alongside a day job in a factory. Others had saved enough money to quit their job and enroll in a course at the county’s college to learn ceramics or painting. Learning might be a process of “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave and Wenger 1991) yet involve an informal network of contacts rather than a clear relationship between teacher and learner. I introduced this brief discussion on the way people learn in order to stress the relationship between “cultural” ideas—ideas about the person and ideal occupation—and ways of learning and being engaged in craft practice. In this case, the cultural leitmotiv of learning for its own sake is arguably a strong motivational factor for seeking opportunities for learning, and for continuing to learn even after one has learned the necessary skills related to a means of livelihood. But cultural ideas are also expressed in terms of judgments of value, including about what constitutes a proper way of learning, and what is a worthwhile occupation. In contrast, and going back to the case I started the chapter with, Mr Tu would tell me that he never learned to work with glazes because he had no education beyond primary school. He had learned pottery from his father, in an “apprenticeship” fashion. His father was one of eight shifu (“masters”) employed in a factory, producing large wine and pickled vegetable vessels on the wheel (glazing of the pots was carried out by other workers in the factory). At the time, workers were paid by the piece, and to produce enough to feed their families they had to involve their wives and children to produce more pieces. Tu and his three brothers thus started at a young age to help their father—in Tu’s case, at the age of 8 and later learning to work at the wheel in his early teens. When I reported back to Tu Ming’s thoughts on the contrast between the mindless work of the potter versus the intellectual work of the glaze artisan, Tu commented that he did not work with his brain, but with his heart. For Tu, working with clay involves a certain relationship with materials, which is strongly associated with hard difficult work (laodong) and a difficult life (chiku), whereas the work involved with glazing is qingsong, relaxed. When Tu was countering the “intellectualist” discourse of other artisans, he was referring to another set of significant values, the ethos of hard work and dedication to work. These, I often heard mentioned, were values that were rapidly disappearing in Yingge; the capacities of artisans to work hard were being eroded. Young people, I was told, do not want to take up work with clay, as it involves hard work in damp environments. In contrast, Tu told me that

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FIGURE 15   Old-fashioned pickle jar, freshly made on the kick-wheel © Geoffrey

Gowlland.

his father was “hen lihai,” excelling in his work, and always giving his best; Tu said that he himself was far from equaling his father despite always giving the best of himself. Young people did not contradict the views of their elders: for instance, an 18-year-old aspiring artisan, learning the craft from his father, talked to me about his generation who did not know how to work hard and were more interested in playing with their mobile phones and computers. He entirely agreed with the discourse of his father and father’s generation about the lack of dedication and laziness of young people. This lack of dedication is claimed to be visible in the very objects that artisans produce: the artisans of today are no longer producing the large and labor-intensive pots some of their parents used to make, shifting focus instead on the production of smaller, “lifestyle” products, pots with decorations and pretty glazes now consumed by the Taiwanese middle classes. The younger generation, I was told by many, are too lazy to learn and to work hard (see also Simon 2005) and, often as a result, to take up the work of their parents. The generation born in or after the 1980s and its economic boom are routinely referred to as the “strawberry generation” in Yingge and Taiwan in general—a generation of young people as fragile as strawberries and who get bruised easily. Ceramics is one of the majors offered at the vocational school of Yingge; young persons from the ages of fifteen to eighteen learn the basics of wheel-throwing, glazing and



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design, yet parents and teachers point out that after graduation, students are likely to take up a job unrelated to ceramics, or pursue academic studies. The childhood memories of older artisans, in contrast to the unwillingness of younger people to work with clay, are associated with the experience of playing or helping out in areas where clay is prepared or used. One artisan now specializing in modern glazes remembered the first, and last, time he tried to taste the clay that was used in his father’s household factory when he was a child—the difficult-to-get-rid-of grit left in his mouth convinced him this was not an experience to repeat. Others remember helping out their parents around the pit where clay was prepared. One of the activities carried out by children involved siphoning out the surface water covering the clay; to get the water flowing, the child had to first suck on the siphon tube, being careful not to get the unpleasant taste and grit of clay in his or her mouth. It might be important to note here that what is probably most significant for artisans in Yingge is being one’s own boss, rather than being involved in a given activity. Being a laoban involves not simply owning one’s means of production or employing workers, but being involved at the end of the chain of production, taking credit for the object produced, rather than selling an unfinished object to another. For instance, the work involved with paint might or might not involve creative work and knowledge acquired through self-study. In a workshop headed by a woman entrepreneur, Ms Jiu, young women are employed to paint liquor bottles. Employees range from young unskilled women employed on an ad-hoc basis when the factory receives large orders to more advanced paint workers. Yet Ms Jiu takes credit for the work, having designed the motifs and done the more important work of painting the outlines that will then be filled in by the workers.

Craft materials, person and distinction It is interesting that the anthropologist Yen Yuehping (2005) I refer to above uses the word “glazing” of the self to talk about the process of Chinese self-development consisting in transforming the “raw” self into the social and cultural self. The “glazing” of something raw takes place at two levels in Yingge: at the level of the pot, when the raw clay is covered in “cultural” glaze and paint including distinctively Chinese patterns and motifs, and the raw self, being “glazed” with culture and education which is especially true of the glaze and paint artisans/artists who seek culture in constant efforts of self-development. So the properties of objects and materials overlap with the properties of persons. At the same time, another discourse, expressed by clay artisans and countering the discourse of the glaze artisans, also

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borrows from the “vocabulary” of learning and self-development: the idea of dedication and of hard work. This is in turn used to formulate judgments of value, in particular aimed at the younger generations who supposedly lack this dedication. What does this contrast between two different materials, clay and glaze, and the work of two kinds of artisans, tell us about the making of craft objects in Yingge? I have been interested and influenced by the phenomenological literature on enskillment in trying to make sense of what I observed during my fieldwork. The phenomenological approaches of Tim Ingold and others (e.g., Ingold 2000; O’Connor 2006) and others are particularly interesting in thinking about ways in which the learning and making of objects with skills involves the total involvement of the body in the activity at hand. These approaches are invaluable in understanding the work of artisans. At the same time, such approaches and their concern with embodiment and the senses are of limited use to understand some of the concerns of artisans in their daily lives, including social exchanges and their understanding of their position in society. At the same time as Ingold is rejecting a certain mind-body dualism, he is arguably creating another dichotomy, between the discursive and the experiential (Sinding-Larsen 2008). What I find problematic is the way the phenomenologically inspired literature is leaving out or even rejecting the Marxist-influenced perspective of relations of power, authority, creation of exclusivity, and authenticity (in craft). Are these two perspectives mutually exclusive? The approach of the French Matière à Penser (MàP) group (e.g., Warnier 2001; Julien and Rosselin 2009; see Gowlland 2011) is useful in bridging these two perspectives, bringing together senses, materiality, sensorimotor engagement with the material environment, and questions of creation and maintenance of relations of power and authority. The MàP criticizes three approaches to material culture: the first that has addressed material culture primarily as a sign to be decoded (the semiotic approach), the second that considers things as agents on a par with human agents (in the writings of Bruno Latour or Alfred Gell), and the third, the “material culture studies” initiated by Daniel Miller (Julien and Rosselin 2009; Warnier 2009). Left out of these three approaches is what the MàP identify as the praxeological value, or capacity of the mind/body to incorporate and disincorporate things in its body schema. This is the physical capacity of persons to bring an object into their bodily schema—for instance, a hammer can become a natural extension of the hand when used by a skilled carpenter, and can then be “disincorporated” when no longer in use. But processes of incorporation and disincorporation, for the MàP, are rarely neutral, but part of broader relations of power that act on the body through things. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault—both the earlier Foucault, theorist of power relations and the “later” Foucault of ethics and self-realization—the



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MàP try to understand the ways in which relations of power can arise out of the capacities of the human body at incorporating things into its habits. Interaction with things is habitual, wordless, seemingly natural, and difficult to make conscious—and for that reason, particularly effective at shaping the political subjectivities of persons. The MàP borrow from Foucault to think about the different subjectivities that are created through interaction with material culture. The notion of subjectivities, we know from Foucault, includes both perspectives of the subjective (how we experience the world) and subjectivation (being the subjects of people in power, the shaping of the self to adhere to what is expected from us). For the MàP, material culture holds a central role in these processes, because of its power of being incorporated, wordlessly, of becoming “natural,” and thus naturalizing power relations. These ideas are useful in going beyond the phenomenologically inspired writings on craft and material culture. Practical learning involves the gradual change of habits in relation to the material world. It implies the creation of difference through the acquisition of sets of skills specific to given material and social environments. But difference can also be exploited in the creation of inequalities (Beteille 1983). When anthropologists discuss enskillment, they are at risk of leaving out the huge potential that learning through the body has in creating differences and inequalities. The one issue with the MàP I want to take up here is the focus on material culture, a category often difficult to define, and which remains ambiguous in their work. Tim Ingold (2007) insists that we should not be thinking in terms of abstract categories such as materiality or material culture, but rather of materials and their properties. Materials are not the fixed and stagnant material objects that we surround ourselves with, but are quite literally alive, in constant states of change and mutation—for instance wood, Ingold’s prime example, is in a state of flux as it splits, warps and cracks over its “lifetime.” The properties of materials encompass not only chemical or physical properties, but also histories of flux and mutations. The example of wood in Ingold’s article is rather convenient, as it is a material that obviously goes through definite changes in its “history”—it is after all the result of actual life, a living tree. Clay has its own histories, its physical changes produced through shifts in geology, and weathering by rain and shifts in temperatures. But its mutations are particularly striking in the hands of humans, especially its chemical transformation in the kiln that turns a fragile material into one that can withstand millennia without shifting. An explanation of the way the properties of a material such as clay come to be imbued with meanings and judgments of value does not find a place in Ingold’s argument. Yet in Yingge, the properties and mutations of clay, and of glaze in the kiln, are at the root of the creation of such values and meanings. The raw clay’s water retention capabilities imply a certain way of working

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with it, a certain sensorial engagement with it, which serve as a basis for judgments of value. The dampness of the clay discourages young people from working with it, and leads them to prefer intellectual pursuits or the ease of use of their computers and mobile phones. The contrast with the hard and long-lasting surfaces of the fired clay, covered with smooth, shiny and impermeable glazes, leads glaze artists to claim the superior value of their work, and justifies their claim of authorship (also in the form of patents) of the object as a whole. To paraphrase the words of Yen Yuehping (2005), in the kilns of Yingge the raw clay comes to be covered with the glistening glaze of culture.

Local and national materials Clay and glazes as materials have geological histories, and histories of transformation in the daily work of artisans. They can also come to have a particular national history, as in the case of Taiwan. In this section, I retain the focus on materials to think about the relationships between cultural ideas about learning, the relative worth of intellectual and manual pursuits, and divisions of labor, with broader issues of nationhood. In significant and meaningful ways, clays and glazes come to shape not only two different ideas about what being a person or artisan in Taiwan means, but also relate to what it means to be Taiwanese—ideas about nationhood. In order to appreciate the ties between ceramics and the nation in Taiwan it is important to consider the historical development of Taiwanese ceramics. Just over 200 years ago, an immigrant from mainland China arrived in Yingge, and introduced ceramics techniques to the island (Hsieh 2007). The techniques he introduced were geared towards efficiency of production: the first items were for daily use, bowls, containers for storing food, and not the finer ceramics traditions of China. Jiggering and jollying were the main methods of production used at the time; now in their mechanized forms, these techniques are associated with the making of cheap industrial products. As mentioned, these proto-industrial techniques were transformed into industry by the Japanese in the early decades of the twentieth century, an industry that boomed in the 1970s when Taiwan became a global exporter of industrial ceramics. A particular situation is at the origin of the shift in production from daily use objects to fine ceramics, an example of which I started the chapter with. The Republican government (Kuomintang, or KMT) that took power in 1911 on the Chinese mainland was later to take refuge on the island of Taiwan in 1949, escaping the Communists of Mao Zedong. The KMT government



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in Taiwan claimed to represent the “true” China, and to be the legitimate government of China as a whole. At the time of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China (1966–76), when the Communists ordered the destruction of traditional and “backward” forms of culture, Taiwan’s KMT claimed that the inhabitants of Taiwan were the sole holders of the authentic and traditional Chinese culture that was zealously being destroyed in Communist mainland China. The Taiwanese response to the Cultural Revolution in China was the “Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement” initiated by the KMT government (see Chun 1994). In Yingge, this Cultural Renaissance inspired an entrepreneur, Hsu Tzu-jan, to change the course of his business, a factory producing ceramics grinding wheels. In 1972, he set up a fine ceramics factory, the Tai Hwa Ceramics Company, with the aim of producing the kind of finely painted porcelain produced in China’s Jingdezhen (Hsieh 2007). This shift to laborintensive production of fine porcelain also involved a revolution in production techniques: unreliable coal-fired kilns were replaced with gas-fired ones, a technology imported from Japan. The factory was involved in making reproductions of antiques, taking inspiration from the objects in the collections of the National Palace Museum that had been shipped to Taiwan from Beijing’s Imperial Palace by the fleeing KMT government. Other factories in Yingge soon followed suit. The success, and symbolic importance (China being the birthplace of porcelain), of the Tai Hwa Company led to close association with the KMT government, fueling the latter’s nationalist discourse as representing “free” China (Muyard 2009), and the company’s products were routinely used as diplomatic gifts. The problem was that Taiwan did not have a tradition of fine porcelain production. Decorated wares had in the past been relatively simple and unsophisticated. In order to produce replicas of antiques, and since they could not turn to China for help, factories invited ceramics masters from Hong Kong and Japan to train their workers. The pot Tu was holding in the vignette I started with, covered with recognizably Chinese motifs, is thus not the fruit of a long tradition, as it would have been had it been produced on the mainland, but rather of an “invented tradition” with origins in mainland China, but also Hong Kong and Japan. In fact, the material itself, porcelain clay, was and continues to be imported from Japan. The idea that Taiwan represents the “true China,” or indeed is a part of China at all, could not be contested until the lifting of martial law on the island in 1987 (Simon 2005). This claim was at the origin of inequalities between the people of Taiwan: the KMT government imposed a language, Mandarin Chinese, that few except the refugees from the mainland could speak well if at all, replacing Japanese that was the official language of the island until 1945, the majority population speaking two other variants of Chinese. Scott Simon (2005) argues that the repressive language

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politics of the government was one of the origins of the economic boom of the 1970s: the Taiwanese people who were not fluent in Mandarin Chinese (in other words, the vast majority of the population), were barred from many professions. Combined with the breaking up and distribution of land, an initiative of the KMT government, building factories on small plots of land was for peasants one of the few options for social mobility. The claim that Taiwan is and should be part of greater China has been increasingly contested by the native Taiwanese majority. In the year 2000, the second democratic presidential elections in Taiwan saw the rise to power of the opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). An important part of the discourse of this party is that Taiwan is not a part of China, but has its unique roots, culture and history. This has led to a movement of promotion of “Taiwanese” culture as distinct from mainland Chinese culture (Brown 2004; Rudolph 2004). The promotion of distinctively Taiwanese culture is ongoing: for instance, it was as late as in 2011 that Taiwan inaugurated its national history museum, a museum devoted to the history of the Taiwanese people, as opposed to the history of Chinese civilization (Varutti 2011). Until recently, history taught in schools was the history of mainland China, rather than of Taiwan (Simon 2005). The opening of the Yingge Ceramics Museum in the year 2000 is part of the recent move to promote local (as opposed to “Chinese”) crafts (Muyard 2009), and by extension to promote Taiwanese culture defined by its variety and multiculturalism. The Yingge Ceramics Museum is one of a few in the world entirely devoted to ceramics, and one of the first in Asia—soon after, Japan, Korea and China created their own ceramics museums, China making a point of creating the world’s largest such museum in the porcelain town of Jingdezhen. In Yingge’s museum, contrary to what one might expect of a ceramics museum in Taiwan, few of the exhibits on display in the permanent galleries are recognizably “Chinese” ceramics—the kind of fine porcelains that are part of so many galleries of Chinese art around the world. A museum official explained to me that the reason for this was at first quite pragmatic— the buildings of the museum were initially conceived to act as a trade center, and there were no collections when it was decided to create a museum. Yingge’s museum is about Taiwan’s tradition of ceramics, which is in large part a tradition of industrial ceramics. The permanent galleries present the humble origins of Taiwan’s ceramics industry—displaying the roughly made and simply decorated pots many elderly Taiwanese remember using in their childhood—and the evolution of the Taiwanese ceramic toilet. An aura of nostalgia pervades a whole section devoted to scenes of ceramics production that an inhabitant of Yingge would have witnessed in the 1960s, before the boom in production of export ceramics. This representation is politically loaded, for the simple reason of presenting Taiwanese history



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of ceramics, rather than the high ceramics arts of Chinese history. In the gardens of the museum, artisans demonstrate the production of industrial ceramics—slip-molding techniques, and the jiggering and jollying methods associated with the industrial production of the 1950s and 1960s, and now no longer in use in Taiwan’s factories. Mr Tu is in fact one of the stars of the museum: during the weekends, he leaves his workshop and moves to the museum, where he demonstrates how his father and grandfather produced wine and pickle jars using the traditional kick-wheel. The objects he makes (usually left unglazed) in the museum grounds also include daily use objects that are recalled with nostalgia by older visitors. Tu had brought the finely decorated “Chinese” vase I described in the introduction as a gift to the Korean ceramics museum he was invited to. In addition to this vase, the Korean museum also acquired two unglazed pickle jars made by Tu during his visit. The Korean museum seemed to have been at least as interested in the folk, humble roots of everyday Taiwanese ceramics as in the gift of the decorated vase, a product of “high” Chinese culture.

