ANTH 340
Artisan and Connoisseur
Last Offered Spring 2016
Division II Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

In recent decades Americans have increasingly taken up the small-scale hand-work production of specialized goods as a livelihood, depending on connoisseurs who appreciate and are willing to pay high prices for their goods. Products ranging from cheeses to wooden boats have secured markets enabling lifestyles that appear to challenge classic capitalist modes of labor and consumption. We’ll explore this movement. Students will conduct original research resulting in a major paper and presentation. To elaborate: We will explore the differences among traditional craftsmen, hobbyists, and contemporary artisans, considering the nature of creativity and hand-work. We will use Marx’s concepts of the alienation of labor and commodity fetishism as a frame for considering the ways in which both artisans and connoisseurs appear to be resisting modern capitalist modes of production and consumption. But we will also look at the ways in which artisans’ articulation with capitalism and industrial production has shifted over time, beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement around the turn of the last century, through the “hippies” of the 1960s and ’70s, to more recent entrepreneurial artisans and those engaged in the “Maker Movement.” The course entails a commitment to undertaking an original, possibly ethnographic research project in which a student undertakes a detailed investigation of the production and consumption of an “artisanal” product, involving a preparatory paper, a preliminary proposal, and culminating in a research paper of at least 20 pages and a class presentation.