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Communitarian development practices: A perspective from handcraft skills and work*

Andrés Roldán Tonioni
Catholic University of Temuco, Temuco, Chile.
Email: aroldan@uct.cl

Received: 6.01.2009 Accepted: 8.05.2009

* * *

The problem and its theoretical framing

We assume development as historically produced discourse 1, which implies to inquire in the reasons that so many countries had to start being considered underdeveloped at the beginning of the second post-war. Thus, Escobar (1998: 31) speaks of development as "a historically unique experience, like the creation of a domain of thought and action" 2 . The configuration of the international scenario in this discursive and historical context, has been crystallized at territorial level, in terms of economic backwardness and cultural domination.

According to the above, we believe that today it is necessary to relieve different discourses and representations that are not so mediated by development construction, this is, the need to change the practices of knowing and doing, the need to multiply centres and agents of knowledge production, particularly, to make visible the forms of knowledge, particularly, produced by those that supposedly are the "objects" of development so that they can be transformed into subjects and agents;two particularly useful ways of achieving it are: first, to focus on the adaptations, subversions and resistances that, locally, people make in connection with development interventions; and, secondly, to highlight the alternate strategies produced by social movements when finding development projects (Escobar, 2005).

Now, these subversions operate in the structure through a cluster of intervention actions for the management of communitarian life improvements which we will call: communitarian practices (Isla & Colmegna, 2007). Social or communitarian practices are the activities that operate transformations from knowledges in motion, practices are experience, the lived, what has really happened (Martínez 2006), they constitute the complex articulation of social, political and economic relations among actors that mobilize in a field of power relations.

We transit in the search for these new development representations, but just as Elizalde states (2005), development is the deployment of a multidimensional process, and desiring to cover it entirely would be a too ambitious task. In this research development was addressed from work dimension due to the characteristics proper of our subjects of research, arguing that there are different ways of conceiving this (work), from communities, and that those wayys are reflected in subjectivities and practices specific and alternate to the dominant production logics. In this sense, we start from the certainty that in quotidianity there emerge diverse ways of doing, that ellude the forms of colonial domination mainly in political, economic and cultural levels, as micro resistances mobilized by creative practices of transformation of the given. Certeau (1006) calls these practices of resistance arts of doing, those that organize our quotidian life..

This theoretical positioning, urges us to find new perspectives, to the sensitivization of categories, to understand the work processes beyond production and consumption, understanding that although everywhere it is extended and reproduced the colonial reproduction logic of the economic and cultural order (Castro Gomez & Grosfoguel, 2007: Bhabha, 1994), it is much more urgent to highlight how an entire society, or part of this, is not reduced to it. For the purposes of this presentation, and by being a good initial approximation, we will understand work as that human activity that starts to be thought with its denial. This means that the stone touch from which work penetrates in different scopes of speculation, is the idea of work alienation or alienated work (Hopenhayn, 2001).

The concern, then, is the redefinition of the development model 3 (Garretón, 2000). Accordingly, since its beginnings research withdraws from development conception as transformations towards a market economy, as until today this category has been thought, this is, the development model oriented to economic stabilization, the openness to the outside, the deregulation of markets and privatization (and transnationalization) of productive processes (Di Filippo, 2007). Latin America's development, from this approach, must be understood and comprehended with base on how economies were historically linked, and today, to the world market and the way how colonial discourses survive that perpetuate the domination of some regions or groups over others. And our interest starts of finding new knowledges and practices that enable pertinent models to the region, from a development platform, describing and relieving creative and action capacity of individuals recognized as craftsmen.

According to the territorial planning policies, the Araucanía is divided into four large economic territories: Andean Araucanía, Cluster Forestal, Araucania Valley, Vergel del Sur. This research inserts within the Valle Araucanía comprising the communes of: Temuco, Nueva Imperial, Chol Chol Freire and Padre Las Casas. And that is constituted by three intercommunal work teams of small producers, divided by sector: Furniture and Wood Work Team, Handcraft Work Team and Agriculture Work Team.

Map of the IX Araucanía region, Araucanía Valley

By professional proximity, accessibility and the particular features that it presented, we worked with the Handcraft Work Team of the Araucanía Valley territory. It can be said that the most of those who make up the Handcraft Work Team are women, in large number coming from rural sectors and often also belonging to Mapuche communities. From the research we will see that these producers make up a trade community, of well defined social-communitarian practices.

The communities of craftswomen and craftsmen participants of the Handcraft Work Team of the Araucania Valley, in most of the cases, gather from five to ten craftswomen that join in a collective work. For example, the Allilen Zomo Zuwen group (woman that smiles working), of the Folilco sector (Root Water) of the commune of Freire, has representation in the Handcraft Work Team through one of its members who travels to Temuco's meetings, but in itself it is composed of about ten to twelve craftswomen.

