An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre

Beschreibung

This book offers a nuanced reflection on the meaning of making and artisan agency, demonstrating how copper-smithing produces not only objects, but also lives, worlds, meanings, and social transformation. Through long-term ethnography, grounded in apprenticeship to master coppersmith Jesús Pérez Ornelas, Feder-Nadoff’s intimate description of communal and artisanal life in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México provides a critical reappraisal of aesthetics and compelling ways to think about how aura and agency are produced. By mapping flows and frictions between persons, places, and things, this study closes the gap between economic and socio-political analysis of craft, on the one hand, and aesthetic, material, and phenomenological studies of making, on the other. Although craft historically plays a prominent national, even ideological role in Mexico, as in many countries, most artisans ironically remain absent, often living in marginalized, precarious circumstances. By tracing the cycles of life, death, and afterlife, of these maker-protagonists, their bodies of knowledge, skilled performances, and objects, this poetic monograph testifies to their presence.

This book, introduced with a Foreword by Tim Ingold, offers a nuanced reflection on the meaning of making and artisan agency, demonstrating how copper-smithing produces not only objects, but also lives, worlds, meanings, and social transformation. Through long-term ethnography, grounded in apprenticeship to master coppersmith Jesús Pérez Ornelas, Feder-Nadoff’s intimate description of communal and artisanal life in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México provides a critical reappraisal of aesthetics and compelling ways to think about how aura and agency are produced. By mapping flows and frictions between persons, places, and things, this study closes the gap between economic and socio-political analysis of craft, on the one hand, and aesthetic, material, and phenomenological studies of making, on the other. Although craft historically plays a prominent national, even ideological role in Mexico, as in many countries, most artisans ironically remain absent, often living in marginalized, precarious circumstances. By tracing the cycles of life, death, and afterlife, of these maker-protagonists, their bodies of knowledge, skilled performances, and objects, this poetic monograph testifies to their presence.

Autor*in

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff

Themen in »An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre«

Mexican craft traditional art making skilled practice craft apprenticeship aesthetics embodied knowledge performance studies creativity experimental ethnography labor

Stimmen zu »An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre«

“This is a heartfelt homage to a master craftsman and a thought-provoking journey into the anthropology of art and aesthetics. Feder-Nadoff vividly depicts the dynamics of family, community, ritual and change in a Mexican town. Her firsthand accounts of apprenticeship and creativity are finely interwoven with meditations on agency and the continuous un/remaking of person, place and memory.” (Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of London)

“Michele Feder-Nadoff’s stunning book, An Anthropology of Making, demonstrates powerfully how the embodiment of art is linked to the art of living in the world. Through her long-standing apprenticeship to coppersmiths in Santa Clara del Cobre, Mexico, Feder-Nadoff shows how the ethnographer’s existential implication can lead to a profound comprehension of artisanship, culture and social life. It is an ethnography with soul.” (Paul Stoller, West Chester University, Pennsylvania and Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen/Nuremberg)

“Copper and care, forge and field, hearth and home. Crafted through labor and love by artist-anthropologist Michele Feder-Nadoff, this book narrates the ways in which artisanal copper smithing in Michoacán, México combines memory and imagination, linking past, present and future. It is an homage to her teacher, and an example of how embodied practice can produce new forms of knowledge.” (Anne W. Johnson, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City)

“With this book, Feder-Nadoff gifts the reader with a rich and evocative account of the practices of coppersmithing in Santa Clara. Through the words, and accounts of the life-world, of Maestro Jesús, we gain privileged understandings of the techniques and aesthetics of an age-old craft, but also inspiring, and at times deeply moving, reflections on life, community, grief, and the bonds that tie today’s makers to generations of practitioners stretching back to pre-Hispanic times. As a whole, the book offers invaluable insights into the transformational powers of craft – of material form, of bodies and selves, of communities and histories.” (Geoffrey Gowlland, Université de Genève)

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