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Paper short abstract:

This talk discusses how un-knowing constitutes a critical practice for the coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre, where failure, rupture, and alterity shape artisanal skill, performance and agency.

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies of craft and skilled practice argue that artisan agency is honed within ecological and socio-political constellations between persons, places, materials and things (Ingold, Marchand). However, in the family forge of Santa Clara del Cobre, where I have apprenticed for many years, failure and disruption— un-knowing— are key to learning, not only the vernacular copper-smithing methods and aesthetics, but more importantly, how to become both a skilled artisan and community member. It is via walking these very edges and fault-lines—in the gaps of bodily practice and intention, that craft skill, knowledge and agency can become, if not acquired, more fully understood.

This paper explores the peripheries I have experienced, negotiated and analyzed as an artist-anthropologist and artisan-apprentice studying with Maestro Jesus Perez Ornelas (1926-2014) and his sons since 1997. How is the concept of tacit knowledge, so often associated with craft, theoretically and pragmatically inadequate, reductive, over-simplifying and problematic? How can failure and (un)knowing be employed methodologically as a critical component of thinking-in-doing and understanding-in-making? How can working together in the forge temporarily transform and transcend gender, class, ontological and epistemic hierarchies?

Drawing from my doctoral study (2012-2017), "The Agency of the Artisan and their Craft— Between Praxis and Theory— Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán: Towards an Anthropology of Making," this talk will demonstrate how it is in the liminal betwixt and between of peripheries and centers where artisan's agency is developed and performed.