Un-finishing Research: Towards An Anthropology of Making and Perhaps Un-making

How is research a constant embarking, an endless unfolding, rather than a beginning that ends in a safe harbor, or a voyage that ends in returning? How might the processes of ‘making’ – in craft and research – be less about products, conclusions, tidy finishings, and more about becoming? This paper addresses this ‘un-finishing’ by sharing the ethnography and analysis of my long-term apprenticeship experiences with the ‘traditional’ coppersmiths of Santa Clara del Cobre in Michoacán, México.1 This research, a learning through making, has taught me about both.

My first apprenticeship was with Maestro Máximo Velázquez Correa, in the town’s technical school, Cecati1 66, where I began my study of the traditional ‘cobre martillado’, copper-forging in 1997. Subsequently, I began apprenticeship with the coppersmith artisan, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas, most especially from 2004 until his death on June 24, 2014. I continue to study with his sons.

Maestro Pérez insisted on the ‘un-finishable’. In many ways, he instructed me on the un-finishing of things. In his insistence on the impossibility of perfection, whilst training me in the practice of that honored perfection, he taught me that perfecting is infinite, and is infinitely an unraveling. An un-finishing. It is finding new problems and difficulties, confronting new challenges and contingencies, while resolving others in an un-abbreviated flow, encounter and correspondence.2

This un-finishing also points out the limitations of knowledge gained through all making projects, research and craft study. As Trevor Marchand reminds us, all ‘human knowledge like our physical bodies is constantly reconfigured’.3 Un-finishing then, also means to ‘go from known to unknown’ and from outside to inside.4 As Tim Ingold, argues:

We human beings do not live inside our heads; nor do we look out upon the world through the windows of our senses. We inhabit the world itself, and through our senses we participate from within in its perpetual formation. It is from the ground of this participation that all knowledge arises. That’s what we mean by Knowing from the Inside.5

Traditionally, anthropology and ethnography were performed in two steps: first, being inside the study via ethnography, and then going outside the study through theorising. Indeed, a moving from ethnography to theory.6 A beginning that leads to a final ending. This approach has also imposed a structural hierarchy. In this study with the coppersmiths, theory arises in doing and is translated, interpreted, and analysed discursively. Entering into the forge – behind the scenes – privileges wandering, confusion, discomfort, and the truthfulness of disaccord, disapproval, and honest engagement.

This is intensified and complicated by the fact that I not only work in the forge, but also live within the family home, which is similar to living in a village within a village. This compound is a familial nucleus space for at least twenty-three people of four generations. The complex fits a small territorial area in which the forge serves as a central unifier, a hogar – a hearth and home – for the fire and family. Chickens, dogs, cats, and birds run about, as do young children who often stop to play with tools or to help an uncle or a father. Cows, pigs, and sometimes the occasional goat can be seen and heard nearby.

After over twenty years of visits with this family, with stays that lasted anywhere between one week to several months or even several years (as during my doctorate), I am not a privileged visitor: I have become more like a family member. Alternately, I am called an adopted daughter, or the oldest daughter. Most recently, doña Sagrario, my teacher’s wife, called me her favorite daughter-in-law and, with a smile, affectionately added that I was also the most ‘spoiled’. I, in turn, joked that I am the daughter-in-law without a husband. I now have my role within the family’s pecking order and dramas and am as liable to be teased and corrected as anybody; and as a constant learner, this can include anything from hammering to cutting vegetables improperly. The family joke is: ‘Even when you are not here, anything that goes wrong is your fault’. I am compared to the indigenous, colorful, and outrageous, ‘India María’,7 who does not know how to behave in the city and forever makes errors and laughable blunders. Also like her, I am neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ and exist in the nomadic terrain of wandering anthropologist-artist.

To study in the forge within this familial and generational space is, for these reasons, personal. It is also because in the forge, I am physically and psychologically vulnerable.8 I am on the entry-level, lowest rung within the space. My previous experiences – kinesthetic and aesthetic training as an artist – that are relevant to copper-smithing hardly seem important, except as an education to be challenged. My ranking was established by Maestro Pérez, the jefe, the boss of this studio, which he ran autocratically until his passing.

Artisanal teaching is social as well as technical, and not in any way about being passive.9 The learning-by-doing and observing is always about action, solitary and collective. It involves anticipation of not only the proximate steps of the artisan process in which I am directly engaged, but also those of the activities of my fellow artisans around me. For these reasons, apprenticeship is also about solidarity. In the forge, I must be sensitive and aware of the movements and needs of all the artisans working in the space, and to respond to them when needed. If, for example, José Sagrario is smelting silver for a newly commissioned piece, I offer to work the bellows for him as silver is a more sensitive and costly metal than copper, demanding careful observation as it is delicately heated. José is then freed to note the silver’s changing colors, visually measuring its progress as it heats to melting point in the small crucible nested over the raised cendrada, the traditional fire pit.10

Often, I receive conflicting directions or advice. But as Maestro Jesús is my primary guide, he would often be angry if I chose to take advice that ran contrary to his, even if it was given by one of his sons. Sometimes this would embroil me in the middle of an argument about techniques or even safety. Yet, certainly each coppersmith follows the same general ‘traditional’ path, a fluid adaptable mapping of the steps involved in forging a vessel in Santa Clara. Each artisan’s maneuvers and subsequent tactics are developed over time and through repetitive yet varied practice and application.

