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Visual Anthropology

ISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan20

Unpacking Craft Skills: What Can Images Revealabout the Embodied Experience of Craft?

Geoffrey Gowlland

To cite this article: Geoffrey Gowlland (2015) Unpacking Craft Skills: What Can ImagesReveal about the Embodied Experience of Craft?, Visual Anthropology, 28:4, 286-297, DOI:10.1080/08949468.2015.1052324

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2015.1052324

Published online: 20 Jul 2015.

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Unpacking Craft Skills: What Can ImagesReveal about the Embodied Experience ofCraft?

Geoffrey Gowlland

In this article I compare video footage I recorded during two separate studies oncraft ceramics, in China and Taiwan respectively, to reflect on the way images mightcontribute to theoretical reflections on embodied practice in craftwork. In the first,key moments captured by the camera illustrate, and help us to understand, localconceptions of craft and ethics of skilled practice, yet these moments are fleetingand their value unlikely to be recognized by a casual viewer. An analysis of thesecond video footage, in which a Taiwanese master ceramicist is brought to‘‘unpack’’ his skilled knowledge when in the role of a teacher, reveals anotherway in which images can bring viewers to access otherwise ‘‘invisible’’ dimensionsof skilled practice.

What kind of image might give viewers a glimpse of the embodied work of theartisan? The reflection in this article is triggered by a brief event in the videofootage I filmed during ethnographic fieldwork in China, of the ceramics masterGe Taozhong at work.1 I use here four video stills of this moment [Figure 1].These images follow each other closely, separated by a fraction of a second,as can be seen from the almost identical position of the hands of the artisan.The difference between the first and last image is the gaze of the artisan, in thefirst image focused on the pot, in the last on some tool resting on the work-tablein front of him. What interests me in this fleeting moment is the way the gazeof the artisan, initially focused on the action of his hands, seems to anticipatethe next operation, involving another tool resting on the table, whilst the handsfor a brief moment continue the previous operation. These images tell me some-thing about the way the artisan is engaged in the work at hand, namely how the

GEOFFREY GOWLLAND has research interests in the anthropology of crafts, knowledge, and learning,explored through three distinct empirical approaches, on craft ceramics production in newly turnedcapitalist China, on the ceramics industry of Taiwan, and on the politics of crafts for indigenous peoplein Taiwan. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and is currently based at the Museumof Cultural History, University of Oslo. E-mail: geoffrey.gowlland@khm.uio.no

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online atwww.tandfonline.com/gvan.

Visual Anthropology, 28: 286–297, 2015

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2015.1052324

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work of crafting involves anticipation of the next operation in a fluid perfor-mance, rather than being a succession of independent technical procedures.Beyond what these images tell me about the performance of crafting, they havealso brought me to reflect on the kind of images of ‘‘craft-making’’ that I andother anthropologists of craft produce in the field, and what we decide to includein films that show craft processes. Indeed, as I will discuss further, this momentof the footage was initially discarded in a 40-minute edit I produced showingthe making of a zisha pot. Editing creates a ‘‘miniature’’ of the crafting process,which affords the viewer a comprehension of the overall process of crafting,but in so doing potentially contributes to the mystification of the craft, as myethnographic data reveals, also in discarding certain moments in the makingprocess. I will discuss this particular film, what it meant for the artisan depictedin the film, as well as reflect on the process of editing in parallel to the process ofcrafting. In the final part of this article I will present another set of video stillsfrom a different context of fieldwork, which point to ways in which anthro-pologists can better represent the experience of crafting visually, including givinga sense of the complexity of skills and of the hard work involved, and in so doing,more closely relate to some of the issues anthropologists of crafts are concernedwith in their textual outputs.

Figure 1 The ceramics artisan Ge Taozhong, lifting his eyes from his work in anticipation of thenext operation. (Still images are taken from video footage # the author)

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BLINKING AND FLUIDITY

The four still images I present here [Figure 1] are taken from 6 hours of footagefilmed over two days, the time it took for Ge Taozhong to complete a pot. Aftermy return from fieldwork, I edited the footage down into two versions of a filmto show the making process of the zisha pot from start to finish; the two versionswere about 20 and 40 minutes long; the first was used alongside examples of zishapots in a display I curated at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology andAnthropology. The film documents a chaıne operatoire, in other words all theprocedures that are necessary to complete a technical object [Coupaye 2009;Lemonnier 1976]. Omitted from the film are the processes not carried out bythe artisan: clay extraction, preparation (apart from some clay preparationprocedures of the artisan), and firing. In a strict chaıne operatoire approach,these elements would need to be represented, though it was not my intentionto create such a film. The filming process took two days; this was the time-framethat the artisan took to produce the pot from start to finish, in other wordscreating an object ready to be fired starting from a block of clay.