Conclusion I have constructed this chapter in “layers” of meaning relating to materials, things, persons and the nation. The contrast between clay and glaze has enabled me to bring together themes that are usually treated separately in the literature on craft. The first layer is about materials, and the way artisans engage differently with different materials, and the need to be attentive to the properties of materials. Shaping pots on the wheel, and working with glaze, involves two different ways of engaging with the properties and mutations of materials. In the second layer of argument, I talked about the judgments of value attributed to these materials, and to the persons who work with them. Materials, their different properties and the different ways of working and engaging with them, enable certain discourses relating to ideas and ideals about education, intellectual versus manual work, self-motivation and self-development. The properties of materials overlap with and influence the properties of persons, and they contribute to shape artisan subjectivities in Yingge. The nation is the third layer of analysis. Clay and glazes as materials have histories that are locally specific, but also inextricably embedded in national pasts and imaginaries. In Taiwan clay and glazes take on particular significance in debates and tensions surrounding the identification of an “authentic” Chinese or Taiwanese culture and identity. In showing the overlap and interactions between these layers, I wanted to make two comments on the work of Tim Ingold, and of the MàP respectively.

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I have endeavored to respond to Ingold’s call to take seriously materials, their properties and histories as they shift and mutate over time. In relation to the engagement of artisans with materials, I take issue with Ingold, however, by suggesting that one needs to pay attention to the histories of materials not only as they themselves shift and mutate, but also as they influence the lives, work and thoughts—in other words, the subjectivities—of the people who use and transform them. Lacking from Ingold’s approach is an attention to the meanings and judgment of value that are afforded by materials. The MàP approach reveals the relative force of material culture over words and discourse in shaping subjectivities—in my case, the subjectivities of people as producers, artisans, Taiwanese, and members of a given class. Ingold’s focus on materials, as opposed to material culture, enabled me to provide a different perspective on these issues. The properties of materials, as they change in time, either by themselves or through the work of humans, are instrumental to the formation of artisan subjectivities in Yingge, in relations of production and relations of power. I am not suggesting that the judgments of value and subjectivities that materials afford are universal; artisans working in other contexts of ceramics production (or any other craft) might well invoke other properties of materials in their claims. What the discussion points to more in general is the potential of crafts in mediating a range of relationships. In Euro-America, “craft” tends to be invoked as a contrast to “industry,” “mass production,” or the “modern.” In Taiwan, other sets of distinctions are evoked with reference to craft objects, notably based on social status (bosses, masters, and workers), and the opposition of the local and national, or “Taiwaneseness” as distinct from “Chineseness.”

13 Craft, Memory, and Loss Babban riga robes, politics, and the quest for “bigness” in Zaria City, Nigeria Elisha P. Renne

Because we inherited it and it is our culture, since our forefathers. Now almost two hundred years ago and up until now, we keep this tradition because it is a good culture (al ‘adan ne kyau) and these robes (babban riga) are good. ALHAJI DANLADI YUSUF MAIKANWA, ZARIA CITY, JULY 1996

Now they wear kaftan, instead of babban riga [literally, big robe]. Now any man in any position can wear kaftan unlike before—even governors can wear kaftans. Before, if you are an older person, you can only wear babban riga. Even the bridegrooms now, they don’t want to wear babban riga, they prefer to wear kaftan. JIMI MAGAJIYA, ZARIA CITY, JULY 4, 2012

There probably exists no social unit in which convergent and divergent currents among its members are not inseparably interwoven. SIMMEL 1971

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V

isiting the house of Jimi Magajiya in Zaria City (Figure 16), the old, walled section of the larger town of Zaria, in northern Nigeria, one sees young men coming and going with assorted pieces of cut shedda (cotton damask) material, in various stages of design-making, embroidery, sewing, and finishing. Others are beating finished robes on large logs embedded in the floor of one of the compound’s front rooms. On my visit there in May 2012, I was struck by how vibrant craft production continues to be in Anguwar Magajiya (a neighborhood of Zaria City, the old walled area of the larger town of Zaria, in Kaduna State Nigeria), specifically of the hand-embroidered robes known as babban riga, and how it relates to a certain way of life there. For this work reflects a certain integrity and pride in Hausa culture and the city’s past, as Alhaji Danladi suggests, as well as a source of income.1 It also struck me how, in a way, this style of work and life—in the context of irregular electricity (except by noisy generators), intermittent water, and rutted, unpaved roads— actually exemplifies an “appropriate” technology. Yet preferred styles of dress—just as styles of work and life more generally— in Zaria are changing, with many men preferring to wear kaftans with small amounts of embroidery, particularly younger men and government officials.

FIGURE 16   Jimi Magajiya drawing patterns on cotton damask (shedda) in his home in Anguwar Magajiya © Elisha Renne.



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At public events, men associated with traditional rule—in Zaria, they include the Emir of Zaria, his family members, titled chiefs, and district heads—wear babban riga, often with turbans (rawani), which distinguish them from men associated with Zaria Local Government Secretariat workers, teachers, and Islamic scholars who wear kaftan and caps (hula). Indeed, the bigness (girma) and weightiness of heavily embroidered babban riga robes relates to a form of governance that is associated with a particular class structure, political organization, and social demeanor. Indeed, in a system based on “wealth in people,” wearing expensive robes and distributing them to followers was part of a process of building political power, referred to as neman girma (literally, looking for bigness; Northern Region of Nigeria 1954: 5). While cherished by some as tradition (gargajiya) and as a form of respect for an illustrious past, babban riga are viewed by others as cumbersome and old-fashioned. For younger men with education and ambition, lighter-weight, more tailored clothing is viewed as more appropriate for modern (zamani) social life. Wearing a kaftan reflects one’s participation in the quick pace of national and state politics, whereas wearing the babban riga is associated with the slow and stately processions of emirs, titled chiefs, and their entourages (Mauss 1973), with some wearing several layers of babban riga to accentuate their size and wealth. While emirate rule has a long history in the Kingdom of Zazzau (Zaria; Smith 1960), the dichotomy between traditional rule (represented by the emirs and their court) and government officials associated with the Nigerian state was put in place by British colonial administrators who established a form of governance in the Northern Protectorate referred to as “indirect rule” (Beidelman 2012: 19), administered by the “Native Authority” system (Last 2008).2 With independence, a bipartite system of government was established which has continued to the present-day, although the wealth from large-scale oil extraction in the Niger Delta which took off in the 1970s strengthened the hand of the twelve successive federal political regimes— some military, some civilian—which have been in power since 1970. If the frequent changes of political leadership have been reflected in the wearing of military uniforms and kaftans, traditional rulers wearing locally hand-embroidered and tailored babban riga associated with a long-standing Hausa Fulani past accentuate political continuity. Craft production thus contributes to the visual and material reproduction of these interrelated forms of political organization in Zaria. Their partisans’ support for state or traditional rule (and more recently, others’ support for religious rule according to Shari’a law; Lubeck 2011) not only reflects contests over who has the ultimate political authority but also are interlinked by history, by family and social institutions, and by cultural conventions, which underscores Simmel’s (1971: 72) point that these different political perspectives are “inseparably interwoven.” An analysis of hand- and machine-embroidered robe production, patronage, and use in

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relation to the production and consumption of new kaftan fashions captures these diverse currents and provide an intimate view of how forms of political organization are reproduced, contested, and transformed.

Craft continuity, craft loss Crafts represent a category of social things, often connected with memories of place and people, as well as with particular production processes associated with certain modalities of scale and with the past.3 At times, certain forms of craft work, such as hand-spinning in south-western Nigeria, may be abandoned entirely (Renne 1995). According to one theory addressing the question of why and under what circumstances craft production persists in the face of the efficiencies of industrial manufacture, Johnson (1978) has argued that as long as demand persists and that craft objects are not replicated or available on a larger scale, that hand-crafts will continue to be produced. The obverse of this argument underlies the crafts heritage movement, namely that when the mass production of objects has led to the demise of hand-crafted and art objects, that the processes, materials, and people involved in art and craft production must be preserved (Probst 2011). However, in this chapter, I reconsider Johnson’s materialist argument, explaining the continued demand for, and hence, existence of some craft work by virtue of its association with memories of the past people, time and places related to a certain way of life connected with the form of government associated with the Emirate of Zazzau and the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate as opposed to the modern nation state of Nigeria. Related to Weiner’s (1992) conceptualization of “inalienable objects” although differing in the sense that such objects may be newly made and not only consist of things “passed down,” I examine the continued importance of babban riga, embroidered robes, in Zaria City (Renne 2004a) as well as in many parts of northern Nigeria (Kriger 1988; Perani and Wolff 1992, 1999). Nonetheless, disenchantment with traditional rule, particularly by young men who see it as an ineffectual obstacle to the workings of a modern nation state, has led them to dress in ways that distinguish themselves from a particular political past and social hierarchy. To meet this need for new forms of men’s attire, particularly less costly kaftans with small amounts of embroidery, many men in the city have shifted to tailoring and machine-embroidery of these kaftans (Heathcote 1983; Maiwada and Renne 2007). In the area around Sheikh Ladan Sharehu Central Market in Zaria City, for example, there are numerous stores and stalls where the machine-embroidery and production of kaftans takes place and where finished, ready-to-wear



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kaftans are sold. For others living in neighborhoods in less-developed areas of the city, many continue hand-embroidery work in traditional patterns on babban riga robes, which are commissioned by individual consumers. For some, these hand-crafted robes reflect a history of trade and the production of handembroidered robes made from cloth strips hand-woven with hand-spun thread which resonate with people’s ideas about political hierarchy, ethnic identity, and the past, reflecting material processes which contribute to particular forms of value (see Appadurai 1986; Berry 2004; Dilley 2004). For others, they prefer machine-embroidered and ready-made kaftans, associated with modern political institutions and the federal government. These distinctive but interconnected forms of craft work (hand-embroidery/machine-embroidery, old elaborate embroidery patterns/new simple embroidery patterns) and garments (babban riga and kaftan) visually define group boundaries—between traditional rulers (and their followers) and federal/state/local government leaders. The anthropological analysis of crafts as process—with anthropologists’ focus on craftspeople and their work as part of social, political, economic configurations that reflect of changing global flows of people and things (e.g., Marchand 2009; Schmahmann 2006; Wood 2008)—often distinguishes this approach from other disciplinary perspectives on the study of crafts as development, as cultural heritage, as intellectual property, or as aesthetic objects. Ethnographic studies of craft workers within a particular socioeconomic and political contexts—such as shifts in concepts of work and gender, when embroiderer-craftswomen come to be defined as laborers in Old Delhi, India (see Mohsini, this volume)—capture the nuances of conflicting forces that contribute to continued, if changing, forms of craft production or that undermine them. In order to understand the ways that embroidery craft work has come to represent these processes in Zaria, the production and use of babban riga in the past are first briefly described.

Memory and craft work When I return home, I shan’t go into the bush to fetch wood for sale, my foot is sore. I shall do some spinning. If you spin for about five months and collect many spindles of thread, then you can sell it and get money for a cloth, about four or five shillings, or if thread is dear you may get seven shillings. I don’t weave anymore now, the big loom is hard work.—Baba of Karo. (Smith 1954: 251) The conversations between Baba, a Hausa-Bare Bare woman born in Karo in northern Nigeria, and Mary Smith, a British woman born in the UK, that took

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place from November 1949 to January 1950 and which were compiled by Smith in the volume, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa, contain many references to craft work in northern Nigeria, including Zaria and New Giwa, where Baba resided before her death in 1951. Perhaps because she came from a farming family and also because these conversations took place in the early fifties, before women became involved in the hand-embroidery of babban riga, Baba does not mention embroidery work.4 At that time, Hausa women were spinning fine cotton thread, for which there was demand from weavers producing narrow-strip textiles used to make robes; women also wove on vertical “big” looms, although Baba no longer did so because of her age. Earlier references to robes and craft work, mainly by men, may be found in explorer accounts such as those of Hugh Clapperton (who visited Zaria in July 1826; 1929) and of Paul Staudinger (who visited in 1885 and 1886; 1990 [1899]) as well as in the reports of colonial officials and soldiers (e.g., W. F. Gowers 1911; Kisch 1992 [1910]). In these accounts and elsewhere, visitors noted that robes were also used to reward individuals for specific deeds and to reinforce patron-client ties through gifts of quantities of robes to political followers. For example, Last (1967: 105 n.59, 196–7) cites examples of robes received and given as gifts to the Emir of Zaria and the Sultan of Sokoto in the nineteenth century. In a 1954 colonial document, “The Report on the Customary Exchange of Gifts,” the widespread distribution of robes following Muslim holidays such as Eid-el-Fitr, was frowned upon as extravagant forms of patronage which bordered on bribery, although gifts of robes were permitted for Native Authority government appointments or traditional titles (Northern Region of Nigeria 1954: 5). Yet this practice has continued to some extent, with robes of different quality—in terms of the materials used in the embroidery, and the density and detail of the embroidery—given to followers according to rank (Renne 2004b).5 Thus not only was political allegiance reinforced through robe-giving but also, an individual’s status within the political hierarchy was materially represented by the type of embroidered robe given. The specific form of political hierarchy in the Emirate of Zazzau (Zaria) has been discussed by M. G. Smith, who wrote the well-known Government in Zazzau (Smith 1960) as well as an economic survey of Zaria communities in the 1950s (Smith 1955). Regarding craftwork, several expatriate members of the staff of Ahmadu Bello University-Zaria conducted research in Zaria in the 1960s including A. D. Goddard (1970) and David Heathcote (1972a, 1972b, 1973, 1974c, 1975, 1976, 1979). Indeed, Heathcote’s dissertation, The Embroidery of Hausa Dress (1979) provides the most detailed discussion of hand-embroidery in Zaria City to date. In it, he documents materials used, embroidery techniques, and associated dress styles. During the time when Heathcote conducted his research, Nigeria was experiencing an oil boom as



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well as transition to civilian rule (Shehu Shagari became president in October 1979), both factors that contributed to increased demand for babban riga that also led to changing production practices, which included the increasing use of embroidery machine work in robe production. The dissertation, along with subsequent published articles provide a sense of some of the changes overtaking the hand-embroidery of robes, including the declining use of handwoven cloth (including saki cloth which used indigo-dyed hand-spun cotton thread) in favor of imported, industrially woven cotton damask for robes, the beginnings of machine-embroidered robe production, and movement of women into the embroidery of men’s caps (hula).6 Yet even with the increased use of machine-embroidery centered in several large establishments located near the central market in Zaria City (Maiwada and Renne 2007), this protoindustrial system did not contain “the seeds of its own destruction” (Goody 1982: 23). Large-scale industrialization of robe production did not occur in Zaria7 and many machine-embroidered robes reproduced earlier hand-embroidered patterns, including the labor-intensive shabka design. As Heathcote (1979: 170) observed in the 1970s: In spite of the normally high quality of Hausa machine embroidery, hand embroidery is still considered superior by many clients. Though hand embroiderers originally feared that the introduction of sewing-machines would make them redundant, their fears were not realised. An increase in the demand for men’s embroidered clothes in recent years has ensured that there is sufficient work for machine embroiderers without this causing hand embroiderers to lose their customers. While the demand for machine-embroidered robes has expanded forty years later, hand-embroidered robes continue to be made. And along with the continued demand for hand-embroidered babban riga, many related aspects of the hand-embroidered robe production persist, with a range of sub-niches associated with particular stages of robe manufacture—described below—actively being pursued. These labor-intensive and time-consuming practices—such as the hand-drawing of designs to be embroidered which contribute to a certain idiosyncrasy in standardized and named patterns (see Heathcote 1972b), the sending out of particular parts of the robes to different embroiderers who specialize in certain stitches, as well as hand-beating (as opposed to the mere ironing) of finished robes—all underwrite a robe’s value and its authentic relation to the past (Berry 2004).