Although I am responsible primarily to Maestro Pérez, I must respect all of my teachers. So, for example, when Napoleón helps train me to use the sledgehammer, I follow his orders and instructions, swinging the tool with entire mental-corporal concentration over my head to land correctly or incorrectly on the tejo, the round chunk of hot copper, to thin it. I repeat until barely able to raise the hammer. Napoleón wants me to understand not only my own experience of training, but also his own; his instruction, then, is also how he shares his experience as a child in training. My bodily and emotional experiences in the forge trigger his memories, prompting a naturally serendipitous opening for sharing vulnerabilities and the challenges he faced as a child-apprentice.

For these reasons, the apprenticeship model was so key to this research (as it can be to others). It was a form of learning to know with/in the active dynamic flows of the materials, people and place of Santa Clara del Cobre. In retrospect, in selecting the apprenticeship model, I was also following in the ‘pioneering footsteps of Victor Turner’s attempts to bring ethnography to life through performance and drama’.11 As Rupert Cox, Andrew Irving and Christopher Wright, the editors of Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology, explain:

Turner was particularly interested in how corporeal experience and emotion could be evoked through the aesthetics of the performative and collaborative activity that can be used to research and represent the complexity and diversity of human experience. Turner’s students would not only read ethnographies but enact and perform them in order that the social life and rituals of other places could be brought to life and partially experienced, if not understood, in their nervous systems and bodies.12

Apprenticeship also brings additional meaning to Michael Taussig’s concept of ‘the magical power of the copy’.13 In the mimetic activities of the apprentice studying with a master, we might also argue that: ‘The representational force of the copy is derived from the stickiness of the reference as an affective presence of the original’.14 The apprenticeship experience is a complex in which the doubling activities of learning through making – by observing and doing – form the structure, texture, context and matrix of an extremely empathic ethnography. In this learning process, the ethos-aesthetics of the master artisan and the community also becomes instilled, demonstrated and imparted to the apprentice.

This means that ‘how-to-work’ – to make the copper objects, the labor and aspects of production and relationships between artisans, materials and the particular space – comprises and entails an ‘aesthetics of making’. This ethos-aesthetics nurtures a social and aesthetic partnership of labor, production, and creativity. These activities are not merely technical; but rather encompass differentiated knowledge and idiosyncratic solutions to crafting copper-objects. These artisanal activities, then, are the very ‘dispositions’ of Santa Clara, a place, whose culture is encoded, embodied, and transmitted within these making (culture and craft) practices. This sense of place is also embodied in the ethos-aesthetics of the copper pieces produced, whose stylistic expressions of ‘taste and distinction’ is dictated by community values and its codes of conduct.15

Unknown photographer, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas with his son Felix who steadies his father’s piece as he hammers it, circa 1976, family forge and studio, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, image courtesy of Pérez Pamatz family.

We might see making, then, as a hopeful, even ecological and political enterprise, whose processes enact natural correspondences and flows between peoples, places, and materials.16 Anthropological studies of emotions, the body, the senses and its sensorium, embodiment, performance, and phenomenology help enunciate the complex, even existential dynamics of making. This approach to thinking in doing further extends our anthropological under- standing of techniques and leads us to what I propose is a ‘critical aesthetics’.17

The intention is not only to reclaim and restore aesthetics to its sensorial feeling-based roots of aesthe.18 It is also to identify, analyse, and map its affective and effective aspects within the sociopolitical circuits and dynamics in which they are produced, function, and become constituted.19 This is naturally complicated further by interactions with the expectations and aesthetic demands of the global market.

So, for example, in the Santa Clara forge, the admired extremely polished finished copper surface goes beyond mere planishing. Its countless layers of hard work and gentle hammering refer to the importance of a job well done and to a life-work well-attended to, perfected like the surface and symmetry of the copper vessel one makes. Aesthetics, then, is ultimately relational, social, sensorial, and felt in-making, in-transmission, and in-reception.20 Because aesthetics are particular to person and place, they impart colour, sound, smell, and texture to these ‘techniques of the body’ that, as Marcel Mauss argued, are far from universal.21

Working in the forge, one learns that to understand social agency, one must understand aesthetic agency. This is especially true when studying Santa Clara. Its craft trade is profoundly informed and constituted by a confluence of cultural memory and socio-political-ecological conditions. The village history is passed on orally and corporally through the smiths’ techniques. And, importantly, it is also generated via intersecting tropes of Mexican nationalism and identity, tourism and marketing, in parallel with a variety of government and non-profit programs that have supported artisan crafts – ‘artesanía’ and ‘arte popular’ – since the post-revolution.22