One of the difficulties in editing the footage was that most of the artisan’soperations are repetitive and relatively slow. In the edited versions of the film,I represent all steps of the process; the rest of the footage is made up of repeti-tions and transitions from one procedure to the next. For instance in the imagesshown here, the operation involving the use of a bamboo tool to shape the pot asit is being turned on a wooden disk took about a minute in the original footage,and followed several operations very similar in nature involving quite similartools. In the final edit, I took the decision to include about 10–20 seconds of foot-age to represent each successive operation, then cut to the chronologically nextoperation. Thus the edit shows the artisan shaping the pot with tool A, then ajump-cut reveals him using tool B for another operation, etc. This editing decisionwas taken naturally enough, not simply to show the different steps that he takesin the process of making a pot but also to solve a certain difficulty with transi-tions: I was never able to cut the image after an operation was finished becausean operation was rarely finished before another had already started. As is seen inthe still images, the hands of the artisan would still be engaged in one operationwhen the gaze was anticipating the next. It would have been interesting to showone operation until its completion, but I was often forced to cut before that inorder to avoid an edit point at this ambiguous moment between two operations.

The Hollywood film editor Walter Murch, in his book In the Blink of anEye [1995], provides a comment that has helped me make sense of this. For Murchthe edit point in a film is similar to the blink of an eye, and a blink, Murchventures, is usually associated with the end of a thought process. Cutting a film,for him, is thus like blinking, ending a thought. Murch describes how he noticedthat certain actors would blink at the very moment he would want to cut the film,giving him an indication that it was indeed the correct moment for an edit.I found the opposite seemed to be true in the film of the artisan and at theparticular moment depicted in the stills: there is no clear moment when oneoperation stops and another starts. Ge Taozhong does not blink at the end ofa process, but rather the gaze remains active and proactive toward the next

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operation. His actions follow one another in a fluid and seemingly uninterruptedprocess involving the mind (represented by the gaze) and the body (the hands).

Being skilled, or enskilled, involves a fluidity in gestures and thoughts. As TimIngold insists [2000, chaps. 19 and 23], a skill is not the externalization of ablueprint held in the brain and translated into actions on materials, but a perfor-mance, an engagement with tools and materials [O’Connor 2005, 2006]. Artisanswho make zisha pots have their own way of talking about this fluidity and itsimportance in the process of making a pot. Ge Taozhong mentioned that hismaster would bring his students to practice their skills until they would not needto stop to think about what the next operation would be. In other words, thesequence of operations was to be connected in a fluid way in the performanceof crafting. The still images are thus a representation of this value that artisanshold about good work. Individual elements of skill, what artisans call gongfu(the same term as the martial arts’ kung fu ), are important to develop inthemselves, but value is also attributed to the proper sequence of crafting (theorder of operations) and fluid, automatic transitions [Gowlland 2009b]. Theimages I show here are an illustration of a principle that has become importantin the anthropology of enskilment relating to performativity as an alternativeto cognitivism [Ingold 2000; Palsson 1994; Wacquant 2006], including the antici-pative nature of the mind involved in crafting [O’Connor 2005] during which theskilled practitioner ‘‘looks beyond’’ [Keller and Keller 1996] the work at hand.The images also illustrate a cultural value among practitioners of this particularcraft, about the importance of proper sequence and fluidity in performance. Yetwhen I edited the film I was brought to edit out such images in order to retainone of the intentions of the original edit, which was to produce pictures thatcould, in a short time-frame, show all the steps in the making of a craft object;and to retain the intelligibility of the images by avoiding a cut at a moment whentwo actions appear to be carried out simultaneously (one action starting beforeanother ends). A feel for the flow and performance of making is not properlyrepresented in the edited film.

ANALOG EDITING?

