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Fast, Easy, and In Cash
Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy
By Jason Antrosio, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30275-1
CHAPTER 1
The Artisan Returns: Invasive Trades, Invaded Communities
Artisans are back. The crusty bread, the craft cheese with locally pickled cornichons, the handmade sandals and handspun cloth. They speak to us of the traditional and yet are the newly desired must-haves. Unexpectedly, artisans spin dreams of individual and collective economic revival. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, once the biggest shill for the benefits of globalization, now regularly trumpets artisan values as a solution for struggling workers:
I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an "artisan" — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs. (October 23, 2010)
Friedman insists that being an artisan, bringing that something extra to the job, is the only way for individual workers to escape an economy dominated by "McWages." As global economic competition turns out to have more pernicious outcomes than the previously promised prosperity, advice to "think like an artisan" offers a way out (Friedman and Mandelbaum 2011, 137).
This uplifting theme runs through many accounts positing how artisans and a local economy can solve the woes of industrial capitalism and globalization. Embracing artisan values represents the next stage of capitalism while recapturing its true spirit. Adam Davidson, Friedman's colleague at the New York Times describes a change in fortunes for the economy, not just individual workers. In an article titled online as "Don't Mock the Artisanal-Pickle Makers," Davidson says: "It's tempting to look at craft businesses as simply a rejection of modern industrial capitalism. But the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism's godfather, Adam Smith" (February 15, 2012).
Similarly, Michael Shuman's vision of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (2006) tells of how mom-and-pop stores, farmers' markets, local food producers, hometown banks, small-scale manufacturers, and downtown merchant alliances could consolidate into a self-sustaining economy of work and wealth. Shuman takes this idea further in Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity (2012), imagining local investment clubs and local stock exchanges. Apparently local livestock for the farmers' market is not enough — we need our own local stock markets.
Somewhat curiously, the artisan has also appeared as the hero of a very different story: the artisan as anticapitalism and antimarket. In this account, the artisan embodies a precapitalist ethos, nearly desolated by the likes of Adam Smith and his ilk, but now revived in an effort to move beyond, away, or outside of capitalism. Richard Sennett's work The Craftsman (2008) and his follow-up, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012), posit craft and cooperation as fundamental but threatened aspects of human nature.
Here, artisans become alternatives to capitalism. Artisans produce for fundamentally nonmarket needs, for family and community, under constant threat of market and capitalist encroachment. These ideas often invoke not just a local economy but a commons, a nonmarket, community-based resource everywhere threatened by global capitalism. J. K. Gibson-Graham's work on A Postcapitalist Politics makes this most explicit: "the commons can be seen as a community stock that needs to be maintained and replenished so that it can continue to constitute the community by providing its direct input (subsidy) to survival" (2006, 97).
These are paradoxical positions from artisan partisans — how can the artisan and the local economy be both at the vanguard of capitalism and the vanguard of anticapitalism? This paradox parallels the apparent contradiction discussed in the prologue, how the ostensibly procapitalist government of Colombia and the ostensibly revolutionary government of Ecuador both emphasize policies of innovation, as contrasted to tradition.
Part of the paradox can be resolved by stepping away from the typical simplifications and ideal-type visions of capitalism that are often used by pundits and analysts. These commentators have a knack for turning people who are actually growing vegetables, making cheese, or knitting sweaters into abstractions. When we turn to the more mundane realities of people crafting things, together, we discover a different perspective from those who would enlist artisans for either the capitalist or the postcapitalist cause. We find neither blind adherence to tradition nor constant innovation, but people who must perpetually adjust and work skillfully with materials. In short, the turn to anthropological analysis and ethnographic fieldwork helps to dislodge some of these persistent dichotomies.
However, anthropological fieldwork and ethnography by themselves are not a cure-all for this kind of dichotomous thinking. This is because anthropology inherited a long history of looking at the world through categories imported from a powerful vision formed during the rise of industrial capitalism. These categories seemed to describe human economy and natural ecology, but were in fact visions of how that economy and ecology should be. These categories did not just describe the world, they contained a prescription for it. They were rooted in a particular experience in northern Europe, but they were exported as truths for all people, as universal models for economy and ecology (Trouillot 2003, 35–38).
