7 - Social Identity and the Daily Practice of Artisan Production

Summary

Truly now,

Double thanks, triple thanks,

That we've been formed, we've been given

Our mouths, our faces,

We speak, we listen,

We wonder, we move,

Our knowledge is good, we've understood

What is far and near,

And we've seen what is great and small

Under the sky, on the earth.

Thanks to you we've been formed,

We've come to be made and modeled,

Our grandmother, our grandfather.

On the making of the first humans

by the Maker, the Modeler, from

The Popol Vuh; D. Tedlock 1985:147

trans.; see also Christenson

2007:199 trans.

And so it started – according to the K'iche' Maya book of genesis – when the Maker, the Modeler, first formed humans and gave the species the ability to speak, to know, to see, and to give reverence to their Maker. This generative action of making and modeling would be recapitulated by Maya descendants of the first Grandmother and first Grandfather every time a potter crafted a water jar, a weaver finished a huipil, and a stone worker polished a jadeite earflare. Crafting objects – a quintessential human activity – is an intimate and creative process regardless of whether the object is crafted according to ancestral or cutting-edge techniques. Notions of personal identity, gender roles, and position within society are profoundly entangled with crafted objects that provide a mirror, a materialization, of complex situational and relational forces that underwrite the very process of fabrication.