Artesanía is a terminology that was developed in the early 20th century to capture the various related categories of popular art, craft, and the hand-made vernacular and/or ‘traditional’ artisanal production of Mexico. This terminology of artesanía or arte popular was intended to capture an ‘authentically Mexican craft form’ and was part of the larger nationalistic transformation post-Mexican revolution to forge a unique Mexican identity and synthetic culture. This movement of Mexicanidad took place through a vigorous collaboration of Mexican artists, intellectuals, and politicians, and included support from some North Americans. One might see in this history a story of ongoing tensions between the different ideals of a rational modernity – of a developing industrial nation, based in the romantic melding of a new race, created from the mixing of ancient mythic indigenous origins with a (superior) European religious and secular elite. In many respects, the most contemporary Mexican craft is produced in marginalised rural and indigenous communities, which have been pawns in this play of authenticity, often only poster children for tourist promotion but with questionable political power.

Notwithstanding, the coppersmiths are (entirely) aware of these tropes and their often precarious or dubious class status, and utilise all these aspects in their creative positioning via their craft, playing their roles as submissive artisans or as their own political ethnic agent as appropriate and when permitted. The agency of the artisans of Santa Clara is not necessarily or always externally evident; to the contrary, their utmost expression of agency may be their ability to hide it, often under a mask of what may be interpreted as submissiveness, timidity or friendly compliance. As their apprentice, this was precisely what I studied, on their terms and within their context.

Critically, it was understood between Maestro Jesús, his sons and myself that I was there to study ‘como ser’ – literally ‘how to be’ – an artisan. This meant learning ‘to become’ in learning how ‘to make.’ It involved an inculcation of not merely tasks and gestures, but of incorporating the habits of the forge and community and its stylistic elements. Within my relationship to my master-mentor, the tasks of learning, such as listening and observing, reflect collective values and its ethos-aesthetics. For example, I was not to answer back to his criticism, nor was I to question – but to listen, return to work, and try harder. I was to respect my elders and know my place. In my position as an apprentice, I was un-made, as my autonomy was moulded to be reshaped to fit into the forge and family structure.

Studies of artisan embodied knowledge and craft transmission help outline the social and cognitive significance of nonverbal forms of learning. These forms of learning are active and unfinished, constantly shifting. Studying with the coppersmiths of Santa Clara challenges the assumptions and mis- and pre-conceptions of terms such as ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘hand- made’, which obscure artisanal making.

As Leroi-Gourhan explained, all ‘automatic’ skills are first obtained in awkward practice.23 That is to say, one learns clumsily and through error; these ‘plateaus’ of skill acquisition vary with the production needs presented, but they can splinter. To use the word ‘tacit’ is to oversimplify making, and to leave unexamined critical and complex transforming processes. The work of the artisan lies in the rough edges, when a technique accomplished with proficiency is disrupted. As Napoleón proudly declared, a good artisan can take on many types of projects and this is precisely how he learned news things from each designer’s or client’s commission.
In addition, the coppersmiths, as other artisans, do not only use their hands, they use their entire body-mind within a confluence of forces, moving between distal to proximal, and beyond. Their actions and gestures are not just from hand to object, from fingers (distal) to the shoulder and trunk (proximal); but, rather, their movements, even in seated positions, require an attendance of total involvement from feet to position of neck and head. As yoga or tai chi, all elements are raised to conscious attention. As the sun salute in yoga practice runs through the entire body, the smith’s hammer swing is made alive and precise, effective. And this is also because it must actively engage and respond as countless studies of hammering have proven.24

Artisans’ perceptions are not just ‘passive impressions of external information’.25 Rather, the coppersmith must attend to materials and things with a deeply somatic attention.26 These careful movements open up to each other interactively, haptically.27 The skilled coppersmith sees and perceives by hearing, and hears and senses by seeing.28 Tones come in colours and sounds. Visual and aural echoes, pitches, and vibrations become actions that are also instruments to interpret thickness, rigidity, temperature. Duration, speed, resonance, and repetition, flow and disjuncture constitute both activity and information.

It is through the relationship between the metal and my body that I learn about copper’s capabilities and the states it is in, work-hardened or soft, thick or overly thin. As I worked with heightened self-consciousness, my inculcation included not only listening to instructions and berating; more importantly, it involved mimesis, in a profoundly haptic, empathic sense. This is not so much to do with concentrating on the direct exacting imitation, but rather that with these efforts to mimic, I can feel the complexity of movements that by watching (superficially) can appear simple and effortless. Techniques may be executed gracefully by the experienced smith, but for a novice apprentice it was difficult. I felt like a bad dancer to the well-coordinated steps of my fellow smiths and teachers.

As I watched Napoleón work, I felt my own back straighten, my thighs and knees began to stabilise the copper object held over the stake. As my own body became more centred, the hammering increased its effectivity. And even when I failed to execute what I observed, the awareness found through the intense effort of mimesis and imitation provided a window to the knowledge of its goal, and I often was much more likely to be able to break down the steps or components of the actions I had missed in the making process.

