Reflecting On Proximity & Distance in Mexican Artisanal Practice: The Coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán

• In Event: Crafting Citizenship: Cultural Complexities

Abstract

Concurrent to the vast technological advancements in electronic and digital media since at least the 80’s, an enormous material turn has also taken place, drawing scholars and artists to craft and to a corresponding theorization of making. How has this material turn impacted Mexican craft, its makers, its (per)reception, consumers and interpretations?

How have virtual forms of communication, production, even creative expression and design contrapuntally counterbalanced craft? How do the related studies of skilled practice, the body, emotions, affect, bodily-cognition, multi-modal perception, embodiment, and senses inform our understanding of Mexican artisanal production? How has the plethora of new media (per)formed as both argument and theory for making? And, how might Walter Benjamin and Marcel Proust’s ideas of the object's power, —as aura— and Alfred Gell’s notions of technological enchantment help us understand the agency of made things and its makers? How is the material turn and interest in making more than nostalgic? What might the virtual and the handmade share through processes of assemblage, bricolage and simulacra?

This paper addresses these questions by sharing analysis and reflections gleaned from apprenticeship-based ethnography as an artist and anthropologist with the coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, México since 1997. The paper especially draws from my recent doctoral thesis project (2012-2017) “Body of Knowledge —between praxis & theory —the Agency of the Artisan & their Craft: Towards an Anthropology of Making.”

Author

• Michele A Feder-Nadoff, Independent Scholar