Podcasts
Kathryn Harriman University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
Keywords: craft, globalization, material culture, (post-) modernity, Scotland, tourism, visual culture. This paper draws on my own situation as a visual anthropologist doing doctoral research on craft as material and visual culture. My work in the North East of Scotland is based on fieldwork undertaken in 2005-2006, and it combines art and documentary photography with traditional participant observation. The resulting study approaches craft from theoretical and methodological perspectives that are critically situated outside those of trained crafts practitioners.
I explore people's experiences of global processes in the North Atlantic and how those experiences manifest themselves in specific approaches to craft economies today. Modernity and tourism are two main parts of these processes, and it is there that the objective and subjective realities of these cultural exchanges combine. They also set the stage for asking two questions:
"How do the abstract idea and the physical reality of craft mediate relationships between North Americans and Scots?" Followed by, "How do global fragmentation, ethnification, and the contemporary search for "roots" affect the way people in Scotland imagine and manipulate their local economies?" The answers rely on ethnographic research focused not on tweeds and tartans, but on skilled people who live with and make craft as part of their daily lives. So, with the use of images from the field, I search for immaterial relationships that crafts mediate between the "Old" and "New World," between ethnographic locality and global process.
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L'auteure explore la façon don't le modernité et le tourisme influencent les économies à base artisanale dans le nord-ouest de l'Ecosse.