Michele Feder-Nadoff, José Sagrario applying a natural red patina to his piece, circa 2013, family forge and studio, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México.

To enter the world of the forge, I must learn to see and hear anew; by learning to see what my teachers see and hear, they teach me. New knowledge is experienced, acquired when rhythm breaks, is punctured and ruptured by errors that open to reflexivity, even shame and recriminations. Additionally, the bar of expectation by my teachers is continually raised. Training is perpetual and unfinished.

Every day in the forge, like a child, as I grow physically and mentally into the role of apprentice and learn to acquire facility, I take on more responsibility and independence one step at a time. Each tiny step requires additional skill. And each skill level requires additional actively acquired knowledge. Can I identify the specific type of wood by its bark? Is it oak or pine? Do I know which wood not to use when I am just annealing the copper? Do I know how fast it burns? Which to use for which process in the smithing? Do I know how to efficiently cut the wood for the fire? Can I swing the axe firmly and safely?
The master, too, is always in training. ‘Until the day I will die I will never stop learning how to be an artisan!’ Maestro Pérez would declare as many other artisans have equally told me. As one trains one’s eyes and ears and body-mind, what was sufficient at one stage is lost in the dust of the next. The body itself is not frozen.
Across the span of a life-time, the copper-smiths’ muscles strengthen through related daily practices not only in the forge but in the field, through the related movements of wielding a hammer in smithing or the hoe in farming. Sight and feeling are linked, and the more I do – or, try to do – in the forge, the more my visual observation becomes haptic, increasingly interpretive, acute. One feels the movements of the masters as one observes them; the efforts of mimesis even unsuccessful open up a field of understanding of how metal feels and how it feels to move and meet the metal as it moves. As a trainee apprentice, I become more sensitive.

Yet, capacities change over time: with age, my own master’s sight and strength is diminished. And as a woman and with later entrance to the work my body must adapt and transform; age and gender play significant roles.29

I worked to transform my physique, to stride and assert myself with force and control. To enter the masculine world of the fragua, the forge, as a woman has meant to apply the transformative nature of gesture to gender. As Judith Butler has theorised, the ‘body becomes its gender in a series of actions which are renewed, revised and consolidated over time’.30 Likewise, in the forge, my gender identity is constituted by actions, confirming that gender is permeable and performative in support of the feminist position of Simone de Beauvoir, asserting that ‘one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman’.31 In this, my gender is made, re-created in the forge.32

Michele Feder-Nadoff, Maestro Pérez Ornelas and his sons José Sagrario Pérez Pamatz and Napoleón Pérez Pamatz forging the ’tejo,’ ingot of copper, circa 2012, photograph, family forge and studio, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México.

This physical transformation of body and strength is pragmatic and necessary when working in the forge with metals and extreme heat, within the dynamics of the masculine relationships of bonding and camaraderie. As I engage as fellow coppersmith, although a novice, my ‘femininity’ is suppressed, until at times my teacher forgets and cannot understand why my hammer-blow is not equal to his. On Sundays, he would be reminded by my non-forge garb and say, ‘Now you look like a woman’. However, it is more than only actions and body representations and postures. The understanding of the process and the work itself bonds us, in a language and discourse, a conversation of particular intimacy, of shared understanding, interest and concern.

Unlike the classical images of the smith – portrayed, for example, by Peter Paul Rubens33 and De Goya Lucientes Francisco34 – it is grace and agility, rather than brute force, that are key. Like the dancer, alone and in partnership, I learn rhythm, balance, coordination, and how to use centrifugal force. And, like the musician or tango-dancer, I must acquire an almost telepathic, intuitive empathy with my fellow smiths, my tools and copper material. The hammer and its weight must be perceived as a friend and companion, rather than an enemy. Gravity and weight become forces to join with; as in martial arts, rather than resist these, the enemy’s power is integrated into the movements and intentions of one’s own body. This incorporation from outside to inside is transformed into new sets of synesthetic unities.

The copper-smith navigates like a blind mole tunnelling, via a sense of direction and volition smelled and sensed along the way of the path they carve. These routes unwind through a visceral memory of making into a future un-finishing.35 This is why even when repeating a particular style, it may still be tweaked, adjusted, and transformed. As the artisans would promptly reply upon being asked what they are making: ‘Voy a ver como se sale!’ – ‘I will see what turns out!’.

Movement in artisan practice – as in all creative efforts – is complicated by combining a mixture of invisibles senses of direction, that although not visible, nor audible, are perceptible. These comprise (what I humorously call) the ‘mole theory’ and attest to a haptic visuality. This attending in the moment is similar to what occurs in wheel throwing of the potter, when their touch remains in one place while the press of their fingers and hands give form to the spinning clay, moulding its space through stillness and time.