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Hand-embroidery and Babban Riga in Zaria City Thus despite these changes in the production process, hand-embroidery work continues. By considering continuities in the work of Jimi Magajiya and others involved in the hand-embroidered robe business in Zaria City, one can more clearly see how they have adapted to the changing situation, maintaining “the past in the present” in northern Nigeria. I first met Jimi Magajiya in 1994. At that time, he was working at the central market in Zaria City, drawing designs on robe pieces (he also did farm work during the rainy season). In the late afternoon, he would sit in front of one tailor’s shop, with a pen in hand and a large wood board on his lap, drawing designs freehand on shedda robe parts that would then be embroidered before being sewn together. When I interviewed him in July 1996—he was thirty-one years old at the time, he explained how he became involved in the work: Embroidery is our main work [in Anguwar Magajiya] … But before they would embroider, someone would design the pattern. While they were embroidering, it was the design work that impressed me. From that I started to learn how to do designs on paper and at last, it became my work. I was 17 years old when I started. At first, I learned to do this work through doing technical drawing in secondary school. I did technical drawing and fine art, so it became easier for me. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, August 20, 1996) Jimi’s work, as I subsequently found out, represented just one of several economic sub-niches that were part of babban riga production. The sub-niches reference different stages of production and distribution, which include cloth and thread sellers, tailors, washers, beaters, and robe sellers, as well as designers and embroiderers (Renne 2004a). Alhaji Isyaku Shittu, whom I also first met in 1994, has a market stall two rows down from where Jimi worked and specializes in the sale of shedda cotton damask (Figure 17). He began work under his brother, who was also a cloth seller: The way I started this business, I was brought up with it. My parents were doing this business so that since I was small, they started showing me how to sell shedda. I started this work when I was 17 years old. [Even when] I was small, I used to go to the shop. When people would buy material, I would help carry the material to their place or to the junction for them. From that, I learned how to cut the materials and how to sell the materials to people, until I knew everything. (Interview: Zaria City, July 19, 1996)



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FIGURE 17   Isyaku Shittu with textiles for sale in his stall at Sheikh Ladan Sharehu Central Market, Zaria City © Elisha Renne.

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At that time, Alhaji Shittu sold packaged shedda that he said were brought to him for sale, although he traveled to Kano to buy other types of cloth (plain weave Funtua and the printed cloth called Cuperon). In contrast to Alhaji Shittu, Alhaji Danladi Yusuf Maikanwa traveled frequently to Kano to buy boxes of embroidery thread, zippers, needles, and

FIGURE 18   Danladi Yusuf Maikanwa at his stall in Sheikh Ladan Sharehu Central Market where he sells a range of embroidery thread and associated materials, Zaria City © Elisha Renne.



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sewing thread for his market stall which is five stalls down from Alhaji Shittu’s (Figure 18). When I first interviewed Alhaji Danladi in 1996, hand-embroidery thread was in high demand during the Sallah season: In a day, some will buy two boxes of thread, some will buy three boxes and some will buy ten—that is on a normal day. During Sallah, some will buy seventy boxes, some will buy eighty, some will even buy one hundred boxes [each containing ten balls of thread]. But during the rainy season [when men may be farming], the thread we sell is not more than fifteen to twenty, or seven to eight in a day. (Interview, Zaria City, July 1996) Alhaji Danladi began his career selling potash (kanwa) under his father when he was seven, helping him after attending allo (Islamic) school. Later his friends convinced him to go into the thread trade. In 1996, he had ten young men working under him, his own five sons and five sons of his senior and junior brothers. Just east of the central market, in Anguwar Limanci, one large compound is devoted solely to washing babban riga in preparation for beating. Jafaru Alhaji Faru started work as a robe washer when he was eleven: My father taught me how to do this work, because washing and beating was his work, although he also farmed. My father would put water in a washing container, then I would wash it although I still couldn’t wring it, so he would wring it himself. He would take the robes and wring them if I washed them very well until the time I could wring them myself. Now there are some boys who work for me, there are many of them … We are all related, some are my senior and junior brothers’ sons … We are doing this washing work together but our parents have stopped washing now, they have left it to their children. (Interview: Zaria City, July 1996) Once the robes have been washed and are partially dry, they are taken for beating (see Maiwada and Renne 2007: 38). In both Anguwar Limanci and Anguwar Magajiya, young men finish robes by beating them with wooden mallets over logs embedded in the ground. This manner of finishing, which is akin to ironing, but which smoothes the embroidery work and produces a characteristic sheen, is preferred by customers: “the robes will look good— they will look shiny and more costly when they are beaten” (Interview: Suleiman Abdul, Zaria City, July 1996). Previously, some of the most costly robes, made of doubled material (referred to as tokare), embroidered with the most elaborate patterns—such

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as Yar‘ Madaka and aska biyu (two knives)—were embroidered by masters such as the late Alhaji Lawal Magaji, who lived in Anguwar Lalle and who embroidered robes for the Emir of Zaria. According to Alhaji Magaji: The Emir [was] buying robes [through his secretary] at any time, not just at Sallah or for turbaning ceremonies, but during Sallah he [bought] more. Last Sallah, [in 1996], he purchased both the small and large sizes of robes, more than one hundred, maybe two hundred … He buys robes because of fashion (‘addo) and it is tradition for the Emir to give robes at many times (Interview: Zaria City, August 25, 1996).8 Several of the men who were participating in robe production in Zaria City took pride in their work and noted how aspects of their production contributed to the reputation of the city throughout northern Nigeria, for example: In northern Nigeria, there are no beating places except Kano and Zaria. And in Kano, they can’t do it as well as Zaria, since people in Kano used to bring their robes for beating here, like the Jama’a Kano and others, even now they are beating the robes of one titled Kano man. (Interview: Zaria City, July 1996) However, in the past three years, these practices have been undermined, both by economic constraints and by political events and practices which have led some men to dress in ways that are seen as being more in line with a more modern, fast-paced future associated with the nation state and its capital, Abuja.

Marginalizing the past and diminishing demand Even in 2005, when women embroiderers were interviewed about the shift to machine-embroidery in Zaria (Maiwada and Renne 2007), some noted that hard times had affected babban riga sales, reflecting a tendency to idealize the past. Yet a 2012 economic survey conducted by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics noted that: “The percentage of Nigerians living in absolute poverty … rose to 60.9 percent in 2010, compared with 54.7 percent in 2004” (O. Ibrahim 2012). Jimi Magajiya’s assessment in 2012 of the decline in demand for babban riga reflects this trend: But from the years 2000–7, I can say that there were more sales for babban riga but in 2009–12, there is so much reduction. During 2000–7, people



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had money [during Obasanjo’s time], everything was good. But after these years, things have changed. Especially since three years ago, we have so many problems, there is no money and there is no market. He may be referring to the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, who came to power in May 2010 with the death of Umaru Yar’Adua, or to the insecurity associated with the increasingly violent attacks on government officials and traditional rulers by the fundamentalist Islamic group, Jama’atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda’Awati Wal Jihad (JASLWJ), popularly known as Boko Haram (literally, “Western education is forbidden”; Agence France-Presse 2012). Recent house-to-house searches by military personnel have also unsettled people in Zaria (Sa’idu 2012). The fear and uncertainty in many parts of the north has strengthened the position of the federal government as a source of security, welfare, and wealth, while weakening that of traditional rulers who are themselves clients of the state. The earlier commissioning of and distribution of embroidered robes as a means of gaining political support has been affected by this situation: Before, politicians used to buy babban riga and distribute them to people. But now they don’t do that because they don’t need their vote. The way they used to do it before, they used to buy robes and give them to people so that those who are doing the robes can have a market. Now instead of buying robes, they prefer to buy expensive cars to give them to the person who can help them to win the election. Because of that, he knows he has no problems with the masses because he doesn’t need their vote. That is why things have become worse now. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 4, 2012) His point about political aspirants buying “expensive cars” to give to political “king-makers” associated with the dominant national political party suggests that a new means of neman girma, “looking for bigness,” has taken place as the political authority of traditional rulers—the old aristocracy—has largely been replaced by “professional politicians who must live off politics and the [oil rents of the] state” (Weber 1946: 369). His statement also reflects his belief that the party politics determines elections in Nigeria, not popular support. With babban riga robe distribution having a diminished value in the political world and when “even governors can wear kaftans,” the situation of hand-embroidery work has changed in Anguwar Magajiya: This time people don’t like babban riga, so now our work has reduced. We used to do small-small designs that wouldn’t make the dress heavy so that

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the youth can wear it. Even when we reduced the design, they still don’t wear it [because it is a babban riga style]. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 4, 2012) Even the system whereby embroiderers bought cotton damask material, had it cut into requisite pieces and marked with designs, then embroidered (or distributed the pieces to those who specialized in particular stitches), and finally gave the embroidered pieces to tailors for final sewing and robe finishing has changed. Robes were then sold directly to customers who had commissioned them or to traders in Zaria City market but in either case, they made a profit on their original outlay. However, embroiderers no longer are able to purchase the expensive types of imported cotton damask desired by wealthy clients, while the less costly damask that they can afford would only be attractive to ordinary consumers, resulting in marginal profits: Many people can do this embroidery but before they used to buy their materials and do the embroidery and sell it … now there are rich people who can buy the expensive material and give them to do the embroidery because they can’t afford to buy the expensive material and do it themselves. They can only buy low quality shedda [cotton damask] and if the masses buy it they cannot spend much and there is little profit. But still those who are doing the embroidery in the area have increased because they have nothing to do except the embroidery. And they are doing it not because they are enjoying it or because they are getting something but because they have nothing else to do. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 4, 2012) In other words, many embroiderers would, as Johnson predicted, leave hand-embroidery work if they had other income-generating opportunities. However, women in Anguwar Magajiya, who came to the hand-embroidery of babban riga robes later, are likely to continue with this work and possibly branch out into new styles of kaftan hand-embroidery because the work fits in well with the social practice of seclusion after marriage (Pittin 1984).



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Other changes in craft production and consumption Women and robe embroidery in Zaria City Of the robes hand-embroidered in Zaria City since the 1970s, many are handembroidered—at least in part—by women (Renne 2004a; Maiwada and Renne 2007; see also Wilkinson-Weber 1999). This represents a significant departure from past practices as the hand-embroidery of robes reflected a distinct gendered division of labor—men wove narrow cotton strips used for robes and also dyed, embroidered, tailored, and finished them, while the cotton used for weaving cloth strips and for embroidering robes was carded and spun by women. There were several factors which have contributed to women’s taking up the hand-embroidery of babban riga in the 1970s. With many Zaria City men moving into machine-embroidery work during the 1960s and afterwards, the continued demand for lighter-weight, hand-embroidered robes was filled by women who learned to do this work from their brothers and husbands, as well as from young boys who hand-embroidered when visiting women’s homes. They attributed this change in babban riga production to increased demand for hand-embroidered robes during the oil-boom years of the 1970s, to women’s need for more profitable work (substituting cap embroidery with robe embroidery) which they could do in their homes (observing the practice of seclusion—remaining within their family compounds), and to men handembroiderers’ shift to more remunerative machine-embroidery (dinkin keke).9 Indeed, many women who do hand-embroidery (dinkin hannu) live in Anguwar Magajiya, including Jimi Magajiya’s wife, Hajera Yusuf: I started doing dinkin hannu seven years ago, my mother taught me. It was three years ago that I started doing babban riga to sell myself. I would go to the market to buy cloth or give money to my husband to buy it, my husband is the one who does the design for me [she does ‘yar Dikwa and aska biyu (two knives) designs]. I used to do only zurgu and cuku stitches; I’m giving out the pieces for someone to do dinke stitches for me. Some people in the neighborhood are doing the sewing, then I’d do the washing myself—some boys are doing the beating in our house. Sometimes people come to the house to buy robes or my husband will sell robes for me in Zaria City market or in Abuja. He also takes robes for many women in Anguwar Magajiya and brings them to Alhaji Dogara [who has shops in Zaria City, Kaduna, and Abuja] (Maiwada and Renne 2007; Interview: Hajera Yusuf, Zaria City, July 11, 2005).10

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Another woman who, in 2005, had been doing hand-embroidery work for twenty-seven years, gives a sense of the dominance of hand-embroidery work in Anguwar Magajiya. In her husband’s large family compound where she lived, there were twenty married women in the house, thirteen of whom did hand-embroidery, along with six unmarried girls. Of the ten married and ten unmarried men, all did hand-embroidery (Interview: Halima Bello, July 2005). She also displayed a certain pride of embroidery work and place regarding Anguwar Magajiya, noting that: Anguwar Magajiya has more embroidery than anywhere in the City, from Anguwar Magajiya, then Anguwar Amaru. It was from Magajiya that women started to embroider babban riga. Anguwar Nufuwa, they are experts in zurgu but they aren’t as good as Anguwar Magajiya. (Follow-up interview with Halima Bello, Anguwar Magajiya; original interview conducted on December 28, 1994) According to Jimi Magajiya, this situation has continued in Anguwar Magajiya: Both men and women are doing the embroidery. They are all the same because there are different types of design when doing babban riga, we have four: askar, surfani, ‘yar ‘yar, and lizami. You can see one woman who can only do surfani [simple chain stitch] the man can do askar, but only askar. Women can do one design, men can do another design so together they do the whole [there is no association with designs by gender]. (Interview: Zaria City, July 4, 2012) As with the recent shift in women’s taking up babban riga hand-embroidery, there are also no associations with particular hand-embroidery stitches and pattern designs by gender.

New styles and kaftan embroidery While Anguwar Magajiya remains a center of babban riga robe production in 2012, embroiderers there are just learning the new style of hand-embroidery of kaftans, known as dinkin mai rumi: Really, kaftan is more popular than babban riga, the difference is that the kaftan, the embroidery is different from the embroidery we are doing in Magajiya. They are doing it with zare rumi [silky rayon or polyester] thread— when you look now this type of kaftan is more popular, more common, than babban riga. In this area, we don’t have people doing this type of



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embroidery—mai rumi. It is now they have just started learning how to do it. A few of them have started doing it but they are not many … People don’t normally do it here, they will only do it for themselves. But places like Anguwar Kusfa and Kofar Koyarbana, they are well-known for this type of kaftan. The most popular … kaftan is kuftar. We just call them kaftani dinkin rumi [embroidery with rayon rumi thread] or dinkin keke [machine embroidery]. There are different kaftan in different designs. They call them mai bajo [owner of the badge], sabon kufta [new kufta], and others. And they call some of the kaftan Abuja because Abuja is a new place in Nigeria. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 8, 2012) These kaftans, identified by names referring to the pattern and placement of small amounts of either hand- or machine-embroidery are sold in Sheikh Ladan Sharehu Central Market in Zaria City. For example, there are two styles of mai rumi hand-embroidered mai bajo style, which has two badge-like circular patterns at the kaftan front for sale, which were probably made in Anguwar Kusfa. Two other named kaftans, Yar’Adua, which refers to the late Nigerian president, Umaru Yar’Adua, and laflafatu, are hand-embroidered, while the more elaborate Abuja style is machine-embroidered. Many babban riga names refer to particular pattern designs of identifiable objects—knives (aska)—or places—Dikwa, a town in Bornu, although some of the more recent babban riga with smaller patterns have been given names such as Abuja (the federal capital), Baiyero (the Emir of Kano), Ahmed Makarfi (the former governor of Kaduna State), and Secretariat (the name for local, state, and federal government buildings) that associate them with government (Renne 2004a: 119). Yet the names of kaftans refer almost exclusively to things, people, and places associated with the federal government—badges [or medals], the late President Yar’Adua, and Abuja. While Jimi Magajiya also notes that new designs have been incorporated in babban riga embroidery, according to him they represent variations on earlier well-known earlier patterns, such as aska biyu and aska takwas (“Two knives” and “Eight knives”): Babban riga, they [patterns] don’t change. Before we had tokare, aska biyu, aska takwas, and ‘yar Dikwa and there was another one we are doing, the one with hand- and machine embroidery, we call it shabka. But we really can’t call it hand-embroidery because it has machine-embroidery on it.11 Up till now, we are doing the same style with new designs—so we are doing one called Aska Tara [“Ten knives”], you can have ten or twenty babban riga with different patterns but they are all called the same thing—we just call them “new design.” (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 4, 2012)

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While making slight changes in embroidery designs on babban riga, embroiderers in Anguwar Magajiya maintain the association of these robes with past tradition.

