An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre: Presence of Absence

Abstract (English)

This poetic 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 reproduced. 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. The chapters are like spokes in a taoist wheel, each creating a space that proffers presence: that of Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas and Santa Clara del Cobre. Readers can enter chapters in any order. Each is a portal through which the reader enters Santa Clara by various doors, on days of mourning and grief, or separation and dismay, failure and defeat, or triumph, on days of jubilee, joy, frolic or display and abandon. Together these entries and exits form the affective and day-to-day topology of Santa Clara, punctuated by plateaus and valleys of reflection, interpretation and analysis. The narration weaves back and forth between more theoretical narration to poetic description, and from past to present, like a shuttle in the threads of the loom. The book is arranged into two parts. Chapter 5, Person and Place acts as a spine and chapter 1, the helm. The first half, chapters 2, 3, and 4 enter specific places and scenes: the corn field, the forge and home, and the copper fair. The second half, chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9, enter the material culture realm of copper things where a critical aesthetics links social and aesthetic performance interstitially. This monograph provides an intimate glimpse into the life of Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas, his dreams and ambitions for himself and his community. In this anthropological disclosure, the memories shared during ethnography become re-remembered and then extended in the stories passed on within with care. Anthropology is a kind of “memory-work” that cements researchers and subjects affectively, but also includes readers. This requires participant “response-ability,” and as demonstrated in this monograph, creates a critical ethnography of telling, retelling and ongoing exchange.