These ideas revolved around notions that both human economies and natural ecologies have natural end points — they are in unidirectional motion from one state to the next. Moreover, the means of that unidirectional motion is a mechanism: a market mechanism that uses competition to produce efficient activity in the economy and a natural selection mechanism that uses competition to produce efficient creatures in the ecosystem. These two ideas were linked and used interchangeably, becoming powerful templates for seeing the world. In this vision, artisans were everywhere in a competition that would drive them out of their workshops and into agglomeration and efficient capitalist-industrial organization. Ecological resources like commons land and fisheries would inevitably be degraded because of individualized competition. It was always the Tragedy of the Commons, or differently put, the Triumph of Capitalism. As is still often the case, political positions intersected with description — the artisan and the commons were always part of a disappearing past, a past perhaps to be cherished or mourned, or perhaps even to be celebrated and renewed, or a past to be forgotten, despised, and superseded. But always in the past or somewhere else, similar to visitors to the northern Andes today who may see themselves as stepping out of contemporary time and into another, more traditional time.
It takes some rather dramatic rethinking to see ongoing symbiosis between artisan and capitalist forms. It can be difficult to recover the many instances in which commons resources can be quite well-managed over long periods of time, or to understand how a commons resource can emerge from market activities. Similarly, new and more dynamic approaches have emerged in ecology, which view organisms as always interconnected and with a variety of possible emergent outcomes. Ecological systems are always in transformation, which has led to development of new frameworks for understanding invasive species in a larger ecosystem. Taking a cue from earlier borrowings of metaphor and meaning between ecology and economy, we see artisan activities as often emerging from an invasive trade with wider effects on the community.
Our project involves rethinking these templates regarding the directionality and mechanisms of economic change. We put these templates to the test of ethnographic evidence, both from our own work in the northern Andes, but also by reading anthropological and other accounts. This is what we have found:
1. Artisans live with a great deal of risk, uncertainty, and often work in winner-take-all economies. Whereas artisan life is imagined to be a stable, predictable routine, we find people involved in risky ventures. Uncertain outcomes result in a winner-take-all distribution. In fact, the lure of a big windfall, a winner-take-all payout, can be the sustaining motivation to continue manual artisan labor.
2. Artisans are thoroughly intertwined with capitalism. Unlike those who see artisans as embodying a new phase of capitalism — or as a pre-, post-, or anticapitalist alternative — artisan work has always been at the heart of the capitalist system. Artisans have provided unacknowledged inputs for industrial capitalism. Artisan activities have reemerged in the heart of industry. And artisans often are the result of industry as much as they are a precursor to it.
3. Artisans are always entangled in legal definitions and state regulations. Artisans do not exist outside of state regulation, nor do they preexist an advancing state government. Rather, artisans have always been involved in struggles over regulations and who should legally count as part of the artisan economy. State governance and legal definitions can generate artisan activities as much as they regulate the sector.
4. Artisan activities can stem from invasive trades, adding an additional element to a historically invaded community. Although capitalism and globalization can certainly be destabilizing forces, artisan economies often enter and thrive as a consequence of destabilization. Artisan activities can be invasive, as a productive practice spreads rapidly in places that have been unsettled or degraded. However, these invasive activities can then be regularized and routinized, transforming into a new tradition or creating a new commons. In these historically invaded communities, an invasive trade can be transformed into a new community resource.
Invasion Ecology, Invaded Economies
As family after family goes into the same type of new business, what initially might have seemed like economic growth or boom can feel more like a takeover. All around, the same goods spread out for sale; older businesses disappear under a blanket of similar new commodities. A town experiences an insurgent moment, the virulent replication of a market-ready product. Inspired by descriptions from the field of invasion ecology, we name this an invasive trade. In the natural world, such invasions often come about with the arrival of organisms through human activity to areas outside their native range (Elton 1958). These situations, though, are rarely simple. The introductions can involve patterns of florescence, rapid evolution, and competition with native species, hyper and tenacious development, disequilibrium, and system change (Richardson 2011; Rotherham and Lambert 2011). For example, offspring of the goats that settlers brought to the Galapagos Islands went feral, thrived, spread, and stripped a number of islands of vegetation. Unable to compete, many of the islands' famed tortoises were pushed out of their native habitat and were at risk of starvation. Conservationists hired sharpshooters, released sterilized female "Judas goats" to lure out the reclusive males, and flew aerial patrols to aid eradication. Then the successful killing of the goats had an unintended consequence: not only did native plant species make a comeback, but the population of human-introduced blackberry bushes took off as the goats no longer held the plant in check.