Revisiting babban riga production in the twenty-first century As of 2012, Jimi Magajiya works almost exclusively from his house compound in Anguwar Magajiya, where he continues to draw designs on robe pieces but also provides other related services, including hand-embroidery, dyeing, washing, and robe beating. Alhaji Shittu and Alhaji Danladi continue to sell shedda and thread, respectively, in Zaria City market although there have been some changes in the materials that they sell. Alhaji Shittu, who now heads his market stall, sells only shedda which is packaged and is almost exclusively manufactured in China.12 With the closure of many Nigerian textile manufacturing firms in Kano and Kaduna, he has fewer sources for manufactured cloth: Before we used to have dealers who bought the product from Kaduna to Zaria, like Alhaji Babangida—he was a dealer, and Alhaji Tanimu Habu. They were dealers before for over twenty years but now because the places [textile mills] are closed, they are no longer doing it … Now I buy my textiles—everything comes from Kano, in the market, not from companies. (Interview: Zaria City, July 4, 2010) Similarly, Alhaji Danladi’s thread stock is limited as the brands and colors of embroidery threads are reduced.13 On the other hand, designing, washing, and beating continue as before. The combined effects of economic constraints and availability of materials have altered some aspects of babban riga production in the city, but they have certainly not ended it. Indeed, several people involved in babban riga production noted the importance of familial continuity, not only in the way that they became involved in their work (“my father taught me”) but also that they have continued the work as their parents have retired (“they have left it to their children”). Craft work may also strengthen affinal ties, as when husbands, in-laws, or co-wives teach new wives how to embroider, as was the case for several women in Anguwar Amaru: “My husband taught me and also some women of my husband’s brother and also some young men in the house” (Interview: Zaria City, July 2005). This transmission of knowledge through family ties did not apply to everyone; Jimi Magajiya learned drawing techniques in secondary school. Nor is he teaching anyone his skills:



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I don’t have anyone doing designs for me and I’m not training anyone. And there is no place where children can be learning these designs, they can only be using their own imitations to do it. You will find children who do it, but they are their own imitations, they are not trained. There are not many designers in this area, only a few. Yet for many involved in various aspects of babban riga production, this work represents practices passed down in time. While some forms of babban riga production, such as the use of embroidery machines (dinkin keke), are new, embroiderers have expanded the types of embroidered robes available rather than replacing hand-embroidered dinkin hannu ones: The babban riga dinkin hannu and the machine-embroidery dinkin keke have different demand. There are some who prefer to wear machineembroidered work because the embroidery is not heavy. But it doesn’t affect hand-embroidery because people like to wear robes with handembroidery. Because hand-embroidery is our tradition. Even if one buys a robe with machine-embroidery, they would still want to have a dinkin hannu babban riga. Because hand-embroidery has more value than machine-embroidery. So the machine-embroidery hasn’t affected our handembroidery as we have modernized the hand-embroidery to match the modern times so they will look like machine-embroidery. It’s not heavy and it’s not a lot. So machine-embroidery and hand-embroidery are going side by side. (Interview: Jimi Magajiya, Zaria City, July 4, 2012) Nonetheless, the increased production of mai rumi kaftans—both handembroidered and machine-embroidered—has affected babban riga production, although the assumption that hand-craft production would be replaced by machine production has not materialized. Rather, what seems to have happened is that the political basis for the demand for wearing and distributing robes has diminished, with the attenuated political authority of traditional rulers and with new ways of “looking for bigness” (neman girma). This shift in the basis of power and patronage is exemplified in a news story published in July 2012: The Borno State government [in northeastern Nigeria] will build and renovate palaces for the 186 district heads across the eight emirate councils in the 27 local government areas of the state. Governor Kashim Shettima disclosed this at a meeting with traditional rulers in the state on how to tackle the insecurity problem and polio eradication in the state. The governor equally promised to provide the district heads with official cars.

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Shettima noted that it is the responsibility of the government to uplift the standard of traditional rulers. (Y. Ibrahim 2012) This brief newspaper article suggests that while traditional rulers continue to be supported and needed by the state, their economic and political power is restrained by professional politicians who are the ones in a position to distribute various forms of patronage to their clients. Babban riga, while worn by traditional rulers as identifying signs of their status, are no longer part of this patronage process as they were in the past.

Conclusion This question is … whether people who have been able to live for politics and the state, for example, the old landed aristocracy, shall be replaced by the exclusive domination of professional politicians who must live off politics and the state. (Weber 1946) Those involved in the continuity of craft work, specifically hand-embroidery, in Zaria City reflect sociocultural and political economic relations, which, while not unchanging, represent a particular position with respect to time and political rule. Craftspeople there work with their hands (aiki hannu)14— perhaps the best translation of the word, “craft,” which does not have an exact Hausa equivalent—by which they maintain memories and references to the past in which rulers controlled emirate-states through an established system of political hierarchy. The economic basis of this system rested largely on agriculture, which included cotton-growing, and on textile production— hand-spinning, hand-weaving, dyeing, the embroidery of garments, and the textile trade.15 Many aspects of this industry have fallen into decline—only a few older women still spin, the indigo dyepits on the edge of the central market are gone as are narrow-strip hand-weaving looms. Yet kaftans and robes continue to be embroidered, by hand and machine, suggesting demand continues, in part because they represent a system of governance which has not been entirely replaced. While federal government has the ultimate political authority in Nigeria, traditional rulers still provide an important link between people and the state, particularly during crises (as the above-cited news report suggests). Furthermore, even government workers and politicians may wear babban riga for special occasions, particularly if they wish to reference a northern Nigerian



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identity. These “convergent and divergent” political relationships are reflected both in the continued demand for hand- and machine-embroidered babban riga and, with the attenuation of traditional rulers’ authority, in the popularity of hand- and machine-embroidered kaftans mai rumi. Thus despite present-day preferences for kaftans and a declining market for babban riga, Jimi Magajiya is hopeful about the future of hand-embroidery and babban riga production in Anguwar Magajiya: I have nothing to add again, all I’ll say is that I think later on, those robes especially tokare and aska biyu are not made much now because they are labor intensive and the price is low. But we hope that later on the demand will pick up, when they are no longer available. Even the embroiderers are running away from the work and now, machine embroidery is more costly than hand-embroidery. We think that there will be a time when these embroiderers will be needed again. I hope for this to happen. The fact that kaftans may be adorned with hand-embroidery (dinkin hannu) as well as with embroidery by machine suggests that even with the reduced demand for babban riga, hand-embroidery work in Zaria City—as something too precious to be forgotten—is likely to continue for many years.

14 Crafting Muslim Artisans Agency and Exclusion in India’s Urban Crafts Communities Mira Mohsini

The term “artisan” evokes for us a certain stability, a certain identification of an individual with a function. Yet identities are often misleading. RANCIÈRE 1989: 5

If we are to attend to the specificity as well as the internal variety of experiences and expressions of workers’ lives in order to understand the present as well as possible futures, we need to recognize that theirs is an internally differentiated reality, that does not necessarily conform to the prevalent models that homogenize “labour” as a single category. TALIB 2010: 13

I

met Shafiq, an embroidery worker in his forties, in a small, dimly lit one-room workshop in Seelampur, a slum area on the eastern outskirts of Delhi. His workshop was one of many located in the dusty inner lanes of the sprawling neighborhood—a bare room with a concrete floor and a single fluorescent tube light. Inside, on the floor, were three raised wooden rectangular frames,

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about five feet by three feet and about two and a half feet high. Between the frames was either velvet or silk cloth pulled to the edges by thick pieces of string. Shafiq, along with his four young apprentices, sat cross-legged on the floor, hunched over the frames, rhythmically sewing sequins into the brightly colored cloth with a long crochet-like needle, a technique known as hathari. These embroidered velvets and silks would eventually be tailored into inexpensive saris and kurtas (long shirts) and sold in one of the many local markets around Delhi (see Figure 19). I had known about Seelampur early in my fieldwork. It was one of the many impoverished neighborhoods that formed the periphery of the capital metropolis. Neighborhoods like Seelampur were notorious for being resettlement areas for communities that had been forcibly removed from more central (and desirable) neighborhoods in Delhi during the time of the Emergency in the 1970s due to policies of urban “beautification.”1 With rapid urbanization over the past thirty years, Seelampur has also become home to migrant populations looking for work in Delhi, often arriving from rural parts of India. Seelampur, in particular, has a large concentration of Muslim migrants who have settled in the area, making it one of the few other “Muslim neighborhoods” in Delhi. As a result, the neighborhood has a growing informal economy, evidenced by rows upon rows of small workshops, like Shafiq’s. I was strongly urged to spend time in Seelampur by a long-time activist who was involved in craft revival. She told me simply that, if I wanted to

FIGURE 19   Two wooden frames in Shafiq’s workshop, located in Seelampur © Mira Mohsini.



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understand the state of urban Muslim artisans in India, I must not only spend time in Old Delhi—my primary fieldwork site—but also in Seelampur. The locale was particularly known among Delhi embroidery workers, especially those who lived and worked in the old city, as a place where one could find “labor,” and most importantly, cheap labor. If one needed to get a bulk order of embroidered wall hangings or kurtas made, then many embroidery workers would sub-contract the work to “labor,” the term implying a category of person. I often heard my Old Delhi informants talk about getting extra work done by “their labor” in Seelampur.2 The work that was done there was generally considered to be low quality (chalu). If a high-quality embroidery piece needed to be made, then the work would be sub-contracted within networks of kin or outsourced to well-known artisans in Old Delhi, Agra or Farrukhabad—but certainly not in Seelampur. Whenever the need arose for the sub-contracting of intricate, high-quality work, I rarely heard the term “labor” being used; instead the word “karigar” or artisan would typically be used. In some cases “buzurg” or noble elder would be used to convey a high level of respect for the artisan. Yet despite being someone else’s labor, Shafiq was by all measures a highly skilled artisan, and referred to himself as such. His parents had sent him to a master artisan (ustad) in the village where he learned how to do hathari work for a number of years. Shafiq proved to be talented in embroidery and learned the skill faster than most. After some years of rising through the ranks of apprenticeship, Shafiq’s ustad bestowed him with a formalized certificate, which recognized Shafiq as a master of the craft, and licensed him to teach others. So when Shafiq’s nephew bought a workshop in Seelampur, he moved to Delhi to teach others how to do hathari work. Because of his current position as a master artisan, Shafiq did not consider himself as labor; he was an artisan (karigar)—and the distinction was clearly made—but he conceded that he often does “labor-work” (mazdoori kaam). Shafiq’s positionality as both artisan and labor offers a measure of ambiguity and tenuousness in analyzing categories that are, by definition, stubbornly rigid. As Mohammad Talib notes, in order to challenge homogenizing categories we must pay attention to the “specificity as well as the internal variety of experiences and expressions of workers’ lives” (2010: 13). In this chapter I critically examine how two particularly salient categories, artisan and labor, are constructed and subverted throughout the occupational trajectories and life-courses of embroidery workers in India. I will consider how local experiences and articulations of work, and engagements with economic and social contingencies blur the boundaries between conceptualizations of “artisan” and “labor.” The majority of embroidery workers I know in the old city of Delhi have been in the position of and considered both artisan (karigar) and labor (mazdoor) throughout their careers.3 These two categories

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demarcate different experiences of work, which are often overlooked when craft production is perceived as a unified and near-mechanical industry involving types of actors, such as artisans, middlemen, buyers, workshop owners, etcetera. With an ethnographic lens focused on the “sites” of concept-making4 (Hacking 2002), I will elaborate on the different meanings of these two categories as they are understood in everyday experiences and in relation to the life-course of embroidery workers. In particular, I focus on critically questioning the broad category of artisan by examining the way it has been constructed in the literature on craft in India. My reading of the category of labor will be limited to its local articulations in relation to constructions of “artisan.” In the next section I discuss the site of my fieldwork, Old Delhi. Instead of situating the site as a singular “craft community” (Bundegaard 1999; Venkatesan 2006), I present the old city as a complex and at times liminal place where contesting visions of craftsmanship, authenticity and belonging combine to produce a tense and ever morphing understanding of who is an artisan and who is labor. Following this section I turn to the literature on craft in India to interrogate the construction of “artisan” within a resilient binary in the scholarship: craft as heritage versus craft as exploitative small-scale industry. I argue that in both cases the persona of the artisan is conceived as a fixed social fact whereby there is little room to question, for example, whether the artisan—either as purveyor of heritage or as victim of economic exploitation—even considers herself to be an artisan. Before presenting ethnographic accounts of two of my informants’ life-courses as embroidery workers, I will briefly discuss the local meanings of “labor” as a category.

Situating “labor” and “artisan” in Old Delhi Old Delhi brings to mind many images and sentiments with regard to its history as well as its long-gone and present-day residents. When some think of the old city, it conjures nostalgic sentiments of a glorious Muslim past, when the Mughal Empire was at its height. For others it evokes Muslim decline in India. After the unsuccessful 1857 rebellion of Indian soldiers against the British, the city’s inhabitants were brutally suppressed and many fled the violence; the city became a shadow of its former self (see Ali 1940; Gupta 1981). By the middle of the twentieth century Old Delhi was at the crossroads of major events, the foremost being the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Partition resulted in a significant population transfer between the two countries—Muslims from the elite and middle classes migrated to Pakistan and Hindus, including a large number of Punjabis, relocated to the old



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city. In recent decades, many of Old Delhi’s previous residents have moved into more “middle class” neighborhoods in south Delhi, and the prevailing discourse about the old city is that it has become a “Muslim ghetto” that is more prone to “communal violence” than other parts of the city.5 Today there is a perceptible demarcation of neighborhoods (mohalla), with Hindu residents and Hindu-owned shops spatially separated from those neighborhoods with predominantly Muslim residents and shops. Yet regardless of the spatial divisions of the old city, its most prominent aspect is that it is, like many medieval towns in India, a city of small workshops. The variety of small-scale production that occurs in Old Delhi ranges from the manufacture of auto and motorcycle parts to paper printing to woodwork to embroidery work. Indeed it was the abundance of workshops located along the busy market roads and narrow inner lanes that created my first impression of the city (see Figure 20). Furthermore, Old Delhi did not conform to much of the craft literature’s notions of “community” as a spatially, socially and economically integrated unit of production. Old Delhi’s craft scene was, if anything, highly heterogeneous and socially stratified. This heterogeneity was particularly salient within the embroidery industry. My fieldwork was conducted with embroidery workers who are skilled in zardozi, a form of embroidery that uses various kinds of metallic wires.6

FIGURE 20   The view from a workshop of Old Delhi’s busy market © Mira

Mohsini.