The year before my teacher’s death, he began to tell me that if I did not make a piece in his style, namely with ‘heads’ and ‘feet’, he would never know if I had become a good artisan. Although I had been working on forms intrinsic to the traditional styles of the community, and had focused on gajos – the gadroon ribbed or rounded gourd-like shapes – Napoleón, as well as his father, were insisting that was not enough. One needed to venture beyond the comfort zone of what one has learned, like a runner seeking out new terrain or a different speed or stride. It was also a privileged invitation. Personal artisan style is not to be taken-up freely. This was an invitation for a closer enskillment and inculcation. This last lesson before my master-teacher’s death represented his trust in me to not betray him; but rather, that my efforts would honour him by sharing a deeper understanding of his work. Even his own sons, such a Jose Sagrario, did not make a piece with human heads until several years after his father had passed on.

Jesus Pérez Ornelas, Detail Vase with twelve heads, circa 1980, vase, approximately 12 x 12 x 12 inches, forged and engraved copper, collection Museo Nacional del Cobre, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, photograph by Michele Feder-Nadoff.

Jesus Pérez Ornelas, Vase with twelve heads, circa 1980, Vase with twelve heads, forged copper, approximately 12 x 12 x 12 inches, forged and engraved copper, Collection Museo Nacional del Cobre, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, photograph by Michele Feder-Nadoff.

Tradition comes with a double meaning derived from its Latin root-word, tradere, implying that the handing down of tradition can also mean a handing over, becoming a traitor to this very tradition.36 So, careful thought is given to what you teach and to whom. To receive maestro Pérez’s command bore with it a serious privilege and responsibility. I took up my teacher’s call knowing it was crucial to obey and also feeling the limitation of time as Maestro Pérez was now past 85 years of age. I spent months on my first piece. First learning how to make feet and then beginning to learn how to make the heads. This process evoked discussions which helped me learn even more, not only about how to work the copper, but about maestro Jesus’s process and how and what these shapes meant to him.37 He thought the faces of my first headed piece were feas – ugly – that I should have thrown it into the street, trashed it. The aesthetics of my first piece might have conformed to Giacometti’s aesthetics but not to Santa Clara’s.

 Diablos y Angeles, views 1, 2, 3, 4, 2013, 4 x 5 x 5 inches, forged copper, photographs by Napoleon Pérez Pamatz.

This piece was followed by another one, to which I also devoted months. Then, one night, in the evening of Mother’s Day, Maestro Jesus and his wife Doña Sagrario and I were gathered in the kitchen for an evening snack, when my teacher began to berate me gently (in the forge, criticism was given out much more harshly). He told me I had spent inordinate time on the piece and that I could have made ten pieces in the same time period. But his criticism was not about economies of time and resources alone; he went on to explain: ‘Do you think the first time I made the piece with heads that I was happy with it?’ One is never content, there is simply always something wrong. ‘Lo que duele’ – what might bother you – is what you want to improve. This leads to the next piece. What was important was to go on to the subsequent pieces using discontent as inspiration. Making is a continual process; each completed piece is an un-finishing.

In addition, how an artisan performs is always unfinished; work capacity, strength agility, and focus change over time and are diminished or heightened by contingencies of unexpected injury, illness, or old age. When Maestro Jesús suffered a stroke, he was quickly back to work, rising early every morning and very persistently, consciously cutting wood so as to retrain his body and its nervous system to readapt, compensate, and readjust. In these later years, he would tell me, ‘Now our pieces are the same, mine are crooked (chueca) also!’. Yet, his skill was always maintained in this will and intention, a determined desire to continue to work and create.
Curiously, the pieces that seemed to mean the most to my Maestro when we talked just a few days before his death, were his tools. All his finished copper pieces that had travelled far from him, with this or another client, meant little. Many photos of these completed copper- works had been taken, but had flown away with the visitors who took them, and in albums lent out, but never returned. What meant something to him, ultimately, were his tools, especially his array of forged stakes, each one a footnote to a style and to a particular piece he or a son had created and invented.

Michele Feder-Nadoff, Maestro Pérez’s tools: various small stakes, 2014, photograph, family forge and studio, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México.

Michele Feder-Nadoff, Maestro Pérez’s tools in his corner: small cinceles, 2014, photograph, family forge and studio, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México.

One must also remember that artisans do not only use tools: the coppersmiths often make them. Moreover, artisans perform not only with tools, but also as tools. As agents, artisans are instruments of their own agency, yet at times, instruments for others. And, finally, tools age, as artisans do, conforming to use and disuse, abuse or care across their lifetimes.

As Walter Benjamin describes, we give things agency, the ability to look back at us through our caring gaze in which their aura is gathered near.38 Tools, like rituals with their ceremonies and festivals of a collective past, produce an amalgamation of mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire.39

Through their use, the artisan acquires both a memory of tool-use, called up in practice, voluntarily, intentionally; yet also, the tool calls up the involuntary and improvised way of using it anew, afresh based upon the old and familiar. So, as a rite performed twice or three times, it has meaning, a pattern to be broken in the contingencies of performance. That is to say, that artisan practice combines the new and the old, techniques that accommodate and respond to changes in material differences, subtle fluctuations, challenges, and inventions based upon inner visions and imagination, or the complicit changes of organic metal or the demands of a designer or client.

