Repairing Tradition: Vernacular Knowledge, Cognitive Spaces, and Economies of Work in an Agricultural Repair Shop

Abstract

Abstract Making and remaking have long been intertwined. While there is a rich history of artisanal, craft, and industrial fabrication in folklore studies and history, histories and studies of repair have only recently begun to emerge as part of a larger effort to re-think the nature of creativity (and thus also of tradition). Dotting urban and rural landscapes around the world, repair shops occupy physical and mental spaces situated between maintaining things as they are and creating something entirely new. That is, repair is not just a matter of re-creating an object; rather, it is the product of an engagement with not only the object itself but also the environment in which it is found. Repair draws to it both simple fixes that re-integrate an artifact as well as more complex forms of disintegration and integration of seemingly disparate parts that lead to novel combinations and utility. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation of a repair shop in the Louisiana prairies, the current study seeks to understand repair as a complex socio-technical system, a negotiation of the world as it is with the world as it should be.