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Perceptions of this industry are not uniform and often vary depending on one’s relationship to and impression of the old city. There is a widespread perception that the craftsmanship coming from the old city is by and large sub-standard and of low quality. This opinion was conveyed to me in a number of ways. In a meeting with a woman who has been involved in craft revival for many decades, she characterized Old Delhi’s craft scene this way: “The city is full of chalu (sub-standard) work; artisans are the ‘banyas’ of Old Delhi.” This was a bitter indictment of the perceived state of craft in the old city. Banyas are a sub-caste who primarily engage in merchant trade. In essence she was saying—with an acute sense of distaste—that artisans have left their skillbase to become sales-people who push their wares at any chance they get. This opinion is often accompanied by an impression of the old city as a place of filth, poverty, and general unrest. In another conversation with a skilled artisan in his home in Old Delhi, I asked him if there is any “asli” or real and authentic work being done in the city anymore. To my surprise he said that most of it is cheap, and the only real work to be found is in cities like Agra or Bareilly. But, he said, there is one exception in Old Delhi: the badge-makers. According to him, these are the real artisans who do very fine work in embroidering badges that are part of official uniforms, usually for the police and military (I have also seen this fine zardozi work on the regalia of Freemasons). He added that in this case it is women who do most of the work, because according to him, men are less diligent and likely to be either sleeping or out of the house “chatting.” Apart from these views on who does work and in what capacity, the zardozi industry is marked by both the variety of people who take up the craft and the multiple forms of the craft. To illustrate these complexities, it may be instructive to compare Old Delhi’s zardozi industry with Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber’s (1999) ethnography of the Lucknow chikan embroidery industry. The zardozi and chikan industries share certain similarities. Both are situated in urban centers and the majority of workers are Muslim. Also zardozi and chikan were historically patronized by the local ruling Muslim elites; products made in these styles symbolized wealth, status, and power. The production processes of both types of embroidery are fragmented and middlemen play an often exploitative role, resulting in the marginalization of embroidery workers. It is quite common for both groups of workers to take up home-based piece-work, but workshops also provide employment. These similarities, however, give way to important differences between the two industries. There are three fundamental differences between the chikan industry in Lucknow and the zardozi industry in Old Delhi. In Lucknow, the production of chikan is virtually synonymous with the city and attracts a host of tourists to its many dedicated chikan emporiums. The zardozi industry in Old Delhi, on



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the other hand, does not have a similarly exclusive association with the city in popular imagination. Zardozi is known to be carried out in many places across India; from Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay to Agra, Bareilly and Farukhabad. Indeed, at present Delhi is not even the most renowned place for zardozi work. I was told that Agra is much more famous for its zari embroidered wall hangings and carpets, whereas Bombay is better known for the production of so-called “fancy” zardozi, which is produced in the factories of high-end designers who often cater to the film industry.7 However, what is common among zardozi production in these diverse places is its association with an “Islamicate,” and often a specifically Mughal, courtly culture and a perceived Muslim aesthetic. In addition to the differing ways in which the two styles of embroidery are related to place, there are also differences in how workers conceptualize the origins of their craft. In the case of Lucknow embroidery, Wilkinson-Weber documents numerous different stories and origin myths, some of these narrated by businessmen and others by embroidery workers, in order to explain how this craft emerged in Lucknow. Some of these stories and myths focus on royal origins where aristocratic women initiated the craft, while others attribute its origin to visiting angels who taught the skills to one man. By contrast, in Old Delhi, I came across no such stories or widespread myths in the case of zardozi. Yet, many workers stated that the craft began in India during “the time of the Mughals” and that it was the Mughals who took the craft wherever they settled in India, thus explaining why zardozi is found in so many parts of the country. Being able to connect one’s knowledge of the craft to a long and illustrious past also produced a discourse that, from the perspective of “artisans,” separated them from “labor.” Labor just did work, but artisans were embedded in a wider socio-cultural craft-based milieu. The third distinction between the two industries is the gendered aspect of production. In Lucknow, embroidery is done predominantly by women whereas in Old Delhi this is not the case. Women producers in Lucknow, according to Wilkinson-Weber, are often superficially propped up as bearers of tradition and heritage, in order to promote the industry as authentic. She discusses some of the images of women doing embroidery in Lucknow, where they are pictured wearing the full veil, known as burqa or purdah. Wilkinson-Weber notes that “[i]n these depictions, chikan is portrayed not just as the archetypal artefact of Lucknow, but one produced by a marked and, to middle-class Indian and foreign consumers, exotic group; that is, women in purdah” (2004: 294) However, the zardozi industry in Old Delhi is not as gendered in terms of production, where women are the primary home-based producers and men are the buyers, suppliers and middlemen. In fact, one of the first things I realized was that the composition of zardozi workers is extremely heterogeneous. I met women who did zardozi at home and produced piece-work

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that would often supplement the family income; I encountered both male and female zardozi workers who became fairly adept at taking advantage of coveted government schemes; and I met men and women who belonged to families where the knowledge and skill had been passed down for generations. I met immigrants (boys and young men) from Bihar and West Bengal who had come to Delhi in search of any kind of work and just happened to be placed in a zardozi workshop to learn the skill for the first time. I met men and women, who came from a long line of crafts production, but were becoming increasingly disillusioned by the state of their craft. I met zardozi workers who would use their wide networks to get high-quality products made from Agra and Kashmir, thus essentially taking up the role of the middleman. I met men, and a few women, who had successfully made the transition from craftsperson to business-person and presided over a large portion of the supply chain or had opened their own businesses. I knew workers who specialized in doing embroidery on handbags, belts, saris, and cushion covers, and I met those who seemed to be competent in many styles of embroidery, priding themselves in being innovative creators of unique designs. As a result of this plurality and difference, it is impossible, I contend, to subsume all people involved in the industry under a homogenizing identity. As I have already mentioned, the category of “artisan” is insufficient, if not sometimes misleading and contentious, because not all people who work in the industry are referred to or consider themselves to be artisans. In the next section I discuss how the category of “artisan” has been constructed in the craft literature. I argue that the consequent rigidity of its boundaries often does not correspond to the lived realities and experiences of work.

“Artisan” as symbol and victim In much of the literature on craft, the word artisan (or craftsman/person) is used to describe those who produce particular objects of aesthetic and/or functional value and purpose. It is understood that a considerable amount of time and manual effort goes into creating such objects, often through embodied and repetitive practices, gestures and actions (Ingold 2000). Richard Sennett writes that the defining feature of the artisan-craftsman is that he produces for the sake of doing something well, with consummate excellence (2008: 144–5). Thus pride in handicraft is the realm of the artisan.8 As Jacques Rancière (1989) notes, the term artisan evokes a definitive stability within this form of identification. Furthermore, it is assumed that when this figure of the artisan becomes estranged or alienated from his pride of work, he loses the essence of what it



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means to be an artisan—he loses a sense of self and therefore stability. This is the well-known narrative of anomie. The threatening specter of anomie, and the loss of some artisanal “essence,” I suggest, imbues the category of the artisan with two prospects of identification: artisan as symbol of tradition and artisan as victim of economic disturbance.

Symbol In the context of India, the term artisan or craftsperson seems to signify a range of emotional sentiments and political commitments. India’s complex history of trade and commerce is replete with mentions of artisans (Asher 2006; Bayly 1983; Roy 1996, 2005), and observers often praise the unsurpassed work that has been produced in the region. In many ways the history of craft work, including the movement of craftspeople with conquering armies and their role in establishing empires, is coeval with the history of globalization, well before its twentieth-century manifestation (Ludden 2005; Vanina 2004; Washbrook 1990). In India, the history of craft work is also an inherently powerful symbol of national struggle and identity. The connection between the persona of the artisan and the historical development of the nation-state engenders a particularly resilient construct where the artisan remains entrenched as a rigid categorization. This is the construct of craft as heritage and tradition. Craft production as a manifestation of heritage and tradition has tended to serve the interests of nation-state building, or nationalism in general, and it is especially salient in the literature about Indian craftsmanship.9 During the late colonial period, the notion of craft as symbolizing heritage and tradition was influenced by conditions emanating from the advent of industrialization in Europe. The separation of work from other spheres of life along with the alienation of the worker from his work, offered fertile ground for the categorization of “artisan” as the antithesis of industrial labor or the proletariat (Mollona 2009; Thompson 1963, 1980). The Arts and Crafts movement, beginning in Britain in the nineteenth century by the efforts of writers, poets, and activists, was a reaction to and condemnation of the worker’s alienation. In turn, the movement also romanticized non-industrial work, and in particular, the plight of the Indian artisan was taken up as a cause for concern among the movement’s proponents (Venkatesan 2009). Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was actively involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, produced numerous written works on South Asian art that captured the pre-Independence nationalist view of the synonymy between crafts and the nation. His plea was that the Indian craftsman must not only be saved from the prospect of extinction due to colonial policies and the onslaught of modernity—which were held in

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stark opposition to traditional values—but the artisan should also be upheld as a representative and symbol of India as a nation (Coomaraswamy 1909). Coomaraswamy portrayed artisans as carriers of an authentic image of India, one that is predominantly rural, Hindu, and uncorrupted by colonial modernity (see also Inden 1990; Mohsini 2011). In particular, he viewed traditional Indian crafts as specifically bound to caste society, which symbolized a kind of organic solidarity (Greenough 1996: 232–3). For him, and for his ideological successors and contemporary craft revivalists, “Indian craft … [is] timeless, materializing, not an individual’s vision but a community’s, indeed an entire nation’s” (Venkatesan 2009: 80). In the postcolonial era of development and modernization, the state has continued to adopt, in its policy agenda, the “craft-as-heritage” notion with its inherent allusions to authenticity (cf. Lindholm 2008). For instance, the preamble of a comprehensive manual detailing programs for artisanal development in India, published by the Ministry of Textiles in 2007, states that handicraft “started as part time activity in rural areas.” Greenough contends that it is village industries—which resonate with popular ideals of an authentic India—that have featured prominently in the government’s successive five-year plans, and been “allowed to persevere more or less unmolested by industrial competition” (1996: 243). From the anti-colonial struggles up to recent efforts to manage India’s economic liberalization, artisans have been etched into the nation’s imagination as in need of being saved or revived from the haunting specter of radical change. Perhaps with the hegemony of “free market” ideology and the rise of export-oriented production (see Ong 2006), the rigid category of the artisan is reinforced and reified by its commercial appeal to both domestic and overseas buyers. Ethnic chic, fair trade, and “lifestyle” shopping are all variations of a commercial, and also developmental, impetus that construct narratives of authenticity, projecting certain “types” of people (artisans) who produce certain “types” of things (Indian handicrafts) to fulfil a hybrid desire for modern-traditional consumption. Similarly, tourism, civil society and government programs have in many ways reified the closely related categories of artisan, heritage, and tradition (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009).The artisan becomes a mere symbol of traditional values in the face of modernity and globalization. Meanwhile the artisan as worker, as a producer embedded in local and global economic structures and social relations, is overlooked in this discourse.

Victim In parallel to this vision of the artisan as purveyor of authenticity and traditional values is an equally essentializing notion of the artisan as victim, or



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as a member of an exploited small-scale industry (Kak 2003; Scrase 2003). Again, if we look to Coomaraswamy and the influences of the nineteenthcentury European Arts and Crafts movement, both condemned the alienation of the worker, and especially artisans, due to colonialism, industrialization, and mechanization. In these early writings, the figure of the artisan became a symbol of the struggle between tradition and modernity, and it was the prospect of the exploited, alienated artisan-worker along with a dying crafts industry that invigorated the rhetoric of anti-colonial sentiment. Indeed, Gandhi’s swadeshi or self-reliance movement was premised on the effort to free India from colonial exploitation, and it was the handloom weaving industry that was seen as the most damaged by colonial-capitalist interventions.10 According to the narrative, the heavy extraction of raw materials from India to Britain bolstered the latter’s industrial capacity and Britain’s textile industry experienced rapid growth in cities like Leeds and Manchester. Meanwhile India’s handloom weavers struggled to cope with the influx of cheap textiles from colonizer to colony; weavers abandoned their trade and often joined the ranks of industrial factory workers. However, recent historical work on the handloom industry paints a different picture from this dominant narrative of exploitation and decline. Economic historian Tirthankar Roy writes that the assumed high costs of industrialization seem to be undermined by the survival of “several hundred thousand handloom weavers” in India. Roy considers that “[b]y the end of the nineteenth century, not only had a large number of weavers survived competition from British cloth, they were also investing in new tools and processes” (2002: 507, 508).11 Contemporary anthropological scholarship on artisans in India also tends to emphasize the disenfranchisement of workers, and the threats to livelihoods from the forces of global capitalism. To give one example, Peter Knorringa (1999) examines Agra’s leather footwear artisans and the threats faced by this unregulated, informal industry. Knorringa notes that before the 1990s— when India’s economy was less open to export and foreign investment—the footwear industry functioned quite effectively within a home-based and small workshop economy. Since India’s market reforms and liberalization during the 1990s, leather workers have been adversely affected by competition from mass-produced plastic footwear and have experienced the loss of markets. As a result of such threats, fewer workshops are in operation and artisans are forced into overcrowded home-based production, where wages are meager and employment is not secure. The artisans in Knorringa’s study are indeed agents who are forced to adapt to rapidly changing economic conditions—and not mere relics of a bygone age, as feared by those who promote the craft as heritage discourse. However, as the study’s focus is on economic marginalization, artisans are portrayed as victims of an increasingly laissez-faire system, with little agency to shape their worlds. How do

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artisans (re)engage with processes of learning, skill acquisition, and accomplishment (cf. Marchand 2001) under tough circumstances? How do artisans (re)conceive their lives as sites of struggle and what forms of everyday acts serve to overcome or succumb to daily trials? How do ongoing dialogue and debates recast understandings of culture and belonging (Smith 1999), and what role does travel and mobility serve to (re)constitute their economic, social, and cultural lives (Marsden 2008)? These questions are often elided when narrowly perceiving artisans only as victims. The point here is not to rewrite history or deny the detrimental effects of colonial and neoliberal policies on craft communities. Instead my point is to question and deconstruct the ways in which the category of the artisan has become a static symbol of the nation or a narrowly conceived victim of hegemonic economic changes by way of the resilient binary that I have discussed in this section: craft as heritage versus craft as exploitative smallscale industry.12 While these studies are insightful in their own right, they do not problematize the local meanings of the category nor do they fully account for the changing claims that people make about the positions they inhabit in relation to social and economic contingencies. Without critically questioning the broad category of artisan in our framing of the analysis, we miss the ambiguity and tenuousness that inflect people’s everyday experiences of work. For instance, new questions can be foregrounded when the stability of “artisan” is challenged. For instance, what are the processes that one undergoes to know that one is an artisan? Does one remain an artisan all throughout one’s life? Is it possible to become a non-artisan even while doing handicraft? Insights into these questions can be excavated from detailed ethnography that takes into account, as Talib notes, both the experiences and expressions that workers use to articulate their relationship to various kinds of work. Before presenting such ethnographic accounts, I will briefly discuss, in the next section, the local meanings of “labor” in the context of Old Delhi. Following this discussion I will provide two ethnographic accounts of embroidery workers’ occupational trajectories as they move between inhabiting the categories of artisan and labor.

Who is “labor”? A note on local meanings In the broader Indian context, the term “mazdoor” (or “majdoor”) is regularly translated as “worker” (see Talib 2010: 257). Many trade unions in India employ the term in their organizations’ names: Bengal Chatkal Mazdoor Union is a jute mill workers union; Hind Mazdoor Kisan Panchayat is the



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India Workers Peasant’s Council; and Hind Mazdoor Sabha is the Workers Assembly of India. However, in this chapter I choose to interpret the term as “labor” for a number of reasons. Firstly, the term “worker” is often conceived in relation to industrial work, thus making it—especially within Marxist and trade unionist discourses—a politically cohesive category that denotes an element of proletarian collective consciousness. In the context of craft work in Old Delhi I want to avoid such connotations because embroidery workers (and here I use the term in its more generic form) are indeed not organized nor do they express an overt political consciousness as “workers.” Secondly, in translating mazdoor as labor, I want to emphasize the distinction between what Arendt calls animal laborans and homo faber, or the separation between the labor of our bodies and the work of our hands (1958: 85). The embodiment of labor, also conceived of as toil where the body experiences hardship, is a critical aspect in the constitution of the mazdoor. Thirdly, and on a more ethnographic note, my informants would sometimes interchange the English word “labor” and mazdoor to reference a locally constituted hierarchy of work. Many would often go to Seelampur, which I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, or other peripheral areas in Delhi to source cheap labor. In considering the question of who is labor, therefore, I must first clarify the context in which the term is used. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, my fieldwork was conducted among embroidery workers, primarily in Old Delhi. The embroidery workers I knew had long family histories in the industry, often spanning four to five generations. Many had been settled in Old Delhi for this length of time, while others had settled relatively more recently, often from Agra or Bareilly, but still came from families that had passed on the skills of zardozi. My informants explained that because they had long association with craft, and because they had trained either within the family or with master artisans for many years that they were real, authentic (asli) artisans (karigar). They felt that they were accomplished in their knowledge and practice, and that they really understood how to produce work of the highest quality. As one of my informants told me, “real craftsmanship (asli karigari) is about understanding, not just about doing.” In the context of the zardozi industry in Old Delhi, the connotations of being labor, or mazdoor, are akin to the anti-thesis of how the asli karigar (real artisan) is constituted. If one is deemed to be a “mazdoor” this typically characterizes someone who is not skilled to a high level in the craft. Being “labor” also often implies a transient relationship to the craft—the mazdoor who enters the trade does not have a family connection or history of doing this kind of work. The stereotypical mazdoor is usually a male migrant, and especially in Old Delhi, often comes from the eastern states such Bihar, West Bengal or Uttar Pradesh to find any kind of work in order to send back money to his family or sometimes to pay off a debt (cf. Breman 1996). In some cases

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the laborer, usually a young boy, may be left at a workshop, often by a relative, and will then proceed to learn the trade. However, in these situations, the period of apprenticeship usually lasts an average of six months and the level of skill acquired is usually just enough to do basic hand-embroidered work made for the mass-produced market. These young apprentices learn a version of embroidery known as hathari, which requires less learning time than zardozi. This kind of work carries a stigma and is considered sub-standard by those who are known as and consider themselves to be real artisans. However, as I discuss later in the chapter, those who initially begin as (often migrant) labor subvert such categorizations to become regarded as artisans. But even this may not be the end of the story as many revert again to being considered “labor.”