The Craftsmen's Work Team of the three tables that comprise the Araucanía Valley's territory was the last to be established as such. It is born as a public-private initiative in the middle of 2007 and has been working since then with public organisms such as SERCOTEC IX Region, Chile Emprende, FOSIS, among others.

We intuitively knew, based in previous experiences with these small producers, that this group of artisans would give us those alternate representations of development, from the perspective of work 4 . Artisans are considered as protagonist agents of social transformation at local level and thus we will deepen, through their work practices, on the significant construction of development.

These social actors that we identify as small producers, constitute one of the main engines of regional employment, its main action is based on the ties established between one and others to achieve purposes, therefore, they are agents that are mobilized by social transformations in well-defined power fields. The problem of communitarian development is the one of overcoming the state of stagnation, of non change or non transformation, of the community. It is in small enterprises where more delay to operate the transformations aimed at optimizing the practice community that they constitute (Martínez 2006).

According to the above, the question of research was: Which is the meaning attributed by the Araucanía Region artisans to their social work practices and the trades through which they build a notion of development? Which was responded through the following specific objectives: 1. To identify the main work social practices and trades that daily reproduce the artisans work of the handcraft work team of the Araucania Valley; 2. To determine the meaning given to social work practices and artisans' trades through discourses around them; 3. To approximate to the development concept that these small regional producers construct, as assumptions that regulate their practices of socio-communitarian transformation and 4. To make a contribution about development analysis, starting out from the experience generated by social practices of the artisans' community.

The local context

Araucanía Region is one of the zones where poverty indicators exceed the national average (13.7 %), since the poverty index presented by the region is 20.1 % only surpassed by VIII Region that presents 20.7 % (MIDEPLAN, 2006). We are talking about one of the regions with highest poverty index at national level, which directly impacts on social structure. The above is strengthened since, according to the amounts, the region is the penultimate in the national ranking of Human Development in Chile (MIDEPLAN, UNDP, 2000).

Its ethnic composition presents it as one of the regions where it is concentrated most of the population recognized as descendant of originary peoples, in this case Mapuche, who at national level sum 604.349 inhabitants, of which 203.221 are concentrated in the IX Region (23.4 % of the total regional population), followed by Metropolitan Region and the X Region (Census, 2002). Its importance lies not only in its numerical size, but also in its social-cultural wealth. However, despite this panorama rich in cultural diversity, reality shows that Mapuche people suffers directly from the orientations that development has assumed in different political projects coming from the chilean State. Currently there exist variables that make complex the ethnic configuration of the region, linked to the quality of life associated with these groups, the rurality of its geographical contexts, the degree of integration-exclusion of chilean society, the inequality in the distribution and access to incomes, among others, placing it in a position of social and cultural vulnerability.

Thus, at national level it is noted that persons who declare to belong to the mapuche people have in general lower levels of achievement in human development 5 than those who declare not to belong to any originary people (...), the largest disparity is shown in the field of access to material resources, where both the situation of poverty as income per capita are widely less favourable to those who declare to belong to mapuche people (...) moreover, comparing among regions, the largest distances are expressed on the income dimension where the Mapuche of Araucanía Region have only half of income per capita than those of the Metropolitan and double their percentage of poverty incidence" (UNDP, UFRO and MIDEPLAN, 2003: 14-17)

The main economic activities that comprise the gross domestic product of the region are: the agricultural-forestry, where highlight the traditional crops, the livestock and forestry production; the hotel management associated with tourism, all with a participation of near 20 %, and manufacturing industry with processing plants of cellulose, as well as furniture industries with a participation of 15 %. The total workforce of the IX Region is around 363.950 people. Of this total, 28 % is occupied in the agricultural sector, followed by the manufacturing industry and commerce, hotels and restaurants, while 10.2 % is the unemployment rate 6 (MIDEPLAN, 2006). On the same line, in the Araucanía 75,2 % of employment in the region depends on the micro and small enterprise. Productive activities depend, as in most regions of our country, mainly of the utilization of its natural resources and of services sector. Remember that “micro”, small and medium enterprise represent more than 90 % of the universe of enterprises in Chile, contributing (in sales) 16 % of the product and more than 70 % of the employment (CiPyME, 2007), being this last figure essential for the socio-economic functioning of the country.

