Craftswork
As opposing to the now lost trades and crafts that we discussed under the oral history heading, now, the testimonies about crafts and traditional industry of today are gathered here.
As Antxon Aguirre Sorondo defines it, a craftsman is "who creates popular art, although from the anthropological perspective it would be more exact to define craftsman as the worker who is skillful with his hands and whose tools take second place to his man´s own ability and imagination". This idea based on the ability and ingenuity is completed with a factor that is clearly distinctive. Craftsmen make unique and non-standardarized utensils.
From the point of view of different administrations, craftsmanship has been equaled to small traditional manufacturing industry including "homemade" food products ( to be more exact, traditionally elaborated products) that other more strict definitions exclude. Inspite of government support, the future and vitality of craftsmanship are quite uncertain, due to the lack of rising generations plus the difficulties of econonomic subsistence in a more and more competitive and demanding market in prices and quality. Specialists in this sector signal out as solutions to the insistence on singular, unique and high quality designs, a promotion marketing and management training and to the opening of new commercial markets, in addition to fairs and crafts markets. The diffusion of registered in service craftsmen, the areas they belong to and production techniques used, is relaised by the association of craftsmen of Navarre, official web pages and other organisms.
Living craftsmen have been the aim of a recent monographic study, "Estudio etnológico sobre la artesanía y su significado en Navarra" (Ethnological study on craftsmanship and its cultural implication in Navarre), ethnographic research conducted by the members belonging to the group Etniker Navarre-Nafarroa and coordinated by Pablo Orduna.
Of course, the relatioship between vocabulary and graphic images is relevant.
- Download PDF1 Graphic vocabulary of craftsmanship
- Download PDF2 Overview study on creaftsmanship in Navarre and Lower Navarre
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