The cultural transformation of things and ways of doing. A bet in dialogue based on the works of Sennet and Appadurai

Abstract

The proposal of the work focuses on putting two works of a cultural nature in dialogue. The first refers to “The social life of things. Cultural Perspective of Commodities” by Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. The second work focuses on the book "The Craftsman" by the American sociologist Richard Sennet. Both works are put into dialogue and exchange to rethink the cultural transformations that society is going through in relation to the ontological nature of things and the (new) ways of doing. Many times we work on large-scale processes and transformations, thus losing sight of the small socio-cultural pieces that shape the lives of societies. In this sense, Appadurai's proposal starts from an anthropology of things, where to understand the social life of objects we must follow them, since their meanings are inscribed in their forms, uses and trajectories (Appadurai, 1991). For his part, Sennet rescues the role of the craftsman due to his connection between the hand and the head, as an actor-producer of a materiality that must be vindicated. In this sense, the craftsman seeks an emotional reward, based on certain achievements resulting from his unique ability. And these ways of doing things differ from the patterns of production and consumption imposed by the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective of the work is focused on understanding the socio-cultural perspective of things and ways of doing things in current times, trying to identify other ways of approaching these elements and categories. The retrospective and historiographic look allows the authors to focus on the objects of study to understand their tensions, changes and (dis) continuities. The methodology used for this article was based on a systematized reading of the two books, identifying relational fields to put the works in dialogue. For this, it was decided to take a third work “The corrosion of character. The personal consequences of work under the new capitalism” also by Sennet. This choice was based on the fact that this third book has an argumentative structure that allows us to combine these ideas in a specific spatial unit. In the absence of fieldwork, this work allowed us to replace the emerging fields and categories in an empirical cut plane. We consider that although it cannot be understood as fieldwork in the traditional sense, nevertheless, the experience analyzed in the text allows us to stage the reflections of the authors in the proposed texts.