Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings

CHAPTER FOUR: Wood-Carving Communities

c r a f t i n g t r a d i t i o n 60 WOOD-CARVING COMMUNITIES CHAPTER FOUR Casual visitors to wood-carving communities in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca often encounter scenes of pastoral tranquillity. Farmers slowly lead their ox-teams over corn and bean fields set against wooded hills. Carvers and painters talk quietly as they work on their pieces in outdoor courtyards on sunny days that are neither too hot nor too cool. Goats, chickens, turkeys, donkeys, and pigs cross dirt roads. Even the most oblivious tourists soon find out, however, that Arrazola, San Martín Tilcajete, and La Unión Tejalapan are very much part of the wider world. The artisans listen to rock music on the radio, watch soccer on television, and use cellular telephones. Construction workers are building large concrete houses; roads are being paved. Some of the picturesque farmers turn out to have spent years in California. This mix of the modern and the not-so-modern is, of course, characteristic of much of contemporary Latin America. Nonetheless, many observers of the Central Valleys have largely ignored recent changes and focused instead on long-standing cultural traditions. They em60 61 w o o d - c a r v i n g c o m m u n i t i e s phasize subsistence production and aspects of religion, material culture, and social organization that either can be linked directly to pre-Columbian times or were introduced to Oaxaca by the Spanish prior to Mexican independence . As Michael Kearney notes (1996:95), “scores of investigators . . . have seen the Valley of Oaxaca . . . as populated with subsistence and petty commodity producers operating outside of capitalist relations.” Although this analytic approach is now rare among both Mexican and foreign anthropologists conducting research in Oaxaca, it continues to be common in tourist brochures, newspaper accounts of artisan communities, and advertisements for wood carvings and other crafts. By the latter part of the twentieth century, the majority of anthropologists writing about Mexican crafts were stressing connections between local communities and the wider world. Many scholars emphasized the place of folk art in government policy and capitalistic development. Writers such as Néstor García Canclini (1993), Scott Cook (1993), and Victoria Novelo (1976) showed how communities had been transformed by government policies encouraging craft production and the activities of intermediaries seeking to profit from the folk-art trade. Some of these writers (e.g., Cook and Novelo) downplayed cultural aspects of crafts and focused on the economic articulation between household producers and capitalist intermediThe Central Valleys c r a f t i n g t r a d i t i o n 62 aries. Others (e.g., García Canclini) argued that the cultural losses were inevitably associated with the immersion of crafts into national and international marketplaces. Most contemporary anthropological scholarship on Oaxacan craft communities (e.g., Cohen 1998; Kearney 1996:165–169; Wood 1997) pays considerable attention to the movement of people, images, and goods across national borders, especially the U.S.-Mexican frontier. Writers have noted that income from craft exports and remittances from temporary or permanent emigrants living in the United States help maintain community fiestas (Cohen 2001:962) and allow the persistence of long-standing systems of cooperative labor and government. Kearney (1996:141) has coined the term “polybian” to describe the identity of migrants who move back and forth “from ‘peasant’ to ‘proletarian’ life spaces.” Although I cannot agree with Kearney’s interpretation of wood-carving styles in terms of transnational identity, his comments (Kearney 1996:166) are thought-provoking: Just as the creators of tourist art are a complex polybian type, so are the artifacts they produce. One such style that has recently occurred in Oaxaca is painted wood carvings characterized by a whimsical combination of morphologies and surface designs . . . At first glance, many of the creatures represented in this genre of tourist art appear ambiguous in the sense that ambiguous creatures inhabit indefinite places betwixt and between worlds . . . But whereas ambiguity mediates dual opposition, the creatures of contemporary Oaxacan wood-carvers, who are situated in complex transnational fields that lack dual polarity, are appropriately polybious. Rather than hybrid monsters formed by combining species from conventional habitats, they are formed from combinations of multiple real and imagined species, as benefits beings that inhabit multiple real and hyperreal habitats. The magical...