Occupational trajectories and life-courses: Two ethnographic sketches Najma Najma lives and works in Old Delhi. She belongs to the largely Muslim occupational group, or biradari, known as Ansari. This biradari, a term that is akin to “internal caste-like stratification” (Harriss-White 2004: 144) encompasses a wide range of artisans associated with textile production, including embroiderers. Najma is a skilled zardozi worker, meaning that she has learned metallic embroidery work from her mother and maternal and paternal aunts.13 Like many women who have inherited the skill Najma considered herself to be a real artisan, or an “asli karigar.” However, this is not a story about how Najma became an asli karigar, but instead this is a story of how she became “labor” and what the concept of labor means for her, and others who are in similar positions. This may seem like an inversion of the narrative that first one commits one’s unskilled labor to learning a craft through apprenticeship methods and then one becomes a skilled artisan who is capable of teaching others. But as I will argue in this chapter, Najma’s story of becoming labor sheds light not only on the nuances of both terms—artisan and labor—but also on how contemporary economic changes have made such categories a flexible and fluid part of every life for those who have acquired a craft skill. Najma’s story is fairly typical of how many women (and some men, although the trend is more prevalent among women) experience the process of becoming labor even though they may come from a family skilled in the craft for generations. After completing tenth grade at the local government school, Najma started learning the craft at the age of fifteen from her



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maternal aunt (khala). The craft of zardozi has been passed down in the family for generations, mostly through women.14 All of the women in Najma’s extended family knew how to do zardozi, but in her generation, some male cousins had also learned the craft. Najma was proud of the fact that she had not been initially trained in hathari, but instead became very good at doing “haath ka kaam,” or hand work, which implies learning real or “asli” zardozi. From the age of fifteen till about forty-five, when I met Najma, she had been producing on-and-off from home. But throughout Najma’s time as a skilled zardozi worker, she has not always referred to herself nor been thought of as an “artisan.” The period when she felt like and considered herself to be an artisan was when she effectively became a “middleman.” The shift from home-based work—a topic I will return to later in the chapter—to going out and producing without intermediaries occurred when she successfully obtained a government-issued artisan ID card, which recognized her as a skilled craftsperson. With this identity card, she was eligible to display goods and sell directly to consumers at government-sponsored exhibitions and fairs, such as Dilli Haat, a popular venue in Delhi where artisans from all over India showcase their crafts for a two-week rotation period.15 Najma received her ID card in 1994—soon after Dilli Haat had opened—but then, unlike today, the application process was tedious and Najma had to travel 170 kilometers north of Delhi, to Rourkee, in the present-day state of Uttarkhand in order to apply for the card. Regardless of the cost and distance, Najma was dedicated to procuring this card because she knew it could potentially open many doors for her as an officially recognized artisan. There are two important incentives to having an artisan ID card: Najma was eligible to exhibit zardozi products at government-run venues and she could submit an embroidered piece for either the state or national award scheme, also sponsored and funded by the government. The ID card therefore officially recognizes and promotes skilled artisans and simultaneously creates what it means to be a “skilled artisan.” Thus, Najma pooled together her resources and became a small-scale producer.16 This meant that she procured the raw materials and design templates independently, usually by going to the various wholesale markets in Old Delhi, such as Nai Sarak and Kinnari Bazaar—well-known places for buying materials for zardozi work, such as metallic wires, semi-precious stones and pre-made design sheets (khaka). Moreover, she was also in a position by that time to outsource some production to other artisans, whom she referred to as her labor. She told me that during her days as a “middleman,” the labor that she employed for outsourcing work tended to be unreliable and would often “get up to no good” (“nakhray karte hain”). This manner of talking about labor was quite common among people who had perhaps once been in a similar position themselves—the position of

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doing labor-work or mazdoori kaam—but who had managed to diversify their activities so that they were no longer at the bottom of the production chain and more importantly, were no longer “labor.” Najma maintained her independence and status as a real artisan for a few years; however, at the behest of her teenage sons and husband, she went back to working from home once her government-issued ID card had expired. It was from this point on that Najma returned to the domain of being “labor” (mazdoor), a position that she had also inhabited before she obtained her artisan ID card, when she felt like and was considered to be an “artisan.” Becoming labor, or returning to being labor, marked an important point in Najma’s life. For many years prior to being a real artisan—that period when she sourced both materials and workers (labor) to make her zardozi products—Najma had done home-based piece-work for a middleman; she had considered herself as labor at that time as well. Now she was again in the position of being labor, doing low-quality piece-work for low wages. Although Najma is a highly skilled artisan, at various times in her life she has presented herself as labor due to the nature of the work she was given and her positionality vis-à-vis the chain of production. Although she gained independence and perhaps a certain status as a real artisan through her connections with government schemes—which of course enabled a high degree of control over her own production process—this was short-lived and she returned to home-based production.

Atif With the prevalence of cheap, low-quality work in the zardozi industry, many who are considered to be real, authentic artisans mark themselves apart from people who produce low-quality work. A distinct social stratification emerges based on meanings of cultural capital. Urban residents, and especially those with a known family history linked to former centers of Muslim power—urban centers like Delhi, Agra, Bareilly, Calcutta, Saharanpur—leverage this cultural capital against those perceived to be their inferiors, namely rural Muslims. It is rural Muslim workers, whether skilled or unskilled, who are labelled as “labor” (mazdoor). In addition, with rapid urbanization and increased migration into cities, it is migrants, usually young boys and men who come from villages, who are also referred to as “labor.” The stigma of doing low-quality, hathari work is largely associated with migrants and rural workers. However, coming to Old Delhi does not necessarily mean that one remains labor or that after becoming a skilled artisan one does not return to being labor. Much like Najma’s story—except in reverse order—Atif’s illustrates the tenuousness and flexibility of these categories.



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Atif came to Old Delhi from a village in Bihar and began as an apprentice in a workshop located off one of the main bazaar roads in the old city. This workshop is adjacent to a well-known retail shop that specializes in elaborate and heavily embroidered wedding outfits. What is unique about this business is that all the embroidery work is done on the premises as opposed to being outsourced. The workshop consists of a large room that accommodates about six large wooden rectangular frames on which embroidery work is done. The walls of the workshop are a dull blue-gray color and the old age of the building can be seen in the deteriorated state of the walls and ceiling. Shelves have been built along the length of the walls and contain piles of material, plastic bags full of beads and sequins, scissors of varying sizes, and a collection of empty plastic teacups. The room is lit with a few tube lights, but these mostly remain switched off during the day, since the street-facing wall is entirely made up of windows. The bustle of the street is a constant source of noise in the workshop. On most occasions when I visited the workshop, four or five young boys would be seated around each wooden frame. There were usually two older men seated next to each other doing “real” zardozi, while most of the younger boys would be doing hathari work. The bulk of production in the workshop consisted of lehngas, saris and shalwar suits, which would then be sold in the shop next door. Most of the young boys who worked in the workshop had migrated from two or three villages in Bihar and a few came from an area near the West Bengal-Bihar border. The two older men were the workshop’s resident master artisans, who would also teach the boys the skills. One had come from the adjacent state of Uttar Pradesh while the other was from Old Delhi. Beyond the purview of the master artisans and the workshop owner, many of the young boys and men I encountered expressed their sense of camaraderie when it came to describing their work environment. Some told me that it was like living in a hostel at college, because at night they slept right there in the workshop. Sunday was their day off, and the boys would often head out as a group to play cricket or watch a film. One of the more talkative and boisterous young men in the workshop was Atif, who was known as the “hero” of the workshop. He often teased the other younger (and older) boys and would make sexually explicit jokes with his peers, but only in the absence of the owner. He had come from an area on the Bihar-West Bengal border called Sitamohi.17 In addition to speaking Urdu, he also spoke Bengali. He was twenty-five years old at the time of my fieldwork and had already been in Delhi for twelve years working in various workshops across the city. His family in Bihar were farmers and he had been brought to Delhi by a relative so that he could earn money to send back to the family. Atif’s story of arriving in Delhi was quite typical of many migrants I spoke with during my fieldwork. The story goes that some relative, perhaps an uncle or

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cousin, would travel to Delhi in search of work and either be “recruited” at the train station by someone from a workshop—a practice, I was told, that was common ten or fifteen years ago, when labor was in shortage—or he would arrive in Old Delhi and ask around for who was looking for work. Those from Bihar often preferred to look for work in Old Delhi because this was known to be one of the few “Muslim” parts of Delhi, an important point of consideration since all of the immigrants from Bihar and West Bengal I met were Muslim. The relative who had initially come to the city would make one or two trips a year back to the village in Bihar and use the opportunity to bring other members of the extended family to Delhi in order to work for a wage. This is how Atif came to work in Old Delhi, initially as migrant labor.18 Prior to working in Delhi, Atif had no knowledge of the craft and was put to work as an apprentice under a skilled artisan, or ustad. He first learned to do hathari, but because he was a quick learner, the ustad also taught him zardozi. When I met Atif, he was considered quite skilled and even taught some of the younger boys how to do hathari work. Atif’s story, however, was met with tragedy. After some years of working in Delhi as a boy, he went back to Bihar to get married. He was married to his wife for just a year, when she suddenly died. Atif told me that he was so distressed that he decided to leave his village and return to Delhi to work. The second time he came to Delhi he did not find the kind of work he wanted to do so he moved to Bombay. He had heard that in Bombay there were many more opportunities to work in zardozi workshops that require highly skilled artisans. He ended up working in a workshop that produced clothing designed by the famous Indian designer, Manish Malhotra, who was known to dress many Bollywood actors and actresses. After spending over a year in Bombay, Atif came back to Delhi because he decided to open his own workshop in New Delhi with a friend who was also from Bihar. They decided they wanted to produce for the export market, so they saved up some money and had even chosen the space that they would turn into a workshop. Unfortunately the deal went sour—Atif did not explain the details—and I got the impression that he felt embarrassed by the incident. However, Atif told me with confidence that once they have made enough money again, they will open an export workshop. It is likely that had Atif opened his workshop and began producing for the export market, which while lucrative is often associated with low-quality work, he would have gone back to the category of labor from having been an artisan. Atif’s story, like Najma’s, is not an uncommon narrative about the ways in which people navigate various positionalities with regard to their working lives. By looking at their life and occupational trajectories we get a sense of how the categories of artisan and labor are flexible; at multiple times in a person’s life, they can be labor or artisan. Thus, while it was common for



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highly skilled artisans to refer to those with less skill or those who produce chalu work as merely labor, sometimes many of these skilled artisans would themselves become or be perceived as labor, engaging in “laborwork” (mazdoori kaam), like Shafiq, whom I introduced at the beginning of the chapter. The point when an artisan becomes labor and does laborwork as opposed to “real work” (suchcha kaam or asli kaam) is often correlated with their position vis-à-vis the wider economy and hierarchy of production. The stories of both Najma and Atif point to this distinction: When one becomes labor one loses independence and is merely given work to do. Their experiences as “artisans” on the other hand entailed a certain amount of control over their work—as an officially recognized artisan Najma travelled to craft fairs to showcase her work and she also essentially became a “middleman”; Atif was able to find employment in a famous designer’s workshop.

Conclusion The philosopher Ian Hacking writes that “we constitute ourselves at a place and time … in quite specific, local and historical ways” (2004: 3). With this in mind, the primary aim of this chapter has been to foreground such locally specific and internally differentiated ways that people engaged in craft work inhabit multiple positionalities, sometimes conflicting, over the course of their working careers. Beginning with the insights of Rancière (1989) who challenges the stability of the category of the “artisan” and Talib (2010) who draws attention to the homogenizing category of “labor,” in this chapter I have used their insights to trouble these rigid categories. Who is considered an artisan and who is labor is an ethnographic question, although in much of the literature it has not been treated as such. Instead, “the artisan” has oftentimes become an over-determined, reified category, which has at varying times served colonial, nationalist, and global capitalist objectives. “Labor,” on the other hand, tends to be singularly associated with unskilled work. Instead of taking these categories as a pre-existing social fact, I examined them through an ethnographic lens, foregrounding the spatial, temporal, and historical conditions that made inhabiting multiple positionalities—artisan and labor—possible. There is no denying that embroidery workers face precarious working conditions. India’s economic liberalization has been a boon to very few in the industry, while the majority survives by traversing the tenuous boundaries that separate the real, asli artisan from labor. Both the state and the market are powerful institutions that deeply affect the life- and work-trajectories

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of many who live in and between the status of artisan and labor. And it is often in the face of these contingencies and uncertainties that the rigidity of boundaries between categories is broken down, and differentiated realities emerge.

Notes Chapter 2 1. The fieldwork for this research took place over twenty months in 2008 and 2009, and was funded by the Emslie Horniman Fund of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. All personal names in this chapter are pseudonyms, with the exception of Manuel Jimenez. 2. Artesanía: the Spanish term for “craftwork,” which I argue elsewhere is not entirely coterminous with English usages of “craft” (Cant 2012: 49–58). 3. I do not mean to suggest here that the producers of computer software or other such products are not legally recognized as authors, but rather that the public does not generally consider this authorship to be an intrinsic and inherently desirable feature of the objects themselves. 4. Güera: a light, or white-skinned woman; often used for white North Americans, but also for light-skinned Mexicans. 5. In contrast, when artisans refer to shared patterns and techniques, they often use the term manera (manner) (i.e. “these carvings are made in the traditional manera”). 6. Naming practices in San Martín follow the typical Mexican form where children take their apellido paterno (father’s first surname) followed by their apellido materno (mother’s first surname) to form their own doubled surnames. Because of this, children do not have identical surnames to their fathers, thus even in the “family mode,” workshops’ names continue to reflect the adult man’s identity. 7. There are a few women carvers in San Martín, and it is noteworthy that these women are either unmarried or married to men permanently working in the United States. 8. During the 1990s gallery owners and the state appropriated the term “alebrije” from the famous papier-mâché figures of Mexico City, in order to market the woodcarvings more widely. Oaxacan woodcarvings are now considered by many Mexicans to be part of the same genre as papier-mâché figures, although most artisans themselves insist on a distinction between the two forms (cf. Brulotte 2012: 175 n.2). 9. Although Catalina’s first name is included in their signature, García is Miguel’s paternal surname. In her non-work life, Catalina never uses the surname García.

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Chapter 3 1. Those born after 1980 and coming of age in an era saturated with digital media and information technology. This is the primary demographic from which “script kiddies” have emerged, youthful pranksters with some measure of programming ability and a significantly greater measure of hubris (Kelty 2008). 2. Notably, a raft of YouTube send-ups of the “Get a Mac” campaign featured the open source operating system known as Linux, the metaphorical “Green Party candidate,” as a woman. 3. This is similar to the overlap in meaning of the institution of marriage, which entails an intimate, personal significance, a religious significance, and a legal/ state-based significance. 4. This connects with Miller et al. on the virtuality of money. Elsewhere I have discussed the opacity or inscrutability of certain aspects of digital culture (Lane DeNicola 2012), and how this combination of opacity and (putative) immateriality bear an important resemblance to magic and spiritual traditions (DeNicola 2010a). 5. Perhaps the most well-known example of Perl poetry is “Black Perl,” first posted to the USENET discussion system in 1990. 6. See, for example, Clockworkcouture.com. (Accessed August 22, 2015). 7. The Model M is sometimes referred to as the “clicky keyboard,” and the associated Wikipedia page for the device includes an audiorecording of the sound the keyboard makes in use. 8. “Those sensations originating from my own body—the sweat drying on my skin, the pressure building in my bladder, the blood rushing to my groin—only heightened my awareness of the distant bodies of those I was interacting with but could not physically see. I was reading text on the screen, but I was thinking and feeling in terms of flesh … Although I had never met either NCLifter or Plutarch in person, I held a substantial impression of their considerable bulk and strength. PECS may have been giving me a virtual rose in physical space, but my mind never questioned the tangibility of his sculpted physique sitting before the keyboard” (Campbell 2004: 4). 9. The ad is for ActiveState, a prominent Canadian software company specializing in tools and systems for open sources.

