Artisan has recently become a buzzword in the developed world, used
for items like cheese, wine, and baskets, as corporations succeed
at branding their cheap, mass-produced products with the popular
appeal of small-batch, handmade goods. The unforgiving realities of
the artisan economy, however, never left the global south, and
anthropologists have worried over the fate of these craftspeople as
global capitalism has again remade their cultural and economic
territory. Yet artisans are proving to be surprisingly vital
players in contemporary capitalism, as they interlock innovation
and tradition to create effective new forms of entrepreneurship.
Based on seven years of extensive research in Colombia and Ecuador,
veteran ethnographers Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld's
Fast, Easy, and In Cash explores how small-scale production and
global capitalism are not directly opposed, but are rather
essential partners in economic development. Antrosio and
Colloredo-Mansfeld demonstrate how artisan trades arrive and
flourish in modern Latin American communities. In uncertain
economic environments, small manufacturers have adapted to excel at
home-based production, product design, technological efficiency,
and high-risk investments. Illuminating this process are vivid case
studies from Ecuador and Colombia: peasant farmers in Tuquerres,
Otavalo weavers, Tigua painters, and the t-shirt industry of
Atuntaqui. Fast, Easy, and In Cash exposes how these ambitious
artisans, far from being holdovers from the past, are crucial for
capitalist innovation in their communities and provide
indispensable lessons in how we should understand and cultivate
local economies in this era of globalization.
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