Artist and anthropologist, Michele Feder-Nadoff will share key concepts of an anthropology of making as they emerged in her long-term fieldwork as an apprentice to the master coppersmith, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas (1924-2014) and his sons in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, Mexico. Drawing from her recent monograph she will discuss how through this mentorship she learned not just how to hammer a copper artifact, but what it meant “to be” an artisan in this traditional mestizo rural artisanal community. Making creates persons, places and things, she discovered, but also can become a method of hope and human agency.
Michele A. Feder-Nadoff is Independent Scholar, Artist and Anthropologist as well as Assistant editor of the Journal of Embodied Research.
Link to the Zoom session: https://uni-graz.zoom.us/j/63942240668?pwd=uQwLMJqqgjooc8KvOKeTbkjtJX5MP5.1
Meeting-ID: 639 4224 0668
Kenncode: 608629
The lecture is part of the current seminar series "Anthropologies of Skill and Making" at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University of Graz.