Chapter 4   1. Many thanks to Alicia Ory DeNicola and Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber for organizing the workshop—Taking Stock: Anthropology, Craft, and Artisans in the 21st Century—that led to this timely volume. I am extremely grateful to them for bringing together an impressive group of scholars who offered lively discussion and important critical insights into pressing issues concerning craft

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today. I wish to thank all the participants at the Grove Park Inn Arts and Crafts Conference, especially the craftspeople who shared their insights and work with me. I thank Francis C. Lees for the photographs used in this chapter.   2. The recent political discourse exalting the US middle class became prominent in Barack Obama’s first presidential race, and increased even more in his second. In the 2008 presidential election campaign, Obama repeatedly talked about tax cuts for the middle class, identifying anyone making less than $250,000—about 98 percent of the US population—as qualifying; this stance became the centerpiece of his 2012 successful election bid. During these elections, we heard little about poverty directly, although the wealthy were clearly demonized for their greed that fueled the sub-prime mortgage that led to the near-collapse of the entire US economy in 2008 and the diminishment of opportunities for Americans to actualize the American Dream. In this discourse, the middle class is treated as the moral center of US society.   3. This does not mean that racial segregation was not deeply embedded in suburban development. The New Deal Federal Housing Administration established a national neighborhood appraisal system, which tied mortgage eligibility to race. By defining integrated communities as financial risks and ineligible for home loans, wealth was concentrated in the hands of whites. Of the $120 billion of home loans backed by the federal government from 1934 and 1962, more than 98 percent went to whites. http://www.pbs.org/ race/000_About/002_04-background-03-02.htm (accessed November 22, 2014).   4. These include early “community studies” and the more recent work of Di Leonardo (2004), Yanagisako (1985), and Ortner (2003). The Sloan Foundation’s Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life has supported research on work and families, especially the rise of the two-career family.   5. Ironically, studying the US middle class may soon fulfill anthropology’s more traditional sense of engaged scholarship given the recent shift of poverty to the suburbs: a March 19, 2012, New York Times article on “The New Suburban Poverty” reports that “nationally, 51 million households had incomes less than 50 percent above the official poverty line, and nearly half of these households were in suburbs.” Moreover, in 2008, “nationwide, 55 percent of the poor living in the nation’s metropolitan regions lived in suburbs.” Poverty is on the rise in US suburbs not only because more people today live in the suburbs, but also because the recent economic downturn has had “an outsize impact on suburbs, with the decline in certain categories of jobs and an end to the housing boom that drew many urbanites and immigrants to the suburbs in the first place.” http:// campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-new-suburban-poverty/ (accessed May 24, 2013).   6. For critiques of this “anti-aesthetic” stance, see Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (2001) and Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic (2000).   7. Although cultural critique Elaine Scarry (2001) has also turned to an analysis of beauty as an emotive experience, arguing that the recognition of beauty is analogous to the recognition of justice, her work problematically reproduces the Western idea of beauty as a metaphysical entity in and of itself.

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  8. In addition to Morris, Edward Burne-Jones was a painter; Walter Crane a children’s book illustrator; and C. R. Ashbee an architect (all but Burne-Jones were socialists).   9. In 1884, for example, the Donegal Industrial Fund was established by the British philanthropist, Alice Hart to develop cottage industries in famineravaged Ireland, especially in lace-making (see Helland 2004). In 1897 in the United States, where the Arts and Crafts Movement was part of the larger Progressive movement dedicated to the education and improvement of the immigrant working classes, Jane Addams established Hull House, the US’s first settlement house in Chicago, which was also home of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society (http://www.utoledo.edu/library/canaday/Exhibits/ artsandcrafts/midwest.html) (accessed February 12, 2014). Paul Revere Pottery in Boston trained daughters of Italian and Jewish immigrants— known as the Saturday Evening Girls—in craft production and business skills, providing them an alternative to factory employment and the opportunity to run a business (http://www.arts-crafts.com/archive/pottery/seg.shtml) (accessed March 3, 2014). Candace Wheeler, the US’s first professional interior designer established organizations for design training for women such as the Society of Decorative Arts in New York to turn “the common and inalienable heritage of feminine skill in the use of the needle into a means of art expression and pecuniary profit” (Kaplan 2004: 252). Across Britain and the United States, societies, clubs, and production centers dedicated to the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement flourished (Fariello 2004: 14). However, the focus on beautification was not always without its problems. A similar movement for city beautification that arose at the same time as the Arts and Crafts Movement called for aesthetic solutions to urban poverty and has been deeply criticized for its lack of attention to real social problems. 10. Although often considered a manifestation of European Romanticism, the Arts and Craft Movement was neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern (Kaplan 2004: 11, 12; but see Lears 1994: 83). 11. In Ireland, for example, the Irish School of Art Needlework, established in 1880, enabled “gentlewomen in reduced circumstances” to find “private employment” and was intended to “revive a beautiful and useful art” (Helland 2007: 158). Objects made by these craftswomen—especially lacework and embroidered panels—were exhibited as distinctly Irish at exhibitions including the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair, and in support of Home Rule, and were used to construct a distinctly Irish identity (Helland 2007: 158–72). 12. Whether in Pasadena, Buffalo, or Minneapolis, bungalows shared a set of common features often signifying the desire for a social way of life that was casual and informal: preference for plain and unadorned surfaces, use of natural materials, and decorative motifs extracted from nature (Mayer 1992). The Arts and Crafts commitment to simplicity meant that a bungalow typically consisted of little more than a few spacious rooms with an open interior plan to allow light to flood every room (Mayer 1992). Fireplaces of stone or brick were the focal point of family life. Bungalows were simple, ornamented by woodwork, room dividers, and built-in cabinets made of

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locally occurring woods, emphasizing the interrelatedness of furnishings to structure; foundations built of rough rubble or cobblestones anchored the house to the ground, similarly relating structure to environment (Mayer 1992). 13. Dianne Maddex and Alexander Vertikoff have pointed out that as of 2003 “newspaper advertisements placed by Fannie Mae to promote the American Dream of home ownership still show[ed] a bungalow as the archetypal home” (2003: 11). TV shows typifying US middle-class life often feature craftsman houses or bungalows, including, for example, “Thirtysomething” “Parenthood” and “Numbers.” 14. As James Curtis and Larry Ford (1988) point out, Bungalow courts arose between 1910 and 1930 in California, Florida, and Arizona, as an alternative to crowded city living. Composed of six to ten small, usually one-bedroom, houses carefully arranged around a planned communal open space, they offered affordable housing at the same time as a sense of community and safety. This made them particularly attractive to young, white women who wanted to live alone while at the same time seeking more communal daily living. Today, there is a new generation of bungalow courts, both refurbished original courts and new ones. As in the past, they are built to supply low-cost housing and the combination of privacy and community building is still the primary basis of their appeal. 15. The exhibition traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, providing wide exposure. 16. Christopher Pinney (2004) describes this more generally as corpothetics, the idea that when we enjoy art, we do so with our bodies.

Chapter 5 1. We would certainly be remiss if we did not thank the American Institute of Indian Studies which has provided generous funding and support for too many aspects of both Clare and Alicia’s work to list. Suffice it to say that we met at the AIIS guest house, have both returned there many times, and much of the fieldwork responsible for this book and the larger ideas that bound it would not have been possible if not for AIIS. Special thanks of course goes to the families in India who made Alicia Ory DeNicola’s work possible, especially Vijendra and his family, Mukesh and family, Vishnudevi and family and Indra and family. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber thanks all those who helped in innumerable ways in research stints in Lucknow and Mumbai, and with respect to this essay, Rinki Roy Bhattacharya, Monalisa Sata and Ashok Darzi. 2. These memories are based upon interviews by the author as well as interviews with and archival news articles by Jaipur resident Sitaram Jalani who recorded and published a compendium of memory and local lore in the Rajasthan Patrika Sunday Supplement in 1997. His writings depict a common story of Bagru in the years leading up to India’s Independence in 1947.

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3. Chikan embroidery is prototypically white cotton embroidery on a white muslin or cotton base, although a variety of different colored threads and fabrics are sold in the present day. Fine work is occupationally and taxonomically distinct from cheap work, and chikan goods range from the very cheap (roadside stalls sell cheap chikan clothes for $2 or less) to the very expensive (designer chikan saris fetch prices as high as several thousand dollars) (Wilkinson-Weber 1999, 2004). 4. Marx’s comments about the laborer, technology, and deskilling are highly relevant here (1976: 458–61). 5. A useful comparative comes from Richard Unger’s (1991) account of shipbuilding in the medieval (and pre-capitalist) period in Europe. In northern shipyards, the builder and his men worked collaboratively and without a sharp division of labor; in the south, a distinct kind of ship design corresponded to a distinction of the skilled foreman who directed the work, and less skilled workmen who followed his instructions. Eventually by the 1500s the southern pattern came to dominate the north as well. 6. This kind of differentiation among artisans is also the topic of discussion by Mohsini, Milgram, and Gowlland in this volume. 7. Mobilizing craft production and products to articulate a political ideal of “the nation” has been remarked by several scholars investigating the construction of an authentic national and regional dress (e.g. Bean 1989; Kawlra 2014; Tarlo 1996). 8. Tailors in particular refer to a “filmi” cut which means a way of setting up the cut and fit so as to accentuate the body. While costumes for both males and females can be tagged “filmi” for being especially colorful, flamboyant or outré, the “filmi” cut as such I have only ever heard discussed in relation to women’s costumes, highlighting the more prurient aspects of female presentation on screen.

Chapter 6 1. In Spanish: “salir a parchar” (to go to work), “voy a parchar” (I’m going to work), “ella está parchando” (she is working), “estar en el parche” (to be at the place where selling takes place), “me quitaron el parche” (they took my merchandise — usually referring to law enforcement officers). 2. Also known as marfil vegetal (“vegetable ivory”): Phytelephas macrocarpa palm seed. 3. A whitish composition metal: 50 to 70 percent copper, 13 to 25 percent nickel and 13 to 25 percent zinc. 4. Called “motor tool” (using the English-language words) by traveling artisans.

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Chapter 7   1. Pronounced ‘patch bay,’ and as of mid 2012 was renamed Cosm.   2. ‘Hack’ in this context is not defined as a breach of computer security system, but a clever, non-standard way of working around a problem using available materials. Using duct tape to hold wires in place is a hack.   3. In UK households, kettles are typically electric and plug into the wall. They are not designed to be heated on a stove.   4. Technologies before Current Cost (e.g., WattsOn) did not make it easy to upload data onto the Internet. Current Cost does afford that possibility but, for this group, the pre-made connection back to the Current Cost monitor was not sufficiently efficient. However, ‘efficiency’ may have been simply an excuse to build more hardware.

Chapter 8   1. See Michael Pollan, “Vote for the Dinner Party. Is This the Year that the Food Movement Finally Enters Politics?,” New York Times Magazine, October 14, 2012: 62–4.   2. Recent work in the anthropology of food has examined the tension between techne or empirical knowledge as embodied craft and technoscience or abstract knowledge as systematic classification modes (Heath and Meneley 2007). In the debates over what counts as good food, technoscientific definitions of quality are associated with an instrumental rationality focused on product safety and managed risk in contrast to techne definitions which are understood as a qualitative rationality centered on cultural identities, artisanal work practices, and quality of life (Heller 2007: 606).   3. In Washington, I conducted two focus groups with undergraduate students enrolled in Georgetown University anthropology courses and one focus group in a private home. The groups in New York and Pennsylvania were also held in private homes.   4. Sales of dark chocolate have grown ten times faster than milk chocolate since 2002.   5. W. Nicholls, “Beyond Bittersweet,” Washington Post, September 18, 2002: F 1 and F 4.   6. One Pennsylvania participant expressed her anger at the decision of Hershey Foods to move part of the production facility to Mexico.   7. See J. Moskin, “Hints of Wine? Chocolate Enters the Tasting Room,” New York Times, December 3, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/03/dining/ hints-of-wine-chocolate-enters-the-tasting-room.html (accessed December 16, 2003).   8. These testimonials were reported by Martine Leventer of Martine’s chocolates in New York during a telephone interview I conducted with her on 10/6/2011.

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  9. Five participants in the tasting at the private Washington DC home engaged in a game of confectionery distinction by demonstrating their knowledge and exclusive patronage of European and French chocolatiers. One of them is a French woman who married an American and the three others are dedicated Europhiles who travel or stay for extended periods every year in France. 10. Marie Belle chocolates, www.mariebelle.com (accessed 16 October 2011).

Chapter 9 1. In Morocco, tourism and handicraft sectors contribute billions of local currency yearly amounting to almost 59 MMDH (billion dirhams) in 2007. (The exchange rate for 1 Moroccan Dirham is 0.1 US Dollars).

Chapter 10 1. Background research for this paper has been ongoing since 2001, while fieldwork specific to this account was conducted from 2010 to 2014. Financial support has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2000–3, 2004–7, 2008–11, 2012–16) and from OCAD University. In the Philippines, I am affiliated with the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines Baguio, Baguio City and I thank my CSC colleagues for their support. I also thank the volume editors for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. To those in the nito reed industry who answered my numerous questions, I owe a debt of gratitude. 2. Parts of this section build on and expand previously published material in Gerber, Turner and Milgram (2014). 3. All names of individual people are pseudonyms. 4. The exchange rate I use is: 1 US$ = 45 Philippine pesos.

Chapter 11 1. See http://makezine.com/ (accessed August 20, 2015). 2. An early version of the Spyn technology used patterns of infrared ink printed on yarn to correlate media collected while crafting with stitches on a garment (Rosner and Ryokai 2009). Though visible to the computer vision algorithms through an infrared-enabled camera, this pattern remained invisible to the naked eye (see Figure 14). 3. The majority of members were white, college-educated and over the age of fifty. 4. All names of individuals and groups are pseudonyms.

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Chapter 12 1. This chapter is based on data collected during two periods of fieldwork in Taiwan, in 2010 (March–August) and 2011 (September–December). Fieldwork was funded by two British Academy Small Grants, writing-up of the chapter was made possible by an “Yggdrasil” Visiting Researcher grant from the Research Council of Norway, based at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. The names that appear in the chapter are pseudonyms. 2. Artisans who work at the wheel tend to be men. 3. Taiwan had a role to play in China’s new role of main producer of ceramics, since many Taiwanese entrepreneurs moved to the mainland to establish factories since the 1990s. 4. Artisans would often tell me they quit their job, but in many cases they had actually been made redundant. I did not systematically verify their claims.