In this way, over time, for the artisan, their hammers and other tools, become responsive ‘handles’ for both voluntary and involuntary recollections that lose their ‘mutual exclusiveness’ in performance and use.40 One knows how to use the tool without looking for it, and as one comes around an unexpected bend, or unplanned resistance, one responds and accommodates. This shift in attention borrows meaning from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who explains that ‘memories need to be made possible by the physiognomy of the givens in order for them to come to complete the perception’.41

In artisan practice, the tool comes alive through a coalescence of caring relationships – between humans, materials and things.42 As Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue: ‘Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in relation to the inter-minglings they make possible or that make them possible’.43 Tools are made-things which, like artisan agency, are bound up in a potentiality, whose un-finishing is precisely the source of its power.

For the artisans of Santa Clara, the objective of their artisan trade and practice is not simply making pieces to be bought and sold, to maintain themselves and their families. It is also about engaging in poiēsis, an open-ended never-ending process of un-finishing. What Heidegger posited as the creative versus the pragmatic praxis, linear, Hegelian, rational and completely efficiently intentional and hylomorphic.44

For Santa Clara’s coppersmiths, as for the ancient Greeks, praxis and poiēsis are shared yet distinct experiences. Pure praxis is finite. To create with will and to complete with intention. To make ‘things’, nothing else. Yet, their other goal is captured by poiēsis which means to reveal – to un-finish, to unravel the fabric of reality, to uncover the invisible presence of the concealed. Because for many of the artisans of Santa Clara, skills are bequeathed providentially, gifts to be constantly honed in a world of relationships – collective, personal, with family, and community – balancing the demands of this world with another, the spiritual.

In this study, the un-finishing of things has also taken place in the mortal finishing, the apparent completion of a lifecycle of Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas. Yet this lifecycle remains incomplete, unfinished. His story continues in an after-life imprinted in the history of his family and the Santa Clara community, passed on and received by his sons and former students, including women who studied with him in the community school. This legacy also travels with(in) his copper vessels.

February 12, 2016, more than a year and a half after Maestro Pérez’s death on June 24, 2014, a homage exhibition, titled Pasión y Orgullo, un Legado Perdurable45 was inaugurated in the Museo de Artes y Industrías Populares in the nearby town of Pátzcuaro.46 The pieces shown paradoxically did not conform to my teacher’s explanation of a well-made piece.47 They were far from perfectly balanced. Many had been left unfinished or were awkward, humble. Scratched lines still visibly mapped a symmetry that often failed. Yet, the final copper pieces were powerfully present in being un-finished. They were tender reliquaries of extended aura and agency. And they also reveal another aspect of ambákiti, the local P’urhepecha indigenous term for the beauty of the well-made: rather than static perfection, their palimpsests of process attest to being ‘made with great passion’, and even tenderness.48

Maestro J. Pérez Ornelas, forged, engraved, chased and repoussé copper, approximately 4 x 6 x 6 inches, 2014, in exhibition Pasión y Orgullo, un Legado Perdurable, Museo de Artes y Industrias Populares, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México, photograph by Michele Feder-Nadoff.

Maestro J. Pérez Ornelas, forged, engraved, chased and repoussé copper, approximately 4 x 6 x 6 inches, 2014, in exhibition Pasión y Orgullo, un Legado Perdurable, Museo de Artes y Industrias Populares, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México, photograph by Michele Feder-Nadoff.

In my apprenticeship, the ontological and epistemological goals were linked, definitely intertwined. I learned the importance of the functionality of an object; its decorative qualities; emphasis on evenness, smoothness and equality of parts and surface; putting every part in its proper place with proportion; working with patience; working hard; valorising traditional motifs; taking great care with the finish; balancing whole and parts; creating symmetry; and using architectonic design and organisation of form.

But, in this concentration in making in the family forge, I was also initiated to a way of life and way of being. In learning the actions and gestures of the smith, I learned the stance and modes of maleness, what it meant to become more macho, or what the woman in the family called macha for a woman. To not cry openly, to be internal, guarded. To protect myself.

In this training, though the relationship built between my teachers and myself, I am also taught social guidelines: to know my place in the social hierarchy; to work hard; to be patient; to pay attention to details; to not give up; to be efficient; to be respectful towards my elders; to be quiet and listen; to not respond openly; to have balance and be centred; to have rhythm; to be devoted; to concentrate; to be focused and remember; to know when to give up and move on; to work collectively and help others; to know when to leave others alone; to be observant; to be vigilant; to be loyal; to reciprocate and exchange; to form alliances not based on money; to keep perspective in all ways; to respect tradition and the ways things are done; to be practical; and finally, as we have seen, to make the work with great passion and the heart.

