This volume of thoughtful and interdisciplinary essays (published in honor of art historian Janet B. Esser) explores the history and agency of makers of material culture though a variety of crafts and traditional practices in Mexico. Part I, titled Translating Insides and Outsides, Materials and Gestures, Nomadic Aesthetics and Community, includes six essays (each introduced by a “pondering”) which describe and explicate contemporary and historical research about artisans, crafts, clothing, textiles, aesthetics, masks, female empowerment, and the Huipil in Mexico from the nineteenth century, through post-revolutionary times, and up to the present. Part II, titled Fortleben, Calling Forth, Living Forth, includes an interview that the editor, Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff, conducted with Janet Esser in 2016 along with selected excerpts from Esser’s PhD Dissertation on Winter Ceremonial Masks of the Tarascan Sierra in Michoacán, Mexico. This is followed by photographs taken by Dr. Esser during her research, a bibliography, and a helpful glossary of terms, and preceded by an afterword by Dr. Ronda Brulotte, an anthropologist and Latin American specialist who teaches at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Feder-Nadoff has translated or co-translated some of the material, and her foreword indicates that the authors plan to publish this volume in Spanish, which she notes is the “original language of the majority of these chapters and the native if not secondary language of most of its authors.” Language is one of the most interesting and significant aspects of this volume as the authors reflect on how it has been used to both stereotype and diminish the makers of objects in Mexico, as well as how it impacts perceptions of the objects they create.
Lorena Ojeda Dávila (a Latin American historian) and Iris Calderón Téllez (a member of the P'urhépecha community and a textile craftswoman) note in their Pondering the following: “Artisans not only create objects to be used in specific spaces but are also protagonists, who disseminate the history of their culture among themselves; the apron, the wanego, or the belt, just like a text, specifies the culture of a society. It is a form of transmitting history through material things and indicates to us that through its reproduction and use a tradition lives” (114). I would argue that this is the same process folklorists recognize in folk culture, a term rarely used by any of the authors but recognizable to any folklorist who has studied, documented, and collaborated with the makers of material culture.
Feder-Nadoff notes that “this book is a study of making as a making of worlds. It is a modest effort to decolonize ‘craft’ and ‘artesanía’ by admitting to our tasks as radical translators whose work bears epistemological, ontological, and political repercussions” (17). The authors/researchers acknowledge their role as translators and are particularly careful to explicate terms for the objects, their makers, and the processes they explore in a respectful and reflexive manner, often dismissing such words as “craft” and “artesanía” and in the case of Anne Johnson, pointing out that the mask makers in the community of Teloloapan, Guerrero, where she studied devil masking, refer to themselves as “mascareros” (those who make masks) (80). These studies are excellent examples of collaborative ethnography along with helpful descriptions of how politics and economics have impacted the lives of members of Indigenous and non-elite communities throughout Mexico.
Esser studied a specific winter tradition in the Tarascan Sierra of Michoacán which centers on the role of makers of masks and masked participants including three types: the Old Ones, the Blackmen, and the Ugly Ones. The selected excerpts from Esser’s thesis include sections on slavery in Spain, Portugal, and Mexico, and Black societies in the New World, with some research about the complicated role of Africans in Mexico. As Feder-Nadoff states, “This prescient aspect of Esser’s research can contribute to future research on Mexico’s multiracial and multiethnic complexity” (176). This is also the one section of the volume which includes numerous photographs that help to illustrate the production, and some of the context for how the masks were being used in the Tarascaran Sierra when Esser conducted her research in the 1970s.
My only criticism of the volume as a whole is that it should have included more photographs. While photographs, if not described in detail, can contribute to stereotypes, they are a crucial piece for understanding the carefully constructed work of these artists.
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[Review length: 723 words • Review posted on October 4, 2024]