# Art Craft Vernacular by AG and janastu
* 12 Nov 2020

* announcement
> ART | CRAFT | VERNACULAR

> Annapurna Garimella (AG) will present a talk that uses the mortar and pestle to think about art, craft and the vernacular as 3 ways of categorizing, making and thinking about objects in India since 1947.

> This conversation is important for janastu and friends because it impinges on the work of the organisation and seeks to engage with it critically.


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>* View or Download slides and presentation video: https://files.janastu.org/s/w3jb4iqCYLNgA5z
>* [slides on gdoc ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IKP_pVOMHKaT9o6s5Gtgmdgk8dZOvTTXOtIcHCBFZBY/)
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## comments/discussion
micah on bhanu comment:
- "The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.” This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair. You come up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels."
- paul via micah: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft
- What are the false dichotomies that are present in digital craft?
- how much truth is there in the difference between digital and physical craft?
- What is the hierarchy between those two?

## aside. LoI links of interest

### General interest

* On water for chocolate
Something very exciting about this, like making a kere between the two hills so the village has more.. in the sense that the pool of resources can increase for the village with the activity that the wifi will enable. Does that sound right?
* Read at leisure: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept for life that has been exposed to what he terms the structure of exception that constitutes contemporary biopower. The term originates in Agamben's observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zoē (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zoē and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. Suggestions made in 2008 by Scotland Yard and the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain that children as young as five should be DNA typed and their details placed in a database if they exhibit behavioural signs indicating future criminal activity is a perfect example of what Agamben means by bare life. It reduces the prospects of the life of a particular child to their biology and takes no interest in or account of the actual circumstances of their life.
* https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095446660
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/travel/turkey-honey-forest-bees.html
*
### progress and continuity
[11/19/2020] AG: On another note, this is a really useful debate to watch as you formulate your ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs

Earlier, when not everyone read or wrote but all could listen, there was a multipart division of labour in the production and reception of texts: inspiration (god or a beautiful woman, or an event), patron, composer, lekhaka (scribe), bhanaka (reciter) and of course the listener. One problem with the coming of printing is that this diversity of actors was reduced and the reader took on a much larger burden in accessing the text.

This leads me to think that the task today is to make recitation and inscription central to giving people access to the worlds that any text creates. There is also a very vibrant world of the tikakara or commentators which was a legitimate form of writing itself which incorporated, accepted, argued and questioned the text(s) that came before.

This is text of the Bhagvata Purana made in Mewar, patronage unknown, has the Sanskrit text, commentary in Mewari and commentary in the form of a painting. It was not done all at once. You can see this from the script in red at the bottom. When people have the capacity and the chance to intervene in the text, they do. It is pretty clear from the wear and tear on the text that it was recited and used regularly.

There was not a huge division between "folk," "courtly" and "sacred" texts in the way texts worked and were treated. Even folk performers edited the text for audiences and the occasion at hand.