If we consider that the unemployment rate in the IX Region is 7.1% and of poverty, 20.1 % (CASEN, 2006), we can get to infer that much of the population that has an employment in a micro and small enterprise cannot overcome the condition of poverty, since an important proportion of the economically active population work in these. The amounts are clear in this regard, persons who work in minor economic units are punished.

Methodology

To approach the artisans significances it was used a data-based qualitative methodology (Valles, 1999), which allowed us the description of the artisan practice qualities, relieving the communitarian development perspectives of the artisans of Araucanía. We assume that, although there are various methods to concrete a research of communitarian development practices, "we have to accept that at least the task of conceptualizing alternatives must include a significant contact with those whose alternatives must be investigated" (Escobar, 1998: 419). Therefore, we privilege the participant and direct observation in scenarios, workshops and headquarters in the field and in the city, their homes and meetings on the Araucania Valley Work Team.

The option chosen for the selection of informers was to focus in a gradual process, by phases and intentioned of contact and approach to craftswomen and craftsmen that illustrated us the quotidian practices of their work, in order to deepen in their social relationships and analyze them in discussion with the conceptual framework, what has been called theoretical sample (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

The instruments of main data collection were: the application of twelve interviews in depth, half-structured to craftswomen and craftsmen, two interviews in depth to expert subjects 7 , two focal groups, the field observation in the communes and the expanded field notes of these visits and participation in meetings of the Handcraft Work Team of Araucanía Valley. These techniques were articulated in a way that they respond to a coherent and reasoned strategy of data collection allowing us a triangulation in data collection. The principle used was theoretical saturation, we permanently contrasted data obtained from interviews with what we effectively gathered with focal groups. The first craftsmen were interviewed, then it was performed the first focal group, we kept interviewing and carried out the second focal group to finish the last interviews in the commune of Freire.

In coherence with the above, for the data analysis it was utilized the model of grounded theory, with support of the qualitative data analysis Atlas ti software, based on the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and the steps followed in this research were: from gross data to the initial coding or open categorization ("open coding"): Its objective was to open the work with the data from an initial categorization process. The development of the initial categories or axial coding: At this time we are looking for properties, in pursuit of structuring the information, and what we did was to relate the initial categories. As last operation, the selective coding, we chose one category as central and then we related the others to that category, increasingly organizing the articulation of that theory's components, in a process of increasing densification (Mella 2003).

Results

"The larger time one works is at home because there it is where we have our things, although we jusy spent some time, since we must also take care of the house labours, to work in the fruit-gardens, with birds, animals, then we spend some times, but in those times we are happy"

(Temuco's craftswomen, focal group)

 "I like it because it is a work that historically belonged to our people, I generate products of cultural, patrimonial significance"

(Freire's Craftsman )

One of the main findings that the current investigation revealed is that handcraft is a work that refuses to alienation, homogenization and standardization of production processes and of modern workplace. We affirm that the significations construction of artisans in the region is characterized by giving account of alternative subjectivities to the dominant discursive models of development.

The construction of sifnifications in relation to development, from the scope of its handcraft practice, is deployed from the cultural rescue. Social practice that connects to an ancestral culture, the Mapuche, key pillar of the communitarian architecture in which they build their pertainance. The results reveal that handcraft practice is a work that is positioned in the tension between the cultural and ancestral rescue of a traditional practice and the requirements of an economy of accumulation and conversion of work into capital, requiring them to position their parts in the regional market.

A proposal is presented for trade analysis, through three analysis axes: work, trade and knowledge. Work as the activity to participate in the production process; trade as the apprehended and performed ‘profession', formation in some area, and knowledge as the 'art' of technique and instrument handling.

For the subjects of research, the handcraft work is that exercise though which it is 'earned' life, carried out with natural products, which gives them the freedom both to adjust and self-regulate their schedules as to innovate and test different designs in their pieces. The artisan's work has a direct connection to the rescue of cultural identity, historical pertainance and the narrowing of the family link. In its practice it is recognized that there exists affection, a love for what is done, affection that is accentuated by the recognition in the otherness of work embodied in each of the pieces and designs of these. Its social practice is that who rescues the natural, with which it returns to the origin, that who seeks beauty in the diverse, not in the homogeneous and that therefore, is highly creative, retailer, observer and inquirer.  We can say, in addition, that handcraft is a non-professional work, this is, it is always apprehended in any form, either through the family experience or by tutors, but it differs from modern professions, in the weberian sense of these (Aguayo 2006).

Craftsmen and craftswomen have taken conciousness of revaluing the original, the unique, the exclusive of their pieces. I invite you to review the following passage of a craftsman of Nueva Imperial commune: "Handcraft cannot be standardize, because it is as a nurse, all nurses click different, then the craftsman will always place a different tint to his product, independently whether this is the same design ", analogy that allows us to see some of the essential characteristics of hancraft work.