To study alongside the master coppersmiths of Santa Clara has been to un-finish the divide between subject and object; praxis and theory; anthropology and ethnography. Ingold’s (often misunderstood) argument is not that ethnography is not useful, but that by dividing praxis and theory or by separating ethnography from anthropology, we tend to form a colonising bridge to knowledge that subsequently clouds our ability to understand the epistemic value and properties, the ecology of doing and knowing in practice.49

Un-finishing is also integral to this study’s primary methodology – apprenticeship.

My ethnographic discoveries in learning to become an artisan are encountered tangentially, through disparate fumbling connections and analogies, through loose threads and in little bits. Codes of conduct are discovered in bodily engagement and everyday practices,50 such as learning to hammer copper in the forge, as well as washing clothes or dishes in the family home. I developed a sense of a specific place, felt when walking upon these simple but tenuous paths guided by one’s teachers, their family and other community members. The irony and efficacy of ethnography is precisely its un-finishing. This is because it is based upon processes of displacement and re-emplacement of its subjects, the ethnographer and the persons and place being studied.51

This essay initiates an anthropology of making that, in acknowledging un-making and un-finishing, has examined the performative and cognitive processes, powers and potential of artisan-makers and their made things as instruments, tools of becoming. This agency (of artisan life and practice) is possible only by being, in its persistence and resistance, un-finished. This is the resilience of un-finishing. And this is its very plenitude.

