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Masters of Craft

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

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Midterms

n  Research Question

n  Focus: Who/what you studied.

n  Method: How you studied.

n  Findings: What did you find out? And

how does this relate to theories of our
class?
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Key Concepts
Work Ethnographic
n  Work (Meaningful work & n  Emic vs. Etic Data
Good Job)
n  Thick Description
n  Expertise & Expert Novice
n  Culture vs. Community
n  Profession
n  Discourse Community+
n  Flow
Community of Practice
n  Cool
n  Habitus
n  Emotional labor
n  Technical Communication
n  Taste
+ Ethnographic Fields
Choose three to connect together
n  Cool
n  What is good?
n  Norms
n  Insiders and outsiders
n  Tradition
n  Taste
n  Authenticity
n  Philosophies of life
n  Ways to police good
taste/Sanctions
n  Reaction to outside labels
(bartender vs mixologist) n  Exceptions and rule
breaking
n  Key ceremonies (slowing
time and focusing n  Key debates in
attention) community
n  Key places (safe spaces) n  Different characters,
roles, and positions in
n  Co-membership/ecology community
of brother/sister
communities (craft n  Conversion experience or
distilling, bartending, joining rituals
slow food)
n  Outsiders inside (Pueblo
n  Phonies and fakes meet cutters, barbacks)
n  Challenges and risks to n  Failures
the community
(challenges to n  Concepts of time
masculinity)
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Craft: What is it?
Why is it important?
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Craft: And Writing?
n  Craft as crafting: the view that the process of making is just as (or more)
important than the product. Seen under recent marketing terms like “artisan-
made,” this approach values skill and technique over mechanistic
production.

n  Craft as product: the view that products made using a craft process carry a
Benjaminian “aura” of originality that individuates the consumer, worships
tradition through consumption, meshes with local values, and bonds user
and producer.

n  Craft as a set of rights: the view that craft is a set of rights that offsets the
alienation of workers from the products of their labor, stresses the skill of the
worker, and develops workers as unique individuals who have a right to
gratification and freedom in their jobs.

n  Glenn Adamson: “The application of skill and material-based knowledge to

relatively small-scale production.”

n  David Pye: “the workmanship of risk” vs.“the workmanship of certainty”

n  Tami Katz-Frieberg: “laboriousness + obsession = authenticity”

n  William Morris: “So long as man allows his daily work to be mere unrelieved
drudgery he will seek happiness in vain. . .the worst tyrants of the days of
violence were but feeble tormentors compared with those Captains of
Industry who have taken the pleasure of work away from the workmen.”
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Craft Ethics
n  “Folk revivals, often grouped under the heading of Romantic
Nationalism, have involved a great deal of stereotype and cultural
chauvinism. . .placed a great emphasis on craft traditions as authentic
expressions of the homeland, or as means to cleanse a visual culture
tainted by foreign influence.” Adamson

n  Bryce Covert on Payin with Lovin: “They have to come up with cutesy
tasks. . . . If someone dances, they have to dance too. . . . [P]oorly paid
people [have] to slather a smile onto their face and cover up the real
conditions under which they labor. . . . [F]amilies can’t survive on the
money they make. But the company instead wants its customers to see
employees who are genuinely delighted that a mother hugged her son
in front of them.”
https://www.videodetective.com/tv/superstore-going-the-extra-smile/
444785

n  therapeutic class tourism: “Alex, a university professor by day,

explicates this idea of class tourism: ‘[DIY home improvement is a]
chance for me to be something entirely di erent than a professor for a
day or two a week . . . kind of an image of myself as almost being blue-
collar for a couple days a week’” (Risto Moisio et al. 303).