The film I produced and launched on the internet (on the website Digitalorienthosted by the University of Cambridge) was well received by the artisan. Onthe occasion of several return visits, he repeated that this film had been beneficialfor him, in particular as he could refer both potential and long-term customers tothat website. Although customers were usually familiar with the basic techniquesof the craft, for all of them this was the first time they had had the chance to seethe entire process of crafting. It seems that I was the first to document the makingof a zisha pot from start to finish, with a film published on the internet in 2004.I am not saying this with pride, but to highlight a particularity of the type ofceramics that I documented: the process is relatively long and complex, andis rather different from the wheel-shaped pottery most readers will be familiarwith, in which pots can be shaped in a matter of minutes (and can be documentedin one uninterrupted shot). Artisans did mention that there had been previous

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attempts at filming them at work, but these images were short segments of themaking process. One of these attempts, that was circulating among artisans inthe form of a digital file on a CD-ROM at the time of my first visit in 2003–04,is a documentary produced by Shanghai television in the 1970s. That film wasproduced at a time of strict planned economy when all artisans were workersemployed in a state-controlled cooperative factory. The film demonstrates theCommunist aesthetics of the time: smiling workers are shown making pots inan idealized and clean workshop setting. The images are obviously staged, andone is given only a glimpse of individual moments in the crafting process; itappears to be more important for the filmmakers to show the end results, teapotsand other ceramic objects decorated with natural motifs and calligraphy. Touristsmight visit some of the workshops where artisans work (though most of the moresuccessful artisans work in the privacy of their home) and might capture a fewminutes of film on their camcorders or smart phones. The artisan I filmed,as I mentioned, took two days to complete his work, and the process hasprobably not been documented in its entirety before.

Before filming the artisan I asked whether he was not worried that filmingmight reveal certain secrets of his craft. He dismissed this concern, claiming tobe one of the few who knew traditional techniques, as the vast majority of his col-leagues were now using the time-saving ‘‘modern’’ device of the plaster mould[Gowlland 2009b]. In fact I realized that the ‘‘revelation’’ of the techniques ofthe craft would play a very important role for this artisan, serving to confirmhis claim to be well-versed in the ‘‘traditional’’ techniques of the craft, and itwould work as a form of proof of this claim, ultimately playing a role in thevaluation of his work [Gowlland 2009a]. Thus the revelation of the techniquesof the craft helped him compete in a context in which other artisans mightproduce the same kind of pot but using the ‘‘non-traditional’’ plaster moulds.The film I produced was one form of evidence for the artisan that he knewand used traditional techniques [cf. Cant, in this issue].

Artisans resorted to other methods besides the use of images2 in their claims touse traditional techniques. The one I discuss here (as well as others) had in factdeveloped what I have come to think of as his own version of the film edit, a kindof ‘‘analog’’ (to mark the contrast with my own ‘‘digital’’) edit of the craftingprocess. In half an hour artisans are able to demonstrate the techniques of theircraft by making an object that looks like a teapot, employing most of the sameprocedures as a normal pot, but introducing enough shortcuts to complete theprocess in such a short period. The resulting object is an ‘‘edited’’ version ofthe process which allows visitors to the workshop (including potential custo-mers) to see the making of a pot and understand the crafting process withoutthe burden of extensive stays or observation of repetitive tasks. My own editof the process ultimately served the same function.

MINIATURES

Let me analyse both the analog and digital edits of the making of a pot, withreference to a famous concept in the anthropology of art. What Levi-Strauss

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identifies as aesthetic pleasure is the capacity of a work of art to reverse ourunderstanding of the world: whereas one comprehends the external world fromits parts that one fits into structures, the art object ‘‘can be grasped, assessedand apprehended at a glance’’ [Levi-Strauss 1966: 23]: knowledge of the wholeprecedes knowledge of parts. Works of art achieve this by removing a dimen-sion of reality: for instance, a painter discards certain details in the painting sothat viewers do not get lost in details, but they are given the opportunity to seeat a glance the whole and understand how it relates to the particular. Filmachieves this ‘‘miniaturization’’ effect not by shedding details in the picturebut, at least in part, by collapsing time in the act of editing. This was the powerof the edit that I produced: from two days of work, and six hours of footage,the 40-minute film made the process accessible in one sitting to a viewer, some-thing that was not possible physically except if viewing the artisan producingthe simplified version of the pot, as described above. Collapsed time also makesthe process accessible intellectually, as it is easier to understand the techniquesof the craft and how the elements integrate, without the burden of repetitionsand procedures which might appear superfluous but are actually necessary toproduce an object.