1 This paper draws from my doctoral thesis, ‘Cuerpo de conocimiento – entre praxis y teoría – La agencia de los artesanos y su artesanía. Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán. Hacia una antropología de hacer’ (Body of Knowledge – Between Praxis & Theory – The Agency of the Artisan and their Craft, Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán: Towards an Anthropology of Making), (PhD diss., El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017).
2 I use the word ‘correspondences’ to link it to Baudelaire’s world of correspondences (1861), taken up also by other writers, such as Proust, as well as to Tim Ingold, who argues that ‘Anthropology is an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world…thanks to its embedding in our observational engagements with the world and in our collaborations and correspondences with its inhabits’, and see: Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 241–43.
3 Trevor Marchand, ed., Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between, Mind, Body and Environment (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), xii.
4 Cristián Simonetti, ‘Feeling Forward into the Past: Depths and Surfaces in Archaeology,’ Time and Mind 8:1 (2014): 69–89, accessed 2 July 2018, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1751696X.2014.992686.
5 Tim Ingold, Place (Aberdeen: Knowing from the Inside Project, University of Aberdeen, 2017), Citation from the publication folio ‘Place’, produced for the occasion of the exhibition The Unfinishing of Things, May–September 2017, as part of Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design. This 5-year project funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant was led by Professor Tim Ingold in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, starting in June 2013 and running through May 2018.
6 These comments are also based on conversations with Tim Ingold in discussion with the author, on June 28, 2017, regarding his attitude towards ethnography and anthropology as will be elaborated further in this text.
7 India María is a personality of an indigenous woman who comes to the city and does not know how to behave. She appears as a character in a popular series of movies, and is also used in many television programs. The program is totally not politically correct, being classist and racist, yet it is regarded as amusing. One of the characters is s stereotype of the tourist ‘gringo’. The family had me look up some movies and we watched parts of them together.
8 This is not in any way to suggest that the family and the coppersmith masters are not protective of me. Indeed, the family is both exceedingly caring and also tough and ruthless in their criticism, in their training me as to how to live in their home and how to work in the forge.
9 As articulated by Jean Lave through the contrasts she articulates between formal and informal situated learning, and see: Jean Lave, Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice, (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also: Michael Herzfeld, The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), where he discusses how the social hierarchies and complexities of apprenticeship can lead to confusing and difficult situations where some knowledge is hidden from the apprentice. The stresses in apprenticeship-based ethnography and apprenticeship generally lie in identifying the secrets, the mis-information, the mis-informed or ‘missed’, left-out on purpose to preserve the secrets-of-the-trade.
10 The family of Pérez Pamatz is one of the few families in Santa Clara that still use the (non-electric) bellows for creating the air draft for the wood-based fire. Most fire pits in other forge-studios use electrical draft systems to maintain the fire-pit. These are similar to blow-dryers which create a strong draft running from tubes along the ground to the entrance of the pit.
11 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, ’Performing Ethnography,’ The Drama Review: TDR, 26:2 (1982): 33–50; See also: Dwight Conquergood, ’Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee Camp: Performance, Communication, Culture,’ TDR 32:3 (T119):174–208, who took this methodology up in his work with(in) the Hmong community in Chicago. This is also connected to the work by Loïc Wacquant and his research as a novice boxer apprentice in the south side of Chicago. See Loïc Wacquant, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
12 Rupert Cox, Andrew Irving and Christopher Wright, eds., Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 3.
13 Idem, 4.
14 Ibidem.
15 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinción: Criterio y bases sociales del gusto (México: Taurus, 2002).
16 Trevor Marchand, Making Knowledge; Marchand, The Masons of Djenné (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009); Marchand, Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen [2001] (London: Routledge, 2012). See also Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, eds., Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), and also Ingold, Being Alive, and Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill [2000] (London: Routledge, 2011).
17 See Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 346–56. The term ‘critical aesthetics’ is developed in my doctoral thesis building upon Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 2007) and Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn, ed., Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). See Gell on his clear articulation of aesthetics (of material culture and works of art) as part of ’social technology’, whose cognitive and psychological processes refer as much to the maker as the spectator-perceiver. Aesthetics is not a frozen body of traits congealed so to speak within objects, but rather a spectrum of socially imbricated affects and effects, whose efficacy is bound up in their social relations and ability to communicate and express and generate these relations.
18 See Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptic Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), who explains that the etymology of aesthetics comes from the root aesthe, meaning to feel and perceive via the sense.
19 On relational aesthetics, see also Jennifer Fischer ‘Relational Sense: Towards a Haptic Aesthetics,’ Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine 87 (1997): 4–11. Building similarly upon the works of Ingold and the relationship between making things by non-humans and humans, or examining weaver-makers with nest-building birds.
20 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 286–93, on an aesthetics of making and esp. 288 on relational aesthetics; and 114, interpreting Gell’s theories of anthropology of art in relationship to a relational aesthetics.
21 Marcel Mauss, ’Les Techniques du corps’ [1936], Journal de Psychologie 32 (2009): 3–4.
22 See, among many other references: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism & Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alicia Azuela de la Cueva, Arte y Poder (México: El Colegio de Michoacán and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013); Alicia Azuela de la Cueva, ‘Peace by Revolution: Una Aproximación Léxico-visual al México Revolucionario,’ Historia Mexicana LVI 4 (2007): 1263–1307; and, Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico 1920–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
23 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech [1964], trans. A. Bostock Berger (Boston: MIT Press, 1993).
24 See, for example, Nicolai Bernstein,’ On Dexterity and Its Development,’ In On Dexterity and Its Development, ed. Mark L. Latash and Michael T. Turvey, trans. Mark L. Latash, (London: Routledge, 2016), 3–246.
25 See Simonetti, ’Feeling Forward,’ 4, citing James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 149.
26 Thomas Csordas, ’Somatic Modes of Attention,’ Cultural Anthropology 8:2 (1993): 135–56.
27 See Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 245.
28 Ibidem.
29 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 199–200, on gender in Santa Clara and its relationship to this study.
30 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 523. This essay explores gender-based actions that are performed to not only ’reproduce’ social gender norms but to ’subvert’ them drawing from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir.
31 Ibid, 519.
32 See also: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
33 Peter Paul Rubens, Vulcan forging the Thunderbolts of Jupiter, (1636–8), collection Museo del Prado, Spain.
34 De Goya y Lucientes Francisco, The Forge, c. 1819, oil on canvas, 191 x 121 cm, Collection of the Frick Museum, New York, United States.
35 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 230–33, chart of a ‘Haptic Glossary: Towards a Preliminary Vocabulary of Embodied Perception’; and also on the ‘mole-theory’, 94, 211–12, 320, 390, 239.
36 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 411-12.
37 Maestro Pérez confided that the original model for his vessels with heads was his son Felix, who passed away at a young age, barely thirty in 1993.
38 Benjamin, Illuminations, 188.
39 See Benjamin, Illuminations, 159, on his reflections on Baudelaire and his references to these concepts of voluntary and involuntary memory drawn from Proust.
40 Ibidem.
41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. trans. D.A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 20.
42 See Barbara Bolt, ‘Heidegger, Handability and Praxical Knowledge,’ TEXT 3 (2006). See also Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed., William Lovitt (London: Garland Publishing, 1977), 8.
43 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
44 See Ingold’s writings, and specifically his essay ’The Textility of Making,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102. Ingold argues against the hylomorphic notion of making and creative design of total intention beforehand, concept and making thus separated, or sequential. My essay argues that this confluence of making – that generates design, techniques and processes – is also bound up into socio-political-economic ecologies, and systems. These are strategies that make and unmake, constitute and contest, are always un-finished.
45 In English: Passion and Pride: An Enduring Legacy.
46 See Feder-Nadoff ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 405–08.
47 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 286–326, a chapter dedicated to an analysis of this last discussion with Maestro Pérez about how he defined a ‘good-piece,’ as a ‘well-made’ piece.
48 See Feder-Nadoff on ‘ambákiti,’ ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 294–95, 299, 417–25.
49 These comments are also based in conversations with Tim Ingold in discussion with the author, June 28, 2017, regarding his attitude towards ethnography and anthropology.
50 See Jackson, ‘Knowledge of the Body,’ Man, New Series 18:2 (1983): 327–45.
51 See Feder-Nadoff, ‘Performing Knowledge: between Praxis and Theory in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán,’ in Artistic Research: Is There a Method?, ed. Alice Koubová (Prague: Academy of Performing Arts, 2018). See also James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 53; Michael Jackson, Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11. See, finally, Feder-Nadoff, ‘Cuerpo de Conocimiento,’ 78.