Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction

1 i n t r o d u c t i o n INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE On January 1, 1998, Jimmy Carter visited the small Mexican town of San Martín Tilcajete to look at brightly painted wood carvings. The ex-president of the United States was vacationing in the state of Oaxaca with his wife, Roslynn, their four children, six grandchildren, and ten other relatives and friends. The group was accompanied by bodyguards, government officials, and guides on their excursions to the colonial churches, archaeological sites, craft villages, and markets of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. They stayed in San Martín for half an hour, buying numerous pieces and chatting with artisans. The Carters had decided to go to San Martín after seeing a display of carvings from the town in the zócalo (central square) of the city of Oaxaca. Although the residents of San Martín were honored by the visit of the former president, they were not surprised that such a famous man would spend part of New Year’s day looking at Oaxacan wood carvings. Since the mid-1980s these whimsical pieces have adorned the shelves of gift shops and private homes in Mexico, the United States, and Europe and have c r a f t i n g t r a d i t i o n 2 been the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles, museum exhibitions , and television programs. Oaxacan wood carvings appear on calendars , postcards, and T-shirts and are sold in catalogs and over the Internet. Artisans from the principal carving centers of San Martín Tilcajete, Arrazola, and La Unión Tejalapan have traveled throughout the United States giving exhibitions of their craft. Many families in these communities have prospered by selling their pieces to wholesalers, store owners, and tourists. Men and women who once eked out a living through farming and wage labor are now able to build concrete houses and purchase automobiles, satellite dishes, cell phones, and compact disk players. Oaxacan wood carvings are part of a growing trade in what Nelson Graburn (1976) and others have called “ethnic and tourist arts.” Crafts such as Otavalan weavings (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1999), Kuna molas (Tice 1995), Côte d’Ivoire carvings (Steiner 1994), and New Guinea masks (Silverman 1999) change hands in complex, multistranded commodity chains that usually link artisans from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania with consumers from the upper and middle classes of the United States, Canada, and Europe. The commercialization of crafts has improved the standard of living of many artisans in some communities but has enriched only a few merchants in others. This trade is part of an increasingly rapid flow of people, commodities, and images across national borders in recent years that has led some anthropologists (e.g., Kearney 1996; Marcus 1995; Roseberry 1989) to advocate a global perspective that entails multilocal fieldwork and a rethinking of long-established ideas about cultural boundaries. This book examines the history, production, marketing, and cultural representations of Oaxacan wood carvings. These colorful pieces are an extraordinarily apt illustration of how the global demand for exotic “indigenous crafts” can lead to an invented tradition (Hobsbawm 1983). The origins of Oaxacan wood carvings differ from those of most other ethnic and tourist arts. Accounts of craft commercialization ordinarily describe how objects that were at one time integral parts of indigenous cultures become transformed as the result of a global marketplace. The hybrid nature of such crafts leads to heated debates about their artistic merit and “authenticity .” The Oaxacan wood carvings, however, are late-twentieth-century creations made mostly by monolingual Spanish speakers. The pieces nonetheless are stylistically similar in some respects to other local crafts with longer histories and are often promoted as a symbol of “Zapotec Indian” identity by merchants dealing in ethnic arts. 3 i n t r o d u c t i o n ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO ETHNIC AND TOURIST ARTS The growth of tourism during the late nineteenth century in areas inhabited by non-Western peoples led to an increased production of art objects as souvenirs. Although some of these souvenirs were replications of objects with long-standing cultural significance, many others were innovative hybrid art forms. Despite the economic importance of the souvenir trade, anthropologists paid little attention to ethnic and tourist art until the 1970s. They focused instead on ways in which traditional arts...