Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 9.05 Crafts
Presentation #1 Title
Builders, Entrepreneurs, Luthiers, and Traditionalists: Crafting Musical Instruments in West Virginia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper is concerned with how West Virginia instrument crafters conceptualize their work within regional ideas of authenticity and global processes of exchange and production. Poised at the intersection of music and craft, Appalachian musical instrument crafters are uniquely positioned to engage two regularly employed representations of regional identity. Based on ethnographic data collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews throughout West Virginia in 2014, this paper presents the perspectives of crafters that have migrated to Appalachian West Virginia, where they now create and maintain instruments. Underlying these perspectives is an attempt to comprehend how West Virginian instrument craftspeople understand the objects that they create within a changing ideology of regional and craft identity. Builders’ conceptions of the authenticity of craft, the role of craft tradition, West Virginia’s place within crafting histories, and the claiming regional identity are discussed, giving dynamism to a creative process that includes cultural as well as instrument construction. As part of a larger research project concerning instrument crafters in the region, this paper also considers the desires of interviewees toward research design as an important aspect of the research process.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth is a graduate student in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Anthropology where his research centers on the production and representation of Appalachian material culture. Prior to joining the University of Kentucky, he worked for two years with the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Cultural History Program in the South Caucasus and Central Asia.
Builders, Entrepreneurs, Luthiers, and Traditionalists: Crafting Musical Instruments in West Virginia
This paper is concerned with how West Virginia instrument crafters conceptualize their work within regional ideas of authenticity and global processes of exchange and production. Poised at the intersection of music and craft, Appalachian musical instrument crafters are uniquely positioned to engage two regularly employed representations of regional identity. Based on ethnographic data collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews throughout West Virginia in 2014, this paper presents the perspectives of crafters that have migrated to Appalachian West Virginia, where they now create and maintain instruments. Underlying these perspectives is an attempt to comprehend how West Virginian instrument craftspeople understand the objects that they create within a changing ideology of regional and craft identity. Builders’ conceptions of the authenticity of craft, the role of craft tradition, West Virginia’s place within crafting histories, and the claiming regional identity are discussed, giving dynamism to a creative process that includes cultural as well as instrument construction. As part of a larger research project concerning instrument crafters in the region, this paper also considers the desires of interviewees toward research design as an important aspect of the research process.
