From Artisan to Entrpreneur: The Refraiming of Craft Work as a Strategy for Reproduction of Unequal Power Relations
Keywords:
Craft. Comsumption. Enterprisation. Entrepreneurship. Inequality.Abstract
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an activity as old as the craft has been the target of economic incentives from the state and NGOs operating in Brazil. Intervention actions taken by organizations like the Brazilian Service of Support for Micro and Small Enterprises (SEBRAE), aims to transform the Brazilian handicraft production in a generating activity of employment and income, linked to the international consumer circuits and/or tourist activity. In examining the proposals that underlie such interventions, is notorious the speech re-framing craft and artisan identity, through the enhancement of entrepreneurial action and the emphasis on management and on the urgent need to impose to the craftsmanship standards of competitiveness inherent in the capitalist economy. But the new entrepreneurs-artisans have in the redefinition of its activity the appearance of a social integration that fails to materialize itself. Because of the intervention processes that have re-framed the Brazilian handicraft production, we observe certain loss of material and symbolic traits that are peculiar to the craft production, culminating in the naturalization of the entrepreneurial ideology as a model for the configuration of the craft. In this context, what happens is the mere incorporation of more and more people entangled in the world-system that feeds the matrix of the modern/colonial capitalist power. And this process, which emphasizes enterprisation of crafts, trivializes as much as it reproduces the idea of development as a synonym for expansion of consumption capacity. The logic behind this ideology is the notion that the proclaimed freedom that would be inherent in the neoliberal policy lies in the potential of the consumer individual. A commoditization of craft closes a cycle that ultimately remove the autonomy of the craftsman, removes it from an emancipatory perspective and reproduces a situation of dependence in which there is no prospect of change. Social inclusion is a euphemism for the incorporation of new consumers in the mass market.
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