Bøger af Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff

Performing Craft in Mexico examines how Mexican artisans and diverse actors perform as translators of aesthetics, politics, and history through the field of craft. The contributors build from historical and ethnographic archives and direct engagement with makers to reassemble an expanded vision of artisanal production and the complicated classifications that surround Mexican popular art-making--from the Anglo term "craft" to the Spanish term "artesanía." This book also homages Dr. Janet Brody Esser's research on the Blackmen masquerades of Michoacán, exploring African history and presence in Mexico. The contributors provide wide-ranging insight into the agency, history, and contemporary world of Mexican makers and other entangled actors in the field of craft.

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 thecycles of life, death, and afterlife, of these maker-protagonists, their bodies of knowledge, skilled performances, and objects, this poetic monograph testifies to their presence.