Summary
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.
Contents
1. Un-finishing Memory
2. Field of Corn
3. Forge: Hearth and Home
4. The Copper Fair
5. Person and Place: The Life-World of Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas
6. The Good Piece: An Aesthetics of Making
7. Aesthetics of Memory and Use
8. Aesthetics of Time and Space
9. Aesthetics of Abduction and Fragmentation
10. Restoring Aura: Straight from the Heart.