Paper short abstract:

The objective of this paper is to analyse two periods of "heritagisation" of craft in Cape Verde - the national independency and the present one- and to reflect on the processes of apprenticeship and transmission of skills at these different times.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to share the partial results of an on-going research project of a Phd Programme on heritage, crafts and national identity in Cape Verde. This paper will analyze the creation of the National Centre of Crafts in Cape Verde (1977) in a conjuncture marked by the national independence, whose revitalization and emergence of the crafts served as a critic to the colonial regime. This case was the first action of "authorized heritagisation" to resist the effects of industrialization on crafts and mostly to revitalize the popular culture as a struggle to conduct to national independency. Influenced by the Amílcar Cabral ideas, a group of artists that form the National Centre of Crafts "return to the source" and start the processes of apprenticeship with the older ones to transmit to the younger in the future. The National Centre for Crafts was extinguished in 1997 and only in 2011 was created the National Centre for Crafts and Design. That date was marked by a set of public policies that have been made with the purpose of giving a greater visibility to the Cape Verde craftsmanship, in a gradual process of orientation to the heritage processes and consequently to the tourist market. Nowadays the main mission of the Centre is to stimulate the economic activity of national crafts with the conjunction of "modern" and "traditional" crafts. This new set of cultural policies on crafts reflect a new mode of apprenticeship and skills transmission processes that will be questioned in this paper.