An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre: Presence of Absence

This book offers a nuanced reflection on the meaning of making and artisan agency, demonstrating how copper-smithing produces not only objects, but also lives, worlds, meanings, and social transformation. Through long-term ethnography, grounded in apprenticeship to master coppersmith Jesús Pérez Ornelas, Feder-Nadoff’s intimate description of communal and artisanal life in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México provides a critical reappraisal of aesthetics and compelling ways to think about how aura and agency are produced. By mapping flows and frictions between persons, places, and things, this study closes the gap between economic and socio-political analysis of craft, on the one hand, and aesthetic, material, and phenomenological studies of making, on the other. Although craft historically plays a prominent national, even ideological role in Mexico, as in many countries, most artisans ironically remain absent, often living in marginalized, precarious circumstances. By tracing thecycles of life, death, and afterlife, of these maker-protagonists, their bodies of knowledge, skilled performances, and objects, this poetic monograph testifies to their presence.

Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff is an artist and anthropologist concerned with making, not only as the creation of things, but also of lives, worlds, meaning, and correspondence. Her critical ethnography, centers on Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, where she initiated an apprenticeship with a master coppersmith in 1997. This seminal experience formed the backbone of her trajectory from artist, trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to founder of the arts and culture non-profit Cuentos Foundation, to Fulbright Scholar, and PhD at El Colegio de Michoacán. As a theoretician, she incorporates perspectives of onto-epistemology, performance and phenomenology to delve into the anthropology of making and everyday aesthetics, employing collaborative research methods. Her approach bridges the gap between economic and sociopolitical critiques of craft and more formalist technical-aesthetic analysis, integrating neuroscience, cognitive studies, physiology, affect, kinesthetics, perception, and embodied knowledge. Feder-Nadoff’s art is included in private and public collections, such as the Illinois State Museum, DePaul University Museum of Art, Elmhurst Art Museum, Rockford Art Museum, and the Figge Museum. She is the editor of Rhythm of Fire: The Art and Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, Mexico (2005) and the artistic director of the accompanying video Night-blooming Jasmine. Recent publications include her edited volume, Performing Craft in Mexico: Artisans, Aesthetics and the Power of Translation, (2022), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.