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Paper short abstract

Craft communities are often conceived romantically, as bounded places of origin, where artisans are settled and aesthetics are persistent and autochthonous. Yet, artisans are often itinerant travelers and gifted storytellers, whose agency is honed through social and aesthetic performances.

Paper long abstract

Mexican craft communities are often romantically conceived as fixed and stationary places whose community artisans are settled and whose aesthetics are persistent and autochthonous. Visitors and clients come to visit. Yet, the artisan as Benjamin has pointed out, is also an itinerant traveler and gifted storyteller. Rather than only a passive receiver of tradition, artisans are curious and intelligent makers, whose crafting builds multiple bodies of knowledge.

In Mexico traveling to sell ones wares has often been part of one's trade. This suggests that the artisan's talents lie in a conjunction of social and aesthetic performances in which they reproduce their objects and represent their trade and collective communities. This presentation focuses on the travels of the master coppersmith Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas (1926-2014) of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán and its impact on not only his own family forge and their aesthetics traditions, but how these sojourns continue to impact the community today.

From the perspective of an anthropology of "making," this talk follows maestro Pérez's journey to analyze how artisan agency is honed in active flows and frictions between people, places, materials and things.