The politics of craft and working without skill: reconsidering craftsmanship and the community of practice

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Clare Wilkinson Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola, ‘Introduction: Taking stock of craft in anthropology,’ in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1-16. Heather Paxson, The Life of Cheese: Crafting food and value in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Susan Terrio, ‘Visions of Excess: Crafting good chocolate in France and the United States,’ in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 135-151. Frances Mascia-Lees, ‘American Beauty: The Middle Class Arts and Crafts Revival in the United States,’ in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 57-77. Eileen Boris, ‘Crafts Shop or Sweatshop? The Uses and Abuses of Craftsmanship in Twentieth Century America,’ Journal of Design History Vol.2, No. 2/3 (1989). Etymologically, the -ship suffix derives from proto-German through Old English, and until the 19th century only denoted a condition of being (as in “apprenticeship,” the condition of being an apprentice), rather than any inherent qualities of the person; T.F. Hoad, ed. ‘-ship,’ in The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). I conducted twenty months of research in San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico from 2008-2009. This research was funded by the Emslie Horniman Fund from the Royal Anthropological Institute. Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. (Cambridge: Harvard College, and Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1984), p. 173. William Morris, “The Art of the People.” In On Art and Socialism, ed. Norman Kelvin. (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999 [1884]), 31. This is also in part the result of the languages we use: the contemporary meaning of the English word “craft” cannot be easily divorced from the broadly Marxist principles set out by the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the United States. Soumhya Venkatesan, ‘Learning to Weave, Weaving to Learn… What?’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 16, No. S1 (2010), 173. For a detailed critique of the material engagement concept, see Tom Yarrow and Sian Jones, “‘Stone is Stone’: Engagement and Detachment in the Craft of Conservation Masonry.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 20, No 2 (2014). Trevor Marchand, Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (Richmond: Curzon, 2001). Trevor Marchand, ‘Embodied Cognition and Communication: studies with British fine woodworkers, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 16, No 1 (2010). Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Elizabeth Station, ‘Life in Practice,’ The University of Chicago Magazine Nov-Dec. 2011. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013). Marchand, ‘Embodied Cognition’. Erin O’Connor, ‘Embodied Knowledge: The Expert of Meaning and the Struggle Towards Proficiency in Glassblowing,’ Ethnography Vol 6, No 2(2005). Venkatesan, ‘Learning to Weave’. Alanna Cant, ‘‘Making’ Labour in Mexican Artisanal Workshops,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 24, No S1 (2018). Roy Dilley, ‘The Visibility and Invisibility of Production among Senegalese Craftsmen,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 10, No 4 (2004). Michael Herzfeld, The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Tim Ingold, ‘Materials Against Materiality,’ Archaeological Dialogues Vol 14, No 1 (2007). Mira Mohsini, ‘Crafting Muslim Artisans: Agency and Exclusion in India’s Urban Crafts Communities’ in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 239-258. For a further critique of the “making” approach, see Cant, ‘”Making” Labour”. Sennett, The Craftsman, 268. Ibid., 37. Andrew Cox, ‘What are Communities of Practice? A comparative review of four seminal works,’ Journal of Information Science, Vol 31, No 6 (2005). Rebecca Schneider, ‘Science Teacher Educators as a Community of Practice’, Journal of Science Teacher Education Vol. 18, No. 5 (2007). Amy Smith, ‘Knowledge By Association: Communities of Practice in Public Management’, Public Administration Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Fall 2016). Mary Bucholtz, ‘"Why Be Normal?": Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls’ Language in Society, Vol. 28, No. 2 (June 1999), 203-223. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Ibid. W. Warner Wood, Made in Mexico: Zapotec weavers and the global ethnic art market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 16-17. Wood goes on to argue that the model can be bolstered by drawing on Bourdieu’s work on ‘fields’ of social production, an approach I have found very useful in my own work. For an interesting example of this, see Dawn Nafus and Richard Beckwith, “Number in Craft: Situated Numbering Practices in Do-It-Yourself Sensor Systems,” in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization and Capitalism, eds. Clare Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola. (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 115-134. Michael Chibnik, Crafting Tradition: The making and marketing of Oaxacan wood carvings. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Alanna Cant, The Value of Aesthetics: Oaxacan woodcarvers in global economies of culture. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019). Ibid. Figure based on a survey conducted March to April 2008. Jeffrey Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Serena Eréndira Serrano Oswald, “Migration, Gender and Woodcarving in San Martín Tilcajete,” in Migration, Gender and Social Justice: Perspectives on human insecurity, eds. Thanh-Dam Truong, Des Gasper, Jeff Handmaker and Sylvia I. Bergh (Heidelberg, New York and London: Springer, 2014), 177-192. Cant, The Value of Aesthetics, 50-67 Ibid. This perspective is reinforced by markets that place value on particular aesthetics and artistic conventions, such as signatures. See Cant, ‘”Making” Labour’. See Chibnik, Crafting Tradition and Wood, Made in Mexico. Cant, The Value of Aesthetics, 68-84; 85-129.