Commenting on the idea of a miniature, Marilyn Strathern [1993] invites us toreflect not on what miniatures reveal but what they conceal. As Anne-SophieLehmann [2012] argues of the ‘‘showing making’’ genre of images (images repre-senting artisans at work), the apparent revelation of techniques can also serve ina way that highlights the apparent magical tricks of the craft–images of ‘‘making’’that can mystify. Images can impose a certain distance between artisan and view-ers, who realize their inability to produce such an object. It is intriguing thatLevi-Strauss’ argument seems to be contradicted by another famous argumentin the anthropology of art: Alfred Gell [1998, 1992] argues that the root of thepower of art lies in the way it escapes intellectual grasp on the part ofviewers—as in the cathedral made of matchsticks that Gell says so fascinatedhim as a child, or tortuous Celtic knots. Instead of revealing, or affording intel-lectual resolution, art for Gell captivates, ensnares and reveals to viewers theirintellectual deficiencies, forcing them to recognize the powers of the originatorof the artwork.

Although this article is addressing the genre of ‘‘showing making’’ imagescritically, it is unlikely that anthropologists interested in crafts and techniqueswill forgo producing these kinds of image, given their capacity to make complextechniques intellectually accessible. But it is all the more important to reflect onwhat these kinds of image do, their agency [Gell 1998] once they become objectsin themselves that circulate in and across regimes of value [Appadurai 1986].This is in part what the ethnographic analysis brings. In my case, knowledgeof the context of production, ideas and values about craft and skilled practiceof the artisans, and following the film as object as it circulates in physical form(on a CD-ROM) or virtually online and returns to the place of production, canbring me to reflect on the potential, including political potential, of these images.This dimension of the images is not conveyable through the images themselves,and instead I have to resort to text to make sense of them. The images themselves,in the form of the edited film, keep viewers at a distance [Willerslev 2007].

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THE ETHNOGRAPHER AS APPRENTICE ENTERS THE FRAME

I will leave aside this first set of video stills at this point and turn to a reflectionon footage I collected in another setting, the ceramics production center of Yinggein Taiwan. I present these images as a kind of counter-example to the case thatI discussed so far. As I was reflecting on the images of zisha discussed above,I realized there was another set of images that might serve to convey whatwas missing in my edited film of a zisha pot, and was only accessible in fleetingmoments of my footage [Figure 2].

During fieldwork in Taiwan I regularly visited the workshop of master ChanKuo-hsiang, the artisan shown in these images, until he invited me at first to helphim with certain tasks such as moving large pots, and eventually taught me hiscraft, at first sporadically and later more regularly. These images are taken fromthose initial sporadic instances of teaching. I want to argue that in these pictures,beyond the interest in watching a teacher instruct a student and the richness ofmethods of teaching and of the experience of being an apprentice, the imagesserve to ‘‘unpack’’ the skills of the artisan, and can provide a sense of the richnessof the embodied experience of work of the artisan not usually accessible in theclassic edited format of ‘‘showing making’’ illustrated earlier, nor in text.

Figure 2 The ceramics master Chan Kuo-hsiang, with the ethnographer. Top row: bringing thestudent to be attentive to sound. Bottom row: Chan clapping his hands to impart a sense ofappropriate rhythm of work. (Still images are taken from video footage # the author)

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In the first and second still images [Figure 2, top left and right], the teacherpoints to his ear, at the same time as he is telling the student (myself) ‘‘listento the sound.’’ He goes on to give me a demonstration of how to beat the clay.Until that moment I, as learner, was concerned with observing the actions ofthe teacher and imitating what I had seen; here the teacher is telling me to beattentive to the sound that is being produced and to imitate what I hear ratherthan what I see. In this case, what I am to be attentive to in the sound is bothits loudness, indicating how hard the clay is to be beaten, and its rhythm. Inthe third and fourth still images (bottom left and right), taken from the footageseveral minutes later, I am shown practising the technique I have just learnt,whilst my teacher is sitting on the floor. He is observing, but also shown clappinghis hands whilst chanting ‘yi er yi er’ (‘‘one two one two’’), giving me the rhythm Iam to adopt in beating the clay with the mallet and pounding tool and alsoexhorting me to beat harder at times when I relax my efforts.