Chapter 13   1. Marchand (2009: 23) makes a similar point about the masons who are responsible for building and maintaining the buildings of Djenne, “which convey a tremendous pride of place, steeped in the town’s rich cosmopolitan heritage and ancient urban history.”   2. The nation state, Nigeria, was formed with the amalgamation of the Northern Protectorate and the Southern Protectorate in 1914.   3. I believe that Alhaji Danladi is referring to the Jihad of Shehu Usman dan Fodio, which began in the early 1800s, almost two hundred years ago (Last 1967).   4. Women in Zaria City began to do hand-embroidery of babban riga in the early 1970s (Renne 2004a: 112; Maiwada and Renne 2007: 43).   5. Interview: Mallam Aminu Inuwa, Majidadin Danburan, interviewed by E. P. Renne, May 14, 1995; see Renne 2004b: 128–9, 141n18.   6. Maiwada (2002) also discuss the decline in wild silk thread production, formerly used in robe embroidery, although Jimi Magajiya notes that tsamiya thread is still spun and tsamiya embroidery is still done in Zaria City (see also Douny 2011; Shea 1980).   7. This dynamic did not play out among tailors in Kano either (Pokrant 1982).   8. Alhaji Magaji estimated the cost of a tokare robe embroidered in the aska biyu pattern with the highest quality materials (shedda: Excelensa, thread: Anchor) as costing around N40,000, approximately $465 (US) in 1996.   9. Schneider and Weiner (1986) observe an alternative dynamic, namely that when market prices for certain types of textile-related crafts increase, that men may move into these occupations. 10. Alhaji Dogara has a large building/store on the edge of Zaria City Market where his employees sell robes and kaftans—both hand- and

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machine-embroidered; he also has shops in Kaduna and Abuja (Maiwada and Renne 2007: 36). 11. He is referring to the way that shabka robes are presently being made with a combination of machine-embroidery (by men) and hand-embroidery (by women; see Renne 2010: 86). 12. Of five different brands of shedda cotton damask available in Alhaji Shittu’s stall in June 2010, he identified five (LeMantex, NBTX, Koyo, Senfiertex, and Blue Sky) as coming from China. A package of Cotton Swiss Voile was labeled Osaka®; Alhaji Shittu said that it came from Japan via Cotonou, Benin (Notebook Zaria 2010–11: 77). 13. Hassana Yusuf noted the recent difficulty of finding good quality red embroidery thread. 14. There are two translations for hand-embroidery, one which is general, dinkin hannu, the other which is specific to robes: riga mai aiki, the owner of robe [embroidery] work (Newman 2007: 3). 15. In precolonial times, this system also included a range of ranked slaves, many of whom carried out agricultural work (Smith 1960).

Chapter 14   1. For an ethnographic account of a neighborhood similar to and in proximity of Seelampur that emerged as a result of Emergency policies, see Tarlo 2003.   2. My informants tended to use the English word “labor” when they spoke about their network of workers in Seelampur.   3. In this chapter I use the phrase “embroidery worker” as a more generic term that can encompass the fluidity with which one can inhabit the categories of artisan and labor throughout a life-course.   4. Ian Hacking (2004) writes that concepts are words that become locally and historically meaningful in specific sites of construction. These sites are “the sentences in which the word is actually (not potentially) used, those who speak those sentences, with what authority, in what institutional settings, in order to influence whom, with what consequences for the speakers” (Hacking 2002:17).   5. The stigmatization of Old Delhi even precedes this recent middle-class flight. When New Delhi was designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens in the early twentieth century, with wide boulevards and massive roundabouts, it was known as the “white town” in contrast to the old city, or the “black town” (Gandhi 2011). Ajay Gandhi writes, “The black towns where the vast majority of Indians still lived were simply seen as unhygienic, opaque and dangerous” (2011: 204).   6. The word zardozi is derived from Farsi and literally translates to sewing with gold. The craft has strong connections to Persianate culture, and became an urban-based craft in India in at least the thirteenth century. Historically, zardozi was done on textiles that were consumed by the elite classes in

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India due to the heavy use of real gold and silver wires. Today zardozi work is found on many decorative items and clothing. The use of real metals has been replaced by what is called “imitation” zari, which are copper-based wires.   7. For an ethnographic account on the changing role and de-skilling of workers who create costumes for Bollywood film sets, see WilkinsonWeber 2006.   8. In the anthropology of art, as well as material culture studies, there is also a long-standing debate about whether an artisan produces handiwork/craft or art. This well-rehearsed debate questions where and how to draw the line between artisan and artist, and between craft and art (Errington 1998; Sennett 2008; Steiner 1993; see also Cant and Terrio in this volume).   9. The construct of craft, or craftsmanship, as heritage and tradition has also been formative in imagining the nation state in other contexts. See, for example, Herzfeld 2004 and Terrio 2000. 10. For a discussion on how the image of the artisan as primary producer of hand-spun cloth (khadi) was critical for the swadeshi movement, see Tarlo 1996. 11. For a related historical account of the relationship between commercialization and artisan production during the colonial period, see Roy 1996. 12. I wish to thank the editors of this volume for highlighting this prevailing binary in the craft literature. 13. Women learn from fathers and male members of the extended family as well, so gendered knowledge transmission is not always segregated. 14. From an economic history perspective, Tirthankar Roy writes: “In northern India, embroidery work was more than a commercial skill, it was part of the education of girls in Muslim families, rich or not-so-rich … When under economic pressure, adult women formed a team and carried out job-work for urban merchants.” (2005: 160) 15. Despite the state’s power to create the category of “skilled artisan,” many of my informants voiced serious doubts about the credibility of so-called artisans who displayed at the venue; they believed these imposters were just business people with little craft knowledge or skills. 16. Wilkinson-Weber (1997) notes that women in the Lucknow chikan industry sometimes become so-called “agents.” These agents are often middle-aged, urban-based women who are relatively more mobile and less restricted by purdah than younger, rural-based women. Also, female agents, like Najma, are more skilled in embroidery work and are more likely to have won a government award for skilled craftsmanship, but as I’ve discussed elsewhere this is not always the case (Mohsini 2011). 17. In their study of young men in rural Uttar Pradesh, Jeffery, Jeffery and Jeffery (2008) write that many young Muslim men, who are excluded from educational and work opportunities, turn to embroidery work in the cities as a reputable source of income. 18. With reference to his research on migrant workers in the Bhilai steel plant in central India, Jonathan Parry observes that “most migrants follow a path

270 Notes

already well-trodden by others in their network.” (2003: 230) Villalobos, in this volume, also discusses the importance of networks among traveling artisans in Latin America, which create a sense of solidarity and discursive self-identification among this nomadic group.

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Index Addams, Jane 60 Aesthetics 25, 27, 37, 40, 44, 48, 49, 54, 55, 58, 59–61, 77, 91, 144, 152 algorithms 37, 44, 48, 53, 116, 126, 191, 197 American Beauty (1999 film) 57–8 Anthropology 21–3, 32, 34–6, 42, 58–60, 81, 96, 99, 110, 121, 135, 139, 141, 200, 205, 206, 209, 211, 221, 249 and art/craft 21–2, 23, 32, 135, 200, 221 and class 58–9, 249 digital 36 four principles of 99 Apple Computers 38–9, 43, 48–9 see also Jobs, Steve Art Nouveau 60 Arts and Crafts Movement 24, 33, 53, 54, 57, 60–77, 247, 249 Ashbee, C. R. 63 basketry (basket weaving) 10, 117–19, 133, 138, 175–6, 183 Bollywood 194–6, 256 see also India Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 42, 59, 61, 72, 80, 90 calligraphy 206 capitalism 55, 62, 68, 70, 80, 82–5, 90, 96, 100, 103–4, 112, 157, 160, 249 coding (software) 37–8, 40–8, 53–4, 118, 131, 191, 197 see also computers, programming; data and databases; hacking; technology, digital colonialism 89, 154, 160, 167, 219, 222, 247–50, 257

commodity chains 171–3, 181, 185–6 Communism 201, 212–13 computers 23, 35–54, 116, 125, 189–90, 195, 197, 208, 212 programming 35–55, 191, 195 user experience design 37, 44, 45, 47–8, 50 see also coding; data and databases; hacking; programming; technology, digital Consumer Reports (US magazine) 140 consumerism 8, 68, 72 Cosplay 49 costume 94–5 craft fairs 120, 126–8, 196, 253, 257 craft stores, commercial 170, 182, 185 crops, cultivation of 152, 162, 164, 183 rotation 162 see also farming, organic products data and databases 37, 40, 42, 55, 116, 120, 123–4, 125, 127, 128–9, 130–3 see also information systems degrowth 163, 167 Deleuze, Gilles 74 design and designers 26, 29–30 37, 40, 48, 49, 53, 60, 62, 64–8, 73–4, 76, 80–97, 116, 117–19, 121, 138, 141, 152, 158, 169–70, 176, 179–83, 189, 191, 202–4, 206, 209, 218, 223–4, 229–35, 244, 246, 253, 256–7 digital 37, 40, 48, 49, 131, 191 DIY 116–18, 189 environmental 119

296 Index

Indian 80–97 interior and furniture 53, 62, 64–8, 73–4, 76 Latin American 26, 29–30 Moroccan (carpets) 158–9 Muslim 253, 256–7 Nigerian (garments) 218, 223–4, 229–35, 244, 246 retailers 169–70, 179–81 Taiwanese (ceramics) 202–4, 206, 209 see also furniture design; printing and printers; textiles Dibbell, Julian 41 DIY (Do it Yourself) movement 4, 49, 68, 74, 115–19, 184 see also maker movement economies and economics 15, 22, 26, 33, 59, 62, 65–6, 67, 80, 86, 87, 88, 92, 97, 99, 100–4, 107–9, 111–12, 133, 149, 154, 156–9, 161, 164, 166–7, 169, 171, 173, 175, 181, 184–5, 201, 208, 214, 221–2, 224, 228, 234, 236, 241–3, 247–50, 257 development (in 2nd and 3rd world) 22, 83, 92, 104, 155–7, 163–7, 169–70, 176, 248 global (economy) 15, 34, 58, 65, 82, 97, 100, 154, 157, 169, 176, 185 socioeconomic context 79, 111, 157 see also marketing; marketplaces embroidery 73, 74, 80, 83, 84–96, 218–37, 239 see also needlecraft energy efficiency (home) 115–19, 122–30 England 62, 160 entrepreneurship 37–8, 80–1, 88, 136–7, 152, 156, 170–81, 183–6, 209, 213 ethnomathematics 118, 120 see also mathematics Europe 62, 65, 102, 119, 136, 137, 145–8, 150, 160, 166, 170, 179, 247, 249

factories 63, 83, 84, 87, 200, 201–7, 209, 213–15, 245, 249 fair-trade goods 139, 142, 157, 248 see also farming; organic products farmers’ markets 136 farming 84, 136, 137, 139, 153, 160–6, 175, 222, 224, 227, 255 see also fair-trade goods; organic products Foucault, Michel 75, 154, 210–11 France 52, 62, 135–51, 153, 160, 167 franchising 143 furniture design 62, 63, 65–7, 70, 181, 189 see also design and designers Gandhi (1982 film) 95 Gandhi, Mahatma 93, 249 Gates, Bill 38–9 gender and gender politics 29, 50, 52, 67, 88, 91, 98, 118, 133, 141, 154–6, 159, 174, 191, 221, 231, 232, 245 in India 88, 91, 98, 221 in Latin America 29 in Morocco 154–6, 159, in Nigeria 221, 231–2, 245 of technology 50, 52, 118, 133 see also women gentrification 135, 140–1 gift-giving 107, 142–5, 148, 149–50, 164, 200, 213, 215, 222 Ginsberg, Allen 58 glazing 33, 138, 199–212, 215 see also pottery globalization 65, 100, 108, 137, 160, 247, 248 GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) 136 Green movement 129, 130, 134 Guattari, Félix 74 Guevara, Ché 108 hacking hardware 116, 118, 128, 129, 130, 133 software 35–7, 40, 49–50, 128, 189 see also coding (software); computers; technology, digital

Index Hermeneutics 116–18, 123, 126, 128, 132–3 homelessness 107 Hubbard, Elbert 63 hygiene 49, 159 IKEA 189 imports/exports 87, 136, 140, 143, 171, 176–7, 179, 182, 201, 212–14, 223, 230, 248, 249, 256 India 36, 79–96, 106, 221, 239–51, 253, 256–7 see also Bollywood indigenous craft and materials 171, 182, 186, 201 information systems 36, 37, 40, 55, 121, 130, 194 sharing 131, 161, 206, 207 see also data and databases; technology, digital Islam 85, 219, 227, 229, 245 Italy 160 Japan 119, 201, 212, 213, 214 Jobs, Steve 38–9 Kant, Immanuel 59, 61 knitting 189–98 labor, division of 29, 33, 86, 87, 141, 154, 199–203, 212, 231 Latin America 32, 33, 100–12 leather workers 249 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 141 Lewis, Sinclair 58 maker movement 116, 119, 125, 132, 133, 135, 189, 196, 198 and “Maker Faires” 120, 126–8, 196 see also DIY movement marketing 34, 40, 80, 82, 86, 92, 137, 145, 152, 157, 164, 165, 166, 173, 175, 182 see also economies and economics marketplaces 21, 84, 85, 102, 136, 138, 153, 157, 165, 174, 220, 223–7, 230, 231, 233–4, 236, 240, 243, 253 see also economies and economics

297

Marx, Karl 24–5, 64 Marxism 24–5, 60–4, 87, 210, 251 Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 40 materialism 62 materiality 37, 40, 41–2, 45, 48, 51, 52, 55, 73, 116, 121, 124, 153, 154, 155, 191, 210–11 and the digital 40, 41–2, 45, 48, 51, 55, 197 and gender 154, 155 and industrialization 52 and mathematics 116, 121, 124 mathematics 37, 43, 120–1, 195 see also coding; ethnomathematics Matrix, The (1999 film) 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14, 61, 70 Mexico 21–8, 31, 102, 104, 109, 110 Microsoft Corporation 38–9, 41, 43, 45, 47 see also computers; Gates, Bill middle class (American) 57–61, 65–6, 72, 81–2 migration; Migrants 26, 100, 104–6, 108, 157, 212, 240, 242, 246, 251, 252, 254–6 modernism 36, 40, 119, 120 modernity 24, 62, 83, 84, 91, 119, 135, 159, 174, 247–9 Morris, William 24, 62–5, 72, 74, 77 Mughal Empire 85, 242, 245 Mumford, Lewis 58 nationalism 33, 82, 84, 96, 174, 213, 247, 257 needlecraft 190, 195–8, 240 see also embroidery neoliberalism 250 Neorural(s) (movement) 160, 163 see also farming nineteenth century 24, 52, 53, 60, 62, 85, 110, 145, 201, 220, 222, 247, 249 nutrition 161, 165 organic products 49, 136, 137, 139, 142, 153, 160–7 see also fair trade; farming

298 Index

peasants 25, 27, 160, 163, 166–7, 214, 251 porcelain 65, 199, 201, 213–14 post-colonialism 248 pottery 33, 63, 109, 138, 200–1, 203–5, 207 see also glazing printing and printers 42, 54, 80, 83–4, 85–92, 97, 191, 243 see also design and designers; textiles programming 43, 46–7 Rancière, Jacques 239, 246, 257 Ruskin, John 24, 62, 68 Salons de Paris (consumer goods exhibition) 144 San Francisco 107, 142, 149, 190–1 Scarry, Elaine 74 Sears Roebuck company 67 Sennett, Richard 20, 23, 24, 246 Simmel, Georg 217, 219 Socialism 53, 54, 60, 62, 64, 65 social networking 174, 189, 194 Spain 160 Spyn (digital application) 190–2, 195–8 steampunk (aesthetic movement) 49–50 Stickley, Gustav 65–7, 72 suburbs (American) 57–8, 67 sub-contracting 87, 88, 89, 241 sustainability 40, 136, 152, 157, 165, 172, 182 technology digital 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 46–7, 51, 52, 116, 118, 120, 121, 126, 130, 189–98 and gender 52, 67 industrial 49, 67, 118, 176, 213, 218 see also coding; computers; hacking, software technophobia 197 television 4, 41, 68, 125 textiles 52, 62, 63, 65, 73, 80, 84, 87, 92, 96, 115, 169, 179, 189, 195,

222, 225, 234, 236, 248, 242, 252–3 design of 62, 63, 65, 73 and gender 80, 222, 252–3 production, automated vs. handmade 52, 234, 236, 248, 249 and tradition 84, 87, 96, 169, 179, 189 see also printing and printers; weaving This Old House (US television series) 68 tourism 19–22, 25–7, 30–1, 60, 68, 85, 96, 101–7, 109, 111–12, 122, 138, 154, 156, 244, 248 and collecting (of crafts) 22, 26, 27, 31, 156, 183, 244 effect on economy 60, 85, 96, 101–7, 111, 112, 138, 244, 248 video games 41 Washington Post (US newspaper) 141 weaving (textile) 33, 52, 74, 109, 154–9, 176, 179, 192, 193, 231, 236, 249 see also textiles Williams-Sonoma 169, 179, 181, 182 women 19, 20, 25, 29, 31–2, 52, 63, 67, 73, 85–8, 91, 100, 120, 140, 154–8, 159, 171, 175–6, 191, 198, 209, 221–3, 231–6, 245–6, 252–3 and authorship 29, 31–2 and morality 154–7 and status 157–8, 171, 175 and work 63, 67, 73, 85–8, 244, 245, 252–3 see also gender and gender politics World War I 60, 67 World War II 75, 147 Wright, Frank Lloyd 60, 63