Crafting Tradition: The Making and Marketing of Oaxacan Wood Carvings (review)

Animals, angels, "monsters," and devils are typical examples of fanciful and brightly painted wood carvings from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca that have become popular over the past two to three decades. Sold in museum stores, galleries, and gift shops in college towns and "artsy" or gentrified urban areas throughout the United States, these inexpensive but appealing carvings are often incorrectly characterized as representative of a proud and long-term village tradition. Michael Chibnik carefully and systematically debunks this ascribed heritage as a cultural misrepresentation propounded by dealers who believe that romanticizing the craft and the artisans who produce it—i.e., lengthening the cultural distance between carvers, portrayed as poor, exotic, isolated, and Indian, and buyers, portrayed as culturally sophisticated, sensitive, upper middle-class American cognoscenti—is good for business. These inaccuracies, however, do not necessarily detract from the interest that this recent artistic phenomenon holds. Exploring the history, production, and marketing of Oaxacan wood carvings, Crafting Tradition provides a detailed socioeconomic examination of some of the complex issues surrounding the commercialization of craft and the effect of a globalized economy on these predominantly small, rural, family businesses.

Chibnik begins by discussing how the academic and economic realities of his life as a professor of anthropology forced him to modify the classic, long-term fieldwork experience, replacing it with more numerous, intermittent, and shorter periods of research spread over many years. This research style enabled him to track certain changes that ultimately contributed to a more comprehensive appreciation of the carvings within a broader socioeconomic context and triggered his realization that any in-depth study of this artistic phenomenon could not be undertaken solely in the family compounds and small villages where the wood carving takes place. Instead, his fieldwork needed to be conducted in a multilocal, transnational manner, mirroring the cross-border movement of the objects themselves.

Crafting Tradition follows the money, starting with the birth of this trade circa 1940 with artist Manuel Jiménez, and examines the entrepreneurial workshops that quickly developed to capitalize on the growing market, as well as the trading links of the middlemen, exporters, and importers north of the border. Chibnik discusses individual artists, extended-family workshops, as well as those that are more "industrial," and the wood carving communities as a whole, using brief case histories to illuminate alternative responses to the complex economic web of this trade. The seven chapters devoted to this examination far outnumber the remaining four on the history and creative/production processes of the craft. There is little discussion about the intrinsic artistic merit or expressive qualities of the work or about changes manifested over time. Although the color plates of objects and the black and white images of the artists provide a general visual sense of the material, they lack data, such as object dimensions, media, and production date, important to researchers concentrating on the objects and the artists themselves.

Consequently, although the admirable specificity defining the links in the commodity chain would be of great interest to economic anthropologists, Crafting Tradition may be of somewhat less interest to folklorists and art historians. Tantalizing questions about the extent to which invented traditions can still incubate folkloristic qualities and behaviors are suggested but never explored; similarly, although certain comparisons are made between the economic path of the carvings and more "traditional" Oaxaqueño crafts, there is little discussion about how such different history and heritage might resonate in similar or divergent ways among the artists and their communities. Connections between this craft and earlier carving traditions (masks, dance regalia, and so forth) are mentioned only in passing, without discussion, and the artists are rarely allowed to speak for themselves (even in translation). Instead, Chibnik quotes widely from the first published popular book on the...