I limit myself to these video stills here for brevity’s sake, but will give a briefaccount of other interesting moments in that same footage to further put thesestill images in context. At one point, my teacher demonstrates the correct place-ment of the feet as one walks around the pot beating the clay. In demonstratingthis, he slows down his movement, getting me to pay attention to the feet whenpreviously I had only been attentive to the hand action. In this part of the footageI am shown observing what the teacher is doing, moving my head or taking asideways step to get a better view. In other moments, the roles are reversed: I takethe tools that he hands me, and it is his turn to observe my actions.

These techniques of instruction in the context of work that I have just describedare forms of ‘‘education of attention’’ [Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000], whereby theteacher draws the attention of the learner toward elements of the practice thatare important—the movements of the feet, or the sound that is made. When I firstpick up the tools and try imitating the master, I concentrate on imitating the handmovements as I had seen them, but the footage goes on to show the momentswhen the teacher draws my attention to elements of the performance that Ihad not been attentive to, and the gradual improvements of my technique. Theteacher at times slows down the movements to enable me to grasp them moreeasily; for instance, at one point he illustrates the movement of the tool andthe way the wrist is to relax by demonstrating this movement in slow motion.After slowing down the movement, he then speeds up again, giving a sense thistime of the strength and rhythm I am to adopt. These teaching methods, I realize,have particular cinematic qualities. Hollywood action movies like to employ theeffect of slowing down and speeding up images: slow motion enables the viewerto grasp the details of an action, say a battle scene, and the film returning tonormal speed then emphasizes, say, the impact of a weapon against a shield.The techniques my teacher was using served similar functions without manipu-lation of the images: they first highlighted the details of the motion, then drewattention to elements that can only be appreciated when carried out withoutslowing down, notably rhythm and force of impact.

When captured on film, the teaching strategies that Chan Kuo-hsiang employsare not only useful for me to access the techniques more easily, through a‘‘scaffolding’’ of learning [Bruner, Wood and Ross 1976], but they also enable

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the viewer of these images to grasp dimensions of the craft that would not beaccessible in the ‘‘showing making’’ genre of film I started the article with.Perhaps one might think of these images as the opposite of the ‘‘miniature’’ effectof the edited film I discussed: there is an amplification effect at work, wherebythe skills of the artisan are slowed down, unpacked as the same action is shownin different ways, first in slow motion, then at normal speed, or where attention isfirst brought to the hands, then the movement of the hands, then sounds. Insteadof giving an overall impression of the entire process, as in the miniature of theedited film, this footage magnifies and enlarges the particular. The apparentsimplicity of the skills becomes unpacked, the viewer comes to see the multipledimension of the skill, and through this, I would suggest, gets a better sense ofthe embodied experience of the artisan.

Skills are not ‘‘correctly executed movements’’ but an ensemble of gestures andattitudes that are learnt and fine-tuned in the context of the performance ofmaking, and in dialogue with materials [Ingold 2000]. I am not suggesting thatthis video document can have educational value; I doubt images can replace anapprenticeship in which the teacher is attuned to the progress of the student.I am rather suggesting that these images have a quality that brings them closeto being the visual equivalents to textual discussions on embodiment and practice.Rather than being amazed or mystified by the skills of the artisan, as in the firstedited film, a viewer of the second film can get an (admittedly shallow)understanding of the complexity and layered nature of the apparently effortlessskills of the artisan at work. The artisan, as teacher, points to the importance ofthe involvement of the whole body at work, not only located in the hands andthe tools but in the senses (vision and hearing), and the whole body (gaze, feet,hands). The images, in which a novice enters the frame, can also offer much to con-vey a sense of the sheer hard work of the craft: several moments in the footageshow me interrupting my work out of exhaustion, yet the skilled artisan carriesout his work seemingly without effort. In this way also, these images do not createthe ‘‘miniature effect,’’ the mystifying capacity of images to remove details andbring viewers to attain an objective and distant view of the reality captured on film.

In the case of the artisan in Yixing discussed in the preceding sections, I had tostop the film—create a still image—in order to arrive at the depiction of some formof ‘‘embodiment’’ of the artisan, when the gaze shifts and anticipates the next movein a fluid performance. I had to freeze the image, and amplify it through a writtenexplanation to reveal a fleeting moment in the film that I think is worthy of notice.In this other case of the teacher instructing a student, this ‘‘amplification’’ happenswithin the images, as the artisan brings my attention (in the film)—but at the sametime the attention of the viewer—to elements of the performance of craft thatwould not otherwise be evident in a ‘‘showing making’’ film.