On the way we discovered the particularities of different artisan's trades:

1. Trade of Silver Jewelry: Or the lonely trade, because of the zeal that is produced by the use of knowledge (technique), characterized by working with metals, particularly silver, and raw material difficult and expensive to obtain. Its knowledge is related to fade and lamination of metals and its designs are linked to images and representations of the retrafe creations with its history and culture.

2. Trade of textiles: It is characterized by the commitment in communitarian work and its knowledge transfered within the family. Its knowledge is associated to the wool washing, combing, spinning, dyeing and weaving, both with knitting-needle as with looms (Witran). In one of the focal groups we are told: "we wash wool, we spin it, weave it and then, if we are lucky, we sell it, (laughters) and if not, it doesn't matter" (Temuco's Artisans)

3. Trade of wood carver: The sculptors of Mapuche Kimün (knowledge). Mainly related to tne production of Mapuche ceremonial musical instruments, such as Kultun, Trutruca, Pifilcas and Bass Drum.

The craftsman knowledge is similar to the artist, and artisans describe it as that knowledge which is unique and unrepeatable in each created piece, therefore, it supports a deep signification. The handcraft knowledges are forged in a process of deep meditation of the craftsman with the utilized technique: spinning, dyeing and weaving technique, as the fade and molding of the metal, and the working of the wood.

Trades are socially constructed and, therefore, they cannot be seen as the result of the final product of a process, since in them it is also given a significance involving a way to value life that the own subjects build. We have seen that work for craftswomen and craftsmen is an element constructor of identity, which allows them to be defined as pertaining to a particular place, to build specific and situated subjectivities. These subjectivities are which we want to revalue if we wish to think in the definition and reflection of a new development model. The development resignification from the resignification of contemporary and traditional trades. To make a critical rethinking regarding the contrary process to the work that has prevailed in the current development model, alienation. The financial institutions and great companies (national and transnational) are strengthened to the point of subordinating the local economies, and above all, weakening States, that appear increasingly powerless to carry on development projects at the service of their communities.

Handcraft keeps in various aspects contradictions with what we understand by labour today. From our first observations of field work there emerged elements that would be transformed in antecedents worthy of being mentioned in this research. The craftsmanship is highly creative and investigative, artisans regulate their work through observation and investigation of new forms and techniques. This debates between a type of rationality of social interaction and instrumental rationality. The artisans are a "community of trade" in the sense that they are a social group defined by their specific, regular and quotidian interrelationships, its shared culture and its rooted sense of pertainance that configures an identity around the performed work.

The research ended as a form of Work analysis, defined as the human exercise of creation and production which in modernity is explained by its opposite, alienation, and an analysis proposal of the different communities of known trades. These as the specific form of the apprehended profession and knowledge, as the art of using technique, presenting itself as a theoretical proposal for approaching the different social practices of work or of the different trade communities. The background was the fact that these social practices of work, in this case the artisanal, helps us to resignify development from a communitarian perspective.

To redefine development, from the scope of work, means to install and rescue social constructions alternate to that we know. Central aspects to achieve that, according to the collected data can be: the possibility of reaching personal goals, spaces for innovation in work practice, recognition in otherness and social regulation of the specific form that work should adopt within markets. At this point it is valid to then raise that "a widespread development only is possible intervening on markets, so that who looses in competence is not sentenced to death... that should lead to the establishment of local and regional systems of labour division and even of local or regional currencies... its organization could be described as a simple production of goods. These local and regional division of labour systems probably configure today the only realistic possibility of returning them a stable base of life" (Hinkelammert, 2001: 20-21)

Some action lines for complementary projects of non-governmental and governmental agencies, in the field of handcrafts, is the organization of initiatives of products exhibition. In these it is maintained the value of irreproducibility of a piece, and at the same time, there exists the possibility that designs are requested. Another general recommendation would be to locate and provide spaces, workshops for ellaboration and sale of artisanal pieces. The above, of course, must be studied so that the positioning of those spaces are performed on their environs, we mean, in the fields if it is required or in the city where the own craftsmen consider it necessary.

To rethink development, requires rethinking trades and the work process. To rethink the trade of teacher, musician, researcher, controller, worker, etc. in terms of a social and communitarian contractual relationship but also as a practice of artistic creation in motion. Development has been exclusively based in advancing on a knowledge system, this is. the corresponding one to modern occident. The prevalence of this knowledge system has ruled marginalization and disqualification of non-occidental knowledge systems. In these latter we could find alternative rationalities to guide social action with a different criterion than economicist and reductionist forms of thought (Escobar 2005).