The field of invasion ecology has unveiled many such surprises. Biologists have tracked these secondary invasions and the complex ways that native and new species interact, discovering interesting paradoxes. To offer one example, at small scales, greater numbers of native species in the affected ecosystem mean less acceptance of invaders, while the fewer the species, the wider the invasion. But at larger scales, the effect reverses: more native species allows more acceptance of invasive species (Richardson, Pyšek, and Carlton 2011). Drawing on such examples from invasion ecology, we are particularly interested in places with long histories of introductions and invasions, the "historically invaded community" (Heard, Sax, and Bruno 2012; Bruno et al. 2004).
For this book, raising the idea of invasive trades and historically invaded communities usefully draws attention to key elements in these artisan stories — novelty, rapid dispersion, the loss of prior trades, rapid systemic change, degradation or growth. A comparison to invasion biology focuses the discussion on how a commodity spreads rapidly in economies that have been unsettled or degraded through urbanization, out-migration, or the collapse of a once fruitful occupation. Peasant communities, old factory towns, and provincial market centers have all been buffeted by new forms of global exchange. But the tireless drive for new markets in the global economy also sets up such locations as the new frontier for entrepreneurs, development specialists, and speculators. Some are merchants contracting with cheap suppliers; others are government technicians offering training and strategies. Thus, even when trades are homegrown, local innovations are borne on the backs of imported technology, international business partners, or a novel kind of external patronage, whether a deep-pockets collector, a visionary retailer, or an ambitious state functionary.
Invasive trades are not to be confused with fads, which are sudden mass markets for fashionable items that go as quickly as they come. The invasive trades and goods involved may be novelties but they are also transformational: they change the character, condition, and possibilities of the places involved. Brash new kinds of economic behaviors drive this change, including winner-take-all competition, speculative over-investment, and rapid reproduction of designs. Consequently, these economies can produce steep inequalities, entail a lot of risk, and crowd out traditional work and products. Under certain circumstances, they come to grief in an invasive meltdown, with markets burning out even as more families flock to the trade for a chance at the payoffs.
Anthropologists and rural sociologists have long had their eye on jarring change that comes with the spread of the world economy. Reviewing the history of the rural upheavals and peasant wars of the twentieth century, anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote of the way that "capitalism cut through the integument of custom, severing people from their accustomed social matrix" (1969, 279). After years of research on land reform and rural development in Latin America, sociologist Alain de Janvry concluded that "the growth of capitalist relations in the periphery feeds upon the stagnation, impoverishment and destruction of the peasant and artisan" (1981, 22). In the Ecuadorian Andes, anthropologist Mary Weismantel (1988) saw not so much the elimination of one economy by another but the literal unhappy marriage of the two. In the early 1980s, husbands from the parish of Zumbagua left to work construction and other jobs in Quito while wives took on more responsibility for farming. "The formation of a household made up of a proletarian male and subsistence farmer female may drive individuals apart in their political and ideological practice, but ultimately semiproletarianization does not so much divide households as unite economies, interlocking rural and capitalist sectors so as to permit the transfer of value from one to the other" (Weismantel 1988, 31–32).
The idea of an invasive economics reengages these issues. However, by attending closely to the details of local enterprises, commodity designs, and market practice, we look at the way invasive trades provoke their own countermovement. There is not so much a backlash against foreign practices, but rather a rapid evolution. Local response channels and begins to regulate disruptive practices. What was once peculiar, and uniquely profitable, can emerge as a more mundane community tradition. The settings and habits of a new trade become regularized as an economic patrimony. The risky new market niche becomes a heritage to be protected and handed down. In these recombinant economies, the novel and alien actually create openings for the collective: an invasive trade becomes a new resource for the historically invaded community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fast, Easy, and In Cash by Jason Antrosio, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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