Film is an invaluable tool to capture the multiplicity of dimensions, the com-plexity of interactions that can take place between teacher and learner which textcan only hint at [MacDougall 2006]. The film of the teacher isolates elements oftechnique in a virtual slow motion, then speeds up to show how this elementof technique fits into the whole. Film is a particularly useful tool to highlight thisrelationship between part and whole. One might cite the visual anthropologistDavid MacDougall’s view here, that film can be a method of ‘‘resensitizing

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us to the physical presence of objects which an urbanized culture has attenuatedand commodified’’ [ibid.: 57]. Specifically in the case of images of craft, filmcan resensitize us to the skills that are largely lost and devalued in a consumerculture [Cain 2012]. MacDougall reminds us that one of the differences betweenthe eye and the camera is that film has the potential to exaggerate differencesof scale and relation of detail to whole—in the images I am discussing here,the artisan, in his methods of scaffolding, affords the same to the viewer.

CONCLUSIONS

I started the article with a question, ‘‘What kind of images might give a glimpseof the embodied work of the artisan?’’ And related to this, ‘‘How can our imagesof craft relate more closely to the texts we write about embodiment, rather thanbeing simple illustrations of these texts?’’ I have given two examples to suggesthow images can turn into valuable resources in this respect. The first examplewas mostly negative, as it showed how the details that might address this ques-tion are often left out or removed from the film images we produce: momentsstanding at the ambiguous threshold between procedures. The second exampleshowed how these fleeting moments when one encounters the embodied workprocesses might be amplified. In the footage of my short apprenticeship inTaiwan the skills of the artisan are unpacked, revealed through the affordancesthat the teacher puts forward, the ‘‘education of attention’’ that enables me tolearn. I use the word ‘‘amplification’’ as an antonym of the miniature: rather thangrasping the whole, viewers are invited to reflect on what is otherwise absentfrom the chaıne operatoire type of film, so they can appreciate the multifacetednature of skilled work. The chaıne operatoire approach might be revealing, but it alsoprevents a certain kind of understanding—one that is less intellectual, perhapsmore embodied in the sympathetic response to the images [Lehmann 2012].

The participation of the ethnographer in the images can play a role—anotherargument for the value of ‘‘apprenticeship as research method’’ [Coy 1989].Apprenticeship as method represents a unique way of providing a first-handaccount of experiences of work. One must of course be cautious about assumingthat one’s experiences of learning the craft are the same as one’s informants’[Gowlland 2009a; Prentice 2008]. In the images I have discussed here, it is inter-esting that the ethnographer takes on an extra role, that of ‘‘directing,’’ in a sense,the actions of the artisan as provoked by his novice status: entering the frameforces the artisan to slow down, draw attention to the mundane and habitual(in his world), and deconstruct his knowledge both for the benefit of theethnographer-as-apprentice and for viewers of the filmed documents.

I hope to have provided in this article a glimpse of the potential of images tocontribute to the largely textual outputs of anthropologists reflecting on embodi-ment and skilled practice. But it might be opportune to end with a reminder, thatthe chaıne operatoire approach to filming craft, despite or because of its mystifyingpotential, is more often than not what is expected of us as ethnographers, bothon the part of artisans and of viewers. The artisan from the first set of stillshad one complaint to make about the film I edited: I had missed a (to him) crucial

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step in the making of the pot, a step I had assumed I could easily removewithout being detrimental to the overall understanding of the process, butin so doing I had broken the all-important chain of technical procedures.

NOTES

1. I use real names in this article. The artisans I talk about are public figures, and the filmsI mention have been available online. I was able to devote time to the reflectioncontained in this article thanks to a research grant from the Norwegian ResearchCouncil (Yggdrasil visiting researcher scheme), based at the Museum of CulturalHistory, University of Oslo.

2. Incidentally, at the time of my initial fieldwork artisans did not appear to make muchuse of video or still camera. Admittedly at the time these technologies remainedrelatively expensive. During later return visits, in 2008 and 2012, artisans wereincreasingly using cameras, as well as websites such as Weibo, the Chinese equivalentof Twitter or Facebook, to promote their work.

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