In Fast, Easy and Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in The Global Economy (2015), Rudi Colloredo Mansfeld and Jason Antrosio take as their point of departure the contemporary dynamics of artisan markets in Andean South America, specifically the integration of indigenous communities within modern economic practises. The scholars intersperse their commentary on the precarity of work in Ecuador and Columbia with a tapestry of immaculate oral accounts and ethnographic vignettes from the Latin American towns of Atuntaqui, Quito, Ottavalo and Oaxaca bringing alive the everyday navigation of the artisans with the spatial scales of ‘local’ and ‘global’,
Having dedicated two decades of their academic career to interpreting the transitioning imaginaries of art, community and trade in the region, Colloredo-Mansfeld and Antrosio are aware that artisans often have to straddle the challenge of interlinking geographically and culturally specific goods, such as shirts, hats, wood-work and jewellery, to the homogenised tastes of a neo-liberal consumer. However, they remain wary of reducing this convoluted and multi-dimensional exchange to simplistic categories like tradition vs modern. One is reminded here of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2004 work on supply chains and the human condition in Indonesian rainforests, where globalisation is viewed not as an inevitable clash with indigenous cultures but, as ‘friction’ which she defines as a kind of ‘stickiness’ to global capital that includes ‘resistance, contestation and subversion’.
The authors don’t just go against the grain for its sake but attempt a genuine problematisation of the artisan figure, who in social anthropology is often reduced to either a primordial relic of non-market ethos or to a risk-averse folk-practitioner who finds their value systems eschewed by the capitalist machinery.
In the book’s opening chapter, Antrosio and Colloredo-Mansfeld engage with the late-modern fascination with “artisanal” bread, cheeses and other hand-spun and home-grown products. In doing so, they manage to drive home, by way of humour, capital’s adoption of traditional practices and the complex chain of rural production and urban consumption this set forth. The chapter outlines how invasive trades like artisanal production bring long-term modifications and speak of a co-constitution between mutuality and rivalry in artisan economies. In doing so, the authors do not pawn off the artisans to a single cause but instead, give them visibility as workers trying their best to adapt to ever-shifting consumer culture.
In the following few chapters, the commercial landscape of the Andes region is explored through careful observation of the Otavalan garments trade and the ‘mallification’ of Atuntaqui, wherein artisans see seasons of profit and send their children to Disneyland for graduation trips but also hit extreme lows where they write a cheque in hopes of having enough money in the future to cash it in. Expanding their field to Tigua paintings and Otavalan belt-weaving, the authors also underscore how even flourishing businesses can be susceptible to criticism due to their success being perceived as the result of illegal activities. This contributes to a much more nuanced understanding of how competition structures and sustains artisans’ economic and cultural practices.
When the book pores over a specific sweater design made by the indigenous artisan Luis Ramos, it does so to build a well-argued point around the concept of ‘cultural commons’ in competitive markets. The term ‘cultural commons’, used by Marxist academic Raymond Williams refers to ‘the common meanings, the arts and learning, the special processes of discovery and creative effort’ within people, where culture is democratised through dissemination. In the case of the Ottavalan textile business, however, these unprotected cultural commons, i.e. their designs, aesthetics, fashion, and identity, open the artisans up to the murky terrains of intellectual property theft exacerbates the cut-throat competition. This competition manifests itself not through the individual desire to outperform the other but, through a ‘structural tie among fellow producers who share trade location and identity’ (pp 79).
As the book draws to a close, Colloredo-Mansfeld and Antrosio leave us with a compelling story involving Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa’s sartorial choice for his inaugural ceremony. The politician chose to wear a specially tailored shirt with indigenous motifs to nod to the country’s native legacy. It was still designed by three non-indigenous women, Sandra Meza, Teresa Casa and Alicia Cisneros. The designers took an indigenous design, created an opportunity for commercialisation at the President’s behest, protected their right on the design through intellectual property laws and ultimately profited from its brand-building.
As a persuasive afterthought, the authors remark that the public life of this shirt can take on different interpretations for its creators and appropriators but, for the Ecuadorian President, who had often been dismissive of indigenous people’s fight to protect their economic base and political consciousness, the desire to brandish a symbol of diversity was perhaps self-serving. ‘What is this new presidential national-brand shirt made of?’ the authors ask and answer, rather heedfully, ‘South American cotton (on a good day), French embroidery thread, and Ecuadorian Tagua nut; political ambition, creative intuition and old fashion nationalism’ (pp 174).
This text, delivered as an ethnographic project, therefore ends up masterfully extracting a host of contradictions and possibilities vis-a-vis artisan identity, as it is manifested within empirical contexts across Latin America.
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Anushka Sinha is an MPhil research scholar at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.