To understand that, in practice, trades are one of the ways by which human beings generate the possibility of giving meaning to their lives, to be able to move, somehow to understand the materiality of our existence, but also to self-confer identity. That work is essential for human beings, because through it, people articulate their lives around a material labour. So, if individuals are left outside of what is work, their world is destroyed not only with regard to labour, but also at personal and family level. For artisans a decisive value is how they integrate and build a collective identity above an individual one.

Final words

At the end of this researcg process we presented a portrait of work practices of some artisanal trades, where we observed some features such as the ancestral culture's rescue, the implicit value in each of the pieces, the fair recognition obtained in otherness and the deep reflection in the technique handling.

We can conclude that the local versions of development and modernity are formulated following complex processes that include cultural practices of production, historical memory and contemporary location within the global economy of goods and symbols. The concern for alternative development roads remains open and is positioned as a fertile field of investigation for social sciences.

We invite to the utilization of the model proposed for the analysis of work practices, in order to describe the different trade communities, at three levels of approach: work, allowng us a general characterization of practice in terms of its specific deployment in society and contact with institutions; trade, allowing to delve into the sensitive description of the different forms of production, traditional and modern; and knowledge which aims to explore and know the deep significations of technique and instruments handling. A dialectical reflection among these levels will allow to sensitize concepts and to build a different look of the production process.

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Notes

* This publication unveils the social investigation called: Communitarian development practices: a look from trades and work, made in the context of obtaining the academic degree of Master in Psychology, major in Communitarian Psychology of the University of Chile, carried out in 2008.

1 For Sunkel and Paz (cited in Boisier, 2001) "Development is a topic of post-war and it should be added it is a topic of the United Nations. Already in the Atlantic charter signed in 1941 by Churchill and Roosevelt it is expressed that the only true basis of peace resides in that all free men in the world can enjoy social and economic security and therefore they committ to search for a world order that allows to achieve these objectives once "the war" is ended. Therefore, it is not surprising that ECLAC, United Nations commission, did of development analysis a prevailing theme both in the reflection as in empirical studies until today. From my point of view, that is the dominant development model that has been tried to be imposed and which today has been channelled by the neoliberal political, ideological and economic project.

2 In another of his texts, Escobar (2005: 18), indicates that the main theoretical orientations associated with the Latin American School of Development can be described as follows:: "Along the last fifty years, the conceptualization on development in social sciences has seen three main moments corresponding to three contrasting theoretical orientations : the theory of modernization in the decades of 1950s and 1960s with its allied theories of growth and development; the theory of dependence and related perspectives in the 1960s and 1970s; and critical approximations to development as cultural discourse in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s, and then he continues," The three mentioned moments may be classified according to the originary paradigms of which they emerged: liberal, marxist and post-structuralists theories, respectively ".

3 Here I share the position of Manuel Antonio Carretón who raises that we are currently in a context of redefinition need of the development model where we must be capable of understanding two parallel phenomena: The internationalization of markets, process that in Chile and Latin America has been carried out by the substitutive industrialization of imports, and on the other hand, the weakening of the State, which looses its hegemonic role as development agent, before the emergence of huge supranational companies that instrumentalize the social and political action.

4 According to Hopenhayn "the work modality changes substantially with the advent of the industrial revolution and the vision that the craftsman had of his work was seen distorted by the new division of labour, and the regime of earn-wage employees and employment insecurity, traits which sharply contrasted with the work style of corporate guilds" (2001: 17)

5 "The Human Development Index (IDH) is an instrument that intends to be a general approximation to the most basic elements that are part of the approach (…) it is concentrated in three universal and interculturally valued basic dimensions (...): health, education and income" (UNDP, UFRO and MIDEPLAN, 2003: 9).

6 It has been intended to maintain the amounts presented in the research original writing, obtained in the above-mentioned references. However today, according to the Regional Economic Report issued by the National Institute of Statistics (2009), the figures do not vary significantly. The Rate of Unemployment, the last trimester October-December 2008, was the same as then, 10.2 %. The Work Force, according to this report, is 395.640 people, of which the occupied reach 355.240. The of unemployment rate and persons seeking work for the first time, that in conjunct explain that the unemployment rate was 8.0 % and 2.2 % respectively. Regarding the national unemployment rate that reached 7.5 %, the unemployment rate of La Araucania was 2.7 percentage points higher.

7 These were: the Priest and Theologian Ronaldo Muñoz and the sociologist Antonio Elizalde. Both were consulted as experts on the subject of development, from the perspective of the liberation theology and from the perspective of Development at Human Scale and its current projections, respectively.