Ofícios artesanais e construção de identidades: encontros com artesãos de Prados - MG

Abstract

An investigation about artisans' identity construction process is the issue of this research. Subjects that have developed their own professional skills and knowledge based on productive practice at handicraft workshops, understood as singular educative places in which the learning of a job is reached through the practice itself into a spatial and temporal environment different of the factory's or professional development training programs. Thislearning process exceeds the mere manufacturing skills acquisition, contributing for the subjective and social constitution of its subjects, undertook on a complex interaction of actions, actors, spaces and times. Throughout the History, the practice of these workers has been classified as an unworthy activity to free men, took as a rough and repetitive job that didn'tdeserve any attention over its learning wrongly reduced to the triad: repeat-imitateproduce. These artisans have a singular knowledge of the production process that couldn't be reduced to repetitive or isolated tasks as it happens to many workers nowadays. They are called to make elaborated tasks that refuse the common division of labour understanding, in which manual and intellectual dimensions are took apart. However, these workers aren't immune to the peculiar labour relations of a capitalist and globalized society, otherwise they participate of its contradictions. Even though that crafts represent traditional jobs that remit ancient modes ofproduction, its workers are contemporary subjects