Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings

EPILOGUE

245 e p i l o g u e EPILOGUE CHAPTER THIRTEEN In May 2002 I had an unsettling telephone conversation with Clive Kincaid, the large-scale Arizona dealer of wood carvings who employed Saúl Aragón as his intermediary in Oaxaca. Although I knew that Clive’s company, Designer Imports, was having some problems, I was surprised when he told me about a dramatic business decision that he had recently made. Designer Imports would no longer sell Oaxacan wood carvings. Throughout the 1990s potential customers had crowded around Designer Imports’ displays at gift shows. But at the beginning of the new millennium store owners and museum representatives were walking right past Clive’s booth. Oaxacan wood carvings had become old news; the retailers of folk art, as always, were searching for something different. Clive’s response was to reduce Designer Imports’ purchases of wood carvings and to rely more on sales of baskets from Panama and pottery from the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Despite this new business strategy, Clive lost thousands of dollars during fall c r a f t i n g t r a d i t i o n 246 2001. He was forced to give up his warehouse in Arizona and to lay off his eight employees. In spring 2002 Clive and his wife, Chris, were running the business from their home and exploring alternative employment possibilities. When I talked to Clive, he and Chris had just turned down job offers from the U.S. Park Service and were attempting to keep Designer Imports operating a while longer. They had reached the conclusion that dealing in wood carvings was a dead end. For the next year the business would focus exclusively on Panamanian baskets and Chihuahuan pots. The decision to stop buying wood carvings was only partly related to dropping sales. The transaction cost for selling a wood carving was much greater than that for baskets and pots. Designer Imports received on average $9.50 for a wood carving; sales of baskets and pots averaged $40 to $50 apiece. Moreover, wood carvings usually consisted of multiple parts, which were sometimes lost or broken in transit from Mexico to Arizona. Clive dreaded the phone call that he was going to make later in the day. The time had come to tell Saúl that there would be no further woodcarving orders. Because Saúl is educated, resourceful, and capable, I thought that he would eventually find another good job. I was more worried about the many wood-carving families who relied on Designer Imports as their most important customer. Although Clive’s decision reflects a weakening of the market for inexpensive Oaxacan wood carvings, there is no reason to assume that the trade will disappear. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was still considerable demand for high-end wood carvings. Furthermore, one cannot make inferences about the fate of a craft from the actions of one company. Designer Imports, for example, had stopped buying weavings from Teotitlán after rug sales dipped in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, Teotitlán rugs were selling well in 2002, if perhaps not at the level of previous years. Despite a genuine desire to help the wood-carvers of Oaxaca, Clive Kincaid ultimately reached the bottom-line conclusion that Designer Imports would do better by selling products made elsewhere. This decision will affect the livelihoods of hundreds of people in Oaxaca, Chihuahua, and Panama. Critics of globalization might suggest that Clive’s actions illustrate how rural Third World artisans have lost autonomy as they have become more immersed in the world economy. Proponents of globalization might point out that the purchases of Designer Imports enabled many rural Oaxacan families to improve their standard of living over the past two de- 247 e p i l o g u e cades. Both the critics and the proponents would be right. I cannot think of a better example of the double-edged impact of globalization. When I told this story to my friends, many asked if they could do something to help the wood-carvers. In the long run individual actions can have only limited effects on the inexorable changes in demand for particular types of folk art. But there is a small way in which everyone can help right now: just buy a Oaxacan wood carving. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ...